If we asked a new client what they had in place for patching most of them would answer in one of two ways. Either they’re “pretty sure” patching is happening regularly, or they know patches have mostly been ignored for quite some time.

Regardless of how they answered, the outcome is usually the same.

Western Digital is a well-known name in the data production and storage industry. Established in 1970, they were one of the original players in the process of making semiconductors and they have a storied history that began with calculator chips, included a bankruptcy as well as being at the forefront of floppy disc creation in the 1980’s to eventually the hard drives they became known for in the 1990’s. Chances are good you have had a Western Digital drive in one of your devices (you may even have one now).

Despite being leaders in the digital storage industry, they’ve unfortunately proven no one is immune when it comes to ransomware attacks.

While this has been in the works for a while, Netflix is moving forward with their plan to crack down on users sharing accounts with those outside of their immediate household much to the chagrin of a vocal portion of their userbase.

Streaming services have become ubiquitous, and the market is profuse with options.

We’ve seen plenty of examples of extreme monetary penalties occurring from data breaches, but this is the first we’ve seen of anyone actually being jailed for one.

Vastaamo was a Finnish psychotherapy provider that was founded in 2008. While it was a sub-contractor under the government, Vastaamo like many healthcare related businesses was the subject of data breach attempts, with two additional successful attempts occurring  in 2018 and 2019. These attempts failed to be reported by the company.

USB flash drives (also known as thumb drives or memory sticks) have grown a lot in the last few years, what was once a handy tool for transporting small files but couldn’t compete with the capacity of CD disks or traditional drives is now available in sizes up to 1 terabyte which makes them a competitive product for even backup purposes.

As promised continuing off the back of last weeks article on Steam ending support for Windows 7 and 8 we wanted to talk about the real elephant in the room for businesses coming up this year, Windows Server 2012 end of life date which will occur October 10th, 2023.

On that date extended support for Windows Server 2012 will end.

You might be thinking, why is Valley Techlogic a business IT service provider reporting on this? While it’s true, most of our content is aimed at our client base which is business owners, there is of course some overlap between that community and the gaming community.

As a Microsoft partner we help our customers receive the maximum benefits from their Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including access to the security features found under Microsoft Business Premium and the line of business software we’re all familiar with Office, featuring programs such as Excel, Word, Powerpoint and more.

Reddit was down for several hours yesterday due to an “internal systems issue”. While the mobile version of the site fluctuated between being semi usable to being completed down, the desktop version was unusable for nearly five hours.

Outages like this that occur to major website are a newsworthy event, as users flock to social media to report the outage and speculate on the cause.

In 2023 it feels like the cost of everything is skyrocketing, from eggs being $10 for a dozen, to the price of a used car being up 61% compared to 2019.

Consumers and business owners alike are scrambling to cut costs where they can, and as a business owner you may be tempted to target your technology spending.