About Mimir IT Consultation Services

What the practice is

Mimir IT Consultation Services is an independent technology consultancy that works remotely with clients in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Europe and further afield. We are based in Somerset West in the Western Cape, which is where the on-site work happens — across the Helderberg, Stellenbosch and greater Cape Town — but it is not where the client list is.

The work is done by a senior systems architect who has spent years building, repairing and stabilising mission-critical environments for international businesses. That is deliberate rather than a stage we are growing out of: the engagements described on this site are the kind where the value is in judgement, and judgement does not scale by hiring.

The practical consequence is that we take on a limited number of clients and say no to work we cannot do properly. If we are the wrong fit we would rather say so on the first call than discover it in month three.

Where the name comes from

Mimir is the figure in Norse myth whose counsel was worth an eye. Odin gave one for a single drink from the well of wisdom. It is a slightly grand name for an IT consultancy and we are aware of that — but the idea underneath it is the actual proposition: knowing what to do is worth more than being able to do everything.

How we are different from an IT support company

Most technology providers in this market sell time and availability. That is a real service and there are good people doing it. It is not this.

We do not run a first-line helpdesk, there is no per-incident pricing, and there is no number to call to have a printer reset. What we do is the layer above: deciding what the business actually needs, in what order, and what it should cost. If your internal person is capable but out of hours in the day, co-managed IT support is designed to extend them rather than replace them.

We resell nothing

No margin on hardware, no commission on licences, no partner rebate on security tooling. This matters more than it sounds: vendor review conducted by the vendor is not review, and an advisor whose income depends on you buying something will eventually find a reason for you to buy something.

The one place that independence has a limit, stated plainly: we build and run our own business software. Where one of those is genuinely the right answer we will say so, and you should discount that recommendation accordingly. Everything else — connectivity, hardware, cloud licensing, security products — we have no financial interest in whatsoever.

What you keep

Every engagement is built so you can end it. Documentation exportable in a form you can actually use, licences and domains registered to your organisation rather than to us, and an assessment whose output is yours whether or not the implementation follows.

This is not generosity. An arrangement you can leave is one both sides keep earning, and lock-in is the most common quiet failure in this industry.

Writing

The Insights section is where the reasoning behind the positions on this site is set out at length — POPIA, cyber insurance, identity attacks, backup testing, the Microsoft 365 deprecations. It is written to be useful whether or not you ever get in touch, which is the only honest test of whether it is worth writing.

Posts are published under the organisation rather than a personal byline, and the numbers in them are sourced and linked rather than asserted.