As you may or may not know, the end-of-life date of Windows Small Business Server 2003 is July 14, 2015. This means Microsoft will be terminating services for the line, services that provide crucial security updates and patches. This termination will be akin to the Windows XP termination this past April: XP can still run on desktops, but the product is off the shelf both commercially and in terms of Microsoft’s internal support; vulnerable, it is a security disaster waiting to happen and generally will not pass regulations. The problems in upgrading a server are similar but far bigger, and the popular mad-dash-switch strategy is not feasible for companies relying heavily on fully-operational 24/7 server activity. The whole infrastructure of a system, in many cases carefully built up over years, needs to be reworked – and this takes time, time that can be born only out of ample foresight. Though the end-of-life for the Small Business Server 2003 is a year away, the question must be asked now: what are we going to do about upgrading?

 (Image courtesy of blog.zensoftware.co.uk) 

So you’ve gotten your head around cloud lingo, and you’ve identified which type of server migration works best for your company’s needs. (If you’re here and you haven’t yet considered these things, check the blog posts hyperlinked in the preceding sentence). All that’s left to do is prepare your company for the migration. This is, of course, easier said than done and unique to every office. NSK is here to offer some general ideas and considerations for your move.

First: if you haven’t already done so, we highly recommend reading our blog post on Cloud Lingo before continuing. Things get hooey if you don't have the cloud-vocabulary nailed down.

Nicole began working at NSK on February 10, 2014 as our Technical Client Service Representative. She brings with her a wide variety of IT and customer support skills developed over her many years in the industry. She has worked at small companies, for which she personally managed all facets of computer installation and maintenance, was a key website developer and managed all equipment orders for the medicine company Lhasa OMS, and was an integral member of Granite Telecommunications’ coding/software maintenance team. At each of these jobs she had a crucial role in managing office tasks and was an outstanding member of customer service teams. 

The following is an excerpted from an important blog by AppRiver on a new and highly dangerous Malware campaign