The CrowdStrike Outage: A Wake-Up Call for QA

CrowdStrike

If you’re anything like me, you had frantic friends or family last week — flights canceled, hospital records inaccessible, public transit MIA… You might not have heard of CrowdStrike previously, but you sure have now. They released an update that caused all sorts of chaos, and (unfortunately for them) it’s a great lesson in how important QA testing is when … Read More

How we’re using AI to help our clients

AI

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been maybe the biggest news story on earth the past year or so. The emergence of ChatGPT kicked off a proverbial arms race between the big tech companies — all of a sudden, you had large language model AIs all over the place. Microsoft gobbled up OpenAI, the company … Read More

Rising Above The Rubble: Taking a Hard Look at Business Continuity

Business Continuity

If business continuity and disaster recovery were people, they’d be those slightly annoying relatives always pestering you to be “better safe than sorry.” While you may get tired of hearing the same message over and over again, they are unfortunately prophetic when a disaster — sayyyy, like a data breach — decides to pay an unsolicited visit. Business continuity is … Read More

The costly impact of IT downtime on small and medium-sized businesses

IT downtime

No matter your industry or size, technology has become the backbone of business operations. From the local coffee shop that relies on a point-of-sale (POS) system to process payments, to the mid-sized manufacturing company utilizing sophisticated software for inventory management, technology is integral to the smooth functioning of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). However, when IT outages or IT downtime … Read More

Business computers: The pros and cons for your company

Business computers

Regardless of whether you’re a lean startup or a massive enterprise corporation, you can’t get very far without computers (I know, pretty obvious by this point). And while we all know how critical computers are for modern operational efficiency and productivity, I still get a ton of questions from our various clients and partners about whether they should outfit their … Read More

IT budgets grow despite economic uncertainty

IT Budgets

For years — maybe decades — management viewed IT as primarily a cost center. A necessary evil, at an often heavy expense, to enable the rest of the company to simply function. Given that prevalent mindset, most business leaders strove to keep IT budgets down as much as possible. The thinking went that if it wasn’t actively improving sales or … Read More

The stages of vulnerability management

Vulnerability management model

Cybersecurity and organizational preparedness have never been more important than they are right now. Both will become more important with every passing week. More advanced, more pervasive and more destructive cyber threats crop up every single day, and your vulnerability management plan has to be up to snuff to keep your company and its clients safe. But where do you … Read More

IT management vs cybersecurity

IT management

IT management and cybersecurity go hand in hand. There are few companies in 2022 that can be successful without high-level performance on both fronts. For most small and medium-sized businesses, these may not even be treated as separate functions or departments, but rather lumped together into the “technology” bucket (which isn’t exactly wrong, either). But, there are important distinctions between … Read More

How to manage security threats in the new WFH normal

WFH

Work from home (WFH) has moved from a side effect of covid mitigation necessity to the new working normal for a lot of high-profile companies (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Obviously not every company in the country can or wants to go full-time WFH, nor should they. But, some version of increased flexibility and/or hybrid working arrangements are going to become the … Read More

What the Slack + Salesforce merger shows about the future of work

Covid has revealed and accelerated business life. It reveals cracks in businesses’ foundations or shines a light on underlying strengths. On the flip side, it has most definitely accelerated the transition to the future of work being closer to today than tomorrow. The work-from-anywhere, communicate in whatever way you want future is now today. Zoom is now part of the … Read More