The SMB IT Department Didn't Vanish; It Moved Into The Laptop

Shawn Chang is General Manager of ASUS North America, where he drives consumer and commercial business strategy in United States and Canada.

gettySmall and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are in the midst of an IT shift. In a 2023 Forrester Consulting study of 421 SMB cloud technology decision-makers, researchers found that SMBs are shifting toward co-managed IT, leaning more on external and outsourced partners to fill in-house expertise gaps and manage their remote and hybrid IT environments. While outsourcing the IT department was unimaginable a decade ago, today, just a few years after that study, we are seeing this shift in full swing.

Today, over half of SMBs now turn to managed service providers (MSPs) to assist with the deployment of everything from their cybersecurity defense and cloud infrastructure to data backups, helpdesks and day-to-day support. GTIA (Global Technology Industry Association) reports that 61% of SMBs now outsource IT services regularly or occasionally. Our own research ​shows that “64% of SMBs now prefer outsourced or hybrid [IT] models that offer flexibility” for remote or hybrid environments.

This number is growing, especially as small and medium-sized businesses gain access to affordable and scalable technologies. Using outsourced and hybrid IT arrangements opens opportunities for businesses to scale up or down as needed. Overall, it allows teams to avoid investing in ​infrastructure they may outgrow in a few years. The services also allow users to access specialized skills, like cybersecurity and threat detection, that they could not previously access without hiring a full-time team. Additionally, MSPs enable workplace mobility and flexibility. ​

This is especially pertinent given that around two-thirds of U.S. companies offer some form of workplace flexibility, according to “The Flex Report Q3 2025.” A small business that can hire an employee and deploy IT services from anywhere gains a compelling advantage when competing with larger enterprises for talent.

Managed service providers are a relatively cost-efficient and advantageous investment for most SMBs, provided you have already invested in the right hardware to support your deployment. The MSP model works best when the device it runs on is reliable and can be securely controlled from remote environments. A deployment of services is nullified when you need to send in your physical device (laptop, desktop, mini tower, etc.) for patching, securing or fixing. Investing in the right hardware is the foundational step in reliably managing your outsourced IT deployments. ​

This can be illustrated by a 2024 example when a faulty CrowdStrike security update​ knocked out about 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide. The crash resulted in thousands of delayed flights, disrupted banking services, outages and offline hospital systems worldwide. The recovery process was tedious and extended. Affected machines had to be booted into Safe Mode or Windows Recovery Environment in order to delete the faulty file by hand, device by device, and machines with BitLocker encryption enabled had to have their recovery key entered manually. In many instances, this had to be done by a technician instead of the device user.

If these devices had been equipped with the right hardware, specifically out-of-band management hardware, the MSPs could have reached those machines below the OS, at a firmware level. This would have allowed them to reboot each device, enter recovery mode and remove the file remotely, without the need to dispatch a technician on-site.

The event exposed a larger fundamental issue with relying solely on remote MSP management. Relying only on MSP software, without the correct hardware in place, leaves businesses vulnerable to downtime and crashes similar to the CrowdStrike update.

For large enterprises, like airlines and hospitals, the CrowdStrike incident was an enormous expense. But the vulnerability it exposed (specifically hardware that cannot be remotely recovered) is not unique to enterprises. It’s a hardware problem that small businesses are less equipped to handle. For a small business with no in-house IT, running on consumer-grade hardware, the downtime translates into thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The average cost of IT downtime (lost productivity, missed revenue and emergency IT repairs) for SMBs ranges between $8,000 and $25,000 per hour.

So, while SMBs might not always experience incidents of the CrowdStrike caliber, any IT delay SMBs experience could quickly drain their resources. This is even more costly when managing a hybrid or remote workforce where an emergency device upgrade or repair requires shipping or emergency site visits. In those cases, what could be a routine system recovery can easily be thousands of dollars in avoidable losses.

Hardware deserves a central seat in the MSP conversation, as proper hardware is what enables MSPs to perform at their best. Hardware features like out-of-band management, built-in diagnostic tools, system health monitoring and centralized management platforms allow IT providers to work efficiently and effectively, enabling them to deploy updates and troubleshoot systems without delay.

With managed services providers, security, monitoring and maintenance have moved away from IT departments and moved into the device itself, where they can be managed from anywhere. With the right hardware foundation, IT outsourcing has been reported to be incredibly advantageous, with organizations reporting IT cost reductions of 20% to 30% and productivity increases of around 20%, as estimated in the industry MSP trend analyses. This has allowed for massive operational shift, and SMBs are better able to compete with far larger rivals on a fraction of the budget.

Over the last decade, the IT department has not disappeared; it has simply migrated from an on-site team into your computer itself. But what we have come to see is that this shift is only successful when the hardware itself can withstand the needs of the IT team.

Before your next technology refresh cycle, it is worth asking your MSP directly whether your hardware can be managed off-site and fully recovered off-site when systems fail. SMBs that are proactive about building the right hardware foundation today will save significant time and IT costs later down the road.

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