Did you hear the one about the company that notoriously abused its customers’ private data for years, then suddenly started claiming that it’s all about privacy? It’s no joke, and far from a laughing matter for consumer privacy advocates.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that his company would begin encrypting private messages on its soon-to-be-consolidated three messaging platforms: Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg went further, positioning the move as symbolic of Facebook’s new commitment to protecting user privacy.

If you’ve been following the news for the past year, you can be forgiven for rolling your eyes.

Microsoft Office 365 has more than 155 million monthly active users, which means Microsoft’s uptime is critical to millions of businesses worldwide. Yet during the last several months, Microsoft has been struggling to ensure that users don’t experience interruption. The latest outage occurred this past Monday, February 18, crippling Microsoft Teams users for several hours.

While it’s easy to expect technology to “just work,” the truth is that for myriad reasons it doesn’t always. That’s true whether you’re leveraging cloud solutions like Office 365 or local storage options. The difference in the cloud is that you’re “renting” a solution that operates remotely. Ultimately, it is your responsibility to maintain control of your data.

Let’s consider three common instances when using Office 365 can prove costly for the unaware.

Imagine yourself as a service provider who wakes up one day, pours a cup of coffee, and checks email, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – only to discover a flurry of panicky messages from customers about your service being unavailable. You rush to your management console to find that nothing is working; your entire operating environment is an unresponsive black hole. Racing to your data center, you discover a faceless attacker has wiped out every bit of data you own and maintain on behalf of your customers, erasing every hard drive on the premises.

What’s worse is they have also managed to destroy your backup servers. You have no recovery options.

That’s not an imaginary worst-case scenario. That’s what happened earlier this week to VFEmail.net, a US-based provider of secure email services.

New computers and software can be expensive. If you're using your laptop for your child's homework assignments or keeping your fledgling small business going, you might be tempted to not update your device or software that often. After all, it’s getting the job done, and as the saying goes, “If it’s ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

A lot of people think this way. A recent report found that most people in 2018 are using computers that are on average six years old. Only 2.54 percent of users have a machine purchased in 2017, and nearly 75 percent of users who own a device bought it in 2011 or earlier.

The problem with relying on an older computer is that updating to newer software – from apps to operating systems – can become more difficult. More importantly, relying on outdated operating systems, file- and print-sharing utilities, and applications can expose your computer and all the data you keep on it to tremendous risks.