Now that we are well into 2021, reports have started being published regarding the affect 2020 took on small businesses and the changes they made. According to SCORE, a nonprofit which works with the U.S. Small Business Administration, 90% of small businesses digitized their businesses last year.

Did your business receive a PPP loan in FY2020? You need to know this: as of this writing, lawmakers on Beacon Hill are expected to pass a bill which will extend tax relief to include Massachusetts businesses who received loan forgiveness for Paycheck Protection Program loans.

More employees than ever before are accidently clicking on phishing e-mails, according to Terranova Security, who partnered with Microsoft during 11 days in October to test hundreds of companies in 98 countries in what they call their “Gone Phishing Tournament.

Within days of taking office, the Biden Administration announced a $1.9 Trillion economic stimulus proposal, which includes $10.19 billion earmarked for “IT Modernization and cybersecurity initiatives,” the largest such federal IT infrastructure project ever proposed.

While concerts may be lacking recently, the execs at TicketMaster are being kept busy by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York. According to a press release the office posted on their website on Wednesday, Dec. 30, Ticketmaster must pay $10 Million “to resolve charges that it repeatedly accessed without authorization the computer systems of a competitor.

Last year we said goodbye to Windows 7, but this year we say goodbye to something not only older, but something that served as a visual medium for businesses, artists, advertisers, video game developers, and has been used by just about anyone who has had access to the Internet between 1997 and today.

Monday, December 14 saw one of the widest outages of Google’s services this year, which affected YouTube and GMail, as well as their own internal systems.

According to Google, “The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally.

Direct iT has partnered with the MSCPA as a Gold Sponsor for their 2020 Tax Camp, which is taking place Dec. 9 to Dec. 11.

To learn more about the MSCPA and their line-up of conferences, please visit https://www.mscpaonline.org/

If you’ve worked in an office or have been in school at any point in the last three decades, chances are you’re quite familiar with Microsoft Excel, but if you’ve been around a longer, you likely know that it wasn’t nearly as popular as its competitors at first.