Tabush Group's Cloud & Managed IT Blog

Once again, I’m amazed at how quickly the past year flew by. At our annual company holiday party in December, I continued the tradition of presenting the ‘State of the Company’ speech to our team, the theme of which was progress and growth. While 2016 was a year of celebrating great accomplishments, 2017 was exciting in different ways as we faced new challenges, set ambitious goals, and reached new heights.

Yesterday, the FCC unveiled plans to overturn the 2015 net neutrality ruling, meaning that internet service providers would be able to prioritize certain types of internet traffic over others rather than treating all traffic equally. But what does this mean to companies who rely on internet access (which in this day and age, is just about every business)?

“There are only two types of companies: Those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked.”  --Robert Mueller, former Director of the FBI

If cyber breaches are an inevitable cost of doing business, how a company responds to a breach is of extreme importance. It has recently been revealed that 57 million Uber users and drivers had personal information exposed in late 2016 and that the hackers were paid $100,000 to keep it quiet.  If all stories are true, the biggest issue with the Uber breach may not be the breach itself, but the lack of engagement, management, and delivery of the response. 

Equifax, one of the 3 largest credit agencies in the U.S., last week revealed a security breach which compromised over 140 million individuals’ personal information. While this is not the largest security breach ever in the US, because of the data that was taken, it has the potential to be the most severe, evidenced by the resignation of the company's CEO and the "retiring" of both their CIO and CSO (chief security officer).

To clarify the title of this post, I’m referring not to clouds up in the sky, rather the ones that live here on land, in data centers across the country and around the globe, and store our digital lives, from music and photo collections to critical business information and applications, better known as cloud computing.

We often have discussions with our clients about moving to the cloud. As time moves on and technology continues to progress, moving to the cloud has moved from becoming a question of “if” to a question of “when.” Cloud makes more and more sense each day.

Intuit’s QuickBooks is one of the most common applications we’re asked about moving to the cloud. It’s a very popular accounting program for small businesses, and, as companies are operating beyond the physical walls of their office, they find a strong need to provide remote access to their QuickBooks data, either to outside accountants or bookkeeping services, or to employees. While Intuit does have a web-based product called “QuickBooks Online”, most businesses and CPAs prefer to stick with QuickBooks Desktop for the functionality, interface, and flexibility it offers.

Each week, I engage in discussions around cloud computing. Often I am faced with business owners (many of whom are very successful and experts in their respective fields) who are cloud-averse, meaning they prefer their IT systems to be on premise, living on servers and equipment that they own, rather than “out there” in the cloud. However, once they give me a chance to explain what the cloud is and how it works, they often have a change of heart.

In his 2002 song “Darkness,” Peter Gabriel states “I have my fears / But they do not have me.” Email is the best and worst thing to happen to business in the last 25 years. Best because it’s simple, fast, free, and accessible instantly from just about anywhere on the planet. Alternatively, because it is so simple, fast, and free, it’s also become so overly abused, which is why it’s also the worst (let’s all remember that for hundreds of years before 1996, businesses ran just fine without email).

For too long, email controlled my life – with dozens of folders overflowing with messages, dings and buzzes interrupting just about everything I did, and lengthy threads involving too many recipients and replies. While Outlook was not my employer (as far as I knew, I had never received a paycheck from Microsoft), it was the focus of most of my days in the office, and when I was out of the office, whichever PDA/smartphone I was carrying that year would fill in until the next morning.

My email had me, I did not have email.

Our team will be in Chicago next week, March 15 - 18, to participate in the ABA TECHSHOW Conference & Expo, hosted by the American Bar Association Law Practice Division. I had the opportunity to attend the show last year, and was very impressed. This year, I'm looking forward to us being one of the exhibitors! You'll find us at BOOTH #806.