Nobody wants to spend their weekend doing paperwork. Nobody wants to spend several evenings in a row sitting over a laptop and slowly digging through every online account they have, resetting every password and carefully documenting everything in a secure password manager. I know this better than anyone, because I forced myself to do it.

Here’s the thing though, EVERYBODY should do it. As soon as possible.

There has been a lot made about the Internet of Things (IoT) recently. The IoT is basically technology that connects to the Internet or your network and offers some sort of specialized task. Think smart light bulbs, mobile devices, monitoring tools, and other appliances that traditionally aren’t connected to the Internet. For today’s businesses this can bring several pros and cons to the table. This month, we thought we would take a brief look at some of the pros and cons of deploying IoT technology in the workplace. 

While there are some aspects of business technology that are quite simple, there are other parts that are complicated and difficult to understand, even for experienced users. In this month’s newsletter, we want to go over how you can keep the complexity of your IT to a minimum so that you have as few headaches as possible.

Has your business been targeted by hackers? Do you even know? Let’s face it, small businesses don’t typically worry all that much about cybersecurity. To many small business owners, they might see it as a luxury for their perceived risk. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that hackers and scammers are targeting small businesses more regularly than they have in the past and without some kind of dedicated cybersecurity strategy, there could be a good chance that your business could run into some problems because of it. 

It probably isn’t hard to think of a time when you’ve stumbled across something that would be useful for work while you were doing some personal browsing. What if I told you there was an easy way to send a website to your browser to view later? Thanks to Google Chrome, this is the case.

Do your employees have a hard time with the technology that you’ve provided them? Are your digitization efforts lagging behind? Are the systems your business is using coming up on their end of support date? Old technology can cause major problems for a business. In this week’s blog, we go through some of the signs that you may need to upgrade your business’ technology.

The business world is always ebbing and flowing with new concepts, ideas, and strategies in the  attempt to innovate. The more technology can be used to do things that help a business run, the more processes can be automated bringing a layer of efficiency that isn’t possible without it. Let’s take a brief look at some of the technology trends that small businesses will be confronted with in 2023. 

So, you want to utilize cloud computing for your business. Making that decision is a good start, but now you need to figure out how the cloud will help accomplish the goals you’ve set for your business. You need to develop a cloud strategy.

Fortunately, we can help.

So, you’re looking to improve your business’ technology…that’s great! More effective solutions are critical to helping boost your success. However, it is important to acknowledge that these kinds of initiatives don’t always have the greatest record of success. Let’s examine why this is, and critically, what can be done about it.

Today’s businesses need to be prepared for threats of all kinds…that’s unfortunately just fact. Modern cyberattacks are not only getting more effective, they’re also able to be a lot less discerning about who they target. This creates exponentially more risk for businesses of all sizes. Let’s go over how you can develop a cybersecurity strategy that helps temper this risk a bit.

With technology playing such a massive role in modern business processes, having someone in the higher ranks to oversee it is a huge advantage. This is the role of the Chief Information Officer—the CIO—which makes them an integral part of the modern C-suite.

So, what kind of thing does the CIO (or your business’ equivalent of it) need to know and consider in order to fulfill their role? 

For millions of people, the rubber ducky is a benign reminder of childhood. Depending on when you were a child, the rendition of Sesame Street’s Ernie singing “Rubber Duckie, you’re the one,” is ingrained in your mind every time you hear the term. Unfortunately, the Rubber Ducky we are going to tell you about today has only fond recollection for people who are looking to breach networks they aren’t authorized to access or deliver malware payloads that are designed to cause havoc. 

For years, IT has been at the forefront of business administration, productivity, communications, and many other parts of an organization's efficient operations. For the growing business it can be rather difficult to know where to invest your capital so that you can get the best ROI or the most value out of your IT investments. Let’s take a look at how the growing business can use their earmarked capital to improve their business.

Today’s business takes effort that extends beyond traditional ways of doing things, and technology is at the center of these efforts. One of the avenues that businesses are using right now to boost productivity is by allowing workers to use the mobility they use in their everyday life. Today, we’ll discuss how added mobility can help bring surprising boosts of productivity.

We often talk about how the Internet of Things can create security issues in businesses if not properly handled. While there are some very real threats that can be posed by the IoT in the workplace, there is no denying that it can also serve some very real utility there as well.

Organizations come in all sizes and with it, there are all different ways of conducting business. Some companies choose to spend more time and money on their organization’s IT than others do. This month, we thought we would briefly go through four different tiers of technology investment and what they mean for your business. 

WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular messaging applications. With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is known for its relative security, as it is one of the few messaging applications that offers end-to-end encryption. A modified version of WhatsApp, called YoWhatsApp, has been reportedly deploying malware.

How often does this scenario happen to you? You’re going about your workday and are being quite productive, when all of a sudden you close the wrong tab in your web browser, putting an end to your productivity. This isn’t crippling downtime or anything, but it’s an inconvenience that we know you can do without. Thankfully, modern web browsers let you reopen closed tabs or windows to get back to where you left off.

With so many different technologies being used in business, it can sometimes be too much for the people out there who aren’t as tech-savvy as others. In fact, some of the people you will work alongside will not be able to grasp some of the simplest technology concepts. Unfortunately, these people don’t know a fraction of what they need to know about the technology they use, and it could put your organization at a disadvantage. This month, we thought we’d give you a few pointers on how to talk to your coworkers who aren’t as knowledgeable as you are in technology or any other field.

With the digitalization of the modern business happening rather rapidly, many organizations still don’t really understand the major benefits that come with it. These shifts give the average business nearly twice the amount of data to manage (and to use). If you have the feeling that your business is lagging behind in this area, we will describe what parts of business you can improve by utilizing your organization’s data.