With all the prominent hacks making headlines last year, it just makes sense to start looking around for security solutions you can use every day in order to better secure your own data. That way, in the event of a major company getting hacked, exposing the data of their millions of customers, even if you are among that number, you’re at least at less risk than you might otherwise be.

Another day, another report of a large company data breach. The victim this time was Hyatt, and the breach impacted a total of 318 of their 627 properties. The culprit in this latest successful hack was malware found on hundreds of payment processing systems, which exposed customer names, addresses, and credit card numbers.

It’s no secret – not all software is created equally. Some products are blasted from the moment they are released, others are greeted with cautious optimism, and a very few are readily embraced by an excited, engaged user base.

Windows 10 has now been in public hands long enough that we can report that Windows 10 seems to be falling into that latter category.

It happens. The day comes when your old, reliable laptop gets traded in for a new model with more bells and whistles, a faster CPU and more storage space. Unfortunately, with Moore’s Law still in effect and computers becoming functionally obsolete, there’s a hard limit to how many spares and older pieces of equipment you can realistically keep lying about “just in case,” so what’s a business owner to do with all that older equipment? Fortunately, there are a number of good options, and we’ll outline a few of them just below:

Sell Them

Here, the best option is to sell them to your employees if there’s an interest.

Whatever business you’re in, you know what a spectacular pain arranging training can be. First, you’ve got to find a relevant SME (Subject Matter Expert). He or she probably doesn’t live in your city, so there’s transportation to arrange, schedules to juggle, possibly lunch to cater, and all the while, the various projects that your teams are working on are sitting idle.

It’s a bit of a paradox. In a world of cheap, ubiquitous storage, most smartphones don’t have a lot of storage, and what’s available to you can fill up quickly. If you don’t keep a close eye on it, you could find yourself running out of room almost before you know what hit you.

It’s no secret, we live in a world of 24/7 connectivity. It’s become such an integral part of our daily lives that we’ve come to expect it. We’re even increasingly taking our work with us when we go on vacation, but there’s the rub. Depending on where you vacation, you may or may not have access to reliable Internet connectivity.

Quick, without thinking, which is cheaper, acquiring a new customer and selling something to them, or selling additional product or services to an existing customer? Most small business owners intuitively understand that it’s cheaper to sell to your existing customer base than it is to acquire a new customer.

There’s no telling how many massive data leaks we’ll see in 2016, especially considering the staggering amount of exposure last year. One hack that is frightening, and that has recently come to light, involves voter registration data that has been hacked on a massive scale.

Tis The Season To Set Goals

With the New Year upon us, if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to sit down and map out your business goals for 2016. As the captain of the ship, you, as a business owner obviously won’t create the final list in a vacuum, but if you haven’t already charted your course for the new year, there’s no time like the present, so grab a notebook and a pen, or your tablet and your favorite note-making tool, put your thinking cap on, and get started!

If it’s been a while since you’ve conducted this exercise, the main goal here is to be sure that the things you map out to accomplish over the course of the New Year are attainable and measurable.