The late American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Written in the 20th century, it has been put in practice by 21st century businesses. As the Internet has grown, the amount of companies expanded, and the amount of data that those companies collect has grown exponentially, especially now that there is a market for such data.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on multiple areas of the American economy, but the shift to remote work opened the door for a veritable bloodbath in the realm of cybersecurity. Despite cybersecurity spending exceeding $126B worldwide, the industry trends in 2020 of accelerated data breaches, phishing attacks, and ransomware attacks is anticipated to lead to more than $6 trillion in damages in 2021. 

As data collection by businesses becomes more prevalent and complex, so too do the legislative and legal policies relating to the protection of that data. This goes for if your business operates in the health industry and has to comply with HIPAA, or you handle large amounts of international clients and need to ensure your data collection methods are compliant with the European Union’s GDPR requirements, or any other number of legal and legislative requirements that might exist for your business at the local, state, federal, and international levels. Ensuring compliance saves your organization money and reputation over time, but can be a daunting and complicated process. 

As managed IT services become popular solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses in handling IT services, there’s a term that gets thrown around with increasing abandon. Businesses with little in-house IT experience might get swept away by the lofty connotations when IT consultants start to extol the benefits of a shift to the Cloud, especially when it comes to data storage. But “the Cloud” remains perhaps one of the most mysterious locations in business today. 

At some point in your career, you’ve likely worked for a company that uses a software solution that seems to be extremely out of date, only a few employees know how it works, and there’s likely a cabinet with a large, well-worn binder full of very complex instructions. This is the curse of legacy software and in complex IT systems, legacy components can often be a major pain point for staff, despite the benefits the software might still be providing to the organization.