Andre Truter has spent more than thirty years in ICT, running his own ICT business continuously since 1999 — first as Cyprotec, later folded into Plena Fide (which, for a period, also carried a construction, renovation and electrical sideline — ICT was always the constant). In parallel, from enterprise infrastructure delivery through Microsoft Partner and Siemens ICT channel relationships, he built and ran Active Directory, Exchange and data-centre environments for banks, mines, government departments, airports, schools and universities. Alongside that, for over a decade, he specialised in adaptive technology — JAWS screen-reader scripting and Braille systems servicing, trained internationally in the USA and Norway — delivering full ICT environments built around the real needs of visually impaired end-users, for clients including the SA National Defence Force, SA Navy, SA Air Force and Military Police.
From the floor to the CEO’s chair. Andre has done this work from every side: planning networks, building and installing them, configuring every layer from the workstations to the domain controllers, Exchange and security, and on into today’s data centres, where he has kept the back end running. That is a rare combination. The person who built these environments from the floor up can also tell you, precisely, whether yours can really do what the people and the business depending on it need.
Along the way, the same pattern kept repeating: ICT managers and finance teams carrying more than any one person can properly cover, with no time and no independent backup to step back and look at the whole environment themselves. Support companies earning steadily from a support contract, with no incentive to ever say the environment needed work. Companies who wouldn’t spend to find out the real state of their own systems — until something went wrong. One recent engagement made the case plainly: a multi-site corporate group believed its ICT estate was documented and properly governed — nobody had ever actually checked. Even while it was being rebuilt into something structured and secure, there was constant pressure to make do with free, budget tools rather than pay for what the environment actually needed. That job is what convinced Andre this needed to become its own dedicated practice — and that every client needs their own tailored assessment, not a fixed template off a shelf, because that’s simply what this market actually expects.
A backup is only as good as the last time someone actually proved it restores.
— Andre Truter, on thirty years of overnight server recoveries
That’s not a hypothetical. More than once, months of backups that looked successful turned out to have no working restore behind them when it actually mattered. What followed wasn’t a restore at all — it was a full rebuild: reloading the operating system, rebuilding the domain, reinstalling every piece of software, recreating every share and permission, completely from nothing, overnight. More than once, one night wasn’t enough to finish.
Fide Technologies was built to close that gap. Not another IT support company — an independent set of eyes, with no stake in the answer.
For years, ICT work happens on the ground — the help desk, the server room, the network cabinet — and most IT companies, Fide’s own early years included, are built entirely around that: fixing what’s broken, one ticket at a time. That’s real, necessary work, and it’s where Andre spent decades of his career.
The people who carry the risk when something goes wrong — the CEO, the CFO, the board, the owner, and often the financial manager, director or ICT manager themselves — rarely have the time or an independent set of eyes to step back and see the whole environment at once. Everyone in that chain is doing real work under real pressure; nobody’s day includes running a systematic, independent check on top of it. When a company is breached, or ransomed, or simply falls behind, that gap is usually what allowed it — not because anyone was hiding anything, but because nobody had the time, the tools, or the standing to look at the whole picture and say so plainly.
That’s why Fide moved its focus from the ground to the top. We still carry the technical depth of years of hands-on support work — but our client now is the person who needs the real answer before it’s too late, not the person doing the day-to-day fixing.