Avefinity

20/08/2026

That slow old laptop your employee is putting up with is costing you more than a new one would.

It's easy to treat a computer as something you only replace when it dies. As long as it still switches on, a new one feels like money you don't need to spend.

Every slow start-up in the morning, every wait for a file to open, every frozen call someone has to drop and rejoin is a couple of minutes gone.

It happens over and over, all day, to everyone stuck on an old machine. Add it up across a year and it's well past the price of a new laptop.

And that's before the frustration, or the fact that old machines stop getting security updates, which makes a slow computer a risky one too.

You don't have to replace everything at once. Just look at how old your team's computers are.

Around the three or four year mark is usually where a machine starts costing you more in lost time than a replacement would.

Ask your staff which computers drive them mad and they'll tell you straight away.

Your IT provider can also point out which ones are near the end of their supported life, since those tend to be both the slowest and the least safe.

15/08/2026

Microsoft has installed Copilot on business computers automatically.

It's worth getting your files in order before you use it.

Copilot can see any file the person using it can already open.

In most businesses, that's a lot more than it should be.

Files get shared with "everyone" for convenience. Folders get opened up for a project and never closed again. It piles up over the years, and no one notices, because no one goes looking through it all.

Once Copilot is in the mix, people don't have to go looking. They ask a question, and it answers using anything it's allowed to see, including files that were left open to the whole company by mistake.

So before you let the team use it, get someone to check your file permissions, starting with HR and finance. People should only be able to see what they need to.

04/08/2026

Your customers are getting their answer before they ever reach your website.

Search Google for almost anything now and there's a good chance an AI-written answer sits at the top of the page. They already show up on a large share of searches, and that share keeps climbing.

When it's there, most people read it and never click through to a website at all.

That changes how people find you. Someone used to search a question your business could answer, land on your page, look around, and get in touch. Now the AI hands them the answer and they move on, and they never see you.

The businesses that get quoted inside those AI answers are getting more visits than before. So it's worth becoming the source it pulls from.

Start with your website. Make sure it answers the questions your customers ask, in plain words rather than marketing waffle, because that's what the AI picks up.

Keep your Google Business Profile filled out and correct.

And get your name onto other respected sites in your field. The more solid places that mention you, the more the AI leans on you.

If your visitors from search have been dropping and you couldn't work out why, this is a big part of it.

27/07/2026

When an employee leaves your business, the security gap is usually bigger than you'd guess.

A typical 25-person business has dozens of cloud accounts per employee.

Email, payroll, file storage, CRM, accounting, internal tools, and third-party SaaS subscriptions.

When the employee leaves, every one of those accounts should be disabled, but in most businesses only the obvious ones (email, computer login) get touched.

The rest sit dormant for months or years, still with the employee's credentials, still accessible if those credentials were ever leaked in a breach.

That's how a fired employee from 18 months ago becomes the entry point for next year's breach.

The fix is a written offboarding checklist that includes every account, not just the obvious ones.

- Day of departure: disable email, computer login, VPN, and any single-sign-on (SSO) accounts that gate everything else.
- Within 48 hours: revoke access on every SaaS tool by checking the actual admin panel of each.
- Within 7 days: change shared credentials the employee knew
- Within 30 days: do a "did we miss anything" review with someone who worked closely with the employee.

Without a checklist, "what did this person have access to?" is impossible to answer in a few months.

27/07/2026

In May 2026, hackers breached Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning platform used by thousands of schools and universities. The attackers claimed data on 275 million users across more than 9,000 institutions.

That breach didn't just affect Instructure. Every one of those 9,000 institutions now has to deal with breach notification laws in every state where any of its affected users live. That means 50 different timelines, penalty structures, and disclosure requirements to track.

Your business probably isn't running Canvas. What happens to Instructure's customers, though, is the same thing that happens to your business when one of your vendors gets breached. You are responsible for notifying your customers under your state's law, often within 60 days, sometimes less. You don't get to wait for the vendor to handle it.

The work to do this week. Pull your list of SaaS vendors (the one you built from the SaaS audit). For each vendor that holds customer data, write down what data they hold and which state's law applies to each of your customers. Then call your cyber insurance broker and ask for the breach notification playbook your policy entitles you to. If they don't have one, that's worth knowing right now, not during an incident.

A vendor breach becomes your legal problem the day they tell you about it. The preparation has to happen earlier.

The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters breached Instructure last week. The hackers, who have also attacked individual universities, demanded the ed-tech giant pay up or face a data leak.

25/07/2026

If you deleted a OneDrive file recently and went looking for it in your Recycle Bin… surprise, it's not there.

Starting in May 2026, files deleted from OneDrive or SharePoint in the cloud no longer appear in your local Recycle Bin or Trash.

They are removed directly from your device and can only be recovered from the OneDrive or SharePoint web‑based recycle bin.

1. Go to onedrive.com or your SharePoint site

2. Click "Recycle bin" in the left menu

3. Right-click the file and select "Restore"

You typically have 30 days before files move to the second‑stage recycle bin (which most people don’t know about), and up to 93 more days there, depending on your organization’s settings.

After about 123 days, they’re gone for good.

20/07/2026

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.