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Microsoft has had a busy year in 2021. With the release of Windows 11 and it’s continued roll out to more and more eligible users, as well as the quieter release of Windows Server 2022 in August. It looks like they’re not slowing down in 2022.

We’ve been notified as a Microsoft partner there will be price increases across the board for their powerful suite of office software, Microsoft 365 expected in March 2022.

While it’s never fun to have an unexpected increase to your overall IT spend, we think Microsoft 365 is still well worth it even at the increased cost.

Not you specifically, but the data that makes up your online activities and private details? What about your various web accounts, for example did you know a hacked Netflix account with 12 months of service is worth $44 on the Dark Web as of 2021?

We know the Dark Web is a nebulous concept and most of the people we talk to really don’t feel as though it has much to do with them.

Halloween is approaching and we thought it would be appropriate to cover some bone chilling cybersecurity statistics business owners NEED to know to protect their business.

Cybersecurity is something we all know we need to do more about but also don’t like to think about, however for business owners’ avoidance won’t make the threats any less real.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “tribal knowledge” you’ve still most likely participated in it. Tribal knowledge is anything in your workplace people just “know”. If you have a particular co-worker that gets upset if the AC is turned down below 75 so no one does, that’s tribal knowledge.

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.