Playbook: Your First 90 Days of Cybersecurity (For Businesses With No IT Team)

If you have no IT team and a long to-do list, “improve cybersecurity” feels impossibly vague. So here’s a concrete 90-day plan in three 30-day sprints. Do them in order; each one buys down the most risk for the least effort.

Days 1 to 30: Lock the front doors

• Turn on MFA for email, banking, and admin accounts.
• Get every team member a password manager.
• Turn on automatic updates on every device.

Days 31 to 60: Make a bad day survivable

• Set up automatic backups with at least one copy that’s offline or immutable.
• Write a one-page “who do I call” incident sheet.
• Test that you can actually restore a file from backup.

Days 61 to 90: Reduce the attack surface

• Inventory your SaaS tools and revoke unused access.
• Remove admin rights from day-to-day user accounts.
• Run a 30-minute phishing refresher with the team.

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Ninety days, no IT team, no big budget, and you’ll have closed the gaps behind the majority of small-business breaches. Want to know which step matters most for your business? Start with an assessment.