Welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Tuesday, April 13th, 2021

I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the Tenth episode of our show,
Listen to us Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursday, or on our Saturday compilations. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.

With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headline

Microsoft has struck a deal to acquire Nuance, creators of "Dragon Natrually speaking" dictation software, for 16 Billion dollars.

The software makers still have to get regulatory approval for the deal, but, seeing as they don't really sell competing products of note, there shouldn't be any issues there. If you aren't familiar with Nuance's software, their flagship is Dragon, a dictation software widely used in the medical, law enforcement, and legal fields. Their speech recognicion engine is easily the best in the industry, as it has been for well over a decade, and is also used to power Apple's Siri assistant under the hood.

So, what does this mean for your business? Well, if you're already a dragon customer, like about 60% of the medical space is, this could mean faster development time for your software, as Nuance has CERTAINLY been underleveraging their crown asset in that dragon speech engine. I would expect microsoft to pour development funds into Dragon, both in how well it integrates with windows and how effectively it can be used to control the system, as well as on the backend, improving the speech recognician. In exchange, I would expect them to use that engine in more products. I would not be suprised, for instance, if Microsoft started licensing the tech out to automakers to control your car's navigation system, climate control, radio, and the like. For those of us who are not Nuance customers, I would also expect wider availabilitiy of the product, and more generalization. Right now, their dictation software primarily caters to the medical and legal spaces, but I wouldn't at all be suprised if a more generalized version of the product shows up as a purchasable license in Microsoft Office 365, making it available to many, MANY more people, at an affordable monthly cost rather than the substantial upfront cost usually associated with Dragon. Having used dragon myself, it is very nice, and allows for faster writing of long passages without the physical strain and ergonomic issues associated with typing, so more availabilitiy is a good thing.

With that out of the way, let's talk about today's solution, specifically, let's talk about a few of the critical security measures everyone needs to make sure they take to avoid getting infected with, for instance, ransomware, which we talked about last week. Most of the time, these programs are able to infect your PC due to a bug in your programs or operating system. Most of the time, these bugs have been patched before you even get infected, so how do you get infected in the first place? Well, the answer is a button on your PC. My favorite button, your favorite button, its called "Restart Later." We've all seen it, we all hit it regularly, when our PC has updates ready to install, we snooze it, perpetually. Or the auto updater doesn't check frequently enough. Or the updater tries to install updates, fails, rolls back, and doesn't try updating again, gettnig you stuck on the version. There's a million reasons updates can fail, and seeing as almost every software update for almost every piece of software includes multiple security fixes, any one of which could be used to compromise your machine, keeping up to date is pretty important. So, if I had to choose one major security measure to put in place for an organization, it would be proper patch management system, critically for the Operating system, where the most serious security flaws can be found, but also important is patching for other programs found on your computers, from web browsers to Databases. A good patch management system will automatically apply patches at a time convenient for users, I personally like 4am sunday mornings. They also allow your IT team to view the versions of your software in use at any given time, and notify about stuck updates. Finally, if a patch is causing issues interacting with another program on your system, they can uninstall it on all systems that have that second program until a patch for that interaction is created. What this means for your business is that you can dramatically reduce IT costs if you are managing your IT in house by reducing the amount of manual work performed by your staff, increasing consistency of your operations by reducing computer errors, as you always have the latest bug fixes, and reduce risk by dramatically decreasing the amount of infections that your staff have to deal with. I would argue that this is actually a more important step from a cybersecurity step than investing in a good antivirus program at this point. All of this saves both your IT team time, and your employees time, which ultimately makes your business more profitable. It's just a small piece of making your business more streamlined, but its cheap, and very easy to implement, while being purely technical, so no operatoinal change is required. From a cybersecurity, and therefore risk standpoint, it's more important to keeping you safe than anything else except backups, which we discussed at length on Thursday. If you haven't checked out our show on what a good backup looks like, I do highly recomend it.

That's our show for today, thank you so much for listening. Tomorrow, catch us for a talk on why you need to rethink how you get in touch with your current customers. In the meantime, check us out on the web at YourOperationsSolved.com, where you can join our newsletter, and be notified of all our uploads I will see you next time.