Everyone knows the password drill at this point. Don’t use words in the dictionary. Don’t share your password. Don’t use just letters, mix in numbers and special characters. Don’t use the same password for different websites or applications. Then change them every (insert your favorite number here) days. Oh, and don’t write any of them down - you need to memorize them all. Really? Have you ever tallied the number of accounts your average user has to keep track of?

I don’t think I’ve heard the term used since the last economics class I took in college. It’s oft-relegated as neigh irrelevant - one of those ethereal, difficult to measure items, that’s left out of the equation for so many business decisions, especially in IT. Not that you can really blame the operational managers in IT – they’re typically so busy fighting fires and pushing projects forward that they’re happy if they can get any kind of metrics together into a report to get upper management off their backs. Trying to put a dollar value on intangibles isn’t even on the radar.

Anyone who’s been following the security pundits and keeping an eye on the threat landscape can tell you that 2016 is being hailed as the year of ransomware. Sensationalist click-bait headlines aside, experts agree that ransomware is more than just the latest vulnerability that happened to make the headlines, and any business that relies on computers (are there any left that don’t?) can’t afford to ignore this. If you must TLDR, at least skim the minimum info below.

Everyone is talking about Managed Services. The number of IT organizations working with MSP’s has been rising steadily – fully half of all IT organizations in a survey conducted by Business Solutions magazine are engaged with an MSP. By all accounts, IT spending is only ever expected to increase, and an increasing portion of those budgets are being spent on, or earmarked for engaging with an MSP to handle ‘the plumbing’ of their IT infrastructure. All that said, there’s no shortage of reasons not to use an MSP – let’s review some of the most common ones.