Most SMBs Think They’re Ready. The Operational Data Says Otherwise. We measured what’s actually happening inside managed SMB environments — not what business owners believe is happening. The gap between the two is the story. Corporate Technologies Research · Published April 2026 · Eden Prairie, MN The opening premise of most IT security discussions goes like this: SMBs are underprepared, and they know it. The reality is more uncomfortable. They are underprepared, and most of them believe the opposite. Read the Full Index DOWNLOAD THE Q1 2026 REPORT Devolutions’ 2025 State of IT Security report found that 71% of SMBs express confidence in their ability to handle a cyber incident. Only 22% have a security posture that could actually survive one. CrowdStrike’s 2025 survey drove the point further: incident rates are nearly identical for SMBs with security plans and those without — 25% versus 24%, respectively. Having a plan and executing a plan are not the same thing, and for most small businesses, the gap between those two things represents their entire margin of error. This index was built to close that gap in measurement. It combines anonymized, aggregated operational data from our managed SMB client base with external industry benchmarks sourced from more than 40 published studies. The goal is to replace what business owners assume with what the systems are actually reporting. “Most SMBs don’t lack awareness — they lack measurement. This index exists to replace assumptions with operational evidence, and to give business owners a benchmark they can actually act on.” — Jim Griffith, CEO, Corporate Technologies Why Surveys Get It Wrong The majority of SMB technology benchmarks are built on self-reported survey data. This is a structural problem. Social desirability bias — the documented tendency for respondents to overstate positive behaviors and minimize vulnerabilities — systematically inflates the picture. SolarWinds found that 87% of businesses rate their cyber defenses as average or better, yet 71% had suffered at least one breach in the prior year. Sophos found that 69% of ransomware victims believed they were well-prepared before the attack. Operational data removes that distortion entirely. Patch compliance is measured by automated timestamp, not recalled from memory. A backup either ran successfully or it failed — the log doesn’t negotiate. Uptime is tracked continuously, not estimated in a survey response. The index reflects Q4 2025 operational data across our full active SMB client base, measured against U.S.-focused industry research published between 2024 and 2026. “No amount of tools matters if you don’t measure real outcomes. SMBs are spending more on cybersecurity than ever, but spending and readiness are not the same thing.” — Jim Griffith, CEO The Five Pillars — What We Found Availability & Downtime The ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey found that 90% of organizations require 99.99% uptime — no more than 52 minutes of unplanned downtime annually. The average SMB delivers roughly 99.84%, or about 14 hours per year. That gap, tenfold, sits quietly inside most businesses as an unexamined financial exposure. Across the managed client base, the average outage rate in Q4 2025 was 0.294 per client per quarter — approximately 1.18 per year, compared to an industry average of roughly five. Average outage duration was 132 minutes, within the range of hardware and software failure, and well below the 8 to 24 hours typical of ransomware-related incidents. All recorded outages occurred during business hours, consistent with systems surfacing failures under active load rather than after-hours intrusions. 1.18 Outages per year (managed) ~5 Industry average outages/year 132 min Avg outage duration 4× Lower frequency vs. industry “The concentration of outages during business hours is consistent with what we see operationally. Hardware and software failures tend to surface under active load. The fact that we’re not seeing after-hours incidents is a direct reflection of 24/7 monitoring catching threats before they trigger outages.” — Ben Silver, Chief Operating Officer Backup & Disaster Recovery Backup readiness is the most consequential section of this index, and the most sobering. Within the managed client base, 71% of clients have automated backups — more than double the roughly 30% industry rate of full automation. Sixty percent have offsite or cloud replication. By those measures, performance is strong relative to a market where 75% of small businesses have no documented disaster recovery plan at all. The problem is what comes after the backup runs. Only 5% of clients have both documented recovery point and recovery time objectives, and only 5% have conducted a tested restore within the last 90 days. Industry benchmarks, already low, place RPO/RTO documentation at 25 to 35% of SMBs and restore testing at 54% for organizations that have ever tested. The managed environment is below both figures, by a significant margin. “The RPO gap is where the real risk hides. Because only 5% of clients have a defined recovery point objective and many rely on daily or infrequent backups, organizations face a significant risk of losing a full day or more of business data when an incident occurs. Most don’t discover that gap until they’re in the middle of a crisis.” — Katie Kelly, Director of Integration Services This matters in the context of how ransomware now operates. Veeam’s 2024 Data Protection Trends Report found that 93 to 96% of ransomware attacks target backup repositories directly. Backup frequency and backup survivability are different things, and most SMBs are operating as if they’re the same. The four false assumptions Kelly identifies during onboarding: Clients assume their backups cover all data — they often don’t. They assume all backups are equal, when immutable and mutable backups have fundamentally different survival rates against ransomware. They assume offsite replication is unnecessary. And they treat backup as synonymous with business continuity, which it is not without tested recovery procedures and documented objectives. Cyber Resilience The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that ransomware features in 88% of all SMB-related data breaches, compared to 39% for large enterprises. Forty-seven percent of small businesses under $10 million in revenue
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