In what is truly the 11th hour (inauguration day for President Trump is January 20th, 3 days from now at the time of writing), the Biden administration announced an executive order that looks to strengthen US cyber defenses against outside influence, particularly from Russia and China.

New year, new threats? Hackers have not slowed down their efforts year over year, in 2024 the average cost of a data breach rose to 9.36 million US dollars. Of course this is taking into account the massive breaches that occurred last year with one attack costing the company that was targeted $500 million dollars.

Windows operating system end of life events are a big deal, with 1.6 billion active Windows devices as of 2024 Microsoft still holds a commanding lead over any other operating system provider. Even though Windows 11 was released almost 4 years ago at this point, it still only represents 28% of the global Windows market share (with 70% still using Windows 10).

There are a lot of reasons for this, from users being comfortable with the Windows 10 interface to many devices that simply aren’t Windows 11 ready (interested in a Windows 11 device in 2025? Here’s our guide).

Users hanging onto a previous version of Windows until the bitter end is nothing new for Microsoft, Windows 7 still had a 12% market share when Windows 11 was released October 2021 (almost 2 years since it’s own EOL date occurred).

In the past, Microsoft has released critical security updates even for systems no longer receiving support.

2024 was a busy year in technology, with a lot of the focus shifted to continuing advancements in AI, which job openings even being available for those who can craft the perfect prompt. 2025 is likely to bring even more focus this way, but what other advancements in technology should your business be focusing on in the new year? Here are our predictions:

5G capability: 5G is not a minor upgrade to 4G, 5G is 10 to 100 times faster and has a fraction of the latency (under 5 milliseconds vs 60-98 milliseconds for 4G – an eternity when it comes to page loading times). 5G also has much greater capacity which will make providing network access to areas previously underserved or underrepresented by cable companies possible.

As an IT service provider, digital security is a big focus for our business. However, it’s important to also plan for physical security when it comes to protecting your business’s technology and data. Especially in spear phishing attacks (which are attacks targeting a specific individual) there is no better treasure trove of data than a device used by someone with considerable access to company data.

When a tech company as big as Meta has an outage, the effects are felt pretty far and wide. Such was the case Wednesday when an outage knocked out a range of Meta services.

Primarily affecting Facebook and Instagram, other Meta platforms such as Messenger, Threads and WhatsApp also had noticeable issues.

2024 is coming to a close and with it we’re reviewing the year in technology as a whole. While we’ve covered advancements in AI, continued benefits to businesses from vendors like Microsoft 365 helping capitalize on more productivity from their technology, more options in hardware and greater adoption for cyber security especially with more regulations in place all point to positive trends in the technology space, there were still a number of notable negatives especially when it comes to cyber security breaches.

Malicious online ads or “malvertising” is on the rise, and no time is more ripe for online scamming then the busiest shopping season of the year.

Malvertising is a cyberattack that involves bad actors injecting malicious code into online ads. These ads will appear from a Google search to be a genuine website, but when users click on the ad they are falling into the attackers trap.

Black Friday is just a couple of weeks away but in recent years most retailers have moved away from the model of having deals only available on the day itself, instead opting for a month-long Black Friday extravaganza.

For buyers you can find a deal on everything from home appliances to furniture, clothing and all other manner of consumer goods but there are still some great deals to be had for businesses especially in the technology space.

As a managed IT service provider ourselves, we strongly encourage every business owner to meet with the person and/or business who provides their IT support services at MINIMUM annually (and here are our five reasons why if you’re curious).

If you already have that annual meeting on the books or are thinking about scheduling it soon to prepare your business for 2025 and beyond, it’s a good idea to go with a few questions that will help you determine if the services you’re receiving are meeting your business’s needs and goals.