The New Year is upon us, and with it comes a new batch of cyber threats. As advances are made in the world of technology, businesses anticipate changes that can make life more convenient. But, like snakes slithering into your home, cyber attackers also keep up with technological changes for their own nefarious ends.

From being an emerging app that allows sharing photos of puppies in vintage-themed filters, Instagram has transformed into a marketing tool that savvy businesses ought to have. The photo-sharing giant now has more than 500 million users, making it an ideal online marketplace.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made another dramatic price adjustment to its popular S3 cloud storage service. By modifying the organization of its pricing tiers, it is estimated that consumers will notice a drop of at least 20% in the monthly price they pay for the technology.

Small business marketing has often been a difficult endeavor for small business owners. Marketing involves a great deal of time, effort, and can require significant financial investment. For a long time, marketing automation was something only enterprise-level businesses and corporations could afford, but with new technology, that’s no longer the case.

Although iPhone bugs and malware are typically unheard of, there’s one circulating the web that you should be aware of right now. The bug, which was discovered in Reddit, is a brief, five-second video that when played causes your iPhone to freeze and ultimately crash.

As long as businesses host valuable data, cyber criminals will continue to bypass the security protocols meant to protect this data. The causes of security breaches range from device theft or loss, weak and stolen credentials, malware, and outdated systems that use ineffective security measures.

One of the hottest topics in tech and in business is artificial intelligence (more accurately “machine learning” or AI). Many business owners are currently looking to this technology for its potential to improve customer communications, and it is predicted that by the year 2020, 85 percent of all interactions will originate from machine learning “bots.

The astounding amount of data that businesses create on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis is totally unprecedented. And that number doesn’t show any signs of slowing, most likely reaching 1.7 terabytes per person by the year 2020. For businesses harnessing that data, this creates a major challenge: Current data storage limitations make it nearly impossible for businesses to backup all their information in a timely fashion.

Contrary to everyone's expectations, the new iPad Mini 5 will not be launched like other Apple products in September. People expect it to be launched in March 2017. The previous iPad Mini 4 is like the first iPad but slimmer and with additional features.

As long as there have been salesmen, there have been scammers trying to sell useless products. Traditionally the elderly have fallen prey to cold-call fraud, but now scam artists are getting tech-smart, and it's the younger generation of computer users who are falling for scams.