Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Most of us are old enough to remember when you had to bring your computer into the shop to get it fixed. This break/fix method in neither affordable nor efficient when you are dealing with several computers. IT services and support has evolved and now is available around the clock though a managed service provider. Businesses that once had to spend large parts of their operational capital on IT administrators now have the opportunity to cut their IT support costs and get comprehensive support regardless.

Business owners know just how costly downtime can be. If your business suffers from technology problems, and your staff isn’t able to properly do their job, then you could be spending a whole lot of money with little or no reward. There is a solution to mitigate technology problems, and we will discuss every aspect of it in this five-part series. In part one, today, we will talk about how proactiveness is the proper approach to business technology. 

Does your business use remote workers? If you currently don’t, you should know that there are several benefits of allowing your staff to work outside of the confines of your office, but you have to be careful. These days, with the threat landscape as it is, it is important that if you are going to allow remote workers, that you have a strategy in place. Let’s take a look at some of the tools you will need if you want to take advantage of remote workers. 

Fishing - a jerk on one end of a line waiting for a jerk on the other end.
Phishing - very similar to fishing, but much more consequential.

While the word phishing is humorous and relatable due to it being derived from the word “fishing”, the consequences of falling victim to a phishing attack are far from comical. Today we will discuss just how serious these attacks can be, and the easiest way to prevent them.

If you’ve ever moved files from a flash drive, you are likely well aware at how troublesome limited storage space can be. Business data storage is no different, however the flash drives transition into servers, and the $10 tech store purchase transitions to thousands upon thousands of dollars storage server. There has to be a better way to store data, right? Luckily, thanks to cloud computing -- there is.

Today, a business accumulates a lot - a lot - of files as time passes, and for the most part, they all need to be stored somewhere. In addition to that, there’s a good chance that multiple people will need to remain involved with these files. These challenges can be resolved by adopting solutions devoted to file sharing and collaboration. To assist with this process, we’ve decided to share a few best practices that will help make your implementation much easier.

The smartphone has quickly become a staple in modern society, as users rely on them to accomplish more and more. You could probably say the same of your own use of it. This means that there are not only huge amounts of smartphones and smartphone users, there is a huge amount of threats out there to target them.

When it comes to operating a business, there are really only two ways that one can do so… either one acts proactively with their business matters, or they tend to be reactive in their approach. Naturally, one method has shown to be far more effective than the other. Today, we’ll explore the features of each to figure out which will work best for you (spoiler alert: it’s going to be the proactive approach).

While we typically write about matters that concern your business and its use of technology in this blog, we decided to do something a little different today. Someday in the not-so-distant future, today’s students will make up the workforce, and their educations are more shaped by technology than ever before. That’s why we wanted to examine the role technology plays in education (warts and all), to understand how it is impacting our youth.

How many of your employees have a personal device that they want to leverage in the workplace? There are a few ways that this can be enabled that doesn’t put your data at risk, and that don’t keep the employee from being able to use their device the way they want to as well. For today’s tip, we’ll explore how this can be accomplished - without undermining your business’ security.

Any business should list its priorities as follows:

#1 - Security
#2 - Everything Else

This means that, should an employee be working from a location that isn’t in your office, you need to have something in place so they can do so without compromising your security. One very effective option to leverage is a virtual private network (VPN) solution.

With the use of computers and mobile devices becoming persistent in the culture, there have been some myths conjured up by people that have become just as incessant. These lead to people getting the wrong idea about situations with their IT; and, ultimately believe things that are going wrong, when nothing can be further from the truth. Today, we’ve picked five such scenarios we feel need to be debunked.

Google Search is the most visited website on the Internet. It’s so popular the company’s name has turned into a verb. Most users just type their query in the Google text box and try to navigate the first page. Typically, there is something of use on that first page, but sometimes there isn’t. Today, we’d thought we’d give everyone a few tips on how to get the results you are looking for with your Google search queries. 

The smartphone is a transcendent innovation of a brilliant idea. As these devices have gotten more and more powerful, it has seen a situation where the batteries powering these devices keep having to outperform the batteries from the previous year’s devices. The technology, however, hasn’t changed very much in over a decade. Today, we take a look at modern smartphone batteries and innovations to power sources that you can expect to see going forward.

Do you know the phrase, “Locks only keep out the honest?” The idea is that even though you lock your doors, there is only a thin layer of glass and good intentions stopping a criminal from entering your home through a window.

It stands to reason that a business that can save some capital is going to be a business that has the freedom to do more with said capital - or in other words, the more money that isn’t spent on one thing, the more money that can be invested into improvements. One effective way that many businesses have saved money on their technology maintenance (without sacrificing performance) is by outsourcing their IT management.

Small businesses may not always need servers as much of their business computing can be done over the LAN with storage based on a home PC. When your business grows large enough to need its very first server, or is large enough for a server and hasn't made a move, knowing what your options are can make all the difference. Today, we will take you through some things you should know when you are out shopping for a new server.

It’d be hard to find a more influential modern invention (not counting the Internet) than the smartphone - it has expanded from voice and messaging to include entertainment, social media, and countless other purposes. This just so happens to include mobile productivity, assisted by a variety of mobile applications intended to augment communication and collaboration between departments, as well as between a business and its clients.

Social media is a big part of the modern world and sharing video is a big part of social media. What happens if you are shared a video, or see a video that you’d like to save to your computer? Today, we’ll take you through the process of downloading videos from your favorite social media sites. 

It wasn’t too terribly long ago that Windows 10 was offered for free to users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. While this offer was constrained to a limited time, the response was surprisingly stagnant. Why didn’t more people jump at the chance to snag the latest version of the operating system - especially when it would come at no cost to them?