Tabush Group's Cloud & Managed IT Blog

As I wrote about at the beginning of the year, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) is a sector of technology that will really grow this year. And, this is why:

 A few days ago, Verizon announced they are shutting down their public cloud services. Customers have a month to migrate whatever servers and systems they run off of Verizon’s cloud and onto a new provider. If a month sounds like a long time to you, you’re probably not the person responsible for your company’s IT.

Last month, we held our annual awards breakfast. As a small business of 25 employees, it’s a much anticipated day, where we all come together to honor team members who have achieved milestones with the company, as well as those who have exemplified our values. Over the past year, we added 6 new employees, so it was also an opportunity to all together welcome them to the Tabush Group family.

As an IT Managed Service Provider (MSP), the largest, and most important, group in our company is our technical services team, which is made up of different types of support engineers.

This time of year always brings a slew of articles about “what’s next” – the hot technologies, stocks, real estate markets, movies, music, food – what we should all plan to use/invest in/watch/ eat, etc. Since everyone else is doing it, I figured why not chime in on the topic I spend most of my time in: Small Business IT. So, without further ado, here are my predictions for 2016:

As cliché as it may be, I can’t believe that we’re only a few days away from the conclusion of 2015. Each December at our annual company holiday party, I get the privilege of delivering the ‘State of the Company’ speech. In 2014, I focused on how we love what we do, and because we love it, our focus has always been on doing it better, and growth has merely been a byproduct. In this year’s speech, I reminisced about how and why I founded the company in 2000 from my college dorm room, and how it has and continues to be an amazing journey of building, learning, and growing. 2015 was no exception to that.

Technology has been progressing at an amazing rate, especially over the past 20 years. Think back to 1994 and you probably couldn't imagine the Smartphone, DVR, Netflix, Wifi, GPS, or Facebook. Despite these amazing innovations, we seem to be going backwards when it comes to digital security. Viruses, malware, spam, and hacking are much bigger problems than ever before, and it seems to be getting worse. How could this be???

A few months ago I wrote about the Target credit card breach, asking how it could happen. In the past few years it’s also happened to Marshalls/TJ Maxx, the California DMV, Michael’s, PF Chang’s, Neiman Marcus, Sally Beauty, and I'm sure many others that didn’t make the headlines. Then there are the thousands of personal PC's containing years of family photos and videos which may have been maliciously destroyed.

Most people I speak to spend most of their workday with Microsoft Outlook in their face (myself included), yet so much of Outlook's features remain untouched. Here are a few of my favorite Outlook tricks, I hope they help you as much as they've helped me.

The big IT news lately has been about the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability, however, malware and viruses still are the most prominent threat to small to medium sized businesses.

CryptoLocker, which surfaced in late 2013, is still out there, and its destructiveness hasn’t dwindled. CryptoLocker is malware which encrypts all files it finds on a computer or network, rendering them inaccessible.

Last month we were called in by a business which had been ‘hit’ with this CryptoLocker virus and want to share with you how we battled it.