From the Principal's Office

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Regarding COVID-19

Since we started in 2018, we’ve taken our clients’ security seriously, making sure they’re as safe as they can be from malware and viruses online as part of our portfolio of services. Unfortunately, biological viruses just aren’t the ones we’re equipped to protect you from.

Effective Friday, March 20, Near the Sun will be suspending all planned upgrades and project work scoped for on-site execution until further notice, in compliance with Governor Wolf’s statewide order. During this time we will continue to provide remote services, helpdesk, strategy sessions, new client consultations, and will continue to respond to true emergencies .

We care about the safety of our clients and neighbors here in the greater Philadelphia and South Jersey communities that we serve, and are committed to doing what we can to curtail the spread of COVID-19. We will continue to monitor and follow any changes or updates from authorities as more data becomes available.

Please stay safe and stay healthy, and we thank you for being a valued customer and part of the Near the Sun family.

Tushar Nene, Principal & CEO

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Microsoft to all of us: “We make Office 2019. Please don’t buy Office 2019.”

Did you grow up with siblings? How did you get along with them? Sibling rivalry has always been a thing since time immemorial – not only within families, but within companies as well. We all saw it years ago when the Macintosh became the main machine from Apple over their Apple II series in the 80’s (come on folks, I know we’re not the only ones that have Pirates of Silicon Valley dialed up on our favorites list). And it seems that now it’s Microsoft Office’s turn.

Office 2019 was released in the fall of last year with its traditional list of SKU’s from their previous standalone products. These came with price tags ranging from $150 to $440 for a single license for 1 PC. But they had heavy competition. More than anything others could provide like Google’s GSuite, Office 2019’s biggest competition was actually their other namesake productivity suite, Office 365. And Microsoft’s been calling a lot of attention this week to which one is their favorite.

Last week Microsoft introduced The Twins Challenge – three sets of twins, each assigned tasks one would use Office for, to see which one could finish the tasks more quickly and effortlessly. The contests were in Excel, Powerpoint, and Word. And as expected, in each contest the twin that was equipped with Office 365 handily defeated their clone using the cloud-enabled features and additional tools Office 2019 doesn’t provide. “Office 365 crushes Office 2019,” was even the headline in their subsequent blog post here by Jared Spataro, Corporate VP for Office 365.

Do yourself a favor and watch the videos through the link above. They’re really quite something.

So here’s the thing. For Microsoft, an Office 365 subscription  provides a revenue stream instead of a single purchase – and I can’t be mad at them for that. Still, the benefits to the user are worth it. In my opinion the reasons to keep going with packages like Office 2019 on either standalone purchase or volume licensing are slim approaching none. At the time of the last standalone release of Office (2016), the boxed product was the same as the Office 365 version. With this new release, they have made a major distinction between the two product lines. Sure the standalone Office 2019 is a one time purchase instead of a subscription model, but it’s still only for one license. And you’ll have to shell out for a copy of the next version of Office too.

For both home and business users, Office 365 can provide 5 installs from a single subscription. For the home user, that can likely cover an entire household of PC’s or Macs. For the business user, this allows installs not only on the workplace machine but a home install as well, giving your people more flexibility to remain connected and productive in a work from home environment. For your road warriors this would cover their laptops and mobile devices as well. And as long as the subscription is active, you not only get standard updates, but entire version updates whenever Microsoft has a new release of the software, and all of the tools leveraging Microsoft’s cloud and AI-powered solutions.

Oh, and your finance department will be happier with you too – because you might have just converted a big capital cost into an operating expense.

Maybe those benefits aren’t enough though – there are some businesses that just aren’t ready to move to the cloud yet. And we get it. It can be big. It can be scary. It can be frighteningly cumulonimbus. We’ve worked with plenty of folks that just weren’t ready to make that transition just yet, who even kept on-premise Exchange Servers on site as well for their email solution. In the end they were all happier with their Office 365 deployments. It not only gave their users more flexibility and freedom, but their IT teams more administrative control too.

There’s really only one instance where we here at Near the Sun can recommend a purchase of Office 2019 over Office 365 – if you’re a close to broke college student and don’t need recurring payments on your likely strained finances, and your school doesn’t provide Office for you, the low-cost Home and Student version may be a better bet for you. I’ve been there kids. Books are expensive.

Ready to move into the cloud with your productivity software? We here at Near the Sun can put something together for you and migrate some of that system strain (and IT headache) offsite. Give us a call or shoot us an email at mercury@nearthesun.com, and let’s talk. Either way, you should visit us at www.nearthesun.com anyway.

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October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Ahhh fall. The mild chill in the air and its requisite changing of the leaves are here. The sound of pumpkin spice orders permeate the air at your local Starbucks. Halloween is right around the corner, and soon all the ghosts and goblins will be out to play. That must mean it’s October, which the Department of Homeland Security has dubbed National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. It’s a collaborative effort between government and industry to make ensure every American has the resources they need to stay safer and more secure online. Their overarching theme since 2009?

“Cybersecurity is our shared responsibility and we all must work together to improve our Nation’s cybersecurity.” – DHS official website

National security and questionable use of the word “cybersecurity” to both begin and end a sentence aside, it’s important from time to time to take a look at your computer and digital systems to do an inventory and see where your organization stands. There are a lot of moving parts to developing a cybersecurity program – it doesn’t just mean having firewalls and antivirus software to block malicious elements from the outside. Without policies and procedures supporting those systems, you can still be left open to attack. How about backup systems and a business continuity strategy? Have your users been trained on how to spot digital red flags when they encounter an fraudulent email packing a phishing scam?

We’ve seen a lot here over our time in IT, from hacked email servers to phishing scams holding user files hostage for ransom. We’ve been able to recover for those affected – but being reactive and recovering from these situations is never easy. It’s made that much more difficult when there’s no strategy in place to handle the situation. Your data is your organization’s lifeblood, and keeping it safe in an ever-changing digital landscape is a continuous process. Over 50% of malware victims can be identified as small businesses in the United States, and now is always a good time to make sure you’re not a part of that statistic.

We can help you get there. From a simple network audit and user training to developing a full-scale technology strategy, Near the Sun can support your organization in its defense against digital threats. So don’t be reactive. Be ready.

 

Contact us through our website at www.nearthesun.com or email us at mercury@nearthesun.com for a free consult!

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Still Hanging on to Windows 7? It May Cost You.

 

Ahhh, Windows 7.

We will admit, it is a great operating system, and a lot of users are still clinging to it after the debacle that was Windows 8. It’s even made some users and IT shops gun shy when it comes to migrating to Windows 10.  But according to Microsoft, that’s only going to last you for so long.

In a recent blog post entitled “Helping Customers Shift to a Modern Desktop,” Microsoft has drawn a clear line in the sand when it comes to continued support for Windows 7. It has already been extended to January 14, 2020, but that’s going to be it. Past this date, for enterprise Windows 7 volume licenses, Microsoft will offer paid support for organizations through 2023.

Windows and Active Directory is what runs a lot of corporate networks, and having migration plans well ahead of time saves time, headaches, and most importantly – money. This is a rerun of what happened with Windows XP years ago, which existed in the same kind of scenario. Windows Vista was widely reviled to the point where OEMs were offering downgrades to XP as selling points for their computers. Users and IT shops hung onto XP as long as they could and didn’t develop new systems that could run on newer versions of Windows in time. The result? A $30 billion bill to the IRS. $9.1 million to the United States Navy. £5.5 million to the UK government for only 12 months of support as examples.

These may be extreme cases, but they are not by any means rare, and should still serve as cautionary tales for corporate users with enterprise Windows 7 contracts.

T minus 15 months to go if you fall under this category. That’s plenty of time to get a migration plan in place, and Near the Sun is here to help. Fill out our contact form here or send us an email at mercury@nearthesun.com. We’ll make sure you’re up to the mark with your Windows systems.