Small and medium-sized businesses are operating in a very different environment to even five years ago. Faster connectivity, cloud adoption, remote working, and regulatory pressure have reshaped how businesses operate – and where risk now sits.
This is not speculation. Microsoft’s Digital Defence Report highlights that smaller organisations are increasingly targeted precisely because they rely on legacy assumptions, but operate poorly configured modern systems.
Below are four trends we consistently see impacting SMBs and SMEs, and why they matter when making IT decisions.
1. Cloud and SaaS Are Now Core, Not Optional
Email, file storage, accounting, CRM, and line-of-business systems now live predominantly in the cloud. That delivers flexibility and scale, but it also changes how access, security, and visibility must be managed.
Microsoft’s research shows attackers are increasingly bypassing infrastructure entirely and targeting identities and cloud access directly. Businesses that still design IT around office-based networks often struggle with performance issues, shadow IT, and blind spots. Modern environments require identity-first security, cloud visibility, and policies that follow users and devices – not buildings.
2. Remote and Hybrid Working Is the Default
Remote access is no longer an exception; it is business as usual. Staff expect to work securely from home, on the road, or across multiple locations.
Common symptoms we see include:
- Slow browsing despite FTTP
- Overly complex VPNs that break regularly
- Little insight into who is accessing what, and from where
Microsoft reports that external remote services remain a major initial access vector for attackers, particularly where legacy remote access models are still in place (i.e. PPTP, some SSL VPN implementations). Secure access now needs to be simple for users and controlled centrally, without increasing operational overhead (ZTNA is a great solution in this space).
3. Cyber Risk Has Become a Business Risk
Cyber security is no longer an abstract IT concern. Ransomware, identity compromise, and data theft directly impact operations, revenue, and reputation.
The Digital Defense Report makes it clear that most attacks are financially motivated and increasingly automated, with SMBs frequently caught in the middle. Smaller organisations often lack dedicated security teams, making prevention, visibility, and rapid response critical (this is one reason we use MDR by default!). This is why security can no longer be bolt-on or reactive. It needs to be embedded into everyday IT operations.
4. Legacy Infrastructure Is Holding Businesses Back
Many businesses are running modern workloads on infrastructure designed for a very different era. Firewalls, endpoint configurations, and network designs that have not been reviewed in years often become sources of risk rather than protection.
Microsoft highlights that attackers increasingly exploit misconfiguration, outdated policies, and unmanaged exposure rather than novel vulnerabilities. Regular review, simplification, and managed services are often more effective than continually adding more tools.
Ready to Reassess Your IT?
As part of our IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) offering, we help businesses adapt to these changes by aligning security, cloud, connectivity, and day-to-day IT management around how the business actually works.
If you have not reviewed your IT setup, security posture, or core infrastructure in years, now is the right time to ask whether it still reflects today’s reality.
The full report can be downloaded here
