PORTLAND, Maine — September 2021 — Systems Engineering has recently been named one of the 2021 Best Places to Work in Maine. This marks the eighth consecutive year the company has been recognized and honored as one of the best places of employment in Maine, benefiting the state's economy, its workforce, and businesses.

Prepare your 2022 IT budgets! Microsoft has announced it will increase rates on its Microsoft 365 (M365) service, March 1, 2022. More than 300 million users will see a 10-25% increase in subscription rates. These price changes mark “the first substantive pricing update since we launched Office 365 a decade ago,” stated Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365.

The office role as a place to work has come under critical analysis in our current environment, focusing less on where work happens and more on worker productivity. Despite a largely dispersed workforce, many companies have found success with a remote work strategy and are capitalizing on change.

The July 2021 Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates were released on July 13. One of those patches addressed a publicly disclosed but unexploited, zero-day vulnerability classified as CVE-2021-34473 - Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. This vulnerability affects on-premises Exchange servers 2013, 2016, and 2019, and was assigned a severity of critical.

It has been well over a year since the shift to remote work began, and now many companies are planning a move back to the office. Before the transition is made, a major point to consider is that the traditional workplace may no longer fit the needs of a post-pandemic workforce.

UPDATE: July 27, 2021

In a Friday, July 23, 2021 announcement, the Kaseya Incident Response team reported no reports or issues with their remediation efforts for customers impacted by the July 2^nd localized ransomware attack against their VSA on-premises product. Due to this positive report, Systems Engineering has resumed the use of the two unaffected Kaseya modules we were monitoring as a result of the original VSA attack.

UPDATE: July 7, 2021

As of July 6^th, Microsoft has completed investigations and released security updates (patches) to address the Windows Print Spooler vulnerability. Systems Engineering recommends patching your workstations and servers to address this and any future vulnerabilities. Our clients who