Every October the CyberSecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) releases a list of resources and tips for National CyberSecurity Awareness Month – which is now in its 18th year.

This year’s theme is “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart”. There has been an onslaught of news worthy ransomware attacks, DDoS attacks and data breaches (up 38% this year compared to last) in 2021 and there has never been a better time to address what the average person or business can do so they don’t end up as part of these statistics.

Windows 11 officially came out on October 5th and maybe it just us or perhaps it’s been overshadowed by other tech news this week, but the release has seemed somewhat unceremonious so far.

Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t released for everyone.

Yesterday if you were trying to login to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Oculus VR you wouldn’t have had much luck. Facebook experienced their worst outage since 2008 (when a bug caused the site to be down for an entire day). They were down for just over 6 hours as a world that suddenly found themselves with more time on their hands speculated why.

If you use VoIP in your business, you may have been affected by service outages so far this week.

That’s because Bandwidth.com, a major hosting provider for VoIP services such as Accent, Ring Central, Twilio and more has been under assault by a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The global chip shortage is still raging on and it’s effecting more business sectors than you might expect. As a technology provider we’re certainly feeling the pinch when it comes to ordering hardware for our clients. The delays have challenged us to get creative with our clients and we’re coming up with interim solutions until hardware makes it in.

As an IT provider ourselves we have some thoughts - okay a lot of thoughts - on what makes a good one.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many of our clients came to us after being failed, sometimes catastrophically, by their previous provider. While we service a large portion of the Central California area, we know many readers fall outside this region and we thought it would be helpful to provide a printable and online capable checklist for the top 9 things to look for in an IT provider.

Speaking in absolutes is not usually a good idea, but in the case of data storage we feel the onus is on us to speak plainly – and it’s the plain truth that your data is safer in the cloud.

It’s natural to be hesitant to move everything into the cloud, especially when it really wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things that all data was stored in filing cabinets.

Microsoft finally has an official release date for their first operating system release in six years, it will be released October 5th, 2021. Windows 11 will be a free upgrade to Windows 10 users – if you’re not already a Windows 10 user we urge you to upgrade while it’s still available and free.

We’ve been on a roll lately discussing the changes and products being rolled out by Microsoft this year, primarily Windows 11 which should be launched this fall. Last week Microsoft announced a price increase to their ubiquitous business products, Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

Office has been a business staple since it’s launch in 1989 (although Word predated the Office grouping of products quite a bit, launching in 1983). The original launch set was Word, Excel and Powerpoint but the product line up has exploded since then including other must-have features such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and more.

While it hasn’t been made official yet, all sources seem to indicate an October 2021 release of Windows 11 is eminent. That date would track with previous release schedules and merges nicely with the big feature updates that always occurs around that time for mainstream Microsoft products.