Another day, another data breach. In late January, T-Mobile was in the spotlight once again when the wireless carrier reported a breach that exposed the data of 37 million customers.

The good news is that organizations recognize the seriousness of today’s threats and the consequences of a breach.

Tick tock. Time is running out on organizations that have not yet upgraded from Office 2013. On April 11, Microsoft is ending support for that version of the popular business productivity suite. Although all applications included in Office 2013 will remain functional after the shutoff date, Microsoft will no longer provide technical support, feature updates or security patches.

The IT environment is more complex than ever, with virtual machines (VMs) running diverse workloads distributed across the corporate data center and multiple branch locations. Deployment and management challenges are inevitable — complex implementation and configuration delay time to value, and in-house IT staff must devote significant time to ongoing maintenance.

In a popular tune from the 1930s, legendary jazz artist Fats Waller sang, “find out what they like, and how they like it, and let ’em have it just that way.” Nearly a century later, that message is right on the mark for business communication providers.

Everything-as-a-Service model allows organizations to pick and choose the IT resources they want and how they pay for them.

“Information technology is undergoing an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own — in the form of computers, software and myriad related components — to being a service that they purchase from utility providers.

Comprehensive planning will help organizations hunker down for the coming ‘cyber storm.’

Increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that exploit economic, social and geopolitical volatility create the perfect conditions for a “gathering cyber storm,” cybersecurity experts warned in January during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

IT security has always been a largely reactive endeavor: Monitor networks and systems in order to detect and respond to any threats that arise. But such an approach is inadequate given the increased speed, scale and costs of today’s evolving threats. According to Microsoft researchers, it can take less than 45 minutes for ransomware to infiltrate and encrypt an entire network — far faster than most organizations can mount an effective response.

The Software-as-a-Service market (SaaS) market continues to experience rapid growth, with surveys suggesting that almost all organizations now use at least one cloud application. According to the 2023 State of SaaSOps Report from BetterCloud, organizations use an average of 130 SaaS applications.

In a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, 54 percent of respondents said the volume of cyberattacks has increased over the past 12 months, with almost half of those reporting a significant increase. Security experts say the surge is due in large part to the transition to a remote workforce.

People are a company’s biggest expense. Wages, benefits, payroll taxes, training and equipment expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of total business costs. However, successful businesses understand that employees are also their most valuable asset.