Eighty percent of surveyed small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rank IT security as a top business priority, with 29 percent spending less than $1,000 on IT security annually, according to a new Untangle 2019 "SMB IT Security Report". 

Outsourcing by companies has been an area of growth for many years, and the trend does not seem to be slowing down. For example, Gartner is forecasting a 17 percent growth in public cloud use worldwide in 2019. Leading the way is infrastructure-as-a-service or (IaaS) with an expected 27 percent growth alone.

In a recent study, respondents say that mobile technology enables them to optimize inventory planning and management (96 percent) and point-of-sale (96 percent), personalize the customer experience (96 percent), as well as boost employee productivity and motivation (95 percent).

It’s no secret that financial institutions are in criminals’ crosshairs.

Sixty-one percent of firms suffered a cyber attack in the past year, compared to 41 percent the year prior. The median cost for losses associated with cyber incidents shot up from $229,000 to $369,000, says a 2019 Hiscox cyber Reading Readiness Report. 

Eighty-six percent SMB clients were recently victimized by ransomware and 21 percent report six or more SMB attacks in the first half of 2017 alone, according to Datto’s State of the Channel Ransomware Report. 

More than three-fourths of small businesses (84 percent) include social media integration or messaging features on their app to keep users on their app for a longer period of time, according to a survey from Clutch.