The little prompt asking to install an update and restart is one of the most-dismissed messages in working life. It always seems to arrive at a bad moment, it interrupts what you were doing, and postponing it costs nothing visible, so it gets pushed to later and later again. What that framing misses is what a great many updates actually are: not just new features or cosmetic changes, but fixes for specific security weaknesses that have been discovered in the software. When a hole is found in an operating system, a browser, or an application, the update is how it gets closed - and once that fix is released, the existence of the hole is public knowledge, which means attackers know about it too and actively look for machines that have not yet applied the fix.
This is what makes putting updates off different from most forms of procrastination: the delay is not neutral, it is an exposure. An unpatched device is not merely missing an improvement; it is running a known, published weakness that anyone can look up, on a machine reachable over the internet. Attackers routinely scan for exactly this - systems still carrying flaws that were fixed weeks or months ago - because unpatched software is such reliable, easy prey. The gap between a fix being available and a business actually applying it is a window during which the business is vulnerable to a problem that has, in a real sense, already been solved. Every deferred restart holds that window open a little longer.
The remedy is undramatic, which is exactly why it is so often undervalued: keep software and devices up to date, and do it promptly rather than eventually. Turning on automatic updates where that is practical removes the reliance on anyone remembering, so fixes get applied soon after they are released instead of waiting on a convenient moment that never quite comes. This applies across the board - computers and their operating systems, phones and tablets, the web browser, the business's applications, and, easily forgotten, the devices that quietly run the network, such as the router. Any of these can carry a weakness a fix has already addressed, so any of them left unpatched is a candidate for the open door.
For a small business, keeping things updated is one of the highest-value security habits available precisely because it defends against real, known, actively-exploited weaknesses at almost no cost - no expertise, no expense, just the discipline of not deferring. It pairs naturally with the other plain foundations: a second step at login, unique passwords, sensible backups, and a wariness of suspicious emails. None of these is glamorous, and updating is perhaps the least glamorous of all, but the unglamorous basics are what stop the ordinary attacks that make up the overwhelming majority of what actually happens to small businesses. The update prompt is not a nuisance to be survived; it is the mechanism by which a known danger gets shut, and the sooner it is acted on, the shorter the time the door stays open.