tax season post mortem our physical server crashed 3 times last week and i am exhausted

tax season is finally over, but our internal office server crashed three separate times during the final stretch. my blood pressure is still recovering.

on top of the hardware failing, the irs cracking down on the written information security plan wisp requirements had me panicking. i am a cpa, not an it guy, and staring at a blank word document trying to write cybersecurity protocols while client files wouldn't load was my absolute breaking point.

we finally gave up on trying to manage a physical box in the break room. we ended up just paying a vendor stratifyit to migrate our files to the cloud and draft the wisp paperwork for us simply because we did not have the bandwidth to figure it out ourselves.

i cannot believe we operated on-premise for this long, but the transition was basically forced on us by the hardware failure. for the other solo practitioners and small firms recovering this weekend, how are you handling your tech? are you still running physical servers, or did you already bite the bullet and outsource it?