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In the coming year, how will your organization be less vulnerable to security threats, remain in compliance, and continue to receive the latest product support?

Quick answer: Upgrade.

Review the chart below and ensure that your Microsoft products are not about to expire. The chart quickly points out some significant end-of-life/support dates that are on the horizon for some of the more popular Microsoft products, including Windows 7, Exchange 2010, and Office 2010. 

It seems these dates are far out, but in reality, upgrade discussions should begin now in order to prepare appropriately. By applying upgrades before products fall out of support, your business will be less vulnerable to security threats, remain in compliance, and continue to receive the latest product support.

Assuming you have your network security basics in place, there are a few cybersecurity solutions that are relatively inexpensive that many businesses have yet to include in their cybersecurity war chest. These tools help you stay ahead of the cyber criminals and provide additional protection to reduce your business' chance of a breach. If you do nothing else with your cybersecurity strategy in 2019, be sure to put these security safeguards in your budgets this fall as they will provide tremendous value for the investment:

When it comes to security risks and errors, businesses often fall victim to assumptions and oversights. The reality is that the protection of information and applications is always evolving and, as criminals find new ways to exploit weaknesses, it's tough to stay one step ahead.

Over the past four decades, organizations of all sizes have seen a significant change to how they do business, due to evolving technologies. And now, as we approach the end of the 2010's decade, the term “Digital Transformation” is abound and you might ask, "Haven’t we already done enough transforming?"

There are many benefits to "moving to the Cloud," or adopting "Cloud Courage" as we at Systems Engineering (SE), like to put it. In addition to keeping up with the way in which technology is moving, it's also important to look at benefits such as CSP billing. Throughout this article, I will discuss what CSP billing is, how it works, and the various benefits involved. 

I am sure you have heard the term "Digital Transformation." In short,  it means elevating your processes, applications, and data to reduce the time and effort needed to meet business and customer needs while driving value for both.  Uber and Facebook are common examples. Clearly, users value the ease and experience while the businesses can scale at very marginal costs.

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear the former Kodak Product Manager speak - he was there when the downfall occurred.  He said all the criticism he received from the management team about the technology was spot-on. The problem was, they could not see beyond the traditional benchmarks, like picture quality, to understand that the ease by which digital images could be shared would change their business forever.  The takeaway is, when you look at the cloud and mobility, look at all it can do, especially those things you could never do before. Don't get caught up on the fact that it doesn’t do things the way you've done them before. 

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of future jobs have not been invented yet. What does that say about the work we are doing today and how we are doing it? What does that mean for the future? 

Effective April 11, 2017, Windows Vista customers are no longer receiving the following from Microsoft:

Our recent SE Lunch & Learn series titled Windows 10: Enabling Your Move to the Cloud featured Microsoft's Steve Deming and Systems Engineering's (SE's) Adrian Wells.  This event gave both speakers a chance to mention the new Windows 10 upgrade benefits for Windows Cloud Subscriptions which had previously been announced by Microsoft on January 19 of this year.