Live statusAll platforms operational · Azure UK South
OperatingUK only · 100% Azure UK Southandrew.starkey@mybusiness.uk.com
About · The founder and the team

Thirty years in Sage. One ransomware incident. The platform you see today.

mybusiness cloud is founder-led but team-run. The story starts with Andrew, but the platform runs because of the engineers and Sage operators who pick up the phone every day.

Andrew Starkey
Founder, mybusiness cloud
Accredited Sage consultant
Published author on Sage 200 and AI security
Based in West Sussex
andrew.starkey@mybusiness.uk.com
Book a 30-min Teams call with Andrew

About Andrew Starkey.

Over thirty years working with Sage 200. Accredited Sage consultant. Published author on Sage 200 and AI security. Based in West Sussex.

Why we run on Microsoft Azure.

A few years ago, my own business got hit by ransomware. We didn’t lose the business - we recovered.

You don’t take security seriously until you’ve lived through an attack. I hadn’t. That’s the gap mybusiness cloud is built to close.

But that experience was the reason mybusiness cloud fully moved to Microsoft Azure, with all the security benefits that come with Azure.

I spent the next year thinking about what I wished I’d had on the day it happened: the kind of always-on security a small business can’t realistically build itself, the backups that get genuinely tested, and a team that knows the system well enough to put it back together quickly.

Around 90 UK businesses host with us today, with hundreds hosted over the years. Sage 200 is our bread and butter - around 90% of our customers run it - and we also host Sage 50, with non-Sage hosting on the horizon where the same dedicated, UK-only model fits.

We didn’t lose the business - we recovered. Andrew Starkey · Founder

Thirty years working with Sage.

I started working with Sage software in the mid-1990s. Implementations, customisations, troubleshooting, integrations. Most of my career has been hands-on with Sage 200 - its data model, its quirks, its add-ons, the things that go wrong on a Monday morning and the things that go right when the setup is correct.

That's not a marketing line. It's the reason a customer can ring us with a Sage 200 IT question and talk to someone who already knows the shape of the answer.

Three concrete ways it shows up

What “Sage
specialism” looks
like day-to-day.

There's a place for a generic hyperscaler. There's also a place for someone who picks up the phone and already knows your system. For our customers, specialism shows up in three concrete ways.

Sage updates land here first.

We test Sage updates on our own systems before they go live on customers'. If something is going to break, we want to be the ones who hit it first.

Add-ons we already know.

Most of the popular Sage 200 add-ons from the likes of Sicon, Eureka and Paperless already run on mybusiness cloud, as well as many third-party integrations into Shopify, Amazon and customers' own websites.

New accountant, same-day setup.

When a new accountant joins one of our customer companies, we set them up the same day. We've done it a hundred times.

Six-month customer catchups

Every six months I sit down with each customer for a catch-up. Over 90% of them tell me they wish their other IT suppliers had a team as helpful and responsive as ours.

90%
Not just Andrew

The people who
actually run
your environment.

Sage hosting is too operational to depend on one person. Behind the founder story sits a small, focused team of hosting engineers and Sage operators.

Founder & Sage adviser

Andrew Starkey

30+ years in Sage. Accredited consultant. The person you'll email when the question is strategic, not operational.

Hosting engineers

Platform operations

Run the Azure infrastructure, patch the VMs, manage the SQL Server estate, and own the on-call rota.

Sage 200 operators

Application support

Day-to-day Sage 200 users themselves. Handle user provisioning, add-on quirks, and the awkward questions.

Security & compliance

Security posture

Own the security stack - segmentation, monitoring, endpoint protection.

Team headcount and named operators are introduced individually during onboarding. We don't put a photo gallery on the website because the people doing the work change less often than the people on a marketing page.

Trusted adviser, not vendor

Four habits
we won’t break.

Sales-led hosting providers will tell you whatever closes the deal. We'd rather lose a sale than mis-sell into a customer we can't keep happy.

Plain English

No “leveraging robust solutions”. If we can’t explain it in a sentence, we don’t understand it well enough yet.

Fact, not flannel

We don’t invent customer counts, fabricate competitor data, or quote a “from” price we can’t honour. If we don’t know, we say so.

Founder-on-the-email

You’re emailing the person responsible. No qualification call, no sales representative layer, no pipeline drip.

Partner-friendly

If your IT provider or your Sage reseller needs to be in the conversation, bring them in. We expect to share operational detail.

Want to talk
to the person who’ll
actually pick up?

Andrew reads every email himself. Reply usually inside a working day.