We get asked which antivirus to buy more than almost anything else, and our answer surprises people. For most of the small businesses we look after, the honest advice is: you already have it. Windows and macOS both ship with protection that is genuinely good now, kept current automatically, and quietly effective. Buying a second product on top rarely adds security, and often adds a second thing to renew and forget.

The real gap is not the tool. It is that nobody is reading what the tool says. We regularly find machines that flagged something weeks ago, sat there blinking, and were never looked at because nobody owned that job. Detection without a person attached is just a light nobody watches. The clever paid dashboard makes this worse, not better, if it simply produces more alerts into the same silence.

So we would rather a client spend the money on the boring layer underneath. Turn on the protection already built in. Get automatic updates working on every device, not just the loudest one. Make sure someone - a named person, not “the team” - actually receives the alerts and knows what to do when one arrives. That combination stops more harm than any upgrade to the antivirus badge on the box.

None of this is us being tight on your behalf. There are settings, mostly for larger or regulated firms, where a managed detection service earns its keep, and we will say so plainly when you are in one. But selling a sole trader a subscription to feel safer, when the built-in tool would do and the real weakness is elsewhere, is the kind of thing that gives our trade a bad name.

The uncomfortable truth is that most breaches we see did not defeat the software. They walked past it, through a reused password or a convincing email, while a perfectly capable antivirus sat idle and up to date. Spend where the weakness actually is.