The Complete IT Equipment Checklist for a New Office in Ireland

Signing a lease is the easy part.

What follows is a stretch of eight to twelve weeks where a dozen unrelated things all have to land in roughly the right order, and most of them depend on somebody else's timeline. The broadband provider. The landlord. The electrical contractor. Your hardware supplier.

Here's the thing most first-time office fit-outs get wrong: they treat IT as a shopping list. Buy laptops, buy monitors, buy a printer, done. But the equipment isn't the hard part. The sequencing is. You can have forty laptops sitting in boxes on move-in day and still have a room full of people who can't work, because the fibre install is booked for three weeks after your lease starts and nobody thought to check.

This is a checklist built around that reality. It's organised by lead time, not by product category, because that's the order you actually need to act in.

Start With the Building, Not the Devices

Before a single device gets specced, you need answers from the building itself. These questions determine everything downstream, and every one of them can take weeks to resolve.

Where does the incoming connectivity terminate? Most commercial buildings in Ireland have a designated comms room or riser, and the distance from that point to your floor determines your cabling run. If the building is older, the existing riser may already be congested.

What's the power situation at desk level? Floor boxes, poke-throughs, dado trunking  whatever's there constrains where desks can go, which constrains where network points go.

What will the landlord actually permit? Core drilling, ceiling penetrations, and rack installation usually need written consent. Get it in writing early. Fit-out disputes with landlords have a way of eating a fortnight.

And critically: what's the Eircode, and has it been checked against provider coverage? Fibre availability in Ireland is not uniform, even between neighbouring units on the same business park. A unit that shows as "fibre available" on a national map may still be a lead-in installation away from actually being connected.

Order this first, before anything else:

• Business broadband, with a confirmed install date in writing

• Backup connectivity (a second provider, or a 4G/5G failover unit)

• Structured cabling  Cat6A is the sensible floor for a new install

• Comms cabinet or wall-mounted rack, plus PDU and patch panels

Telecoms installs in Ireland routinely take four to eight weeks from order to activation, and longer if a lead-in is required. This is the single most common reason offices open without working internet.

The Network Layer

Once you know where the connectivity lands, you build outward from it. The kit here isn't glamorous, but it's what everything else sits on.

A business-grade firewall is the boundary. Not the router your ISP supplies  a proper next-generation firewall with content filtering and VPN capability. If you have people working remotely part of the week, this is also where they come back in.

Switches need enough ports for every network point, plus roughly a quarter spare. Anyone specifying to exactly the current headcount will regret it inside a year. Go for Power over Ethernet if you're running wireless access points or IP phones  it saves a separate power run to every ceiling location.

Wireless access points should be counted by coverage, not by headcount. Concrete walls, glass partitions, and structural columns all matter. As a rough working figure, one access point per 1,000 to 1,500 square feet of open-plan space is a reasonable starting point, adjusted upward for dense meeting-room clusters.

A UPS goes in the rack. Power in Irish business parks is generally reliable, but a five-second dip is enough to reboot a switch and drop every call in the building.

Don't skip patch cables and labelling. Every fit-out under-orders patch cables. Every fit-out regrets it.

Desks, Devices and the Hybrid Question

This is the layer most people start with, and it's the one that can safely be ordered last, because lead times are usually shorter and quantities can flex right up until move-in.

Laptops are the default for almost every role now, even for people who never leave the building, simply because they survive a move to hybrid working without a second purchase. Spec by role rather than by budget ceiling  we've written a full business laptop buying guide for Ireland that covers RAM tiers, storage, and realistic refresh windows, so this article won't repeat it.

Docking stations are the piece that quietly makes or breaks a hybrid office. One cable, one connection, monitors and network and power all live. Match the dock to the laptop's port standard before you order forty of them.

Monitors  dual 24-inch or a single 27-inch is the standard for knowledge work. Buy the same model across the office. Mixed monitor estates create a support burden out of all proportion to the money saved.

Then the pieces nobody writes down until the week before: keyboards, mice, headsets for calls, webcams if the laptops don't have decent ones, monitor arms, and a box of spare chargers for the people who leave theirs at home.

Print and scan still matters, particularly in professional services, legal, and healthcare. One multifunction device per floor with secure release printing, and a consumables agreement, is usually the right answer.

Meeting Rooms and Shared Spaces

Meeting rooms are consistently under-budgeted, and it shows the first time a client dials in.

Each room needs a display sized to the room, a conferencing camera and speakerphone rated for that room's dimensions, and  this is the bit that gets missed  a decided-in-advance answer to the question of how a guest connects. Wireless casting, a cable at the table, or a room PC. Pick one and standardise it. Rooms where every meeting starts with a five-minute cable hunt cost more in lost time than the equipment did.

A room booking display outside each room is a small spend that eliminates a recurring irritation.

Communal areas need the same thought applied to wireless coverage and power. A kitchen or breakout space that people are expected to work from needs to actually support that.

Security Isn't a Later Phase

Every device that arrives in the building is a device that will hold company data. That obligation starts the moment the first laptop is switched on, not when the IT policy gets written.

Under GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, an Irish business is accountable for the personal data it processes from day one. The Data Protection Commission publishes guidance on the technical and organisational measures expected, and hardware-level protection is a straightforward way to demonstrate them.

At minimum, specify business-grade devices with a TPM, Secure Boot, and full-disk encryption. Consumer-grade machines frequently ship without these. We've covered the hardware security features that protect your business in detail elsewhere.

Beyond the endpoint: endpoint protection licences, an MFA rollout tied to your identity provider, and a backup arrangement that includes an off-site copy. If the office is on the ground floor or shares a loading bay, physical access control and a cable-lock policy for desks are worth the modest cost.

Ask your supplier whether devices can be shipped with your image and security baseline already applied. It removes a week of unboxing and configuration from your move-in schedule.

What Almost Everyone Forgets

A short list, drawn from fit-outs that went sideways:

Spares. Two laptops, a switch, a handful of docks and chargers. Something always arrives dead, and a replacement ordered on move-in week arrives on move-in week plus ten days.

Asset tagging and an inventory record. Set it up before the equipment arrives, not eighteen months later when you're trying to reconstruct what you own. This is also the foundation of any sane IT hardware budget in future years, and it's the single thing most businesses skip.

Cable management. Under-desk trays, floor-box tidies, velcro. Cheap, and the difference between a professional-looking office and a visible mess.

Disposal of whatever you're leaving behind. Old kit from the previous premises needs certified data destruction and WEEE-compliant recycling. Both are legal obligations, not courtesies.

Someone's name against the whole thing. A fit-out with four suppliers and no single owner will find every gap between them.

Getting the Order Right

If you take one structural idea from this, take the countdown:

Ten to twelve weeks out, order connectivity and cabling  they're the long poles. Six to eight weeks out, order network hardware and get the comms room ready. Four weeks out, place the device order and confirm imaging. Two weeks out, take delivery, tag everything, and test. Move-in week should be dull.

Reverse that order, and you'll spend your first month in a new office explaining to people why the Wi-Fi doesn't reach the far corner.

None of this is complicated. It's just easy to do in the wrong sequence, and expensive to fix afterwards.

Planning a Move? Let's Get the Order Right.

DataDirect has been supplying and specifying IT for Irish businesses for over 25 years — from single-room offices to multi-floor fit-outs. We source hardware, software, peripherals and infrastructure through our IT solutions and procurement service, which means one conversation instead of five suppliers and five lead times you have to reconcile yourself.

Tell us your lease start date and your headcount. We'll build the checklist around it, flag the long-lead items before they become a problem, and ship devices ready to hand out.

Talk to our team about your new office, or browse what we supply to see the full range.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to set up IT in a new office? Realistically, eight to twelve weeks from lease signing to a fully working office. The bottleneck is almost always connectivity  business broadband and structured cabling can take four to eight weeks or more if a lead-in installation is needed. Hardware ordering is comparatively quick, which is why it should be scheduled after connectivity is confirmed rather than before.

How much does IT equipment cost for a new office in Ireland? It varies enormously with headcount, sector, and whether you're running on-premise infrastructure. Rather than a per-desk figure, the useful approach is to separate one-off infrastructure spend (cabling, firewall, switches, rack) from per-person device spend, then add a contingency for spares and imaging. A supplier who prices the whole fit-out together will usually give you a more accurate total than four separate quotes.

What IT equipment do I need for a small office network? At minimum: a business-grade firewall, a managed switch with room to grow, wireless access points sized to your floor plate, structured cabling to each desk position, and a UPS to protect the rack. Consumer routers and unmanaged switches will work on day one and cause problems by month six.

Do I need a server for a small office? Most small offices in Ireland no longer do. Cloud services handle file storage, email, and identity for the majority of businesses under 50 people. On-premise servers still make sense where you have specific line-of-business applications, large local datasets, or regulatory reasons to keep data in the building  but it's a decision worth testing rather than assuming.

Can DataDirect handle the whole IT setup for our new office? Yes. We source hardware, software, peripherals and infrastructure as a single procurement partner, and we can ship devices pre-imaged with your security baseline so they're ready to use on arrival. Get in touch with your move-in date and headcount, and we'll work backwards from there to build a schedule that holds.