Most IT Problems Give You Warnings — You Just Have to Look
Most IT failures don’t come out of nowhere. Backups quietly stop running. Updates sit unfinished for weeks. Old staff accounts stay active long after someone’s left. A short monthly check catches these things while they’re still straightforward to fix — before they turn into a data breach, a ransomware incident, or an invoice paid straight into a scammer’s account.
Too many business owners only look at their IT when something’s already broken. At that point, the cost is always higher than prevention would have been.
Why Thirty Minutes a Month Is Worth It
Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 31% of breaches started with attackers exploiting unpatched software — making it the most common entry point, ahead of stolen passwords. The same report found the median time to fully remediate a known vulnerability has stretched to 43 days. In most cases, a fix was already available. Nobody had installed it yet.
The ACSC’s Essential Eight framework puts patching at the top of its mitigation strategies for exactly this reason. A monthly check won’t replace continuous monitoring, but it will catch the obvious stuff before it becomes an incident.
The Six-Point Monthly Check
1. Updates
Check whether Windows updates are actually installing on your devices — or sitting at “restart required” week after week. Do the same for mobile devices and the software your team uses daily, like your browser and accounting application. If people keep clicking “remind me later,” that habit needs to change.
2. Backups
Open your backup tool and look at the last several runs. You want to see recent, successful completions — not a string of errors. Then ask yourself: when did someone last actually restore a file from it? If it’s never been tested, you don’t know whether it works.
3. Who Has Access
Pull up the list of user accounts in M365 and read through it carefully. Every name on that list should belong to someone who still works for you. Look for former staff, contractors who wrapped up months ago, and shared logins like “office” or “admin.” Disable anything that shouldn’t be active. Under the Privacy Act and Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, access controls are your first line of defence against unauthorised data exposure.
4. Multi-Factor Authentication
Confirm that MFA is switched on — and that it’s switched on for everyone, not just the people who set it up first. Pay closest attention to admin accounts and anyone handling finances. Microsoft’s research shows that MFA blocks more than 99.2% of account compromise attacks. If you’re using Entra ID, you can check MFA status from the admin centre in a couple of minutes.
5. Devices
Review what’s connected to your systems. If there’s a laptop or phone you don’t recognise, find out whose it is. While you’re there, confirm that laptops are encrypted and that any device with company email on it requires a passcode or biometric lock. Microsoft Intune makes this straightforward to manage if you’re on M365.
6. Subscriptions and Licences
Open your billing page and read through what you’re paying for. It’s surprisingly common to find licences belonging to people who left, duplicate tools doing the same job, or software someone signed up for without telling anyone. A clean licence list also keeps your M365 spend in check.
Making It a Habit
Block it in the calendar on a fixed day — the first Monday of the month works well — and assign it to the same person each time. Keep a running note of what you checked and what you found. After a few months, you’ll start to see patterns. If the same issue keeps coming back, it needs a proper fix rather than a monthly patch-up.
One rule: don’t stop to fix things during the check. Write down what you find and deal with it afterwards. The check only works if you actually finish it.
What to Handle Yourself vs. What to Escalate
Most items are straightforward — a laptop that needs restarting, a licence to cancel, an account to disable. Handle those yourself.
Send anything more complex to your IT provider: backups that keep failing, MFA that won’t enable for a particular user, an unrecognised device, or updates that fail on the same machine every month. These usually point to something bigger underneath.
This Isn’t a Replacement for Monitoring
A good managed IT provider has tools watching your systems around the clock and flagging things you’d never spot from a monthly review. This check covers what those tools can’t know — who left last month, which subscriptions you actually approved, whose laptop is whose. Both matter.
If you’d like a hand getting this set up, we can walk you through where each of these items lives in your M365 environment and take the fixing off your plate. Get in touch with the team at IT TechNinjas — we’ll help you sort it.