Operations

Today's cloud environment has made it easier to start a company, however, many startup & SMB's forget about investing in operational excellence. In general, these companies wait to make operational investments until they have experienced an issue (outages/customer complaints) but most times this investment is too late. Prioritizing “IT Insurance” (service desk, availability, monitoring, disaster recover, and redundancy) will ensure your business grows without taking on any of the risks.

Not willing to make the investment in people and infrastructure - Create analytics dashboards to triage issues. 
Most SMB or startup companies that are in growth mode don’t worry about making and planning for your future growth/scale is becoming more paramount (don’t fumble through growth)

Hiring & quality control are going to continue to be a major pain point. To combat this, companies can take advantage of LLM/AIs to optimize their service desks. This new tech will enable companies to answer customer inquiries faster/better than in the past, make their current service desk staff more efficient, and perhaps even more believable (is this really a person?).

On the redundancy front, more service providers will begin to specialize in these services, making it more of a commodity, thus making it easier/more cost effective.

Lastly,  there is a trend for tech companies to shift to cloud native infrastructures (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) making it more commonplace to ensure high scalability and availability (3 nine’s and higher availability is commonplace for cloud service providers as they are a critical component to cloud based companies and their infrastructures).