Aztek Native Ltd

12/08/2026

Here's something that surprises a lot of small business owners: Microsoft and Google do not back up your data for you. In fact, Microsoft's own terms recommend that you back it up yourself.

Our director, Peter Green, has written a friendly, jargon-free guide on why your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace still needs a proper backup. Your files live in the cloud, so it feels safe, but a deleted folder, a member of staff leaving, or a ransomware hit can wipe things out for good once the built-in recycle bin runs out (and that is sooner than most people think).

Have a read of why sync is not the same as a backup, and what a good one looks like:

https://aztek-native.com/blog/do-you-need-to-back-up-microsoft-365-and-google-workspace/

Not sure where your business data would come back from if something went wrong? We are happy to talk it through, no pressure: aztek-native.com/meet

07/07/2026

Our website has a fresh new look; come and take a look!

Peter has written up the story behind it, and it is a good one. It started a year ago with a rethink of the whole business, took a detour through a brand built from a photo on the back of a business card (the Thames at sunset), and ended with a decision every small business owner will recognise: do the "proper" thing the slow way, or find the smart, pragmatic route when time is tight.

The short version: we chose the option that saved the most time and turned out to be the most secure and low-maintenance too. There is a nice lesson in there about weighing your trade-offs with a clear head rather than doing everything the hard way.

Have a read, and have a look around the new site while you are there:

The story behind the new Aztek Native site: iterating a business plan, pulling a brand from one photo, and why a fast, secure static site was the sound choice.

03/06/2026

Ever had a Word or Outlook add-in just stop working for no obvious reason? You go into the settings, the add-in's still there, it's set to load at startup, and yet it refuses to actually load. Sometimes Word even tells you, helpfully, that it's "enabled by your system administrator, but disabled anyway." 🙃

We came across this recently on a client tenant, and the cause is worth knowing about if you use Microsoft 365.

There's a feature inside Office called Resiliency. If an add-in causes Word (or Outlook, or PowerPoint) to crash or run slowly even once, Office quietly adds it to a blacklist and refuses to load it again. The intent is reasonable; nobody wants a broken add-in stopping them opening their documents. The problem is that the blacklist overrides your settings, and even when you correct the configuration, the original blacklist entry is still in force. The add-in stays disabled, no matter what you do in the user interface.

There is a proper fix; it just needs two things done in the right order, and a bit of knowledge about where Office stores its grudges.

We've written the full story up on the blog (the registry locations, what to check, and how to put it right) for anyone running into the same thing. Link in the first comment 👇

06/05/2026

A client emailed us over the weekend. Microsoft Defender had popped up a quarantine alert on their laptop, and they wanted to know whether to worry.

Standard MSP territory; we log into the Defender portal, look up the device, review the alert. Easy.

Except the portal showed nothing.

Healthy device, recent telemetry, all the green ticks you'd expect, and yet the quarantine event the user could clearly see on their screen was completely absent from the cloud-side console.

The investigation turned up two things worth knowing for any small business running on Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

First: not every Defender detection on a device makes it to the cloud portal. Some get handled silently on the local machine and the cloud never hears about them. That's not a bug, it's how the product works; but it isn't what most people would assume.

Second: the deeper investigation tools that would let you dig past the portal aren't included with Business Premium. They sit behind a higher licence tier most small businesses don't pay for, and shouldn't have to.

The actual cause, in this case, turned out to be a Microsoft signature false positive that briefly quarantined two legitimate DigiCert root certificates from machines worldwide; the kind of thing that can quietly break websites, software signing, and Office trust chains until it's spotted and put right.

We've written the whole investigation up on the blog. If your IT visibility relies entirely on the Microsoft Defender portal, it's worth understanding where that picture stops.

(Link in the first comment.)

29/04/2026

The insurance market is starting to split on AI cover.

Some insurers are quietly excluding AI-related claims at renewal; others are building specialty AI cover from scratch. Same shape as the move that created cyber insurance ten years ago, when tech-related risks were pulled out of professional indemnity policies.

The practical takeaway for small business owners: the renewal questionnaire two or three years from now is likely to ask how you're using AI in your business. If you can answer confidently, you're ahead of the curve.
We've written a piece on what we did about it; an internal AI code of conduct, version-controlled, mapped against our existing data classification scheme. It's the kind of document that doesn't need to be long, but the act of writing it down was more useful than we'd expected.

Full post linked in the first comment 👇

21/04/2026

What do catalytic converter thieves and cyber criminals have in common?

They both bank on nobody watching.

Our founder Peter had a close call last week; two opportunists tried to remove the catalytic converter from his car in broad daylight. They didn't count on his mum being over for the day. She spotted what was happening, went straight out to confront them, and they left in a hurry.

It got us thinking about a question that matters for every small business: your security tools can spot a threat, but who's actually going to respond when it happens outside office hours?

Most small businesses have antivirus, firewalls, maybe some email filtering. These tools do a good job of stopping known threats. But the smarter attacks work around them, and when something slips through on a Saturday afternoon, the alerts just sit there until Monday.

That's the gap that MDR (Managed Detection and Response) fills. The "M" is where the value lives; a team watching around the clock, ready to investigate and act before a small problem becomes a big one.

Peter's written the full story (and the analogy) up on the blog. It's a good read, especially if "hire my mum" isn't a scalable option for your business.

👇 Link in the first comment.

20/04/2026

⚠️ Heads up if you use Vercel

Vercel has disclosed a security incident affecting a subset of customers. If you're a user, it's worth:

1. Checking your inbox for a direct notification from them
2. Rotating your Vercel credentials
3. Rotating any API keys, tokens or environment variables stored against the platform (even if you haven't been contacted)

Better to rotate and not need to, than need to and not have done.

The interesting part of this story isn't Vercel itself though. The breach started with a third-party AI tool that a Vercel employee had connected to their work Google account. When that AI tool was compromised, the attackers used the connection to get into Vercel's systems.

It's a pattern we're going to see more of. AI tools are genuinely useful, but every one you plug into your email, calendar or file storage becomes part of your security perimeter; whether you think of it that way or not.

A few things worth doing regardless of whether you use Vercel:

✅ Review which third-party apps have access to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace
✅ Check whether individual team members can approve new apps on behalf of the business
✅ Before adopting a new AI tool, ask how it stores access tokens and what its security track record looks like

We help small businesses think through exactly these kinds of decisions; getting the benefits of new technology without the unintended consequences. If that sounds useful, get in touch.

📖 Full story (The Register) in the comments.