If you operate on a January-December fiscal year (most Houston small businesses do), the next ninety days are when next year’s IT budget gets decided. If you don’t go into that conversation with real numbers, you’ll either spend too little and pay for it later or get talked into things you don’t need.
Here’s the framework we use with Houston-area clients to build a realistic IT plan that holds up through the year.
Five categories that capture 95% of IT spend
- Licensing — Microsoft 365, line-of-business apps, accounting, CRM, design tools.
- Security — EDR, email filtering, backup, MFA tools, security awareness training.
- Hardware — laptops, monitors, peripherals, servers (if any), networking gear.
- Services — your IT provider or staff, project work, vendor support contracts.
- Contingency — typically 10-15% buffer for things you can’t predict.
The hardware refresh trap
The single biggest blind spot we see in Houston small business budgets is hardware. Laptops bought all at once 4 years ago will all reach end-of-life at the same time. If you have 20 laptops and didn’t budget for refresh, your 2027 IT spend is about to jump $20K-$30K — and you’ll be tempted to defer it, which is how you end up with the Windows 10 problem we wrote about earlier this year.
Real best practice: replace 20-25% of your fleet every year so the cost is steady and no one machine is more than 4 years old.
Where security spend should go in 2027
The 2025-2026 attack patterns make the priority order clear:
- Identity — MFA enforcement, password manager, privileged access controls. Highest ROI security spend you can make.
- Endpoint — EDR (not just antivirus) on every device.
- Email — modern filtering with anti-phishing.
- Backup — off-site immutable copies of everything, including Microsoft 365 data.
- Training — quarterly phishing simulations and security awareness.
For most Houston small businesses, total security spend lands in the $50-150/user/month range across all of these. Less than that, you have gaps. Much more than that, you’re probably overpaying or overbuilt.
What to ask your IT provider during budget season
- What’s coming end-of-life or end-of-support in 2027? Hardware, software, contracts.
- What controls do our cyber insurance and customer contracts require us to add or document?
- Where are we deferring something that should be done this year?
- What’s our actual cost-per-user across all-in IT, and how does that compare to similar Houston businesses?
- What three projects would have the biggest impact on productivity or risk reduction?
The 90-day budget rhythm
September: assess (what do we have, what’s it costing, what’s at risk). October: plan (what does 2027 need to include, in what order). November: approve (get the budget signed off, sign contracts that need renewing). December: prep (procurement queued, projects scoped).
If you don’t have an IT provider running this for you, or you’re not confident in the answers you’re getting, book a free discovery call. We do budget reviews as part of our IT consulting work for Houston-area small businesses.
Aspendora Technologies has provided managed IT services, cybersecurity, and IT consulting to Houston-area small businesses since 2010.