Tabush Group's Cloud & Managed IT Blog

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.

From Turkey to NYC, Mahmut Sarigedik has long since had a knack for IT.

Growing up in Istanbul, Sarigedik credits a variety of situations that helped him follow technology into what is now his career. Throughout his childhood, Sarigedik attended school, and every day afterward, would help his father out at work. “My father was a carpenter; an inventor. I grew up with him at the workshop. He is very hands-on and he always finds a solution no matter what the situation is,” said Sarigedik of his father’s work ethic and character. It was then that he started to learn how to offer solutions to a variety of problems.

Your company’s IT system and its performance is at the forefront of your business and the security of your information is of the utmost importance. Whether it is perceived to be relevant to your firm or not, it is important to realize that any organization’s protection is salient.

There are many perceptions, programs and headlines that buzz within the technology industry. Lately, many of those have revolved around one thing: The security of your information and the privacy that it should have.

As companies look to improve their IT system’s performance, security and productivity, one of the key words thrown around is “Cloud”— Organizations then think, “We need to be in the cloud!” The perception is that it will save money, can be done quite simply and will eradicate outages and downtime. If only it were that straight forward. First, it is important to understand what the cloud is and what it can actually do for your business.

Basically, the cloud is thousands of interconnected datacenters that provide a place for servers to be moved to, data to be stored on and services and applications to be hosted on. It is likely that you are thinking that you already have a server/systems in your office that already does this for you, so why do you need to relocate to the cloud?

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.

The Internet is probably the most significant invention in the last fifty years. It's hard to believe that only 20 years ago, the Internet as we know it didn't exist. Most office desks had computers, but they were for internal applications only. Today, we all know how much that has changed.

But just because every business needs the Internet to function, and the access is limited only to the speed of your connection, should companies allow their employees unrestricted Internet access from their office computers, or should it be limited to business use only?

As a service provider who has worked with over 250 small and mid-sized businesses over the years, I've heard pretty good arguments for both sides.