In this episode of #PoisedforExit, we interviewed Bret Erickson, President of Passkey Technology, a managed IT services firm. Bret has been on the show before, and we brought him back because we know by the number of downloads from the previous episode, he was a popular guest speaking on a hot topic.

Bret talked about how things have changed in technology since his last interview with us! Ransomware is running rampant and the cyber criminals are getting more savvy, Bret said. He's hearing almost daily how companies are being hacked and held for ransom. The hackers are now deleting your backup, once they get into your system, so you have no choice but to pay them. So, what should you do? Use offsite backup systems. 

There's always something to talk about with Microsoft and today we chose to focus on a couple of their products designed for business. Office 365; lots of Bret's clients are upgrading to it. Bret says the License Agreement with Microsoft states that you agree to get your own backup implemented, as they only guarantee recovery of data for 30 days of history. That's pretty scary and I bet many of you reading this didn't know that. 

When it comes to backing up, Bret's rule of thumb is a 3-2-1 approach: 

3 copies of your data

2 locations

1 of them being offsite

We also talked about BEC or Business Email Compromise. I'm going to recommend you listen to the episode for that portion of the show, as you really need to hear what he said about it. Suffice it to say, that as a business owner you need to be training your people on what to look out for. 

Lastly, we talked about the new Windows 11 coming out. As Bret said, Microsoft said they'd never change the name of Windows 10, but lo and behold, they did. It's currently been released to manufacturers and you can get a copy of your own to test, which is what Bret's staff is doing so they can get familiar and better advise clients. 

Passkey Technology is a Microsoft Silver Partner. If you own a firm that has regulatory compliance requirements, you'll need a Silver Partner to work with on your IT systems. 

Being safer in the Cloud today requires things like Two (or Three) Factor Authorization, among many other recommendations. For more on this important topic, listen to the episode here.

Find Bret here and find Julie here.

Thank you to this month's sponsors: Sunbelt Business Advisors and JAK CPA's

Connect with Julie Keyes, Keyestrategies LLC
Founder, Consultant, Author, Pod-caster and Instructor