Tabush Group's Cloud & Managed IT Blog

When it comes to technology, the past decade has shown a slow death of hardware. In the world of consumer electronics and entertainment, we’ve seen many examples of new technologies pushing older ones to extinction: streaming reduce the demand for DVDs, which was less than a decade old; the iPhone killed the standalone MP3 player, which itself had eradicated the Walkman and Discman; the digital camera replaced film cameras; and PDAs killed the Filofax.

Here at Tabush Group we talk a lot about “moving to the cloud,” since our flagship product, Boxtop, does just that: move a firm’s desktop PCs entirely to the cloud so that users can login from anywhere, anytime, on any device, and simply begin to work. But let’s break down one of the most common ways businesses are utilizing cloud services in a more focused way: Microsoft Office 365.

Tabush Group had a successful year!  Take a look at a few highlights from 2017.

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.