Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Data is one of—if not the—most essential resources a business has, which means it is essential that you take the steps to protect it in every way possible from every potential threat. This includes those that could originate from within your own organization. Let’s consider the case of Xiaorong You, who was recently convicted of conspiracy to commit trade secret theft by a federal jury.

One of the most terrifying situations your business can encounter is when it’s clear that you’ve been hacked. It can cause extreme anxiety regardless of what size of a business you run. The most important thing is to know how to react to mitigate the damage to your business’ network and reputation. Let’s go through a few steps you need to take if you’ve been hacked.

While it may not seem so at first glance, the concept of “productivity” has evolved significantly in the last few centuries—the amount of time it has been seen as a priority. Beginning once technology enabled the focus of life to be less day-to-day survival and more centered around industry and scale, the first whispers of our modern view of productivity started in the late 1700s. Let’s briefly examine how our view of productivity developed, and how many are looking at it today.

When so many shifted over to remote operations during the pandemic, it threw a sizable number of them for a loop. It has taken about a year for the shift to settle in, in fact, and so people everywhere are finally starting to feel the impacts of prolonged remote work. One considerable impact: the fatigue that the digital communications required have brought about, and how overwhelmed your team may feel as a result.

Running a business of any size comes with more than its fair share of risks, particularly if that business is on the smaller side. One major risk factor is the prospect of cybercrime and the impact it can have on a business. Let’s look at how this particular risk can influence the challenges that businesses must now contend with.

Email is a hugely useful business tool, which is what makes solutions like Microsoft Outlook so popular in today’s organizations. Having said that, it can become far too simple for the inbox to be overstuffed with outdated and unnecessary messages that ultimately serve little more than to hide the ones you need to review.

Did you know that there’s a capability built into Outlook that can help you keep track of your important messages? Let’s go over how you can use it.

Ransomware attacks are notorious for their expense to the victim—largely because of the various costs that come along with successful ransomware infections, including many that might not be expected at first. Let’s review some of these costs, if only to reinforce the importance of avoiding ransomware as a rule.

For a considerably long time—over 40 years—Apple has staked the claim that their devices are pretty much hack-proof, that most hackers wouldn’t even try breaking into their security measures. Law enforcement was so repeatedly rebuffed by the company as they sought workarounds to get into their devices, that these law enforcement agencies figured it out for themselves.

In doing so, they uncovered a few things that even the most ardent Apple fans may be surprised to hear.

We’ve all received those emails that have some level of sensitive data in them, and we’ve all sent our fair share of them as well. However, one almost has to wonder—how secure is this data as it sits around in someone’s inbox?

With a business’ inventory playing such an important role in so many business operations, the capability to manage it properly can be seen as indispensable. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to help make your inventory management much simpler than it once was. Let’s take a few moments to consider three such tools, and how they are being used now.

With the considerable costs that a business’ hardware investments can bring, it only makes sense to identify any means to optimize these costs available. One very effective means of doing so is to adopt a virtualized environment, either hosted onsite or in the cloud. Let’s take a few moments to consider how virtualization can benefit your organization.

With computers being so integral to modern life, it can be too easy to hear about certain drawbacks—like the purported impacts of blue light—and discount them as little more than a way for companies to sell things that nobody really needs. While we aren’t going to speak to all these presumed drawbacks, we did want to spend some time discussing blue light and how it could impact your health (and how to help keep it from doing so).

For the small, but growing business, there are a lot of risks that could potentially harm their ability to stay in business. One of those risks comes in the form of cybercrime. Over the past several years, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have improved the ways in which they combat cybercrime. Let’s take a look at some of the problems SMBs have to deal with.

Businesses are using more remote workers than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary for them to react and they did, but it has proven to have a handful of challenges. One of the most stark issues that remote workers face is the assault on their mental health. Most newly-remote workers once held several conversations with co-workers day-in and day-out and being isolated for 12 months has taken its toll. This shift is having negative effects on businesses from all over the world. Let’s take a look at a couple of things that you can do about it. 

Workplace burnout has been discussed quite a bit in the last year—which in and of itself seems funny, considering how relatively little time many people spent in the workplace this past year or so. However, just because the conventional workplace was altered doesn’t mean that the potential to experience burnout has been at all.

Blockchain has been one of the technologies that are most cited on those “emerging technologies” lists at the beginning of each year for the past several, yet there is no mainstream indication that the technology is being integrated into tools that can benefit businesses and individuals. Today, we thought we would take a look at some of the ways blockchain technology was going to be used to improve digital systems and what is taking so long for these tools to be developed and initiated. 

If there is one kind of online scam that people need to be more cognizant about, it would be phishing—where a scammer tries to hack the user instead of the computer, tricking them into sharing sensitive information. Phishing can come in enough forms that it has splintered into a few different varieties to watch out for. Let’s go over what a basic phishing attack looks like, some of the different types you may encounter, and how to deal with such an attack appropriately.

Since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, remote work has exploded, and many organizations expect to continue it to some extent after the pandemic turns to an endemic. Let’s take a look at some of the technology choices your business can make to make your remote workforce more effective.

Businesses need to make a decision about where they want to host their central infrastructure, and with so many options available to them nowadays, it’s often a matter of the demands on the data and applications required. Really, the decision comes down to two options: host your central hardware onsite or host it in the cloud. Let’s take a look at the debate now. 

Paper documentation has long been a fixture in the office as a means of helping to organize information and other resources. Of course, asbestos was a fixture in building construction for quite some time as well, so it should be clear that the established way of doing things is never guaranteed to be the best. Considering this, let’s go over what a modern Document Management System is and what options a small to medium-sized business has to choose from.