The IT environments grow at a faster pace than the companies they serve. A decade ago, a company with 30 employees would have had half a dozen servers, a couple of dozens of PCs, and that’s it. Nowadays, there may be: Few old physical servers still housing important data and applications Virtual hosts, holding couple dozen virtual machines (VMs), with different applications, and even different hypervisors 35+ PCs and laptops — including some Macs 20-30 VMs in the cloud – in Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google, or other IaaS cloud Applications and data in the cloud – most probably Microsoft Office 365 Few dozen corporate mobile devices – tablets, phones All of these devices contain important company data, and need to be backed up – and your existing backup solution may not be able to support all of these, or easily scale along with your hybrid IT evolution. What should you do?

In a world where the scourge of ransomware threatens more and more data, it’s of primary importance to protect your data and backups at every step. That’s why the AV-Test Institute examined the threat protection capabilities of popular backup solutions.

Benjamin Franklin once famously observed “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” If he lived today, he might have added “data loss” to that list, since the need to safeguard our data is an everyday part of our tech-infused lives. Given how digitized today’s tax system is, protecting our tax records is critical. Even the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agrees a backup should be a top priority.

The good guys had some wins this week, making the digital world a little bit safer. But it seems the world needs balance—new threats popping up in the place of old ones. Luckily, the innovations weren’t all bad (have you heard about a company that is trying to transform the global coffee supply chain with blockchain?) What tech headlines did you miss last week?