AE Tech Design

08/31/2026

Here’s your gentle nudge for a better Monday.

08/30/2026

On May 19, 2026, Google Cloud's automated abuse-detection system incorrectly suspended Railway, one of its largest customers. The decision took Railway's entire platform offline for eight hours and pulled thousands of small businesses down with it.

Railway is a platform other businesses use to run their applications. Their production environment lives on Google Cloud, where Railway spends more than $10 million a year. That spend didn't matter when an automated system decided the account looked suspicious. The suspension happened instantly. Railway waited about an hour for a human at Google to respond, and the total outage ran around eight hours. For Railway's customers, that meant unreachable apps for a full workday with no warning and no path to escalate.

This matters to your business even if you've never heard of Railway. Your business depends on services you don't control and run on platforms you don't manage. Most of those platforms reserve the right to override their own SLAs when an automated system flags your account or your vendor's account. A cloud provider's automated decision can take you down as fast as a hacker can, and you have less recourse.

The work to do this month is in three pieces. Start with a dependency map. Each SaaS tool your business depends on (QuickBooks, HubSpot, payroll, CRM, file storage) runs on a cloud platform somewhere, and you need to know which.

With that map, identify which workflows have a manual fallback. Can you take orders without your CRM for a day? Can you process payments without your usual processor? The answer might be no, but knowing now is better than discovering it during an outage.

Last, read the SLA for the services you depend on. Most cloud SLAs include carve-outs for "automated abuse detection" and similar events. The recourse, even when the provider is at fault, is usually a service credit on your next bill, not the cost of your lost workday.

Cloud providers fail by accident and by their own systems making wrong calls. Your business should be able to function for at least a workday without any one of them.

This is the service we get when we spend $10m plus? asks automated code deployment outfit

08/29/2026

When an employee leaves your business, the security gap is usually bigger than you'd guess.

A typical 25-person business has dozens of cloud accounts per employee.

Email, payroll, file storage, CRM, accounting, internal tools, and third-party SaaS subscriptions.

When the employee leaves, every one of those accounts should be disabled, but in most businesses only the obvious ones (email, computer login) get touched.

The rest sit dormant for months or years, still with the employee's credentials, still accessible if those credentials were ever leaked in a breach.

That's how a fired employee from 18 months ago becomes the entry point for next year's breach.

The fix is a written offboarding checklist that includes every account, not just the obvious ones.

- Day of departure: disable email, computer login, VPN, and any single-sign-on (SSO) accounts that gate everything else.
- Within 48 hours: revoke access on every SaaS tool by checking the actual admin panel of each.
- Within 7 days: change shared credentials the employee knew
- Within 30 days: do a "did we miss anything" review with someone who worked closely with the employee.

Without a checklist, "what did this person have access to?" is impossible to answer in a few months.

08/28/2026

On May 7, 2026, an Amazon Web Services data center overheated and took out an entire availability zone in US-East-1, AWS's most popular region. Several core AWS services went down, and any business application hosted in that zone was unreachable for hours.

Cloud outages happen to every major provider, not just AWS. Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Slack have all gone down long enough to break a business day in the last three years.

If your business loses meaningful money during downtime, you need a "the cloud is down" plan. The plan has three parts.

A dependency map. Every critical workflow in your business should be mapped to the SaaS or cloud service it depends on. Your accountant uses QuickBooks Online, which runs on AWS. Your sales team uses HubSpot, which also runs on AWS. Your phones might be VoIP, which depends on a carrier you've never named. The map doesn't need to be pretty, but it does need to exist.

An out-of-band communications path. Phone numbers for your key vendors, your insurance broker, your IT provider, and a contact for every team lead. This list lives on paper or on a phone that doesn't depend on your office network. Use the same list from your incident response plan.

A decision tree for what stops and what continues. Some work has to keep happening even when systems are down (taking orders, handling client emergencies). Other work can wait. Pre-decide which is which, so that conversation isn't happening for the first time during an outage.

Test the plan once a year. Turn off access to one major SaaS tool for an afternoon and watch what your team does. Whatever you learn from the dry run is cheaper than learning it for real.

Overheating at a single data center has been identified as the cause of the AWS outage, which impacted customers such as Coinbase

08/27/2026

The quarterly review with your IT provider is one of the most useful meetings on your calendar, but it's easy to let it run on autopilot. Walk in with six real questions and you turn it from a status update into a strategic check-in.

Six to ask at your next review:

1. What changed in our security posture since last quarter? Not "what did you do." What CHANGED. The answer should reference specific risks reduced.
2. Which CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities are still unpatched in our environment, and why?
3. When did we last test our backup restore on a real workload, and what did the test show?
4. How many user accounts have privileged or admin access, and is that list smaller than it was last quarter?
5. What incidents (security events, near-misses, alerts) did we have this quarter that I didn't hear about, and why didn't I hear about them?
6. If we were hit by ransomware tonight, what's our realistic Recovery Time Objective for the most important systems?

If your IT provider can answer all six with specifics, they're operating at the standard you're paying for. Hedging or "let me get back to you" on more than one is information worth acting on.

08/26/2026

Time to explore a fun thought this Wednesday! What’s one thing you’d change about social media?

08/24/2026

Saying this softly—today’s quote is for you.

08/23/2026

In May 2026, hackers breached Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning platform used by thousands of schools and universities. The attackers claimed data on 275 million users across more than 9,000 institutions.

That breach didn't just affect Instructure. Every one of those 9,000 institutions now has to deal with breach notification laws in every state where any of its affected users live. That means 50 different timelines, penalty structures, and disclosure requirements to track.

Your business probably isn't running Canvas. What happens to Instructure's customers, though, is the same thing that happens to your business when one of your vendors gets breached. You are responsible for notifying your customers under your state's law, often within 60 days, sometimes less. You don't get to wait for the vendor to handle it.

The work to do this week. Pull your list of SaaS vendors (the one you built from the SaaS audit). For each vendor that holds customer data, write down what data they hold and which state's law applies to each of your customers. Then call your cyber insurance broker and ask for the breach notification playbook your policy entitles you to. If they don't have one, that's worth knowing right now, not during an incident.

A vendor breach becomes your legal problem the day they tell you about it. The preparation has to happen earlier.

The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters breached Instructure last week. The hackers, who have also attacked individual universities, demanded the ed-tech giant pay up or face a data leak.

08/22/2026

The old rules about strong passwords are out of date.

For years the standard advice was eight characters, mix uppercase and lowercase, throw in a number and a symbol. NIST, CISA, and Microsoft's own identity team all moved off that advice years ago. The current recommendation is simpler and stronger. Use long passwords or passphrases, and stop forcing your team to rotate them on a schedule.

The math is straightforward. Modern password-cracking hardware can guess a complex 8-character password in less than an hour. A 16-character passphrase made of common words takes centuries against the same hardware. Length wins because every extra character multiplies the work an attacker has to do, while complexity adds only modest barriers.

The policy update for your business is short. Set a minimum of 14 characters for general accounts and 16 or more for admin or sensitive ones. Mandatory rotation creates more weak passwords than it prevents, so stop forcing it. Required complexity rules tend to push people toward simpler, less secure patterns, so drop those too. Block any password that appears in known breach databases, and require MFA on every account that supports it.

If your business is still using 8-character passwords with quarterly rotation, you're following the rules from 2010. The new rules are easier on your team and harder on attackers.

08/21/2026

In May 2026, Intuit announced it would lay off around 3,000 employees to refocus the company on AI.

Intuit owns QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Most small businesses use at least one of these. The layoffs are part of a bigger pattern across the tech industry, where companies built around traditional software are rebuilding around AI products. Small business tools are next in line.

Four things to expect over the next 18 months:

1. Product changes. Familiar features get replaced or buried inside AI-first workflows. The QuickBooks you use in 2027 probably won't look like the one you use today.
2. Support friction. Fewer humans on the support line means longer queues and more chatbot-first triage. Get to know your account manager's direct line before you need it.
3. Pricing changes. AI features get bundled into higher tiers, and the base tier loses ground. Expect a renewal call where the rep asks "have you seen our new AI plan?"
4. Data going somewhere new. Your accounting, payroll, and marketing data is the fuel for the new AI features. Check the privacy and data-use settings on each Intuit product you use, and find out what's opted in by default.

Stay on Intuit if it works for you. Just spend the next 18 months auditing what you're paying for, where your data goes, and who answers your calls when something breaks.