Tom Hermstad doesn’t wear a red swimsuit or carry a rescue buoy. But for hundreds of businesses across Southern California, he might as well.

As President and CEO of HD Tech — a Seal Beach managed IT and cybersecurity firm he co-founded in 1995 — Hermstad has spent 30 years pulling companies back from the edge of digital disaster. Network failures at midnight. Ransomware attacks on Friday afternoons. Data breaches that could have ended businesses. Time after time, HD Tech gets the call.

“We call ourselves Cyber Lifeguards for a reason,” Hermstad says. “When something goes wrong, people panic. Our job is to be calm, be ready, and get them out of the hot water safely.”

30 Years Before Anyone Was Watching

Tom Hermstad started HD Tech at a time when most small business owners didn’t know what managed IT even meant. The dominant model was break-fix: wait for something to break, call someone, pay by the hour. Tom thought that was backwards.

“You wouldn’t run your business that way in any other area,” he says. “You don’t wait for your roof to cave in before you maintain it. IT should be the same.”

He and co-founder John Dankha built HD Tech around a different promise: flat-rate, comprehensive IT support — the same firepower a large enterprise uses, delivered to the 20-person law firm or the 80-person construction company that can’t afford an internal IT department but can’t afford to go without one either.

Thirty years later, that model has held. Clients routinely stay for 15 years. The firm carries a 98.2% customer satisfaction score and a 4.9-star rating across 100+ reviews. And they still answer the phone — live technician, under four minutes — every time.

The Moment After

For most of the cybersecurity industry’s history, the answer to “how do you protect businesses?” was the same: build better walls. Hermstad watched those walls get torn down, again and again, as attackers got smarter, ransomware got cheaper, and AI made phishing indistinguishable from legitimate email.

That’s when he developed what he calls the “Right of Boom” philosophy.

“Everyone’s obsessed with prevention,” Hermstad explains. “But what’s your plan for the two seconds after the breach? Most companies don’t have one. We build that answer first.”

HD Tech now uses a 24/7 Security Operations Center staffed by real human analysts — not bots — monitoring client networks around the clock. Backups are immutable, encrypted, and verified daily. Patching is automated. And every client gets a recovery plan built before they ever need it.

The managed IT services HD Tech delivers aren’t just tech support — they’re the difference between a bad Tuesday and a business-ending event.

Built for L.A.’s Most Complex Industries

HD Tech’s client base spans the full complexity of Southern California’s business landscape: defense contractors navigating CMMC and ITAR requirements, law offices managing privileged data under strict confidentiality rules, accounting firms with compliance obligations, and healthcare organizations bound by HIPAA.

“The most regulated industries are also the most targeted,” Hermstad notes. “We specialize in that intersection on purpose.”

He’s also leading HD Tech’s push into AI integration — helping businesses adopt Microsoft Copilot and other tools with the security guardrails, usage policies, and employee training that keep sensitive data from walking out the door.

What Hermstad Builds Next

At 30 years in, Tom Hermstad is clear-eyed about where business is heading. AI adoption is accelerating. Threats are evolving faster than most IT teams can track. And the gap between businesses with serious IT infrastructure and those without is getting wider every quarter.

HD Tech is betting that more Southern California businesses will see what their long-term clients already know: IT isn’t a cost center. It’s the foundation everything else runs on.

Follow Tom Hermstad on LinkedIn. Learn more about HD Tech’s managed IT services at hdtech.com or call 877-540-1684