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.

It’s November and 2025 is just two short months away, we don’t know about you but for us it felt like 2024 flew by and in that time technology planning for our clients has already changed.

For example, 2025 will bring the end-of-life date for Windows 10 which is still dominating the market share of Windows devices at 65%. We have also more clients in introducing AI into their business next year, including taking advantage of Microsoft’s Co-Pilot which works in tandem with their existing Microsoft subscriptions (you can see our latest blog on AI here).

Beyond AI or replacing hardware, what are five ways you can grow your business with technology in 2025? Here’s our suggestions:

Implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
A CRM platform (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot or Keap) helps centralize customer interactions, sales data, and service requests, providing valuable insights into customer preferences and buying behavior.

As you’re going about your day-to-day activities online, thinking of how a hacker might take advantage of even mundane aspects of your routine probably doesn’t enter into the equation.

We all sign on to work for the day, check our emails, maybe post an update on social media and chat with our colleagues before getting into the grind of our daily activities.

With Project Strawberry (the newest iteration of ChatGPT which is touted to boost it’s reasoning capabilities amongst other new features) on the horizon and more and more businesses taking advantage of AI tools such as Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini, the AI train doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon.