IT solutions for small business owners have become one of the most oversold, overpromised categories in the tech industry. Everyone’s got a platform. Everyone’s got a dashboard. Everyone claims their product will “transform your operations.” Last month a client showed me a quote from a vendor offering AI-powered network monitoring for a six-person charity in Hackney. They had two laptops and a shared printer. That’s the state of things.
So let’s strip it back to what actually matters.
A small business — say 5 to 50 employees — needs three things from its IT: it needs to work, it needs to be secure, and it needs to not cost a fortune. Everything else is optional until those three boxes are ticked. And in my experience, most businesses get stuck on the first one. Systems that don’t work properly, that crash at inconvenient times, that nobody fully understands because the person who set them up left two years ago.
IT Solutions for Small Business That Actually Matter
Email and collaboration come first. Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace — pick one and commit. Both work, both have trade-offs. Microsoft integrates better if you’re using Windows across the board and need desktop Office apps. Google is lighter, cheaper per seat, and easier to manage if your team is mostly browser-based. Don’t let anyone tell you one is objectively better. It depends on how your people work.
Backup is the second priority, and the one most often neglected. I’ve walked into businesses where the only backup is a USB stick in someone’s desk drawer that hasn’t been updated since March. The NCSC’s backup guidance recommends the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one stored offsite. Cloud backup services like Acronis or Veeam make this straightforward, even for non-technical teams. A proper backup system costs between £5 and £15 per user per month. Not having one can cost you your entire business.
Then there’s security. At a minimum, every small business should have endpoint protection on every device, a properly configured firewall, and multi-factor authentication on all cloud accounts. If you’ve done those three things, you’re ahead of roughly 70% of UK SMEs. That number isn’t a guess — the government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey paints a grim picture of how few small firms have even basic protections in place.
Where Small Businesses Waste Money
On software they don’t use. I can almost guarantee that if you audit your subscriptions right now, you’ll find at least two tools nobody’s logged into for three months. That project management platform someone signed up for during lockdown. The video conferencing tool you got before you realised Zoom was included in your Microsoft licence. These things add up — £10 here, £25 there — and over a year you’re looking at hundreds of pounds draining quietly from the account.
On hardware that’s either overkill or outdated. A graphic designer needs a powerful machine. A receptionist answering emails does not. Match the spec to the role. And stop running Windows 10 machines that are seven years old — the performance loss alone costs you more in wasted time than a replacement would.
The biggest waste, though, is paying for reactive support. Break-fix IT — where you only call someone when something goes wrong — feels cheaper because there’s no monthly bill. But every incident means downtime, emergency rates, and a technician who doesn’t know your setup trying to fix it under pressure. A managed IT support contract costs more on paper but less in practice. It’s the difference between having a mechanic who knows your car and calling the AA every time something rattles.
Getting Your IT Right Without Overcomplicating It
Start with an honest audit. Write down every piece of software your team uses, every device connected to your network, every cloud service you pay for. If you can’t complete that list from memory, that’s already telling you something. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and most small businesses have surprisingly little visibility into their own technology stack.
Talk to your staff. Not about IT strategy — about what annoys them. The printer that jams every morning. The VPN that drops when they’re working from home. The shared inbox that nobody can figure out how to organise. These small frictions compound into hours of lost productivity every week. Fixing them doesn’t require a digital transformation. It requires someone who listens and knows what they’re doing.
I genuinely believe that the best IT solutions for small business aren’t products — they’re decisions. The decision to back up properly. The decision to stop ignoring security. The decision to invest in support before things break rather than after. None of that requires cutting-edge technology. It requires attention, a realistic budget, and a provider who treats your ten-person office with the same seriousness as a hundred-seat enterprise.
If your current setup feels held together with tape and hope, that’s worth fixing before the next crisis forces you to. The businesses that handle IT disruptions well are never the ones scrambling to find a solution. They’re the ones who already have one.