Microsoft 365 Price Changes:
Check Your Renewals

Microsoft recently announced price changes across commercial, government, and nonprofit segments, taking effect for new purchases on July 1, 2026. For existing subscriptions, updated pricing applies at the first renewal on or after that date.

• Hosted Exchange: Pricing will increase by 5%.
• M365 & Office 365: Pricing will increase by an average of 15% on impacted subscriptions.



Microsoft has also been quietly applying price changes to auto-renewing subscriptions without proactive notice. In some cases, cancelling auto-renewal only disables the renewal cycle but not the underlying subscription, resulting in continued charges at the new rate. Verify which subscriptions are set to auto-renew and at what price before your next cycle.

Stop Paying the VMware Tax with Proxmox

When Broadcom acquired VMware, they rewrote the licensing math. Perpetual licenses are gone, bundles are mandatory, and many organizations are seeing renewal invoices two to six times higher than their last one. Staying with VMware could cost your organization $30,000–$50,000 or more per year in licensing alone.

Proxmox is an open-source enterprise virtualization platform with no mandatory hypervisor license. You pay for hardware and migration, and after that, you pay zero annual licensing fees. Included at no extra cost:

• High availability clustering and live VM migration.
• Software-defined storage (Ceph & ZFS).
• Container support via LXC alongside traditional VMs.
• Automated snapshots and backups.
• Single web UI with REST API, Terraform, and Ansible support.

ZehnTek is an official Proxmox Authorized Partner. Our four-stage migration process (Readiness Assessment, Architecture Design, Phased Migration, Post-Cutover Support) standardizes zero-downtime migrations for most environments.

Ransomware attacks are no longer a question of if; they’re a question of when. Attacks increased by 73% in 2023, with small and mid-sized businesses increasingly becoming primary targets because attackers know they are less likely to have enterprise-grade defenses.

The outcome of a ransomware incident is not determined by whether you get attacked, but by whether you can recover. The statistics paint a harsh reality for unprepared organizations:

The Warning Signs & Questions That Matter

Most organizations assume their backups are fine until they need them. If your systems were encrypted right now, how long would it take to restore operations? Do you know your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?

If you do not know these numbers, haven't reviewed your strategy since your last major infrastructure change, or keep your backups on the same network as your primary systems, your organization is exposed. Most importantly: when was the last time you actually tested a full restore? A backup that has never been tested is a backup you cannot trust.

The 3-2-1-1 Rule & Immutability

A battle-tested backup posture follows the 3-2-1-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one offsite and one immutable.

Immutability is non-negotiable. An immutable backup is a locked, air-gapped copy of your data that exists regardless of what happens to your primary environment and cannot be altered or deleted by ransomware, a disgruntled employee, or an accidental command. Ransomware variants increasingly target backup systems specifically because destroying your backups dramatically increases the likelihood you will pay the ransom.

The ZehnTek Approach:

BaaS Built for Real Recovery

ZehnTek’s Backup as a Service (BaaS) is built around these principles to ensure that when something goes wrong, your answer is a restore, not a ransom payment. Powered by Veeam and backed by Wasabi cloud storage, our BaaS offering includes:

• On-site and off-site redundancy via Veeam.
• Immutable off-site storage in Wasabi that cannot be deleted or altered.
• Daily monitoring and remediation of backup jobs to catch issues before they fail.
• File-level and virtual machine-level restoration included in the base service.
• Veeam licensing and patching managed entirely by ZehnTek.
• Optional Annual DR Test: A documented, full-scale restoration exercise with up to 12 hours of engineering time.
• Optional Cloud Instant Backup Recovery (IBR): Fully automated disaster recovery for on-demand restoration to bare-metal cloud infrastructure.

Hardware Refreshes Without the Capital Hit

Server and infrastructure hardware pricing has risen sharply, making a full environment refresh difficult within a normal capital budget. For organizations facing aging hardware but tight cash flow, two paths can keep you on a modern stack without a lump-sum hit:

• Factory-Refurbished Equipment: Significantly lower cost with full warranty coverage.
• Leasing Structures: Spreads the spend over time to keep the monthly cash flow predictable.

Client Spotlight: SeqCenter

SeqCenter, a Pittsburgh-based gene sequencing firm, needed to grow without growing their IT team. Their Director of Bioinformatics was splitting time between client research and infrastructure, a demanding Linux HPC environment plus a Windows back office, both due for a security and identity refresh.

ZehnTek stabilized the Linux cluster and configured Slurm for efficient resource scheduling, enabled SSO and MFA across both environments without a disruptive OS upgrade, migrated Windows to cloud-based Active Directory with federated identity, and added the monitoring and scanning needed to clear customer security audits. All without taking production offline.

The result: SeqCenter continues to scale without adding IT headcount, and the science team got their time back.