Microsoft's new threat report has a number in it that should change how small firms think about IT.
The median time from a vulnerability being discovered in the wild to being weaponized is now well under 24 hours. The median time for organizations to remediate critical internet-facing systems is 30 to 60 days.
That's the gap. And you don't close it with a good guy who stops by on Thursdays.
I'm not knocking the IT guy. Most of them are sharp, and for twenty years the model worked fine — fix what's broken, set up the new laptop, keep the printers alive. But the job changed underneath him. In that same report, Microsoft found that valid accounts — real credentials, real logins — accounted for 20% of observed initial access. Nothing is broken. Nobody's computer is acting up. Someone just signed in as your office manager at 2am and started reading mail.
Catching that takes monitoring that runs while everyone's asleep, alerts that actually reach a human at 3am, and patching measured in days instead of months. That's a system, not a person.
For a 15-person CPA firm the math is simple: three days down in March costs more than a year of doing this properly.
Worth a look before your next cyber renewal.
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