TECHNOLOGY BLOG

While the security equipment gets most of the attention, the cabling behind the system is also important. The right low voltage cable can help connect security devices and support reliable communication between them.

People are constantly upgrading their technology. I mean, just take a look at how many people upgrade their phone every year even though innovation of the devices has slowed considerably. Alternatively, sometimes users ignore the signs that it is time for an upgrade, even when they are crystal clear. This type of mentality will not help you, especially if your technology breaks down. You need to be able to identify when older devices are holding you back and take steps toward replacing them with better, more powerful ones.

Is Client-Side Encryption New? For Google Workspace apps it is, but client-side encryption has been around for decades; it just has never been so easy. In Google Workspace, this feature is new and can be set up at the server level by users with administrator privileges. For a full rundown of CSE options for your organization, visit Google’s page about CSE here.

Modern hosted cloud VoIP solutions don’t work that way. You don’t need to install a phone system in your office, you simply pay for the number of lines or users. Sure, you still might need to purchase handsets and headsets, but most modern systems also include smartphone and Windows apps, so you can make calls from any device. There’s no shelling out major money for upgrades or to repair and replace hardware—everything is in the cloud.

Microsoft Excel is a really useful tool for organizing data. Using something called a heat map strategy can help you get more out of the solution. If you actively use spreadsheets in your business to contextualize data, you will find this easy-to-use tip for using heat maps really useful.

What is a VPN’s Purpose? A VPN effectively ensures that you and your employees have a secure connection to your business network, which helps to prevent unauthorized users from accessing it or from collecting data as it is in transit between your network and your remote users and their workstation. However, it’s important to remember that—like any other business technology, or technology in general—there are different VPNs out there that offer different features, and therefore, are more or less appropriate for business use.

Favicons are the little images that show up next to the name of a website in your browser. They are often logos that are well-recognized so that users can easily identify which website is which in their browsers. So, as long as you can identify the favicons in your bookmark bar, you really don’t need the names of the websites to direct you where you need to go (unless you have multiple bookmarks or favorites saved from one site, in which case maybe this isn’t the solution for you).

Most businesses dedicate themselves to enterprise security after they have been using a more rudimentary security strategy and find the need for a more comprehensive approach. The first task an organization has to undertake is auditing their current security. This should be done annually anyway, but it can quickly identify strategies and tools that should be retired and replaced with something more robust.

Your Business Depends on Solid Project Management Think about all the things that have gone wrong for your business over the past few years. Now consider if those projects were completed quicker and in scope every time. Consider how much money you would have saved on these endeavors. In our business, projects make up a lot of the tasks that we have to accomplish. For that reason, we like to highlight the technologies that we use to complete our projects on time, on budget, and in scope every time.

Amidst a phishing attack, a hacker will reach out to one of your team members in an attempt to fool them into providing access. This approach is surprisingly successful, and is present in over 90% of today’s breaches and ransomware infections.

Most cloud providers are pretty great about their security measures, but you should consider encrypting your cloud-based applications and data through the use of a virtual private network as well for when data is moving from one system to another. This ensures that your data is safe, even in the event that it is stolen by hackers, as the effort it takes to crack military-grade encryption is often not worth the hacker’s time.

We aren’t trying to scare you, but we cannot understate the danger presented by these threats. Some of these vulnerabilities are so tricky that they can be carried out with only your phone number, providing hackers access to the device without you as the victim providing them access. In short, you could be compromised without even knowing it, and that’s reason enough to educate yourself on this topic.

What is Storage Sense, and What Does It Do? Windows offers a setting, referred to as Storage Sense, that helps a user by monitoring and automatically helping to clear storage space on the device. All of those files you’ve forgotten about? Storage Sense can help clear them out, with you either prompting it to clean up files or setting it to automatically kick on when available disk space gets a bit low.

Cybersecurity has never been more important. There are millions of scams sent out every day that are ultimately targeting you and your employees’ password-secured accounts. Today, we are going to give you some tips on how to create passwords that work best to protect your data and information systems.

Make no mistake, you want your business to grow. There is no better sign that you are resonating with customers and providing the value you set out to deliver. Unfortunately, for a lot of companies, they simply aren’t prepared when their product or service takes off and it ends up ruining what could be a very good thing. Today, we’ll take a look at three actions you can take to keep your business humming along when it sees extraordinary growth.

AI is the Latest Literary Invention Doomed to Become Commonplace AI was also once a work of fiction, and its roots can be traced back to Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, in the section known as The Book of the Machines. In this novel, Butler examines several topics that we can see in today’s technological landscape, including Moore’s Law, which it predated by almost a century. The novel describes a rapidly advancing technology and artificial intelligence, and the machines managed to achieve some level of sentience.

So, the question then becomes, what are you actually paying your employees to do: the work their job requires, or sitting in meetings getting nothing of value done?

What Can You Do to Protect Your Business? The first step toward protecting your network from wearable technology is to implement a reliable Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. This helps to define which devices are allowed within your network and the stipulations you have in place for them. Many organizations will build a BYOD policy centered around smartphones, which isn’t a bad place to start, but it should also cover other equally important technologies, like employee-owned laptops and tablets or other devices used to connect to company assets

Is your business prepared to handle the many challenges that come from remote work, chief among them security? If you aren’t, then the transition to remote or hybrid operations is going to be a rough one, to say the least. Let’s discuss how you can implement secure remote or hybrid work policies that are sure to protect your business now and in the future.

One thing that will always be useful in business and in life is the ability to think critically. You might find that it’s even more helpful when considering decisions related to your IT infrastructure, too. Let’s go over how you can foster these skills within yourself and your employees.

When people talk about the growth of technology in business, no small part of that is what the Internet of Things makes possible. From cost control, to automated scheduling, to helping build operational efficiency, the IoT can present a lot of interesting benefits for a business if you strategically implement systems designed to use the data created by smart devices. Let’s take a look at some of the ways IoT works for small businesses.

The sales process is an integral part of every business. How to get your products and services in front of prospective customers is the big mystery that every business has to solve. Technology can really help improve your business’ sales process. Today, we will look at a couple of technologies that work wonders to help your sales team be more effective.

Most people use their smartphones more than any other computing tool, and businesses must adapt to these trends if they want their employees to be as productive as possible. Businesses can capitalize on their employees’ smartphone use if they are strategic in their implementation of mobile device tools and strategies—including work profiles on Android devices.

Phishing is a word that has a couple of different meanings, depending on the spelling and context. Fishing, like the act of sitting down with a pole and trying to catch a fish, can be a relaxing, leisurely activity. Phishing, with a “ph,” is anything but that, and it can be a tiring and scary situation to navigate—particularly if you or one of your employees have fallen victim to an attack.

The average IT infrastructure is made up of dozens of technology solutions that all work in tandem to ensure your business’ success… at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Oftentimes, you’ll need to contact your technology vendors to either procure new solutions or get your existing ones to work with theirs. How do vendor relations figure into your company’s prolonged success?

Today’s businesses need a data backup, and just copying over data to another place every so often isn’t enough. Modern businesses need a comprehensive data recovery strategy in place to protect themselves from potential data loss in the event of a disaster. Let’s go through why it is critical to formulate one early on, and how to balance its maintenance with everything else your business demands.

Phishing is a pressing issue for everyone, not just businesses. The main problem is that the phishing messages keep getting more and more sophisticated and keep coming and coming until, eventually, something negative happens. For this week’s tip, we wanted to discuss the different types of phishing you can encounter.

The COVID pandemic forced businesses all over the world to adopt remote work practices, whether they were ready for them or not, and it wound up establishing full-fledged remote and hybrid positions which may never have existed otherwise. However, with these new developments come new threats, and you need to be ready to handle them as they crop up.

Last week, we wrote about how patience plays a big role in people’s ability to be productive and efficient. This week we want to explore a few ways to help the people in your organization to become more patient. We all know people in our lives that seem like they could definitely take a chill pill. If that is you, using these four suggestions can help you be more patient in situations that demand it.

Entrepreneurship is extremely frightening to a lot of people, and that’s probably why a lot of people make the choice to work for others. If you think about it, a lot can go wrong; a lot more than can go right. Today, we thought we’d highlight how business owners are able to get through all the problems to forge ahead and create successful companies.

Smart devices are all the rage in today’s consumer-based market. People love to get their hands on devices that can help them better track and manage their lives. There are two factors that play into how these devices can be brought into a professional work environment, though, and they are security and reliability.

Admit it, you don’t know all that much about cybersecurity. In this blog, we spend a lot of time discussing security issues. After all, today there are more threats than ever and many different types of problems that IT administrators, business decision-makers, and even individual employees have to deal with. Over the next two weeks, we have decided to discuss the reality of cybersecurity and what you need to know to get out in front of it.

We make a consistent point to urge our readers to take their organizational cybersecurity seriously. This is because there are threats out there that are targeting your business, no matter how small it is. This week, we take a break from the itemized list of security tips to present 2022’s most devastating cyberattacks to give you an idea of what hackers today can do.

In our blog, we talk about security and data breaches all the time. We tell you how you can take efforts to avoid them and how to prepare your organization for the inevitability of being exposed to them. With all that security talk, we should briefly describe the difference between a security breach and a data breach, because they are two different things that get lumped together quite a bit.

When a disaster strikes your business and your important data is compromised, can your business recover? Can it recover quickly enough for it to not be irreparably damaged? Could you even conduct business without the lost data? How much downtime can your business even take?

Technology has been a critical element in building a business since, well, there’s been business…and 2023 won’t be any different. With operational problems urging businesses to seek out technology to resolve them, continued adoption of technology is imminent. Let’s consider three ways that technology should be used in the coming months.

As businesses have witnessed how both in-person operations and remote work practices can offer unique value to their processes and procedures, hybrid work has become a more popular approach. This has in turn led to many businesses reconsidering how their business space is utilized…and even how much they need.

Just like any other business that takes some time to get to know a new client, a new type of ransomware can take up to two weeks to map a network before it goes in for the kill. This threat from a group called Zeppelin has the potential to be a major threat actor in the ransomware space.

Sometimes you will find something on the Internet and think, “Wow, I’d love to save this, but I also love PDFs.” Well, for instances like this, there are features built into your web browser that allow you to do just that! Let’s go over how you can save a web page or image as a PDF directly from your browser.

Sometimes you have an inbox that is chock-full of emails, but you just can’t bring yourself to delete them. After all, who knows what valuable information could be found in all these messages? The natural solution to keep you from wasting time digging through an inbox day after day just to find important information is to get those messages out of your inbox and into an archive of sorts. Today, we’ll walk you through how to do this for Microsoft Outlook.

In August, LastPass suffered a data breach that allowed hackers to access the LastPass source code. Let’s take a look at this situation and see what you need to do to maintain proper password security moving forward.

individuals and users can access it? While Windows might not have built-in functionality for this type of protection, a free app called 7-Zip gives you the power to do so. Let’s go over how you can use 7-Zip to password-protect a ZIP file on your Windows PC.

“Nice guys finish last.” It’s not a new idea—in fact, it’s paraphrased from a quote teasing the 1946 New York Giants for their last-place finish in their league. In business, it’s become a cliche all its own…but does the cliche actually have anything supporting it? As it turns out, it doesn’t.

The modern company has either completely digitized its business or has at least thought about it. This complete sea change has created a lot of beneficial situations for these organizations, but one element that often gets overlooked is the process of document digitization. In today’s blog, we thought we’d go through the document digitization process and why it is so potentially beneficial for businesses.

People can be very productive. They can also be pretty terrible at being productive. The staff that can find consistency in their productivity typically results in a pretty successful business. Obviously, people have all types of suggestions on how to improve staff productivity, and individual productivity and a lot of it is just hitting on the same stuff. There is one variable, however, that is found in a lot of productive people: Patience.

Back in December of 2021, an API vulnerability impacting Twitter was disclosed. Just a few months later, in July, data from more than 5.4 million users—obtained through this vulnerability—was put up for sale, and more recently, another hacker shared the data online. Let’s take the opportunity to examine the concept of an API attack, and what can and should be done to stop them.

One critical means of protecting your business is having an effective antivirus in place. Find out more about it.

IT consulting can bring your business a lot of value, but many business owners don’t quite understand just how this works.

The CHIPS Act, thought to be in response to both the semiconductor shortage and China’s increasing economic strength, could be a major player in technology production.

The idea of deleting data is a pretty simple one… but what does the actual process look like? Let’s go over it and discuss what it means for your security.

For the modern business, it is important to get tools that can help drive your business forward

How often do you think about your business’ future? If you are a good business owner, chances are your hopes and aspirations for the future are informing your current business practices, but if not, we have news for you.

Businesses today depend more on digital communication than they ever have. That’s why it is important for them to get the tools and resources they need to conduct efficient and effective business. Today, we are going to outline three of the most effective communication tools for business and what makes them so beneficial.

Passwords have been front-and-center for data security since 1960, but even their creator–MIT researcher Fernando Corbató–doesn’t think he should take full credit passwords.

While email has remained a major communication tool for businesses for quite some time, a lot of us might still be struggling to keep it organized.

Today, we want to talk about three ways you can improve your company’s security without completely draining your bank account.

How can you know for sure that each individual accessing your infrastructure is secured from threats?

Whether you’re relying on us to provide you with Microsoft’s services or seeking them out from another provider, the increase in costs is going to be pretty unavoidable.