2019 was a year of continued growth at SpireTech. We’d like to thank all our clients for your continued support and your referrals – we don’t advertise much, so we appreciate every referral!
Review of 2019 Business Activity
We spent a lot of the year focused internally on improving our processes and operational maturity. Some of the areas we worked on include:
- A new billing system and customer portal
- Complete redesign of our website
- Re-organized and relaunched our blog
- Implemented brightgauge for customer reporting and performance metrics
- Improved our internal and customer documentation
- Improved our patch management system, for better and more reliable windows patching
- Moved from Slack to Teams
- Moved to Onedrive/Sharepoint for file storage
- Continued focus on improving security
We’ve also been attending conferences and quarterly IT business peer group events to keep up on current trends and best practices. We learn a lot at these events, and it is an excellent investment of our time.
Client Technology & Systems work
A lot of our work this year was upgrading and replacing and upgrading client systems and technology. We’ve seen some clients remove on-premises servers and move to Onedrive for Business and Sharepoint. Some of the major initiatives include (and are still ongoing):
- Windows 7 replacement or upgrades
- Server 2008 replace/upgrade
- CTERA service replacement
- Upgrade all anti-virus to Sophos
What’s coming in 2020
Some of the trends we see in 2020 include:
- All clients should implement multi-factor authentication for Microsoft and other hosted services. As people share or use weak passwords, this provides an additional layer of protection to your account. We’ll continue to remind our clients of the importance of this.
- A continued move to storing data on the cloud, and fewer on-premises servers. (Sharepoint/OneDrive for business and Dropbox are the main players here). Office365 use grew over 100% in our clients in 2019, and we see that trend continuing, but leveling off a bit.
- A continued focus on security, including MTR/EDR (Managed Threat Response/Endpoint Detection and Response) capabilities.
- Internally, we’ve committed to provide at least 50 hrs per year of continued training per employee. At the rate of change in the tech industry, we feel this is an important investment.
Again, we appreciate your continued support, and wish you a productive and prosperous 2020!