Nowadays, most of us use smartphones; and, yes, probably most of us use them more than is healthy. There are those, however, that have come to depend on their mobile device so much that it completely dominates their lives. As people become even more attached to their phone, the impact this behavior has on their lives becomes more and more detrimental.
It’s incredible how working from home has become the new normal. Just a short time ago most business owners wouldn’t have batted an eye at shutting down the dreams of remote work, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were forced to adjust the way they looked at the situation. Employees in several industries have been working from home ever since. Now that most places have begun to re-open, we thought we would remind you that there are actually some benefits to coming to the office.
In the course of doing business, sometimes the mundane and repetitive tasks, or the responsibilities that employees don’t necessarily always consider to be part of their jobs, can be overlooked. Like any other business, yours needs people to be vigilant to ensure that it isn’t the victim of a phishing attack. If your team isn’t well-trained, or if it isn’t engaged in the fight against cybercrime, you may find that your business is a sitting duck.
Whether your business is just starting to open up, or your staff is diligently working remotely, the effects of COVID-19 are going to be long lasting for most businesses. For those of us who were lucky enough to get our employees situated and productive without putting them at risk, we’ve started to see the value in having the infrastructure to allow for remote access.
Today, the threats businesses encounter from the Internet are more frequent and dangerous than any previous threats. To avoid being the victim of a cyberattack, you will need strategies and procedures aimed at mitigating them. Let’s look at some strategies you need to consider if you are to keep the threats off your network.
While there is no question that security is important to any business, there is often a disconnect between this principle and any actual implementations that it reflects. Unfortunately, this can often leave a business vulnerable. To prevent this outcome, it is important that you follow a few best practices when it comes to fortifying your business against attack.
It isn’t exactly business as usual, but things are beginning to resemble the reality we all knew before COVID-19, thanks to the use of cloud services as a means to continue processes while social distancing is still in play. However, some businesses may still be reluctant to embrace them.
Two-factor Authentication, also referred to as Multi-Factor Authentication, or 2FA, is typically where you log in to something and have to type in a small code from your mobile device in order to finish the sign-in process. It’s really the only thing protecting your accounts anymore, so it’s critical to use it.
People are defined by what they do. The first question they are asked by someone they haven’t seen in some time isn’t about their health or their emotions, it is about what they do for a living. With the COVID-19 outbreak, tens of millions of people are out of work and just as many are working from home. For the business owner, this may not be an ideal situation, but if you are able to keep an open mind, you will find that there is a lot of good that could come from having your workers out of the office. This month, we will discuss the benefits of remote work, the gig economy, and some tools that you can use to ensure that remote workers are keeping up their productivity.
For the small business, times are increasingly tough. Many businesses have been forced to close down until after the coronavirus outbreak has been mitigated, but for those businesses who are still at it, you must be looking to save some money. Outsourcing your IT to a managed service provider may be just the thing you are looking for in order to get the comprehensive IT support your business needs, while also strategically cutting organizational outlay for IT support and services.
The Novel Coronavirus has made its way around the world and it has certainly changed the way a lot of businesses do things. Some businesses have put in some type of disaster recovery platform. This is basically a plan for returning to continuity after some type of disaster, but we are seeing that many business continuity plans were not broad enough to take on a worldwide pandemic. Sadly, many of these businesses won’t open again.
We talk about cybersecurity a lot. We talk about protecting your data from the illusive threat that hackers and cybercriminals bring. We don’t often talk about the more obvious type of security - preventing the physical theft of your data. I think it’s time.
Virtualized technology services are great assets for businesses with limited budgets. Three of the best ways that your organization can take advantage of cloud computing and virtualization services are Software as a Service (SaaS), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and hardware virtualization.
Smartphones, laptops, and Chromebooks empower today’s workforce to be more mobile, and employees are often the driving force behind this. Chances are, if your business hasn’t even begun to think about your mobile IT strategy, a percentage of your staff already has.
Fundamentally, business is simple: if you take in more revenue than you have expenses, your company is a success. There are just so many elements to manage to ensure that revenues outpace expenses that it becomes difficult to ascertain what you can do to cut costs and see a higher degree of profitability for your efforts.
It doesn’t matter where your business is located--chances are you’re susceptible to thunderstorms. Lightning storms are very unforgiving, and they can lead to all sorts of problems for unprepared businesses. We’ll discuss some of the ways that your organization could be affected by a lightning storm, as well as how you can take measures to mitigate these dangers in the future.
When a hacker tries to infiltrate your network, they are doing so with a purpose in mind. Usually they are looking for specific information, like account credentials, personal information, or files that can be used to blackmail victims. Regardless, we’ll go over what a hacker can do with the information that they collect from you, and how you can best protect it from them.
Your IT is a central part of your organization’s operations, but its role has changed significantly as business processes have grown more streamlined. There are always shifts and changes in the way that businesses function which must be accounted for, especially in the modern office environment. How have these shifts affected your business’s IT management?
Who would you rather hire--an employee who comes in late, after your systems have encountered an issue, and takes twice as long to fix them as he said, or an employee who was ahead of the game, and managed to avoid issues before they influenced your business? This scenario is precisely the same one that you encounter when you weigh a break/fix IT provider against a managed service provider.
Few organizations take business continuity planning as serious as financial organizations do. The Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as well as the organizations they oversee, depend heavily on technology for their daily operations. For these establishments, a severe data loss event or significant downtime has the potential to cripple the economy, depending on the severity. As such, they require all of the institutions that they have jurisdiction over to meet certain business continuity benchmarks.
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