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While Microsoft has been somewhat hush hush on the exact amount of their investment into the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI (with some estimates nearing $10 billion).  It is clear that they’re going all in on AI and looking towards the future by already integrating it into their search engine Bing, via a new chat bot feature.

We’ve posted a lot of articles on how to avoid a data breach (here are a couple of recent ones for you to review if one hasn’t happened to you so far and you’d like to keep it that way).

Unfortunately, we fear that if you’ve reached this article you may be part of the growing number of business owners whose data has been breached (in 2020 there were 700,000 attacks on small businesses with damages exceeding $2.8 Billion).

Data breach severity varies widely, from an employee email being temporarily hacked all the way to having your backups infiltrated and locked for a ransom – and even if you pay the ransom you still might not recover your data.

Downloading applications from trustworthy sources is something that has been drilled into most of us as internet safety 101, and many of us would consider the top link on Google to be a trustworthy source.

However, hackers are now taking advantage of that and pushing ads that contain their malware disguised as legitimate applications.

As a technology service provider, it’s probably a given that we believe in proactive maintenance. We believe being proactive is less costly both in lost revenue and lost time (and time is money so it’s doubling down when a technology outage occurs).

Many clients are afraid to replace aging hardware, these systems represent a big investment for them typically and they want to get the most “bang for their buck” out of systems they spent thousands of dollars on.

If you’ve realized you need additional IT support for your business but are on the fence about which route to take, hiring IT staff or outsourcing your needs to an IT service provider the choice can be difficult.

Many of our clients reach us because they have been using an unreliable IT support service, their existing IT staff left, or sometimes because they’ve somehow gotten by with no IT at all but realize that needs to change.

It was announced this week that Microsoft will be laying off 10,000 employees in a bid to cut costs in response to “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities”.

They join the likes of Amazon who also recently laid off 18,000 employees and Meta who cut 11,000 jobs last November.

ChatGPT is a power AI chatbot that allows the user to communicate a question to it and receive a very thorough answer on any topic the user can dream up. Created by OpenAI and already fielding massive investment offers even from companies like Microsoft, they’ve had a ton of buzz in the news both positive and negative.

The new year is upon us and with that comes the opportunity to make needed changes to outdated technology within your business.

Our clients are usually split on when they want to make changes – for some it’s that mad dash towards the end of the year and for others it’s the fresh mindset that comes after the 1st of January.

We’ve posted about LastPass data breaches before but at that time it was purported to be a false alarm according to the company, the news on this most recent breach is that it’s real and that LastPass users should be concerned.

The data breach in question happened in August but LastPass is just now revealing the details on what was stolen and the scope of breach.

It doesn’t matter which e-commerce sector you’re in, the holiday time period is always a big opportunity to increase that year’s sales before the New Year rolls in.

With online shopping growing in popularity year over year there are specific ways to capture more of that online market – especially around the holidays.