The season of giving is upon us again! Across the country, people are making their annual trek through a winter wonderland to the slightly-less wonderful shopping malls of America. With your friends and family spending more time than ever interacting with digital media, now's the time to give some gadgets and software that will make their digital world better, faster, and safer in the year to come.

Here are 10 tech gifts to help you spread holiday cheer and cyber protection.

It’s never been easier for businesses to take advantage of the data security and other benefits the cloud delivers. Indeed, today the security, cost-effectiveness and easy scalability of the cloud compels companies to seek out and leverage solutions – which is driving tremendous growth in data center usage. In fact, the seventh annual Cisco Global Cloud Index report projects that by 2021, 94 percent of workloads and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centers and 73 percent of those instances will be in public cloud data centers. 

When it comes to cloud storage, the landscape is nuanced. Companies have different requirements – from how much businesses need, to where data is stored, and beyond – which makes a one-size-fits-all option quite challenging. To meet varying needs, business growth requires data-storage choice. The good news is that delivering such choice means business opportunities for IT service providers, provided they have the right partnership in place.
 

One of the fastest-growing malware threats of the past 18 months affects half of the businesses in the world, and most of them don’t know it. It’s called cryptojacking, an unintended consequence of the booming popularity of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Most victims don’t notice that they’ve been hit by cryptojacking because its adverse effects are relatively inconsequential: it just steals CPU cycles from your computer, as well as the electricity required to power it.

Getting hit by ransomware -- a similarly-pervasive and fast-growing but much more destructive malware threat -- is like a roundhouse punch to the face: your files get locked up with encryption until you pay some distant criminal hundreds or thousands of dollars for the key. Compared to ransomware, cryptojacking seems more like a mosquito bite: an annoyance, not a grave threat.

But the harsh reality is that like disease-carrying insects, some cryptojackers bring lethal friends along with them.

We’ve talked about how world class sports teams rely on data to maintain a competitive advantage. It is vital to their training, strategy development, and improving performance. The insights generated from that data make it an incredibly valuable asset, which is why so many teams choose Acronis’ technology to keep their data safe.

Another sports leader has joined the ranks of teams who rely on Acronis. Manchester City Football Club – the current English Premier League champions and part of the eight-team City Football Group – has entered into a new global technology partnership. As part of the partnership, Acronis will help the Club enhance and develop its data backup and storage capabilities.