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About

Order out of chaos.

Ruha Solutions is a Maine company providing practical IT support to small businesses that don't have an IT department — and increasingly, teaching what we know to anyone who wants to learn it.

What we do

Most small businesses run on technology nobody owns. The email works until it doesn't. Someone set up the Wi-Fi three years ago and left. There is no documentation, no backup plan, and no one to call when something breaks at nine in the morning with clients waiting.

Ruha Solutions is the answer to that. We handle IT for businesses too small to hire a full-time person and too busy to keep fighting their own tools — remote support, Microsoft 365 and identity setup, security hardening, device management, and the written documentation almost nobody has.

We serve Southern Maine and Greater Boston, with most work done remotely and on-site visits when hands-on help is genuinely needed.

How we work

Three commitments shape every engagement:

  • Explain, don't just fix. Every resolution comes with a plain-language write-up — what broke, what was done, and how to avoid it next time. You should understand your own systems better after working with us, not less.
  • Quote before starting. Projects are fixed-price and approved in advance. No surprise hourly overruns.
  • Say what's true. No invented metrics, no promises that can't be kept consistently, no claims of capacity that doesn't exist. If we don't know something, we'll say so and find out.
Where the name comes from

Ruha is the founder's daughter. The company carries her name as a reminder of who the work is actually for.

From the founder

I came to America in 2005 and did not speak English. Within weeks I found a community technology center, and someone there who spoke Tigrinya explained a computer to me in a language I understood. I started volunteering not long after. That is where this begins — not with a machine, but with a person who could reach me where I actually was.

The path from there was not direct. Language shaped which doors were open to me for a long time, and the work I did varied. But technology never left. I kept volunteering, kept reading and researching, took laptops apart and put them back together, and found my way toward work that kept me near it even when it wasn't the job title. It was the one thing that never stopped rewarding the time I gave it.

By 2021 I was ready to make it official. Certification had come up with a friend more than once by then, and somewhere in those conversations it stopped being an idea and became a plan. I was working overnights, eleven at night until seven in the morning. I would finish my shift, go straight to class at eight, stay until five, and do it again. Four months. I finished top of the class and spoke at graduation.

That certification led to a contract role at a hospital, and eventually to a senior service desk position in a large healthcare system, where I now train the analysts who come in behind me. Some of them have gone on to train others.

That part matters more to me than any of the rest of it.

This company is named after my daughter, and built for both of my children.

I know what it is like to need help from someone who will explain things properly, in words you can actually follow. When something breaks in your office, you get a person who will tell you what happened and why — not a ticket number and a bill.

— Aklil Belay, Founder

Background

Ruha Solutions is founder-led, drawing on senior service desk experience at a large healthcare system — an environment where downtime is not an option and explaining things clearly to non-technical people is the job.

  • Senior Service Desk Analyst in a multi-hospital healthcare system, supporting Epic EHR and several hundred clinical, financial, and administrative applications
  • Promoted from Tier 1 on sustained performance; converted from contract to permanent
  • ServiceNow and Footprints service management, with structured triage and escalation
  • Microsoft 365, Azure, and Entra ID identity administration
  • Rapid7 vulnerability scanning, CrowdStrike endpoint protection, and least-privilege access review
  • LAN and WAN configuration, 802.11 wireless (WPA2/WPA3), SSID and router setup, and network printer mapping
  • Cross-platform support across Windows, Mac, and iOS
  • Trained and mentored service desk analysts, and wrote the onboarding material adopted as the department's standard
  • CompTIA A+ and Google IT certified

Where we're going

An IT company publishing lessons is unusual enough to deserve an explanation. The founder did not enter this field because of a computer. He entered because someone who spoke his language took the time to explain one. That has happened twice since — the analysts he trained have gone on to train others — and Learning is an attempt to make it happen deliberately, in writing, for people we will never meet.

It is also practical. Every problem we solve for a client can become an article, and problems that recur become a lesson. The teaching material is a byproduct of the work rather than a separate job, which is the only reason a company this size can sustain it.

Alongside client work, Ruha Solutions publishes teaching material — written lessons and video drawn from real service desk experience, for people entering IT, analysts trying to get better, and business owners who want to understand their own systems.

That work lives in Learning, and the lessons are free to read and watch.

Start a support request → Visit Learning