Catharsis Managed IT’s Blog
Tips, news, and insights from the IT industry
When should a business retain or delete Microsoft 365 documents?
Every document a business keeps carries both a cost and a risk. Keep records too briefly and the company may breach a legal requirement or lose evidence it needs. Keep everything forever and storage grows, searches slow down, and old content becomes a liability in a lawsuit or a data breach. Microsoft Purview lets administrators
Why cloud application dependencies matter during an outage
A business application can become unavailable even when its core systems are working. A failed identity provider, DNS resolution issue, unresponsive payment API, or backed-up job queue can prevent users from completing essential tasks. These services are dependencies that applications rely on to function. Understanding which dependencies are critical to business operations is essential to
How to document technology decisions before an employee leaves
When a long-tenured employee leaves, the most valuable knowledge they take with them is rarely a list of passwords. Rather, it’s the reasoning behind IT decisions: why a firewall rule exists, why backups run at two in the morning, or why one vendor was chosen over another. Access can be transferred quickly, but that knowledge
Stress-test your incident response plan with a tabletop exercise and no downtime
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), knowing who makes key decisions during a cyberattack is essential. A cybersecurity tabletop exercise helps teams identify responsibilities, test response procedures, and clarify escalation paths before an actual breach occurs. Through guided discussions rather than live system testing, businesses can improve their incident readiness without disrupting daily operations. Why
Cloud service outage response: The runbook your employees actually need
Most organizations have no documented response to a cloud service outage. When their CRM, communication platform, or project management tool goes down, employees either do nothing and wait, or improvise in ways that create inconsistency and, occasionally, additional problems. A runbook solves this without requiring IT infrastructure or significant budget. This document tells people what
How to make Microsoft Bookings work for your schedule
Microsoft Bookings lets clients book appointments without contacting you first, but that convenience doesn’t always produce a schedule that works for you. Without the right restrictions, clients can book with too little notice, cancel shortly before a session, or choose times that leave no room between meetings. Fortunately, Bookings lets you adjust these rules so
8 signs your outdated IT systems are holding your business back
Outdated IT tools have a way of degrading gradually rather than failing dramatically. Systems that worked well a few years ago may start slowing down workflows, creating security gaps that require frequent patching, and increasing maintenance costs. Recognizing the warning signs early is less expensive than waiting for a critical failure to force the issue.
Android screen rotation control: How to stop your phone from flipping when you don’t want it to
Android’s built-in screen rotation control is a binary choice: either the phone rotates automatically based on its accelerometer, or it doesn’t. That sounds fine until you’re reading in bed and a slight shift of your wrist flips the screen sideways, or you’re trying to show someone a photo in landscape and the device refuses to
How to manage Apple devices at scale without the setup chaos
Apple’s device management ecosystem has matured significantly, but it was built in layers rather than as a single unified system. Apple Configurator, Apple Business Manager (ABM), and mobile device management (MDM) platforms each serve a distinct role. Getting the most out of Apple devices in a business environment means understanding all three and deploying them
Planning VoIP for branch offices: What to measure before adding more phones
Adding phones to a branch office seems simple, until calls start dropping during busy periods or audio quality degrades for no obvious reason. Most VoIP problems trace back to decisions made before a single handset is installed: how many concurrent calls the connection can support, whether latency and jitter are low enough to preserve voice