Why Cybersecurity is Important for Small Businesses

Small business cybersecurity is a topic that can often get overlooked. Every business already has many expenses; the last thing you want is to add yet another one. Yet according to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach, cybercrime costs are at a record high for U.S. businesses. It’s critically important for SMB decision-makers to learn cybersecurity best practices and employ cybersecurity solutions to help keep their company safe.

Why do cyber criminals target small businesses?

Many owners think that because their business is smaller, cyber criminals won’t attack them. But the truth is that every sized company is currently being targeted. And when they do attack businesses, these cyber criminals are looking for things like:

• Ransomware leverage: Cyber attackers lock up important business data behind a paywall, forcing companies to pay the ransom to access that valuable data again.
• Credentials: Stolen passwords and reused logins are still one of the easiest ways in.
• Vendor and third-party pathways: By harnessing existing vendor and partner relationships, cyber criminals can gain access to even larger organizations.

2025 data on U.S. breaches indicates small to medium-sized businesses are disproportionally targeted for ransomware, often as SMBs are less likely to have up-to-date and readily available backups:

Ransomware was a part of 88% of breaches for small to medium sized businesses, compared to 44% of breaches for larger organizations. (Source: Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report)

How Managed IT Enables Cybersecurity Maturity for SMBs

Cybersecurity solutions integrated into managed IT services can help small businesses reduce their cyber risk through many ways:

Proactive threat monitoring and prevention

A managed IT provider helps you spot and respond faster to suspicious activity, in addition to things like quickly patching vulnerabilities and applying security updates. You can leverage their experience instead of adding "cybersecurity expert" to the many roles you already juggle.

Access to enterprise-grade solutions

Another benefit that comes from managed cybersecurity services is that you will be able to access more complex solutions to help lower the occurrence of cyber attacks and their overall impact. These can include things like endpoint protection, threat detection and response, backup and disaster recovery, and secure employee onboarding and offboarding.

Scale with your business

One of the great things about outsourcing cybersecurity services is that typically they can more easily scale with your business. These managed IT services scale along with the organization, so you can support new employees, enable remote work, and more.

Better (and faster) resilience

When a cyber attack happens, businesses need to move decisively and quickly to limit business downtime. Managed IT partners should help you with tested backups, documented recovery steps, and an incident response plan your team can actually execute.

Audit and compliance readiness

Managed IT services helps you comply with your industry's regulations. Implement the right controls, maintain documentation, and monitor compliance, as you improve your audit readiness.

Cybersecurity best practices for small businesses

• Educate your team on 1) how to recognize and avoid cyber attacks, 2) how to protect business data, and 3) what to do if an incident occurs
• Update your software and systems consistently
• Implement multi-factor authentication everywhere and train your employees on safe password practices
• Backup your data and be sure to actually test restores
• Establish an incident response plan so it's clear what to do in an emergency

With outsourced cybersecurity and IT services, you can more thoroughly and reliably protect your business (with the right vendor, of course).

The bottom line

Things are changing. Cyber threats continue to grow in frequency and sophistication. It's important to use cybersecurity solutions to help keep your business safe, and managed IT services help you adapt to these evolving threats, protect sensitive data, maintain operational continuity, and reduce downtime.

At Inzo Technologies, we leverage over 300 years of collective IT experience to help your business reduce risk and run more reliably through secure, managed IT services. If you want to discuss your biggest technology challenges, we're just a click or call away.