Tabush Group's Cloud & Managed IT Blog

Having helped create, implement, manage, and restore backup and disaster recovery plans for dozens of firms, the good news is that a solid backup plan is very doable; the bad news is that it’s not as simple as you may think. Here are some experience shares and reality checks.

In honor of National Small Business Week, I thought I’d share some technology tools that are ideal for small businesses.

When I first started my business back in 2000, providing IT services to small businesses, we definitely didn’t have what we do today in the way of easy-to-setup and cost-effective technology tools. If your small business wanted file sharing and corporate email, we would have had to setup your own Small Business Server in your office.

As you may have heard, we made an official announcement today about the successful launch of Boxtop™, an all-in-one cloud IT solution for small businesses that includes virtual desktops, infrastructure, data storage, backups, security, dedicated service, and unlimited tech support. It’s the result of a lot of hard work from our engineering and product teams, and I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished!

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:

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:

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.

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.