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Help & FAQs

Straight answers — including the ones most IT companies avoid

Frequently Asked Questions

Not product questions — those live on the service pages, and we link to them below. These are the questions people actually ask before they hire an IT company in Dubai: what it costs, who owns what, who can see your systems, what happens if it goes wrong, and what we don't do.

Ask Us Something Else Call 055 125 6266
Answered by: NIFTY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LLC, Deira, Dubai Operating since: 2014 Last reviewed: August 2026

The Short Answers

Do you publish prices?
No, and we explain why below. You get a written, itemised quote in AED with VAT shown separately, after a free assessment.
Do we have to sign a long contract?
No. We take one-off projects, and most clients start with a single piece of work before anything ongoing is discussed.
Who owns the licences and hardware you buy for us?
You do. Licences are registered to your company, in your tenant, under your domain — not held in ours.
Do you make money on the hardware you recommend?
Yes. Every reseller does, and anyone claiming otherwise has moved it into the labour rate. We show the hardware and the work as separate lines so you can see both.
What are your working hours?
Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm, from our Deira office. Out-of-hours and holiday cover is available under contract, and cutovers are scheduled outside working hours by default.
What access do your engineers have to our systems?
Named individual accounts, never shared logins, removed when someone leaves our team or your contract ends. We can provide a written access list on request.
If we leave, what do we get?
Everything: documentation, credentials, licence ownership and configuration exports. There is no exit fee and nothing is held back.
What don't you do?
Marketing websites, graphic design, custom mobile apps, and any project we do not think we would do well. We say so rather than learning on your budget.

Jump to a section

  1. Getting started
  2. Money, contracts and ownership
  3. Working with us day to day
  4. Trust, access and risk
  5. Buying hardware and software
  6. What we do and don't do
  7. Coverage across the UAE
1

Getting started

We don't know what we need. Where do we start?

Start with the free IT assessment — it is a survey, not a sales visit. An engineer walks the office, documents what is actually there, and gives you a written report ranked by risk: what is broken, what is a licence you are paying for and not using, what is a security exposure, and what can safely wait.

You keep that report whether or not you buy anything from us, and it is written so another supplier could act on it. Most businesses do not have a technology problem so much as an unclear picture, and an hour of documentation usually costs less than the wrong purchase.

What happens in the first 30 days after we sign?

Discovery first, changes second. The first two weeks are spent documenting the estate — servers, endpoints, licences, network, backups, who has administrative access and what nobody has the password for. That last one is the most common discovery and the most urgent to fix.

In parallel we set up monitoring, agree how you log tickets, and put the urgent items right. The remainder becomes a dated plan with owners against each line. What we deliberately avoid is making large changes in week one: an environment nobody has documented yet is an environment nobody should be reconfiguring.

Can we start with one project instead of committing to a contract?

Yes, and it is how most of our long-term clients started. A firewall replacement, a Microsoft 365 migration, an office cabling job or a backup rebuild are all normal standalone projects for us, quoted and delivered on their own.

We would rather you judge us on delivered work than on a proposal. If ongoing support makes sense afterwards, it is a separate conversation with its own scope — not a clause buried in the project paperwork.

Can you take over a project another company started and left unfinished?

Yes, and the first step is an honest assessment of what is salvageable. Half-finished migrations, part-configured firewalls and abandoned ERP implementations are a regular part of our work in Dubai, and they are rarely as bad as they feel by the time we are called.

We document the current state, tell you plainly what should be completed and what should be redone, and price both. Where hardware or licences have already been bought, we work with what you own rather than restarting the spend — unless keeping it would cost you more over time, in which case we will show you the arithmetic rather than assert it.

Do you visit before quoting, or quote from a phone call?

For anything involving the premises, we visit. Cabling, Wi-Fi, servers, access control and office moves cannot be quoted accurately from a description — wall construction, ceiling voids, riser access, existing containment and the state of the comms room all change the number, and a quote produced without seeing them is a quote that will be revised.

Licensing, cloud and software work can usually be scoped remotely. If we can quote without a visit we will, because a site visit you did not need is time neither of us gets back.

2

Money, contracts and ownership

Why don't you publish prices on your website?

Because almost every published IT price is either wrong or heavily qualified. The same twenty-user office can differ threefold in cost depending on whether the cabling is usable, whether the licences are already owned, whether there is a server to migrate and whether anyone documented the last provider's work. A number on a web page that ignores all of that is marketing, not a price.

What we commit to instead: a free assessment, then a written quotation in AED with VAT shown separately, itemised so hardware, licences and labour are separate lines rather than one figure. You can take that quote to another supplier and compare it line by line — which is exactly what a single bundled number prevents.

Service-specific cost questions are answered on the relevant pages — see IT support, managed IT and servers.

How does invoicing and payment work?

Invoiced in AED by a UAE company, with VAT shown as a separate line and our TRN on every invoice. That matters for your own input-VAT recovery, and it is the reason buying from an overseas supplier often costs more than it appears to.

Hardware and licences are normally invoiced on order, project work against agreed milestones, and support contracts in advance for the period. Purchase-order and vendor-portal processes are fine — tell us at quotation stage rather than at invoice stage, because retro-fitting a PO number to an issued invoice is a week of everyone's life nobody enjoys.

Who owns the licences, domains and hardware you buy on our behalf?

You do, in every case, and we set it up that way deliberately. Microsoft and other subscriptions are registered to your company in your own tenant, your domain is registered in your name, and hardware is invoiced to you and is your asset from delivery.

This sounds obvious and frequently is not. A common and damaging pattern in this market is the provider who holds your Microsoft tenant, your domain registration or your firewall registration in their own account, so that leaving them means losing or rebuying your own infrastructure. Ask any provider you are considering — including us — to confirm ownership in writing before you buy anything.

Do you make a margin on the hardware and licences you recommend?

Yes, and so does everyone else — the difference is whether they say so. We buy through authorised distribution and resell at a margin. A provider claiming to supply hardware at cost has moved that margin into the labour rate, the contract, or a vendor rebate you cannot see.

What protects you is not a supplier with no margin, it is a quote you can audit. Ours separates hardware, licences and labour, names the exact models and part numbers rather than describing them generically, and can be priced against the open market. If you would rather buy the hardware yourself and pay us only to install and support it, that is a normal arrangement and we will quote it that way.

Can you match a quote we already have from another supplier?

Sometimes on the price, but the more useful exercise is comparing what is actually in the two quotes. Most competing IT quotes are not comparable: one includes installation and the other does not, one specifies a three-year warranty and the other a one-year, one has the licences and the other assumes you have them, one is regional stock and the other is a parallel import with no local warranty path.

Send us the other quote and we will tell you where the difference actually is, including where the other supplier is cheaper for good reason. If they have specified it better than we would have, we will say so — that answer costs us a sale occasionally and has earned us considerably more.

If we leave, what do we actually get back?

An exit pack, at no charge, containing everything needed for someone else to take over. That means current documentation of the environment, all administrative credentials, confirmation that licences and subscriptions are in your name, configuration exports from firewalls and network equipment, backup job definitions and a list of every third-party service and where it is registered.

There is no exit fee and no notice period designed to be painful. A provider who makes leaving difficult is telling you something about how they expect to retain clients — ask about the exit process before you sign with anyone, ourselves included, because it is the cheapest question you will ever ask.

Question not here? Send it — we answer technical questions from people who are not customers, and there is no obligation attached to asking one.

Ask Us Directly
3

Working with us day to day

How do we report a problem — do we have to use a ticket portal?

No portal is required. Phone, email or WhatsApp — whichever is fastest for the person with the problem. Call 04 355 1136 or 055 125 6266, email [email protected], or message us on WhatsApp. Everything is logged as a ticket regardless of how it arrives, so nothing depends on one engineer remembering a corridor conversation.

We deliberately do not force staff through a portal to report that their laptop will not start. Portals suit IT departments and frustrate everyone else, and an unreported fault is more expensive than an untidy queue.

Will we get a named engineer, or a different person every time?

A named primary engineer who knows your environment, with a documented backup. Continuity is most of the value in IT support: an engineer who already knows your ERP is temperamental after a reboot solves in ten minutes what a stranger spends two hours rediscovering.

The reason for the documented second engineer is equally practical — people take leave and change jobs. Every environment we support is documented so that a second engineer can pick it up, which is a discipline that also protects you from us. If your entire IT depends on one person's memory, that is a risk whether the person works for you or for your supplier.

What languages does your team speak?

English, Arabic, Hindi and Malayalam. In practice this matters more than it sounds: the person reporting a problem is often not the person who signed the contract, and a warehouse supervisor or a receptionist describing a fault in their own language gives an engineer far better information than a translated summary.

Documentation and written reports are provided in English as standard, with Arabic available where a project or a landlord requires it.

Are you open on weekends and public holidays?

Our standard hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm — the UAE working week since 2022. Saturday, Sunday and public holidays are outside standard hours, and cover for them is available as part of a support contract rather than being assumed.

Two things are true regardless of contract: planned work that would interrupt your business — migrations, firewall replacements, network cutovers — is scheduled outside working hours by default and at no premium, and genuine emergencies are not met with an answering machine. UAE public holidays follow the Islamic calendar and move each year, so we confirm cover dates with contract clients rather than publishing a list that would be wrong by the time you read it.

Do your hours change during Ramadan?

Yes, in line with UAE practice — working hours are reduced during Ramadan, and we confirm the specific hours with clients before it begins each year. Support cover and response commitments under contract continue unchanged; it is the office hours that shift, not the obligation.

It is also worth planning around: Ramadan and the weeks either side of Eid are a poor window for a major migration or an office move, both because of reduced hours across every supplier in the chain and because approvals from landlords, building management and authorities slow down. We will usually advise moving a large project rather than compressing it.

4

Trust, access and risk

Are you a licensed company in the UAE?

Yes — NIFTY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LLC is a UAE-registered limited liability company operating from Burj Nahar Mall, Deira, Dubai, and trading since 2014. We hold a valid Dubai trade licence and a VAT registration, and we provide copies of both on request for your vendor-onboarding or procurement file.

This is worth checking with any IT supplier, not only us. A significant amount of IT work in this market is done by individuals and unlicensed operators, which is fine until you need a compliant tax invoice, a warranty claim honoured, a contract enforced, or simply for the supplier to still exist in two years.

Will you sign our NDA?

Yes, and we will sign yours rather than insisting on ours. Send it with the enquiry if the subject matter is sensitive — we would rather sign before the first conversation than halfway through a project.

Confidentiality applies whether or not a document has been signed: engineers see salary files, client lists, contracts and correspondence in the course of ordinary work, and treating that as confidential is a condition of employment here rather than a favour extended to clients who asked.

What access do your engineers have to our systems, and how is it controlled?

Named individual accounts, never a shared login, granted at the level the work requires and removed when it ends. Every engineer who works on your environment has their own credentials, so activity is attributable to a person rather than to "the IT company".

Access is reviewed when someone joins or leaves our team and when your contract changes, and we will provide a written list of who currently holds access to what on request — a reasonable thing to ask for annually, and a question worth putting to your current provider today. Remote access is through managed tools with session logging, not through a permanently installed consumer remote-desktop product with a password three people know.

What happens if something you do causes an outage?

We fix it first and discuss it afterwards — in that order, and without an argument about fault while your business is down. Every planned change carries a rollback plan agreed before the work starts, which is the single most useful protection against this and the one most often skipped.

Afterwards you get a written account of what happened, why, and what changes so it does not recur. We are a commercial company with the usual contractual limits, and we do not pretend otherwise — but the practical protections that actually matter are the ones taken before the change: a tested backup, a rollback path, an out-of-hours window and a second engineer who knows the environment. Ask any supplier what their rollback plan is. The quality of the answer tells you a great deal.

How do you stop yourselves becoming the way an attacker gets in?

By treating our own access as the risk it is. A managed service provider holds administrative access to many businesses at once, which makes providers a deliberate target — compromising one supplier can reach dozens of their clients, and this has happened to well-known providers internationally.

The controls that matter are unglamorous: multi-factor authentication on every administrative account without exception, individual named accounts rather than shared ones, least-privilege access rather than blanket domain administrator rights, prompt removal of access when staff leave, and endpoint protection and patching on our own machines to the standard we recommend to you. If a prospective supplier has never considered this question, it is worth asking how they would know if it had already happened.

Related: our approach to detection and response is on the cybersecurity and ThreatDown pages.

Can you complete our client's vendor registration or procurement forms?

Yes — trade licence, VAT registration, bank details, company profile and signed supplier declarations are routine for us. Larger UAE organisations, government entities and multinationals all run supplier-onboarding processes, and we are used to the paperwork.

Where the form asks technical questions about our own security posture, we answer them honestly rather than ticking every box — a supplier who claims full compliance with every framework listed on a form is a supplier who has not read the form.

5

Buying hardware and software

Are you tied to particular vendors, and does that bias what you recommend?

We hold partnerships with a specific set of vendors, and yes, that is a bias worth knowing about. We work with Microsoft, Fortinet, HPE, Huawei, Veeam, NAKIVO, AWS and Google Cloud among others, and we are better at those than at products we rarely touch. A supplier claiming to be equally expert in everything is claiming something no one achieves.

Where it matters, we say so on the page itself. Our backup pages state that we partner with both Veeam and NAKIVO and decline to name a winner. Our Huawei page recommends Fortinet for security-led firewall projects. Our cloud page has a section on what should stay on-premises. If we think the honest answer is a product we do not sell, we will tell you and help you scope it — we would rather lose the hardware margin than be the reason you bought the wrong thing.

Do you ever supply grey-market or parallel-import equipment?

No. Everything is bought through the vendor's authorised UAE distribution. Grey imports are genuinely cheaper and the saving is real, which is why the practice is widespread here — but the warranty usually is not valid in this region, the vendor may refuse support or software entitlement against the serial number, and firmware or licensing can be tied to the original market.

The failure is invisible at purchase and appears eighteen months later when a unit fails and the replacement is refused. If a quote you have received is dramatically below everyone else's on identical part numbers, ask the supplier to confirm in writing that the equipment is regional stock with a warranty valid in the UAE. That single sentence resolves it.

How long does hardware take to arrive in the UAE?

Commonly-stocked items are days; configured or less common items are usually weeks, and we tell you which yours is before you order. Standard switches, access points, workstations and small firewalls are typically held in regional distribution. Configured servers, larger storage, specific optical modules and anything built to order are made or shipped after the order.

We give a dated expectation rather than a vague one and tell you when it changes. Where a project cannot wait, we will say whether a different model that is in stock would do the job — which is frequently the better answer to a lead-time problem than paying to expedite the original choice.

Can you supply the equipment only, without installation?

Yes — supply-only is a normal arrangement, particularly where you have an in-house team who will do the work. You get the same authorised-distribution sourcing, the same itemised quote in AED and the same warranty handling if something fails.

The one thing we will do before quoting supply-only is check that the specification actually fits, because the most expensive hardware purchase is the one that arrives and turns out to be wrong — a switch without enough PoE budget, a server with the wrong RAID controller, an access point that needs multi-gig uplinks the cabling cannot carry. If we think the spec is wrong we will say so once, in writing, and then supply what you asked for.

6

What we do — and what we don't

What don't you do?

Marketing websites and graphic design, custom mobile app development, social media, and anything we do not believe we would do well. We also do not take on work where the honest answer is that a specialist would serve you better — SIRA-licensed security installation being a common example, where we deliver the IT infrastructure and work alongside a licensed contractor rather than claiming a licence we do not hold.

Saying this costs us occasional work and saves both sides considerably more. An IT company learning your project on your budget is a bad outcome that is entirely predictable at the quoting stage.

Which of your services does a typical 20-person office actually need?

In practice: reliable Microsoft 365 with proper security settings, a backup that has been restored from at least once, a maintained firewall, working cabling and Wi-Fi, and someone to call. That is the honest core, and it is considerably less than a full service catalogue implies.

What a 20-person office usually does not need is a security operations centre, a full disaster-recovery site, or the top tier of every product it buys. We say the same thing on the cybersecurity page — most smaller UAE businesses with no regulatory driver should fix the fundamentals before buying monitoring. The order matters more than the shopping list.

Start here: the full solutions overview lays out how the services fit together.

Can you help us with Microsoft Copilot and other AI tools?

Yes, and the first thing we will look at is not the AI licence — it is your file permissions. Tools like Copilot surface what a user already has access to, which means that if your SharePoint and OneDrive permissions have accumulated over years without review, an AI assistant becomes very good at finding the salary file somebody shared with Everyone in 2021.

So the sequence is: audit and fix permissions and data governance first, run a genuine pilot with a small group second, then license more widely if the pilot justified it. We would rather run a short pilot that concludes "not yet" than sell licences that go unused — and in this market a large share of AI licensing does go unused.

Related: Microsoft 365 solutions, including SharePoint permissions and data protection.

Do you build websites?

No — not marketing websites, and we will refer you rather than attempt one. Web design is a different discipline from infrastructure, and the overlap between "runs a network well" and "designs a good website" is smaller than the industry pretends.

What we do handle is the infrastructure around one: domain and DNS management, business email and its security records, SSL, hosting decisions, and making sure your domain is registered in your name rather than your last web developer's — which is a problem we encounter often enough to mention it here.

Do you work with startups and very small companies?

Yes, and the useful thing to get right early is ownership rather than sophistication. A five-person company does not need enterprise architecture. It needs its domain, its Microsoft tenant and its licences registered in the company's own name, a backup, and administrative access that does not sit exclusively with one founder's personal account.

Those decisions are nearly free at the start and expensive to unwind at forty people, which is when they are usually discovered. We will happily do a short piece of setup work for a small company with no expectation of an ongoing contract.

7

Coverage across the UAE

Do you cover the whole UAE, and is there a call-out charge outside Dubai?

We cover Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the Northern Emirates from our Deira office. Dubai attendance is same-day for most faults. Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and the Northern Emirates are served by scheduled visits with remote support in between, which resolves the large majority of issues without waiting for a drive.

Travel outside Dubai is priced transparently and agreed before it happens rather than appearing on an invoice afterwards. For clients with regular requirements outside Dubai we set a fixed visit schedule, which is cheaper and considerably more predictable than ad-hoc call-outs.

Can you support our offices in other countries?

Remotely, yes — and we are direct about the limits. Anything that can be done over a network we can do anywhere: Microsoft 365, servers, firewalls, backups, monitoring and user support. Many of our clients have staff or small offices in India, the UK, KSA and elsewhere, and those users are supported the same way as a Dubai user.

What we do not do is pretend to have engineers standing by in another country. Where physical work is needed abroad, you need a local pair of hands, and we will manage that supplier and the handover rather than leaving you to coordinate it — but we will not describe that as our own presence.

Can you support staff working from home or travelling?

Yes, and this is now ordinary rather than exceptional. Remote and travelling users are supported through the same ticket process, with secure remote access, device management and VPN or zero-trust access to internal systems where that is required.

The point worth planning for is that a remote user's problem is often not the laptop — it is their home internet, a hotel network, or a security control doing exactly what it was configured to do. Distinguishing between those quickly is most of the skill, and it is why we instrument the connection rather than guessing from a description.

Related: phone systems for remote staff and cloud solutions.
Going deeper

Product and Service Questions

This page covers working with us. Every service page carries its own detailed FAQ — licensing, sizing, migration, compliance and cost questions specific to that technology.

Support & managed IT

What an AMC covers versus managed IT, response times, on-site versus remote, taking over from another provider, and what is excluded from a contract.

IT Support FAQ Managed IT FAQ

Microsoft 365 & cloud

Which plan, migration from Google Workspace, whether 365 needs its own backup, UAE data residency, renewal timing and licence right-sizing.

Microsoft 365 FAQ Renewal FAQ Cloud FAQ

Servers, storage & backup

Server sizing, Windows Server 2016 end of support, VMware licensing changes, immutable backups, and how Veeam and NAKIVO differ.

Servers FAQ Veeam FAQ NAKIVO FAQ

Networking & infrastructure

Cat 6 versus Cat 6A, whether "Cat 6e" is real, cabling in an occupied office, SIRA approval for access control, Wi-Fi 6 versus Wi-Fi 7 in the UAE.

Networking FAQ Huawei FAQ

ERP, e-invoicing & phones

Odoo Community versus Enterprise, UAE e-invoicing deadlines and PINT AE, VoIP legality in the UAE, and keeping your existing numbers.

Odoo ERP FAQ E-Invoicing FAQ IP PBX FAQ

Explore the site

All IT Solutions Managed IT Services IT Support Dubai Cybersecurity Networking & Cabling Servers & Storage Cloud Solutions Odoo ERP IP PBX & VoIP Contact Us

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NIFTY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LLC · Burj Nahar Mall, M2 Floor, Office D2-4, Deira, Dubai · 04 355 1136 · [email protected]

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