Techsolve Consulting

07/25/2026

The quarterly review with your IT provider is one of the most useful meetings on your calendar, but it's easy to let it run on autopilot. Walk in with six real questions and you turn it from a status update into a strategic check-in.

Six to ask at your next review:
1. What changed in our security posture since last quarter? Not "what did you do." What CHANGED. The answer should reference specific risks reduced.
2. Which CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities are still unpatched in our environment, and why?
3. When did we last test our backup restore on a real workload, and what did the test show?
4. How many user accounts have privileged or admin access, and is that list smaller than it was last quarter?
5. What incidents (security events, near-misses, alerts) did we have this quarter that I didn't hear about, and why didn't I hear about them?
6. If we were hit by ransomware tonight, what's our realistic Recovery Time Objective for the most important systems?

If your IT provider can answer all six with specifics, they're operating at the standard you're paying for. Hedging or "let me get back to you" on more than one is information worth acting on.

07/23/2026

The old rules about strong passwords are out of date.

For years the standard advice was eight characters, mix uppercase and lowercase, throw in a number and a symbol. NIST, CISA, and Microsoft's own identity team all moved off that advice years ago. The current recommendation is simpler and stronger. Use long passwords or passphrases, and stop forcing your team to rotate them on a schedule.

The math is straightforward. Modern password-cracking hardware can guess a complex 8-character password in less than an hour. A 16-character passphrase made of common words takes centuries against the same hardware. Length wins because every extra character multiplies the work an attacker has to do, while complexity adds only modest barriers.

The policy update for your business is short. Set a minimum of 14 characters for general accounts and 16 or more for admin or sensitive ones. Mandatory rotation creates more weak passwords than it prevents, so stop forcing it. Required complexity rules tend to push people toward simpler, less secure patterns, so drop those too. Block any password that appears in known breach databases, and require MFA on every account that supports it.

If your business is still using 8-character passwords with quarterly rotation, you're following the rules from 2010. The new rules are easier on your team and harder on attackers.

07/22/2026

In May 2026, Intuit announced it would lay off around 3,000 employees to refocus the company on AI.

Intuit owns QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Most small businesses use at least one of these. The layoffs are part of a bigger pattern across the tech industry, where companies built around traditional software are rebuilding around AI products. Small business tools are next in line.

Four things to expect over the next 18 months:

1. Product changes. Familiar features get replaced or buried inside AI-first workflows. The QuickBooks you use in 2027 probably won't look like the one you use today.
2. Support friction. Fewer humans on the support line means longer queues and more chatbot-first triage. Get to know your account manager's direct line before you need it.
3. Pricing changes. AI features get bundled into higher tiers, and the base tier loses ground. Expect a renewal call where the rep asks "have you seen our new AI plan?"
4. Data going somewhere new. Your accounting, payroll, and marketing data is the fuel for the new AI features. Check the privacy and data-use settings on each Intuit product you use, and find out what's opted in by default.

Stay on Intuit if it works for you. Just spend the next 18 months auditing what you're paying for, where your data goes, and who answers your calls when something breaks.

In a memo to employees, CEO Sasan Goodarzi said the layoffs are meant to reduce complexity, simplify the company's corporate structure, and deliver better AI products.

07/22/2026

In May 2026, Intuit announced it would lay off around 3,000 employees to refocus the company on AI.

Intuit owns QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Most small businesses use at least one of these. The layoffs are part of a bigger pattern across the tech industry, where companies built around traditional software are rebuilding around AI products. Small business tools are next in line.

Four things to expect over the next 18 months:

1. Product changes. Familiar features get replaced or buried inside AI-first workflows. The QuickBooks you use in 2027 probably won't look like the one you use today.
2. Support friction. Fewer humans on the support line means longer queues and more chatbot-first triage. Get to know your account manager's direct line before you need it.
3. Pricing changes. AI features get bundled into higher tiers, and the base tier loses ground. Expect a renewal call where the rep asks "have you seen our new AI plan?"
4. Data going somewhere new. Your accounting, payroll, and marketing data is the fuel for the new AI features. Check the privacy and data-use settings on each Intuit product you use, and find out what's opted in by default.
Stay on Intuit if it works for you. Just spend the next 18 months auditing what you're paying for, where your data goes, and who answers your calls when something breaks.

07/21/2026

Your office printer is probably the least secured device on your network.

Default admin passwords are still in place. The hard drive inside it stores copies of every document scanned or printed in the last few months. Its web interface is exposed to anyone on the same network, and many printers have known vulnerabilities that haven't been patched in years.

Five settings to change today: replace the default admin password, turn off any wireless or guest networks the printer broadcasts, disable old services you don't use (FTP, Telnet, SMB v1), and put the printer on a separate network segment if your firewall supports VLANs.

Most attackers look at office printers before they look at servers, because nobody changes the password.

07/20/2026

You probably can't list every SaaS tool your business pays for, and that's the first problem.

Your business probably runs dozens of SaaS subscriptions, and a lot of them were signed up for once and forgotten. Some are duplicates, some are still paid by people who left, and a few have data sitting in them you'd rather not lose.
You can audit the whole stack in 20 minutes without involving IT.

1. Pull the last 12 months of statements from every credit card and bank account your business uses for software charges.
2. Highlight every recurring charge that looks like software (monthly or annual).
3. Drop each one into a spreadsheet with five columns: tool name, monthly cost, who uses it, what it does, and last login date if you can find it.
4. Look for duplicates. It's normal to find two project management tools, two file-sharing platforms, and three "we tried it once" subscriptions sitting on the same statement.
5. For anything no one has logged into in 90 days, cancel it. For duplicates, pick one and cancel the rest. For everything that stays, tag a business owner inside your company who's responsible for it.

The audit usually pays for itself in cancelled subscriptions within the first hour. The bigger win is that you finally know what your business is paying for and which tools hold your data.

07/19/2026

When the same person designs your IT systems and protects them, you've got a built-in conflict of interest.

Even a great IT person can't reliably check their own work. Backups, firewall rules, access reviews, incident post-mortems: every one of those checks is done by the same person who built the thing being checked. The result is a system where every safeguard verifies itself.

Large enterprises split these roles for exactly this reason. They have separate teams for engineering and security, and the security team's job is to find what the engineering team missed. Small businesses can't afford a full second team, but the principle still applies.

The fix is lighter than you'd expect. Hire an outside firm for one half-day a year to audit what your internal IT person built. The audit looks at your backup logs, your access list, your patch report, and the last three things your IT person would like to fix. The cost is usually under $3,000, and the value comes from the fact that the outside auditor doesn't work for the IT person.

One half-day audit a year is the whole fix. It costs less than ignoring the problem ever could.

07/18/2026

In May 2026, Google launched a one-click tool that imports your team's Microsoft 365 user accounts directly into Google Workspace.

The feature is built into the Workspace setup flow for very small and small businesses. It pulls user accounts from M365 in a single step, and a separate import handles the data behind those accounts (emails, calendars, contacts, and OneDrive files). What used to be a multi-day project with consultants now takes under an hour for a 25-person team.

The real story is the switching cost. For years, a small business that started on M365 was effectively locked in by the labor of moving off. That lock just got weaker, and it changes the conversation even if you have no plans to switch.

Your next Microsoft 365 renewal becomes a real negotiation. Price increases that used to feel unavoidable because the alternative was too much work now have a reasonable Plan B. Bring it up. The reps already know.

If you're paying for M365 features your team doesn't use (Premium licensing, Defender add-ons, Power Platform seats), the renewal is also the moment to right-size. You're probably paying for two or three tiers above what your team actually needs.
Whether you plan to switch or not, your negotiating position just improved. Use it.

arrow_back Back May 13, 2026 Small businesses can now seamlessly import users from Microsoft to Google Workspace Admin console Google Workspace Rapid Release Scheduled Release We’re excited to announce the beta release of a new, simplified way for very small and small-sized businesses to import th...

07/17/2026

Your work email is on every business card, contract, and website. It's the first thing attackers look for when they're targeting your business.

Phishing crews scrape your website and LinkedIn for the format and patterns of email addresses. Once they have one address, they can guess the rest of your team's emails in seconds. That gives them targets for credential phishing, fake invoice scams, and CEO impersonation.

Email aliases reduce that exposure. An alias is an extra email address that delivers to the same inbox without exposing the real one. Microsoft 365 supports up to 400 aliases per mailbox. Google Workspace supports up to 30 per user. Both are free and built in.

A simple pattern that works for most small businesses:

✅ Use a public-facing alias for any address that lives on your website, business cards, and signup forms (info@, sales@). Keep your real email off public pages.
✅ Create vendor-specific aliases for major suppliers (quickbooks@, dropbox@). If one vendor leaks and you start seeing phishing on that alias, you know exactly which one.
✅ Use one tightly held internal email for sensitive operations like banking and payroll. That one stays off everything public.

If a phishing campaign hits one of your aliases tomorrow, you'll know which list you ended up on. You can shut that alias off without changing your main address.

Need help structuring this for your business? Connect with Techsolve today!

06/25/2026

That "urgent" email from your bank or boss might be a scam.

Phishing emails are everywhere right now, and they're getting harder to spot. They can look like fake invoices, password resets, even messages that look like they're from a coworker. One wrong click can hand over your login or drain an account. Techsolve Consulting helps Swift Current businesses set up email protection, spot the warning signs, and lock things down before a fake email costs you real money. Not sure if your email is safe? Book a free check.

Send a message to learn more