About Mayer Networks

James Mayer founded Mayer Networks in Carbondale in 2006. It began as an IT consulting and support practice serving regional businesses, and it grew because organizations here needed more than someone to fix computers: they needed engineering, accountability and one company willing to own the outcome.

What followed was a steady broadening of what the company does. Network engineering came first, then Microsoft technologies and identity, then cybersecurity as attacks shifted from malware to stolen credentials, then backup and disaster recovery, business communications and VoIP, government technology, video surveillance and physical security, and branding and web work for organizations that wanted the public-facing side handled by the same people who run the systems behind it.

Hosted infrastructure was added to solve problems the rest of that work kept producing: a server replacement nobody had budgeted, an application whose vendor still required an older Windows Server, a county that needed somewhere to run systems if its building were unavailable. Mayer Networks has operated hosted services for more than a decade from a datacenter it owns and operates in Carbondale, with redundant datacenter capability used as part of the hosting and disaster-recovery architecture. It is one capability among many, and it is a capability most providers this size have to rent.

The practical effect is that organizations facing an infrastructure decision are not forced to choose between a large capital purchase and a distant cloud platform, and that replication and failover can be designed regionally, with local engineers accountable for them.

Government work became a specialization rather than a side line. Counties, municipalities, courts, sheriff's departments and election authorities have different obligations around security, availability, documentation and procurement, and meeting them requires experience that generic MSP work does not build.

Cybersecurity followed the same path. As attacks shifted from malware to stolen credentials, the company built its practice around a lifecycle of identify, protect, detect, respond and recover rather than a product list, and around the recognition that recovery capability is itself a security control.

Many client relationships here span more than a decade. That is the most useful thing we can tell you about how the company operates. Serving Southern Illinois since 2006.