Solveit Technology Solutions

Here's a number most small business owners don't know: SMBs spend an average of 6.9% of their revenue on IT, compared to just 4.3% for large enterprises. 💰

Smaller businesses pay more proportionally, yet often get less in return because that budget gets spread across the wrong priorities.

Where are SMBs putting their IT dollars in 2026?

☁️ Cloud services: 31% of the average IT budget
🖥️ Hardware: 22%
👨‍💻 Internal staff: 20%
🤝 Outsourced IT: 15%
📦 Software licenses: 8%
📞 Telecom: 4%

With 57% of SMBs planning to increase IT spending this year, the key question isn't how much to spend. It's whether your budget is going to the right places.

A few questions worth asking:

-Are you still paying for hardware you could move to the cloud?
-Is security in your top three priorities, or still an afterthought?
-Could outsourcing IT give you more capability for less than an in-house hire?

https://www.analysysmason.com/contentassets/e5187a9660b64aa7a15a9aa5fd3d3df2/analysys_mason_smb_it_spending_forecast_may2024_rsmb1.pdf

If your team is using Microsoft Teams mostly for chat and video calls, you're leaving a lot on the table. Here are some features built into your standard Teams license that most small businesses don't know about 👇

📝 Meeting Transcription: Teams transcribes meetings in real time, identifies speakers, and creates a searchable archive. No Teams Premium required.
📋 Auto Meeting Summaries: After a call, Teams generates a recap with key discussion points and action items automatically.
📊 Polls and Forms: Run quick polls or collect feedback directly in a channel without sending a single email.
📅 Scheduling Assistant: See everyone's availability side by side before booking a meeting. No more back-and-forth.
🗂️ Channel Organization: Teams with clear, structured channels by topic have reported 30% fewer misplaced messages and 25% higher team productivity.
🔗 Power Automate Integration: Trigger automated workflows directly from Teams conversations.

Small tweaks to how your team uses Teams can save hours every week.

Supercharge Your Business. Getting Small Businesses Ready for 2025 with Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Community Hub How Microsoft 365 is Empowering Small Businesses In the ever-changing world of productivity and collaboration tools, Microsoft 365 continues to shine as a...

Microsoft 365 Copilot is no longer just for enterprise companies. Since December 2025, it's available for small businesses with fewer than 300 users through Microsoft 365 Copilot Business. 🎉

And the results are real. According to Microsoft's Copilot Usage Report 2025, users save an average of 9 hours per month, complete tasks 29% faster, and SMBs are seeing up to 353% ROI over three years.

What does Copilot actually do day to day? 👇

📧 Drafts emails and responses based on context
📝 Summarizes long email threads and meeting recordings in seconds
📊 Analyzes data in Excel and generates charts with simple prompts
🗓️ Recaps meetings and creates action item lists automatically
💡 Generates first drafts of documents, proposals, and presentations

If your team is spending hours on tasks like these every week, Copilot is worth a serious look.

It’s About Time: The Copilot Usage Report 2025 At MAI, we don’t just build AI tools, we care about how real people interact with them.

If you're paying for Microsoft 365, there's a good chance your team is only using a fraction of what's included. Most small businesses open Outlook, Word, and Excel and stop there.

Here's a quick look at what else is sitting in your subscription 👇

📹 Clipchamp: A full video editor built right into M365. Create training videos, social content, or screen recordings without downloading anything extra.
🎨 Microsoft Designer: An AI-powered design tool for social graphics, flyers, and banners in minutes. No design skills needed.
🔄 Power Automate: Automate repetitive tasks like email notifications, approvals, and form responses. No coding required.
📋 Microsoft Loop: A collaborative workspace that lets your team co-create content across Teams, Outlook, and other M365 apps in real time.
📅 Microsoft Bookings: Let clients or colleagues schedule time with you directly, without the back-and-forth emails.

These aren't add-ons. They're already paid for. The only cost is learning how to use them.

Unlocking Summer Productivity: 3 Microsoft 365 Features SMBs Should Be Using Right Now | Microsoft Community Hub It's summer and employees are taking vacation. But business doesn’t hit pause, and neither do your Microsoft 365 apps. Try these useful features that can...

Here's what the numbers say: employees at SMBs using AI save an average of 5.6 hours per week. ⏱️ Multiply that across even a small team and you're looking at hundreds of recovered hours every year.

And the businesses seeing results aren't running expensive enterprise systems. They're using practical, affordable tools for everyday tasks.

Where SMBs are winning with AI right now 👇

📧 Drafting and summarizing emails and documents
📅 Automated scheduling and appointment management
💬 Customer service responses and follow-ups
🧾 Invoicing, bookkeeping, and routine reporting

57% of small businesses already use AI in some capacity, up from 42% just a year ago. And 91% say it's positively impacting revenue. 📈

The question isn't whether AI is relevant to your business. It's whether you have a plan to use it.

2026 Small Business AI Outlook Report - Business.com 57% of U.S. small businesses are investing in AI technology, up from 36% in 2023, and 30% of employees now use AI daily.

Here's something most business owners don't realize: 94% of all login attempts hitting their network right now are coming from bots. 🤖

Not competitors. Not curious users. Automated systems probing for any door left open: a misconfigured device, an exposed port, an unchanged default password.

According to CISA, network segmentation is one of the most effective things a business can do to limit damage when something does get through. If an attacker gets into one part of your network, they shouldn't automatically have access to everything else.

The basics every SMB should have locked down 👇

🔥 A properly configured firewall, not just enabled but actively managed
🗂️ Network segmentation so one breach doesn't become a full compromise
👁️ Active monitoring to catch unusual traffic before it becomes an incident
🔄 Regular audits of connected devices, especially routers and switches

Most breaches don't start with sophisticated hacking. They start with something basic that was overlooked.

Targeted by 20.5 million DDoS attacks, up 358% year-over-year: Cloudflare’s 2025 Q1 DDoS Threat Report DDoS attacks are surging. In 2025 Q1, Cloudflare blocked +20M attacks (a 358% YoY spike) along with 5.6 Tbps and 4.8 Bpps record-breaking attacks. And that's just the beginning. Read more in our latest DDoS Threat Report.

The AI ROI conversation is over. The results are in.

NVIDIA's annual State of AI report, based on responses from over 3,200 companies across industries, shows companies deploying AI are cutting costs and increasing revenue. Early adopters who were running pilots in 2024 are now at full production scale.

The question isn't whether AI works anymore. It's whether you're actually using it to drive results before the window closes.

What steps is your business taking to move from AI experiments to AI results?

How AI Is Driving Revenue, Cutting Costs and Boosting Productivity for Every Industry in 2026 NVIDIA’s annual “State of AI” reports show how AI is being adopted across industries, what it’s being used for and how companies are achieving ROI, as well as their challenges and goals with the technology.

There's a cybersecurity leadership gap, and small businesses are paying the price.

Sophos reports there are roughly 35,000 CISOs worldwide serving around 359 million businesses. That's a 10,000:1 ratio. For Fortune 500 companies, that's manageable. For SMBs, it's a serious vulnerability.

Cybercrime is projected to cost $12.2 trillion annually by 2031. Most small businesses have no dedicated security leadership to navigate that landscape.

The good news: managed security providers are stepping in to fill that gap with CISO-level expertise without the CISO-level headcount.

What steps is your business taking to stay secure?

CISO Leadership Crisis - The Growing Cybersecurity Gap for SMBs A 10,000:1 business-to-CISO ratio is creating a cybersecurity crisis. Learn how MSPs, MSSPs, and new models like CISO Advantage are scaling security leadership globally.

The AI conversation has changed.

A year ago, most companies were asking "does this actually work?" Now the leaders who are winning have moved past that question entirely. Microsoft reports that top companies moved from using AI for small tasks like drafting docs, to redesigning entire end-to-end workflows.

The businesses that made this shift are pulling ahead. Fast. 📈

The question is no longer whether AI works. It's whether you're using it to transform how you operate.

What steps is your business taking to scale AI?

Scaling AI with confidence: How leaders are using AI to drive enterprise transformation - Microsoft in Business Blogs Tracy Galloway, COO Microsoft Americas shares her experience speaking with business leaders across industries about how AI is shaping the future.

The bar for what a small business can accomplish with technology just got higher.

AI-native software tools are giving SMBs capabilities that used to require dedicated IT infrastructure and large enterprise budgets.

But with new capabilities come new considerations. AI tools introduce complexity most small businesses aren't prepared to manage.

📌 Evaluate which AI tools fit your workflows
📌 Review your data security policies around AI adoption
📌 Think about how AI affects your team and what skills they need

The businesses that figure this out in 2026 will have a real advantage.

How the rise of AI-native software could give SMBs enterprise-level power Just as cloud-native vendors flooded the market a decade ago, we may be on the cusp of a new wave of AI-based applications. Here's why that could be a very good thing for small businesses.

Here's a number that should get every business owner's attention: phishing accounts for 16% of all data breaches.

Modern attacks go way beyond suspicious links. We're talking deepfake voice calls, executive impersonation, invoice fraud that bypasses traditional filters.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams cost businesses more than ransomware in the past year alone.

📌 Verify payment requests through a secondary channel
📌 Watch for urgency and authority in unexpected requests
📌 When in doubt, pick up the phone

Your employees are your first line of defense. Are they prepared?

200+ Phishing Statistics for 2026 Over 200 phishing statistics for 2025 revealing attack trends, top targets, and key insights to strengthen cybersecurity defenses.