2015 is almost a wrap. But before we dive in to the promising opportunities of 2016 and put the last 12 months behind us, let’s revisit the most popular QuickTips topics of 2015. CMIT Solutions wishes everyone a happy, safe, and productive holiday season, hopefully enjoyed with love and laughter in the company of family and friends.

Sometime in the near future, 2015 may go down as the year that Black Friday changed forever. And not just because of efforts like #OptOutside from outdoor retailer REI, which announced that it would close all of its stores on the busiest shopping day of the year so that employees and customers could instead spend the day outside.

In the early days of email, excited computer users embraced the new technology because of the freedom it entailed. You could say anything you wanted about any topic, at any length, and fire away. But once the world realized that all those messages would live on in perpetuity, the need to protect the security and integrity of this most basic of all online communications became more prevalent.

Returning to work after a long holiday is never easy. On top of rediscovering day-to-day motivation in the wake of a relaxing weekend filled with Thanksgiving leftovers, chances are you had a few hundred (or thousand) emails clogging up your inbox on Monday morning.

More than any other American holiday, Thanksgiving is about spending time with family and friends — with the extra bonus of all that delicious food. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie… All of that is the proverbial icing on the cake of giving thanks for our good fortunes in the last year.

Yes, it might be a little early to start talking about cold weather and winter storms. But with the first widespread snowfall of the season affecting the Western United States recently, and a record-breaking Indian Summer giving way to cool temperatures in the Midwest and Southeast, now is the perfect time to get your winter preparedness plans in order.

It’s been more than a year since the CryptoWall virus first started wreaking havoc in cyberspace, and two years since state, federal, and international authorities broke up the related CryptoLocker ring.

But in recent weeks, IT security experts have noticed an uptick in CryptoWall 4.0 infections.

Last month, the United States Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by an unusually bipartisan vote of 74 to 21. But tech experts have already said that CISA may be mostly ineffectual when it comes to preventing the cascade of cyberattacks that have come to dominate the news.

Although the pace of data breach stories seems to have slowed in 2015 compared to past years, the scary part is that could be because such incidences of cyber attacks have become alarmingly common.

Last month, Travelers Insurance reported that 60% of all attacks in 2014 struck small to medium-sized businesses.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about cyberattacks: CryptoLocker virus, spearfishing, data breaches. What do all of these nasty things have in common? They can cost businesses big money if not properly guarded against.

Here’s another reason why it’s so critical to deploy proactive IT services to protect against such crimes: if a cyber thief pilfers money from your bank account, your bank may not be obliged to replace it.