| Almost every Tuesday morning, I have the opportunity to join our amazing support team for a short meeting. We discuss recent issues they’ve helped customers with and ways that we might be able to make our customer experience better. We may talk about tweaks to the software, a better process to accomplish a task, or a recent common problem with an operating system update and how to help our customers solve it. |
| At a recent meeting, one of the topics was about an issue with ransomware. Ransomware is a malicious program that infects a computer by opening a file or clicking on a link in an e-mail that comes from an unrecognized source or may have even been forwarded by someone you know. This program typically prevents access to information on the machine until you pay a ransom to the individual that created the virus. The alternative is restoring a backup from a time before the computer was infected. |
| I bring this up to point out the importance of keeping your antivirus software and operating system up to date with current versions. As older versions of operating systems and software are phased out and not supported by the authors, the updates that include code that attempts to prevent these attacks are no longer available. The cost of keeping your technology (hardware and software) up to date is far lower than the cost of recovering from malicious activity. |
| As you create your budget for the year (which should be complete for 2020 by now) in addition to the normal budgeted items, you should include a line item for keeping your technology current. |