The 30-Minute IT Check Every Small Business Should Do Once a Month

Last year, we picked up several new clients after their previous IT provider retired. Going through their systems, we found the usual grab bag of issues – but one stood out: their backups. They were running a strategy from two decades ago: a full backup once a week, with daily incrementals in between. Incrementals are smaller backups that only capture what’s changed since the last one, rather than copying everything again. And they kept just two weeks of history. It had worked for years. It just wasn’t built for what businesses need today.

We rebuilt the backup strategy for each of them, often using the same software they already had, just configured to match current best practices.

Recently, one of those clients called us. A file was missing from their server, most likely deleted by accident. We went looking and found it in a backup from the month before. Under their old setup, with only two weeks of history, that file would have been gone for good.

Almost none of it happens without warning. That backup had been running for years – it just wasn’t running the way today’s businesses need it to. Old accounts stay active for months before anyone notices. Updates sit half-installed for weeks. A short monthly IT check is usually enough to catch that kind of thing before it turns into a bigger problem.

Why a Monthly IT Check Is Worth the Time

Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that unpatched software has now overtaken stolen credentials as the single most common way attackers get in, showing up in 31% of breaches. The same report put the median time to fully fix a known vulnerability at 43 days.

Most attacks don’t rely on some undiscovered flaw. They use a problem that was already known, with a fix already available. Nobody had installed it yet.

Small businesses take the brunt of it. The same 2026 DBIR found that small organizations accounted for 96% of ransomware victims this year, up from 88% the year before. That’s not because attackers are targeting small businesses specifically – it’s because they’re easier targets. Fewer of the checks are in place that would catch a stale account or an unpatched laptop before it becomes an opening.

Part of the reason is straightforward. Most small businesses don’t have someone whose full-time job is watching for this. IT gets handled by whoever has time between other responsibilities. Small gaps pile up until something forces the issue: an account nobody remembered to disable, an update that silently failed.

The Check

None of these take long on their own. Together, they’re the six places small gaps tend to hide.

1. Updates

Check whether Windows updates are actually installing on your computers, or sitting at “restart required” week after week. Do the same for phones and for the software your team uses most, like your browser and your accounting app. If people keep clicking “remind me later,” that’s worth fixing. This is the item most directly tied to the 31% stat above. An update sitting at ‘restart required’ is a fix that already exists but hasn’t been applied yet. That’s exactly the kind of open door that turns a known vulnerability into a breach.

2. Backups

Open your backup tool and look at the last few runs. You want recent, successful backups, not a list of errors – and you want to know when someone last actually restored a file from it. A backup nobody’s tested is a backup you’re only assuming works.

For most businesses, this is usually a quick look. Check recent successful jobs, and confirm the history window actually goes back far enough to matter. That’s longer than the two weeks we found at those new clients last year. If you’re not sure your current setup would hold up, that’s exactly what our Backup and Disaster Recovery service is built to check.

3. Who Has Access

Pull up the list of user accounts in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and read through it. Every name should be someone who still works for you. Watch for people who left, contractors who wrapped up months ago, and shared logins like “office” or “admin” that several people use. Turn off anything you don’t need. An account that should have been disabled in June is still a working login in September if nobody checks – one an ex-employee, or anyone who gets hold of old credentials, can use without setting off any alarm.

4. Multi-Factor Authentication

Confirm MFA is switched on for everyone, not just the people who set it up first – especially admin accounts and anyone who touches money. Which app you use depends on what you’re protecting: Microsoft Authenticator for Microsoft 365, Google Authenticator or Authy for most everything else. Microsoft’s own research found MFA blocks more than 99.2% of account compromise attacks – it’s the highest-leverage five minutes in this whole check. If you want the fuller picture on why, we cover it in All Businesses Should Adopt MFA.

5. Devices

Look at what’s actually connected to your network and systems. We use Auvik to monitor network infrastructure and an RMM platform to monitor endpoints. RMM (remote monitoring and management) is software that lets us see and manage every network device from one place. That includes confirming BitLocker is turned on across laptops. A lost or stolen device then can’t expose what’s stored on it.

6. Subscriptions and Licenses

Open your billing pages and read through what you’re actually paying for. It’s common to find licenses still assigned to people who left, or two tools quietly doing the same job. This one’s as much about security as cost. An unused license is still an active account somewhere, and a forgotten tool is one more place company data might be sitting outside anyone’s view.

Make It a Routine

Put it on a fixed day each month – the first Monday works well – and give it to the same person every time. Keep a short note of what you checked and what you found. If the same issue keeps showing up, that’s a sign it needs a permanent fix, not just another 30-minute pass. A simple log works fine – date, what you checked, what you found, and what got fixed. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but it needs to exist somewhere besides someone’s memory. Six months of these notes will tell you more about your setup than any single month does on its own.

Who Fixes What

Most of what you’ll find is small – restart a laptop, cancel an unused license, disable an old account. Handle those yourself if you want. Send us the rest: backups that keep failing, MFA that won’t turn on for someone, a device you don’t recognize, or updates that fail on the same machine every month. Those usually point to something bigger underneath. A single failed backup might be a fluke. Three months running, it’s not. That usually means the software’s misconfigured or the storage is full. Or the account it connects to lost permission somewhere – not something a restart fixes.

What This Check Doesn’t Replace

This isn’t a substitute for monitoring. Auvik and our RMM platform watch your systems around the clock and catch plenty that a once-a-month pass never will. What this check covers is the part only you know – who actually left, which subscription you approved, whose laptop is whose. Auvik will flag a firewall or access point that drops offline at 2 a.m. It won’t flag that a contractor who left in June still has a working login. It also won’t notice that nobody’s touched a second project management tool in months.

The Bottom Line

Most IT problems don’t show up out of nowhere. They give you weeks of warning first, if anyone’s looking. Thirty minutes a month, on a fixed day, with a short list to work through, catches most of it before it costs you a weekend – or a file you can’t get back.

Book a Free Consultation

If you’d rather we run this check for you – or want a second set of eyes on your current backup, MFA, and device setup – book a time on my calendar and we’ll take a look. We work with small and midsize businesses across the Sarasota/Bradenton area as part of our Managed IT Services, and a review like this is part of what we do for every client we manage.

Frequently Asked Questions