The New Year provides the perfect opportunity to take stock of what’s important in your work life. In the small to medium-sized business world, technology routinely tops that list — you can’t work well without technology, and technology that doesn’t work well will only hold you back.

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.

With the back to school frenzy behind us and a change of seasons on the horizon, there’s no better time to give your work life a reboot. And believe it or not, technology can play an important part in that. From embracing mobility to harnessing the cloud to preventing downtime through layered security,  machines can make our lives run better.

Hurricane season officially started on Monday, June 1st. And although the NOAA estimates that this year will be a slow one for tropical formation in the Atlantic Ocean, the occasion still highlights the importance of disaster preparedness — especially in light of the devastating thunderstorms, tornados, and floods that struck a broad swath of the country in April and May.

In late September, cybersecurity experts discovered the latest in a long string of software bugs that threatened millions of operating systems, including Mac computers and Android smartphones. The bug, dubbed Shellshock by researchers from Kaspersky Labs and other firms, was initially compared to the Heartbleed vulnerability, only far worse — while Heartbleed stole passwords, Shellshock was able to take over entire machines via remote code execution.

In the small business world, Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting software continues to dominate. When QuickBooks first debuted in the early 1990s, it quickly claimed up to 85% of the market, and subsequent releases have maintained and even increased that impressive share, with an estimated five million companies using the program today.

The New York Times revealed last week that, in mid-August, at least five American banks (including JPMorgan Chase & Co.) were hit by a wave of cyberattacks that stole gigabytes of information such as savings and checking account details. JPMorgan said it hadn’t noticed any increased fraud activity in the weeks since the breach, leading the FBI to speculate that the move could be politically motivated and possibly linked to recent economic sanctions against Russia.