Imagine you have a computer or a system that you rely on for important tasks, like storing important files or running your business. Now, what would result if something unexpected happened and that computer or system suddenly stopped working?

Please be aware that Microsoft Office 2013 has reached its end of life, effective April 11, 2023. This means that Microsoft will no longer provide support, updates, or security patches for the Office 2013 suite. While the software will continue to function, its lack of ongoing support and security updates may leave you vulnerable to potential security threats.

It seems that phishing scams are always on the rise and ever-changing, but the "gift card" scams have been a mainstay for years.  This video will explain how to spot such phishing scams before it's too late.

I won't name names, but I have been shocked at some people I know who have fallen for these scams, including seasoned technical types.  It's best to always be on the lookout and and to be suspicious if you want to avoid these clever phishing scams.

Back in 1999, the first Prometheans were trying to come up with a name for this venture of ours. Earlier tales have been told of how Promethius came to be a part of it, but what I’d like to discuss today revolves around the “Consulting” portion of that storied name.

You see, consulting has always been a major value that we bring to the table, but many of our clients don’t avail themselves of it. In the early years of the Promethius experience, it was very common for Prometheans to be part of our clients’ teams. We attended staff meetings, board meetings and sometimes even staff birthday parties. We consulted on annual budgets, strategic initiatives and even staffing decisions. As technology progressed, however, it became much more common for small companies to departmentalize their tech. It became common practice to rely on software vendors for advice on software functionality, for instance. Rather than work with a trusted advisor to gather requirements and wish lists, company leaders, and sometimes general staff, would start meeting with software vendors and let the demos do their work.

In recent years, many of our prospects/customers approach us already knowing the products and services they wish to purchase. Too often this sort of thinking has led to computer support being viewed as a commodity. Seeking the lowest-priced help desk support can cause some real problems and has left many small companies in dangerous positions in this age of cyber threats.

The risks today are too great to rely on client/vendor relationships. We need to go back to a world of partnership. We need relationships in which we can have real discussions of threats, problems, options and solutions. If there is no trust, then everything seems like a sales pitch. The fact is that the most profitable solution for Promethius, the vendor, is often the “solution” that we would advise against. It would be easy, for instance, to recommend a time and materials solution to our clients that only reacts to problems after they have revealed themselves through some sort data loss or security breach. This kind of arrangement might be good for our bottom line, but it would be irresponsible for us to recommend such a strategy.

So, the moral to the tale is to discuss technology strategies with your trusted advisors and more importantly, choose vendors that you can trust as the number one criterion. View your technology providers as a team of experts that is there to help you make decisions to run your business. If your website developers can’t work with your SaaS providers or your Managed Services Provider, then some changes might be in order because technology needs to work in concert to be effective. Give us a call if you’re interested in discussing your IT strategy.

Promethius began migrating on-prem Microsoft Exchange Servers to the cloud about fifteen years ago and we haven’t looked back. Initially, multi-tenant, cloud-hosted Exchange Servers were owned by third-parties, like Intermedia and AppRiver. This arrangement worked very well until Microsoft decided to get serious about the hosting game in 2011 with Office 365 (I’m purposely ignoring their BPOS service that launched in 2008 because I still have nightmares about it). Microsoft seriously undercut the pricing of its own partners and put most of them out of business. The positive of this move, however, is that Office 365, and now Microsoft 365, have become very solid and essential business services boasting almost 2.4 million business customers. Of course, Microsoft 365 isn’t just email hosting, it’s hosted documents via SharePoint and OneDrive and it’s a project management via Planner and the list goes on and on.

In our 10 years of experience with Microsoft 365, we’ve had very few issues of lost emails/documents, but it should be recognized that Microsoft 365 doesn’t offer a traditional backup and recovery system with lots of retention options, etc. As far as disaster recovery of Microsoft servers go, they seem to rely on their extensive redundancy. This is probably adequate, but companies sometimes get caught off guard when it comes to the email and document retention policies. Deleted emails have a maximum recovery period of 31 days and SharePoint/OneDrive documents have a maximum recovery period of 93 days. Keep in mind also, that this isn’t the industry standard off-site backup. These emails and documents are saved to the same network that is hosting the live data. Many small companies choose not to pay for third-party backup even when these facts are pointed out, but a third-party backup of your most crucial communications and company documents is probably worth a discussion. You might be surprised to learn how affordable it is.

Among many other horrible things, 2020 was a year of rampant computer fraud. Therefore, 2021 is the year we pay for it. Insurance companies took a beating and now it’s time for premiums to rise and requirements for policy renewals to get harder. Insurance companies are now beginning to mandate something that IT companies, including Promethius Consulting, have been pushing for years…Multi-Factor Authentication.

Supply chain issues abound, and if you plan on purchasing computers this year you had better plan way ahead.  In fact we are advising clients to expect delays as long as six months.  This video explains the situation in detail!  

Nobody likes a "gotcha" in any walk of life, and that certainly holds true in IT.  No one can argue that it pays to be prepared.  This is why we buy insurance, financial advice, medical checkups etc., etc.