Software vendors are increasingly using a combination of carrot and stick to induce customers to sign up for their subscription-based software licensing. The “carrots” tend to be extra features or permitted uses, while the stick may be higher prices for traditional perpetual licenses, or discontinuing the perpetual license (almost) entirely, as Adobe has recently announced.

You’ve likely seen media coverage of the recent “Heartbleed” security issue. We have received a lot of questions about it, so I figured a brief FAQ might be helpful.

Virtualization? Isn’t that only for data centers? Not by a long shot…read on.

While virtualization has clear benefits for companies with large server farms and data centers, this is far from the only application of virtualization. Small businesses have a lot to gain from this trend, and the inclusion of Hyper-V and its features as a “built-in” technology in Windows Server makes a compelling case that smaller companies should not ignore the “virtual” revolution in computing. In addition to Microsoft’s Hyper-V, other virtualization products include the market leader, vSphere from VMware, as well as Citrix XenServer, and Oracle’s VirtualBox.

Windows XP was released October 25, 2001. That’s over 12 years ago, several lifetimes in PC operating system time.

Hard drives and data loss are on my mind after a couple of online articles in the last few weeks caught my eye. You don’t read geek news, so you missed these? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. The stories themselves are interesting, but read on for what it means to businesses.

If you’re the type of person that usually skims or skips over our newsletters and blog posts, pay attention to this one. I know, I know…malware…encryption…blah blah blah…security…threat…eyes glaze over…I’m with you. But listen up!

In last month’s article, I wrote about what the cloud is and why it matters to small and mid-sized businesses. Today I’ll dive a little deeper into that topic and mention a few cloud services and applications that businesses may find useful.

It’s getting pretty hard to have a conversation about business these days, or to read a business article, without someone mentioning “the Cloud”. So Cloud is the new buzzword, and technology vendors, required by law to be 100% buzzword-compliant, are lining up to tell you about their cloud services.

As much as I would love to say that Castema’s Managed IT service is the perfect solution for every small business, the reality is that some businesses need the value that Managed IT gives them more than others do. I’m going to break this post into two parts in order to give a complete answer to the question, “Who is a good customer for Managed IT?” Today I’ll introduce the concept of two types of support costs, and explain them, as well as define a new Natural Law pertaining to Information Technology support. Next time, I’ll talk about hotels and how they relate to IT Support business models (trust me), and what that means to your IT support cost.