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The world’s most popular productivity suite, Microsoft Office, has been in the news lately, with the consumer preview of Office 2016 debuting last week. But before you get excited about that shiny new upgrade, which won’t even be available for several months, remember that existing versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint still offer plenty of supercharged abilities.

PCI compliance — sounds complicated, right? Here’s the most important thing to know on the topic: if your business accepts major credit cards as payment, you’re required to comply.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB created the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard in 2004 to improve protection for card issuers by ensuring that merchants meet minimum standards for the storage, processing, and transmission of cardholder data.

Earlier this year, flaws were discovered in Adobe Flash Player that could allow malicious banner ads running on legitimate websites to infect unwitting computer users.

These “malvertising” exploits have been shown to produce a variety of consequences; some install malware that illicitly inflates ad click numbers, while others can immediately encrypt all files on a user’s local and network drive.

Tuesday, March 31st was World Backup Day, which provides the perfect opportunity to take a serious look at the state of your systems. Is your backup drive located next to your computer? Are you entrusting your critical business data to a free (or cheap) backup option that isn’t built for the business world? Is your current backup solution shored up by disaster recovery, business continuity, and virtualization plans?

And before you think, “Data loss could never happen to me,” consider these statistics:

A 2013 Harris Interactive poll found that 30% of computer users had NEVER backed up their data
FEMA and SBA studies show that 25% to 45% of businesses don’t reopen after a disaster
According to a 2013 Aberdeen group report, Inc.

Like its Word and Excel partners in the Microsoft Office productivity suite, PowerPoint is ubiquitous. As of 2012, Bloomberg Business estimated that the slide presentation software claims 95% of market share, with installations on more than 1 billion computers and an estimated worldwide usage rate of 350 times per second.

No matter what business you’re in, information and technology management is important for success. But in the health-care realm, the ability to keep data safe and secure is even more paramount. That’s because government regulations mandated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) state that all protected health information must be strictly protected — and that any breach of such information must be reported immediately.

The Microsoft Windows landscape is scheduled to change again in mid to late 2015, when Windows 10 will be released. That may excite some early adopters who love to have the latest and greatest operating system on their computer. And many industry experts are thrilled that Windows 10, which is currently in its public beta testing period, was designed with business customers in mind — and is forecasted to be much more responsive to user needs.

Last month, an online data breach at Anthem Inc., the second-largest health insurance provider in North America, exposed the medical information, Social Security numbers, and email addresses of over 80 million consumers.

Security experts note that a stolen patient medical record sells for 750 times that of a stolen credit card on the black market.

In late January, the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center released a public service announcement about the recent proliferation of Business Email Compromise (BEC). Defined by the FBI as a “sophisticated global scam targeting small to large businesses,” BECs affected more than 2,000 victims worldwide in 2014, while inflicting upwards of $200 million in fraudulent losses.