The Top 5 IT Challenges Facing Small Businesses
Apr 25, 2025
When you own and operate a small business, it can feel like there’s never enough time in the day to play all of your many roles: on-the-line employee, HR rep, and CEO, to name a few. In 2025, you have to add another hat to that list: Chief Information Officer. To remain competitive in today’s economy, even small businesses need to develop an IT infrastructure to protect their client data, provide key tools to employees, and prepare for emerging technologies.
But it’s never as easy as it sounds. These are the five big IT challenges your small business will likely face.
1. Cost
While every challenge in this list can be mitigated by a strong IT presence, the costs associated with hiring and maintaining a strong, internal IT team are hard topaper over.
According to Glassdoor, the median salary of an IT professional is $70,000/year. Granted, that number doesn’t include other costs associated with onboarding IT professionals, such as recruiting costs, medical benefits, training time, and stock options. That also doesn’t include employee turnover—with a rate as high as 18.3% in the technology industry—which can cost as much as two times an employee’s annual salary.
When your team is small, it quickly becomes unfeasible to make that kind of long-term, internal investment in IT. Unfortunately, the alternative can be just as costly. Without an IT team supporting their employees, small businesses can waste employee resources, put assets at risk, and fall behind the competition with out-of-date systems.
2. Navigating Hybrid Work Environments
In 2025, hybrid office environments are no longer an epidemiological necessity or an employee perk, they’re a must-have for the way work gets done. According to Gallup, 60% of employees prefer hybrid roles, while 33% prefer working entirely remotely.
While hybrid offices allow small business owners to attract strong talent, this environment can create a serious headache for IT systems. Even if you only have a few employees on your team, you have to answer a series of vital questions:
- How will we communicate when we’re not in the office?
- How do you safeguard client data?
- Who steps in to help if an employee’s computer goes bust?
While these questions may seem specific to hybrid working environments, they actually outline the considerations all small businesses have to make. To protect customer data, support your employees, and keep everyone in close communication, businesses from restaurants all the way to private medical practices need to adopt now-essential IT services such as managed security, cloud support, and data encryption and security.
3. Cybersecurity
As a small business owner, you might think your business is simply “too small” to attract the attention of a cybercriminal. Unfortunately, bad actors use this assumption against you, hoping a small but successful business will make for an easy target. This is a costly error—according to IBM, the average cyberattack on a small to medium-sized business can cost anywhere from $25,000–$3 million.
Some companies default to boilerplate employee trainings in an attempt to defend against cybercriminals. Oftentimes these trainings only defend against one or two specific tactics, but cybercriminals use a variety of methods to wiggle their way in:
- Malware: Malware, meaning “malicious software,” is a blanket term for any kind of computer program designed to harm or steal from your systems.
- Viruses: Viruses are a specific form of malware that can “spread” from system to system, like the flu.
- Ransomware: Also a form of malware, ransomware alters a system’s functioning, allowing a criminal to demand payment from the owner toremove the ransomware.
- Spyware: Often hidden, spyware illegally collects information on a system’s functioning and reports it back to the cybercriminal.
- Phishing: Usually in email form, phishing is a method of malware activation where cybercriminals try to trick users into downloading malware on their own.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The recent acceleration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT—has created the ultimate double-edged sword for the cybersecurity world. If AI can be used to help small businesses defend against ransomware and phishing schemes, it can also be used by bad actors to create higher-quality scams at a breakneck rate.
We’re already seeing what bad actors can do with AI: create complex deepfakes mimicking employees’ voices or writing styles, develop high-quality phishing scams, and code automated system attacks. In 2024, 61% of organizations saw an increase in deepfake attacks over the year. To successfully locate all of these threats, small businesses must fight fire with fire and use AI tools to scan for complex, ever-changing threats.
5. Maintaining Compliance
While you work to modernize your IT stack, it’s just as important to take a step back and survey the regulations that protect your industry. There are laws that definethe way businesses store and protect customer data, handle healthcare information, and even regulate how specific employees can contact each other to discusswork-related challenges. Here are a few examples:
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California Privacy Rights Act (CRPA)
For businesses handling the data of California residents, these regulations require data privacy and control for California customers. -
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
This act creates restrictions on the storage and proliferation of patients’ healthcare data. -
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
These regulations create restrictions around the storage and use of customer credit card information.
Unfortunately, compliance regulations and best practices are always evolving, making them confusing to follow. That doesn’t mitigate the fines and legal fees associated with breaking these regulations. The best way for a small business to keep up with changes in their industry is to entrust their IT stack to a teamof professionals.
You have enough on your plate—Let IPM solve your IT headaches
At IPM, we work to solve these IT challenges for you. We’re an affordable, outsourced asset that handles a wide variety of IT business needs, including:
- Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery
- 24/7 Managed Security
- Private and Hybrid Cloud IT
- Private Cloud AI
Turn 2025’s challenges into areas of opportunity with a technology partner that understands your small business needs.