Biting your fingernails.

Leaving the refrigerator door open.

Leaving car windows down during a storm.

These are all examples of bad habits. Almost everyone will admit to having some collection of bad habits, it’s part of the human condition.

Trying to curb these habits is also a healthy part of human nature, but bad habits don’t stop at personal hygiene or vehicle maintenance – there are plenty of technology-centric bad habits that can have disastrous consequences.

It’s nearly the end of the year! While many folks are considering winter vacations, and New Year’s Eve celebrations, business owners and managers have other things on their mind.

The end of the calendar year provides a time for reflection on the successes and failures of the previous 12 months and what might be able to be improved moving ahead.

We don’t claim to be fortune tellers. Unfortunately, there is no crystal ball in our conference room that helps us predict the future. But when it comes to assessing the IT infrastructure of a business, we can spot problems before they happen from a mile away.

The American commute to work keeps getting longer. Despite our freeways and bypasses, more lanes and cars equipped with better navigation technology the average commute time for an American is now around 26.5 minutes.

That’s nation-wide, if you happen to live in a major metropolitan area the idea of a 26-minute commute might sound like a dream come true.

If you’ve followed our blog for any length of time, you probably remember us bringing up the topic of ransomware. Despite our efforts, we’re still shocked by the caviler attitude many business owners have about the threat of ransomware (not to mention cybersecurity in general).

In the third quarter of 2018, ransomware was among the top three in malware trends for digital business threats.

Think about walking around the grounds of your office for a moment. Consider the sights and sounds that you’d encounter strolling up and down the halls into the various departments as you go about your workday.

Hopefully, this exercise brings up some good memories and reminds you of some professional accomplishments.

Winter is coming, and while we don’t like to borrow cheesy puns from Game of Thrones, the ominous warning from the fiction world that George R.R. Martin created does have some relevance in this reality.

For our purposes, we’re going to take spread that warning for businesses who have not yet made the decision to migrate their company data to a cloud network.

It’s nearly Halloween, a time traditionally associated with ghouls and ghosts – at least the kind that dress up and wants to get free candy. While this time of year IS a fun time to get spooked, your technology infrastructure should never be something that frightening.

Ask five different people on the street what “cybersecurity” means to them, and you will likely get five different answers. In a general, you might get answers about setting up a technology infrastructure with protection against hackers or leveraging AI to protect a computer from malware.

In our latest newsletter, Continuous CEO Jason Silverglate and CTO Ross Brouse wrote a little about the importance of training employees on information security best practices. (You’re already subscribed, right?) In addition to outlining some of the risks that come with inattentive or outright malicious employees, they also offered a few tips for onboarding new staff and retraining current team members.