Cybersecurity Blog

CyberDuo has earned the Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work designation, Microsoft’s official recognition of partners who demonstrate proven capability in deploying, securing, and managing Microsoft 365 environments at scale. →

Every growing company in California eventually hits the same fork in the road. The technology has outgrown "the person who is good with computers," things are breaking more often, and someone in leadership finally asks the question: do we hire IT, outsource IT, or something in between? →

Los Angeles small businesses get quoted wildly different prices for "IT support," and the frustrating part is that the quotes are not describing the same thing. One provider says $60 a user, another says $200, and both call it managed IT. No wonder owners default to the cheapest number and find out later what was missing. →

Nobody publishes their prices in this industry, which is exactly why you are reading this. So let us do the thing IT providers usually avoid: put real numbers on the table for the Los Angeles market, explain what moves them up or down, and flag the tricks that make a cheap quote expensive. →

Plenty of industry awards exist, and frankly some are easier to get than others. What we like about this one is what it weighs. Cybersecurity is the first criterion on the list, not an afterthought, and that mirrors how we have operated since 2005: security first, with our own in-house 24/7 Security Operations Center behind every client, rather than security as an add-on product. →

Biotech founders are some of the smartest people you will ever meet, and many of them are running their company's entire IT and security on a shared admin password and a prayer. It is not a knock. When you are racing to hit a milestone before the next funding tranche, configuring conditional access policies is not exactly top of mind. But here is the uncomfortable reality: →

These two terms get used as if they mean the same thing, and they absolutely do not. Confusing them is how a business ends up paying for one when it needed the other, or proudly telling its cyber insurance carrier it "does penetration testing" when it actually just runs a scan. So let us clear it up once and for all, with an analogy that makes the difference obvious, and then sort out what your business actually needs. →

Take a breath. SOC 2 is very doable, especially the first time, if you understand what it actually is and stop trying to boil the ocean. Here is the no-panic guide to getting through it, from someone who has been on the other side of the audit. →

Cybersecurity has a bad habit of inventing three-letter acronyms faster than anyone can keep up, and then vendors slap them on everything until they lose all meaning. EDR, MDR, XDR. They sound like droids from a sci-fi film, and the marketing around them is about as clear as one too. So let us cut through it. →

Choosing a managed IT provider is a bit like hiring a surgeon you will never watch operate. You are trusting someone with the thing that keeps your business alive, mostly based on a sales call and a gut feeling. And the sales calls all sound the same. Everyone says "24/7 support," everyone says "proactive," everyone has a slick deck and a friendly account manager. →

A decade ago, buying cyber insurance was almost insultingly easy. You filled out a one-page form, checked a few boxes, and a policy showed up. Those days are gone and they are not coming back. Today the application reads like a security audit, the questions are specific, and answering them wrong does not just raise your premium. It can void your coverage at the exact moment you need it most. →

Here is a truth that surprises most business owners: when you buy Microsoft 365, it does not arrive secure. It arrives convenient. Out of the box, the settings are tuned to get your team working in five minutes, not to keep an attacker out at 3 a.m. The locks exist. They are just sitting in the box, unopened. →

An email comes in from your CEO. She is traveling, a deal is closing, and she needs you to wire $48,000 to a new vendor today. The tone is right, the signature is right, and she asks you to keep it quiet until the announcement. So you send it. Two days later you find out she never sent that email, and the money is gone. →

If you have started shopping for outside IT help, you have probably run into two acronyms that look almost identical: MSP and MSSP. One letter apart, and a lot of providers use them loosely, so it is easy to assume they are the same thing. They are not. The difference comes down to one word, security, and getting it wrong leaves a gap that is expensive to discover the hard way. →

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are the two platforms that run most of the business world, and both are very good. The honest truth is that there is no single winner. There is only the right fit for how your business actually works. The goal of this guide is to help you make that call with clear eyes, using 2026 pricing and features, not marketing copy. →

Microsoft keeps the service running. Protecting the data inside it is your job. If a file gets deleted, an account gets compromised, or ransomware encrypts a shared drive, Microsoft is not going to hand you a clean copy from last Tuesday. Here is why, and what to do about it. →

If your business is still running Windows 10 on even a handful of machines, the clock is louder than you think. Standard support ended on October 14, 2025. The paid Extended Security Updates program that has been keeping those machines patched since then stops on October 13, 2026. After that date, a new vulnerability in Windows 10 stays open forever. →

Copilot does not break any rules to see your data. It plays by the exact access rules you already have in place. The problem is that almost nobody's access rules are as tight as they think. Turn Copilot loose on a messy SharePoint environment and it will happily find every file your team forgot it overshared. →

On July 1, 2026, Microsoft is changing the price and packaging of most commercial Microsoft 365 plans. If your business runs on Microsoft 365, and most small and midsize companies do, this hits your next renewal. The change is worldwide, it is already confirmed, and the window to plan around it is short. →

Real 2026 pricing for managed IT services in Los Angeles: per-user costs, what drives price up or down, and the questions that expose hidden fees. →