Friday, April 15,, 2022 marks thirty years for our company - three decades of providing quality IT services to clients large and small! Wow – where has the time gone?
Five years ago, I reminisced about the major changes we experienced during our first 25 years of offering business computer services:
- the migration from floppy discs to CD-ROM to flash drives
- heavy computers with parallel and RS232-C serial ports evolving into more powerful computers the size and weight of a book which can communicate wirelessly
- Microsoft operating systems ranging from DOS to Windows 10
- the change in purchasing software – from boxes with physical discs and manuals to digital-only copies
- network computing affecting small offices with technologies ranging from LANs to bulletin boards to online services like CompuServe and America Online
- the migration from dial-up modems to broadband and cellular data
- the rise and ubiquity of the Internet and the influence of social media
- the introduction of mobile computing and the phenomenon of everyone having access to the collected knowledge of humanity at their fingertips
Even with all those changes, it’s amazing how much this industry has changed in just the past five years.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the mass migration to remote work has forever changed the concepts of employment, office hours, and collaboration. In what seems like the blink of an eye, video meeting technologies like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Facebook Live, and others have become the norm (replacing business travel and face-to-face discussions); many employees work from home as much as (or more than) from their offices (our staff included); and it’s become incredibly easy to collaborate with others (both internal and external to the organization) on documents in real-time using cloud-based services that were considered luxuries just a few years ago.
Awareness of computer security has also become far more critical in the past five years. Threats like ransomware have created entire industries – both legal and illegal. Hacker groups and state-sponsored technical terrorists have refined ransomware-as-a-service into a business model, offering new “services” which threaten nearly every aspect of life. Faced with increasing ransom demands and legal liability coverage, the cyber insurance industry has dramatically increased both premiums and technical requirements necessary for policy issuance. Passwords alone are not enough to protect any account today, and two-factor authentication (2FA) / multi-factor authentication (MFA) have become the minimum requirements simply to do business in many industries.
We’ve been in the midst of it all – and much, much more. Our industry changes more quickly than most – and it’s been both a challenge and a reward to have played a part in it.
I’m equally sure the next few years will bring changes which many of us either can’t imagine or which we currently associate with the realm of science fiction. As I noted five years ago, it’s tough not to be overwhelmed by it all – and staying aware of all the interconnected changes becomes more challenging every day. Time and change continue to present new computing problems which directly affect everyone in all areas of life: privacy, security, morals, responsibility, finances, healthcare, etc. These changes affect even the production and delivery of the information and staple items we take for granted in everyday life.
To reinforce some thoughts from my post of five years ago: Even with the uncertainty and the changes we’ve seen over 30 years, I still love the work I do, I’m still challenged to solve interesting problems on a constant basis, and I’m still as dedicated to helping our clients as I was on the naivety of my first day in business. Although some projects have involved sleepless nights, difficult obstacles, and stressful situations (I experienced all three just this week!), they’ve all been tremendously rewarding in one way or another.
I am blessed daily to help people in a practical way while gaining personal satisfaction from overcoming challenges – who could ask for a more rewarding job? A friend stated a couple of days ago that I had invested a lifetime in Logical Operators. If that’s true, then I’m still reaping the rewards of that investment!
If you need help navigating the world of computing for your business or organization, please contact us – we’d love to add you to the list of satisfied customers we’ve been building since 1992! If you’re already a client – THANK YOU for a rewarding and incredible 30 years – we’re grateful for your support and we’re looking forward to what comes next!
Warren J. Hairston, President & Founder
Logical Operators, Inc.