Managed IT built for in-town Atlanta offices

What doing business in Atlanta means for your technology

The Census Bureau estimates the City of Atlanta at 520,070 residents as of July 2024, but that number undersells a working day here. Office towers along Peachtree Street fill with people who commute in from a dozen counties, and a big show at the Georgia World Congress Center can bring tens of thousands of visitors downtown in a single week. For a company with 15 or 80 employees, that density shapes almost every technology decision, from the network closet in your suite to how your team keeps working when the Downtown Connector is at a standstill.

Each district works differently

Downtown's two main ZIP codes, 30303 and 30313, hold about 1,760 businesses with a payroll, per 2023 ZIP-level counts from the Census Bureau. Law offices are the biggest professional group, with 175 in 30303 alone, a short walk from the courthouses, City Hall and the State Capitol. Nonprofits, associations and hotels fill out the rest. Midtown's 30308 and 30309 are about twice that size, with roughly 3,480 establishments, including more than 400 medical, dental and outpatient practices, over 300 law offices and a cluster of software and research companies around Technology Square beside Georgia Tech. West of the Connector, ZIP 30318 covers West Midtown and much of the Westside. It has about 2,260 establishments, among them 51 film, video and post-production businesses, more than Downtown and Midtown combined.

Those groups want different things from IT. A Tech Square startup wants a laptop shipped to each new hire with every app behind one sign-in. A Downtown litigation firm needs document management and court e-filing working at 8 a.m. sharp. An editing shop in a converted Westside warehouse moves footage measured in terabytes. A nonprofit wants strong security on a lean budget, often with grant or donor rules about how data is kept.

Renting a floor in someone else's tower

Plenty of Atlanta firms lease a suite on the 14th floor of a building they don't control. Property management owns the risers and the telecom room and decides which carriers are already wired in. Your firewall may share a closet with three other tenants' gear. Adding a second internet provider means a work order, a certificate of insurance and often a building engineer escorting the installer. We start those conversations early, because a suite move can sit for weeks waiting on a carrier.

Old buildings, new jobs

A lot of offices here sit in buildings designed for something else. Ponce City Market in Old Fourth Ward was a Sears distribution center. Atlantic Station was built on the old Atlantic Steel mill site. Castleberry Hill and the Westside are full of brick industrial shells now used as studios and creative offices. Masonry walls swallow Wi-Fi. Older circuits trip when a space heater lands beside the network rack. Cable may have been pulled by three different tenants over twenty years with no labels. A site survey before you sign a lease, or before you add ten more desks, saves real money.

When the city itself has a bad week

Atlanta businesses learned the value of remote work before 2020. A fire under I-85 near Piedmont Road in March 2017 brought down an overpass and scrambled commutes for about six weeks. In late May and early June 2024, two water main breaks, one in Vine City and one at West Peachtree and 11th Street, put much of the city under a boil-water advisory and closed many Midtown businesses for days. MARTA rail helps, with stations at Five Points, Peachtree Center, North Avenue, Midtown and Arts Center, but the safer plan is a team whose laptops, files and phones work from anywhere. That is where we spend most of our effort.