LetterNine Monthly - IT Made Easy for Cleveland and Charlotte

Hi, and welcome to this month's issue. We pulled together the few IT stories that actually matter for a busy owner or office manager, with no jargon and no fear-mongering. If any item makes you think "should we be worried about that?" - that's exactly what we're here for. Read on, and reach out anytime. We've got you.

MSP industry news

• Windows 10, a year later: the bill for staying just doubled - Windows 10 lost free security updates in October 2025. Businesses keeping older PCs safe through Microsoft's paid Extended Security Updates paid $61 per PC for the first year, and Microsoft doubles that price every year, for up to three years. Joining now means paying for the missed year too. If you still have Windows 10 in the office, replacing those PCs is usually the cheaper path, and we can map which ones upgrade and which need replacing. (Extended Security Updates for Windows 10 - Microsoft Learn)
• More businesses are leaning on an IT partner, and for good reason - Industry analysts expect managed IT services to keep growing fast, driven mostly by two things: security and AI. The shift is away from waiting for things to break and toward preventing problems before they hit your team. That's the whole idea behind a proactive partner - predictable support instead of surprise outages. (More capability, less complexity: how the MSP business model is evolving - Lenovo StoryHub)

Cybersecurity highlights

• Cyber risk is now the top worry for small businesses - For the first time, a 2026 industry report found small and mid-sized businesses rank cybersecurity as their number one threat, ahead of long-standing money worries like inflation and recession. Nearly half of the businesses surveyed saw AI-written phishing attempts in the past year. The reassuring part: a few straightforward protections block most of it, and that's our baseline, not an upsell. (VikingCloud 2026 SMB Threat Landscape Report)
• Stolen passwords are the new front door - even with MFA - Attackers increasingly skip the break-in and just log in, using passwords and session cookies swiped by sneaky malware. Sophos's 2026 ransomware survey found that 97% of victims whose trouble started with stolen logins had multi-factor authentication (MFA: a second check beyond your password) turned on in some form. That doesn't make MFA useless. It means you also need modern protection on every device and backups kept out of attackers' reach. We set this up as standard. (The State of Ransomware 2026 - Sophos)
• Ransomware still lands hardest on smaller companies - Ransomware (malware that locks your files until you pay) keeps hitting smaller firms hard. In Sophos's 2026 survey of organizations that were attacked, only about a third of companies with 100 to 250 employees stopped the attack before their files were locked or stolen, compared with nearly half of the largest firms. The bright side: two out of three victims got their data back from backups. Patching, MFA and tested backups are still your best defense, and we handle them for you. (The State of Ransomware 2026 - Sophos)

Not sure where your biggest IT risk is hiding? Schedule a free, no-pressure assessment. We're local, we'll keep it plain, and we'll tell you straight. Reach out and we're on it.