The Houston Tech Brief

Initial reports say that on November 13, 2026, routine contractor work at one remote FAA site overloaded links at 17 of the FAA's 22 en route centers and stopped US departures for more than four hours. The investigation into the root cause is still under way. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we look at what the early account teaches about IT change management and capacity planning, why the same network failed the same way in 2009, and the five questions a Houston business should answer in writing before any network change: reach, load, watch, way back and window.

In 2009, a misconfigured router meant to affect 21 FAA facilities hit 129, according to the DOT Inspector General.

Read more:

IT Change Management: Could One Router Ground Your Houston Business?

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Katy City Council approved a Zipline drone hub on November 9, 2026 that will run with no staff stationed on site. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we use that hub to walk through four steps for any Houston business site where nobody works: watch every device from somewhere else, give the site a second way online, lock the gear and not just the door, and decide what you record and how long you keep it.

The Katy site will hold six docking and charging towers, each with room for six drones, and Zipline estimates it could open in about three to six months.

Read more:

Remote Site IT: What Houston Firms Can Learn From Katy's Drone Hub

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Outlook, Teams and Copilot failed for most of a Houston business day and night on November 12-13, 2026. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we walk through the full Microsoft 365 outage timeline in Central time, from the first Downdetector reports at 11:39 a.m. to sustained improvement at 8:56 a.m. the next morning, what Microsoft said caused it, the two things to do now, and why a backup and an outage plan are different tools.

Downdetector logged more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports in the first hour of the roughly 21-hour outage, and Microsoft found no indication of malicious activity.

Read more:

Microsoft 365 Outage Timeline: What Houston Businesses Learned

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Scalable IT means the IT is sized to the business and changes with it. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, Part 10 of the Building the Resilient Business series, we walk through four steps: setting up a new hire's laptop and accounts before day one, closing out a departure the same day (back up the company data first, then schedule the wipe), matching Microsoft 365 licenses to people on the renewal date, and opening or closing a location from a standard kit.

Under Microsoft's new commerce rules, a license count can be lowered only within the first seven days after the licenses were added, including at renewal, and a removed license keeps the former employee's email for 30 days before it is deleted.

Read more:

Scalable IT in Houston: Size Your IT to Your Business

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Anthropic launched Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets in beta on November 10, 2026, and made Claude Data generally available, and on Claude Team plans all three are switched on by default. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we clear up five things Houston teams get wrong about the new tools: whether Claude Sheets replaces Excel, what a Claude whiteboard actually produces, what a viewer of a shared Claude Data dashboard can see, which plans have the tools on, and where the work can go next, plus the one-page data rule to write this week.

Our analysis of Census Bureau survey data found Houston-area business AI use averaged 20.6% across 2026, 18th of the 25 largest metros.

Read more:

Claude Sheets and Whiteboards Are Already On for Houston Teams

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Anthropic announced Claude Meetings on November 10, 2026, and it is rolling out in beta on Claude Team and Enterprise plans for Google Meet, on by default for Team plans. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we walk through the eight checks a Houston office should settle before anyone clicks Add Claude: platform, roles, outside guests, connectors, auto-join, transcription consent, which data stays out and who reviews the notes, plus what Claude keeps after a call and why the outside-guest setting matters most for Houston firms.

Claude saves a transcript, a summary and screen descriptions, not audio, and in-call artifacts are free through February 10, 2027.

Read more:

Claude Meetings Is Here. What Should Houston Teams Check First?

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A medical practice downtime plan is the written procedure a practice follows when its EHR, scheduling, phones or billing go offline. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, we walk through a five-step plan for Houston medical and dental practices sized for a 15-day outage: rank the systems, print the paper kit, keep a backup the attacker cannot reach, decide each day's patients in advance and drill it twice a year, plus how those steps match HIPAA's contingency plan standard and what to do when the hospital system you refer to is the one that is down.

The Health Management Academy logged at least 65 cyberattacks that disrupted US hospital care from 2022 through September 2026; 89% put staff on paper, and clinical systems stayed down a median 15 days.

Read more:

Houston Medical Practice Downtime Plan: Can You Run 15 Days on Paper?

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Predictable IT costs for a small business come from turning surprises into scheduled costs. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, Part 9 of the Building the Resilient Business series, we walk through three IT price changes that are already dated, the four kinds of IT spend and which ones can be planned, and why a Houston IT budget needs a storm line for hurricane season.

Under Microsoft's commercial price update, Microsoft 365 Business Basic went from $6 to $7 per user per month for renewals after July 1, 2026, and Windows 10 extended security costs $61 per device in its first year, doubling each year after.

Read more:

Predictable IT Costs in Houston: Put Price Changes on the Calendar

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Key-person risk in small business IT is the risk that the business stalls because one person holds knowledge or access nobody else has. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, Part 8 of the Building the Resilient Business series, we cover where that risk hides (admin and vendor accounts, passwords, the domain account and undocumented setup), why the domain account is the quietest key, and how a defined offboarding process and a company password vault remove the dependence on one person.

CISA's Cybersecurity Performance Goals 2.0 call for revoking all access for departing staff and disabling accounts unused for a set period, such as 30 days.

Read more:

Key-Person Risk in Houston IT: No One Person Should Hold the Keys

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A single point of failure is one component whose failure stops the whole business because nothing else can do its job. In this episode of The Houston Tech Brief from CinchOps, Part 7 of the Building the Resilient Business series, we compare the five a small Houston office usually has (the internet line, the power feeding the network, the phone system, one on-site server and one admin login) and the backup for each, from a second internet line on SD-WAN to two emergency admin accounts.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, and in Winter Storm Uri more than 4.5 million people in Texas lost power, according to FERC.

Read more:

Single Points of Failure in a Houston Office: Which One Stops You?

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Have Questions? Want to discuss further?

Reach out to Shane Stevens, CEO | Founder, CinchOps Technology Solutions: