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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.

Having an employee quit can be very disruptive to your business, besides having to scramble to rehire for the role or find coverage within your organization you also have to tie up any loose ends they may have been working on (especially if they left without a hand off period).

Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to wait until the dust has settled, when it comes to tying up loose ends we recommend jumping into action immediately once you’ve been made aware that your employee will not be continuing in their role.

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.