The Technology Risks Businesses Don't See Coming
Businesses that manage IT reactively can leave security, data and infrastructure problems unresolved until they become costly.
A new cybersecurity framework is urging businesses to shift their perspective on cybersecurity from technical fixes to an organizational risk. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), nearly 82% of small businesses in the U.S. have no employees other than the owner, which raises questions about how well they understand the health of their technology systems.
These systems often remain invisible until a disruption, security incident, or major change exposes their weaknesses. Matt Bratlien, managing partner at Net-Tech, an IT services company, notes that many problems remain undetected because operations continue uninterrupted even when underlying technology issues are present. The 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon found that vulnerability exploitation accounted for 31% of breach entry points, overtaking credential abuse.
The median time to fully remediate a critical vulnerability reached 43 days, highlighting that businesses can leave known weaknesses unresolved for weeks, increasing the window of opportunity for attackers. While cybersecurity is a concern, technology outages can also have significant financial consequences, with 57% of respondents to the Uptime Institute's 2026 Annual Outage Analysis reporting that their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, and one in five reported costs exceeding $1 million.
Bratlien emphasizes the importance of measuring technology environment improvement over time rather than just reacting to immediate issues. Businesses often approve technology investments in response to urgent problems but may defer work designed to improve long-term resilience, consistency, or governance due to less immediately visible benefits.
Sankar Sivarajah, Professor of Technology Management at Kingston Business School, highlights that reactive technology management can lead to fragmented systems, duplicated investment, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and increasingly difficult-to-use technology. He advocates for standardization to establish more consistent foundations for governance, security, and integration.
The rise of artificial intelligence adds urgency to these concerns, as it can expose weaknesses that may have gone unnoticed for years. Businesses experimenting with AI tools risk overlooking old issues, as AI can easily access previously difficult-to-find information. Leslie Willcocks of the London School of Economics and Political Science warns that organizations often focus on new technologies while neglecting legacy systems and longstanding operational issues.
The lesson for small businesses may be to focus more on understanding the condition of their existing systems rather than merely adopting the latest technology.
Written by urgent.news from Newsweek's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
