Tabush Group's Cloud & Managed IT Blog

People often ask me what's on my mind, what I'm working on, and what's "new and exciting." Since I'm not big on social media, this is how I share these things a few times a year.

People often ask me what’s on my mind, what I’m working on, and what’s ‘new and exciting.’ Since I’m not big on social media, this is my way of sharing these things a few times a year.

Fall is here, the election is (sort of) behind us, and eight months into the pandemic approximately 85% of office workers in major cities are still working from home, which is something that many predictions say may never return to the way it was.

Eight months after companies took the proactive step to transition to working from home, many people still have a temporary setup at home and are learning how to adapt to this new reality and lifestyle.  I received many questions about how to make a more comfortable work from home environment to ensure productivity.  Below is my personal work from home recommendations. As you'll see, I'm a big Logitech fan!

Last year, I met the managing partner of a law firm who was in the middle of moving to a new practice management system.  The firm had been on the existing software solution for close to two decades, and Jim (as we’ll call him here), was a bit anxious about the change.  When I asked him why, he said that overall they were happy with the software they’d grown to know and master all these years, but “it’s not in the cloud, and everyone says we need to be in the cloud, so we’re changing” (to a web-based system).

Fast forward to last week when Jim and I caught up and he’s now looking to change back.  “The new system is sleek and cool, and it’s nice that it’s in the cloud, but it just doesn’t do some of the things that we need, and even after all the work we put into migration, we’ve decided to switch back.  Can you help us?” he asked me.

Cloud is one of the hot topics in IT and has been for the past few years. Prior to 2010, cloud products were often inferior to their traditional on-premise counterparts. Since then, however, much has changed, including advancements in telecom, mobile devices, and data center technologies.  Combine that with the maturity of cloud providers and products, and now cloud solutions are often positioned as the best option for law firms.

Recently, a company called me to discuss concerns about their IT security.  This company, based in the US but doing business with clients and vendors in many parts of the world, has been inundated with phishing emails.  The difference here is that these phishing emails are not just generic ones that pretend to be Microsoft Office 365 or UPS trying to steal passwords, but rather, they are spear phishing.  Spear phishing involves impersonating actual people associated with the company, like executives or vendors, in attempts to steal money or proprietary information.  These schemes are becoming more and more common.

When businesses today consider the future of their IT, cloud is always part of the conversation, and rightfully so.  Improvements in technology over the past decade have enabled many functions to be accomplished through a cloud service that previously required servers.

Anytime a business needs to make an IT decision, the primary focus should be value.  Change always has a cost – be it the time to implement or train staff in a new system, the cost of the unknowns in the new system (versus the knowns of the current system), or the actual hard cost in dollars of new technology.  In any case, a business almost always decides to make a change because they are confident that the value delivered by the new system will outweigh its costs and risks, and it will do so by ultimately increasing the company’s productivity and efficiency.  Given all this, we are often presented with a very simple question regarding our Boxtop cloud IT platform, “Will Boxtop save us money?”  While the answer is not universal and often takes some time to get to, it is most often ‘yes.’ Here is how.