The word “procedure” can easily be perceived in a negative light nowadays. It just sounds so… rote… compared to the exciting and dynamic buzzwords that so many “thought-leading, influencing, social media innovators” today toss around. Now, we don’t mean to disparage these personalities - we just want to emphasize that these innovations rely on a foundation to support them, and these foundations are based on business procedures and processes.

On a Windows machine, look at your taskbar, near the Start button and the search function. The next little icon, the one that almost looks like a bit of film, is the Task View button, the button that (among other purposes) allows you to create and manage virtual desktops. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss how to use this handy feature, starting with why you might want to.

The threat landscape is filled with more types of malware than ever. To keep your business’ network running effectively, it’s important to have a strategy to keep malware out. Today, we’ll talk about a few basics you should know to keep your cybersecurity strategy working properly.

With technology being deployed to help businesses solve all manners of operational inefficiency, it’s often difficult to pinpoint what IT will work best for your business. Organizations of all types look to technology; and, at some point you need to ask yourself if your technology is set up to help reach your business’ potential. 

There is no doubt that you have come across the virtual assistant (or voice assistant). Whether you have it on a smartphone or you use it via a digital speaker in your home, you have probably spent some time using some type of virtual assistant. 

Email is a core component to many businesses. With 124.5 billion business emails being sent and received each day, that doesn’t seem to be in danger of ending. Are the emails that are coming and going from your business secure? That may be another story, altogether. In order to keep your email security at a premium, we have outlined the following tips:

Capital One is one of the largest credit card issuers in the world. On July 29th 2019, Capital One made an announcement, confirming it is the victim of one of the largest data breaches in financial sector history, as a former software engineer for Amazon has been indicted on charges related to the hacking.

Cybersecurity has become an overly complicated, increasingly important part of our lives. These days, many people are concerned about their privacy; who is collecting their data, what data is being collected, how to prevent information from being stolen, how to prevent breaches, etc. Then there are the traditional threats like malware, ransomware, and phishing that are not only becoming more common place but are capable of doing more damage. 

Windows 10 has a lot of features to offer a user, and more are being added all the time. We don’t want you to miss out on any, especially if they could help to streamline your business’ processes or your users’ experience. Here are four that you might find particularly handy.

In order to build a profitable business, productivity has to remain consistent. If your business offers a service, and you are having a hard time managing all its moving parts, professional services automation (PSA) software may be right for you. Today, we will give a quick overview of what exactly a PSA is, and how it can serve as an extremely useful tool for businesses who operate in the professional services space.

The funny thing about ransomware is that they give them very strange names: Bad Rabbit sounds like the name of a villainous bunny who gets his comeuppance in some type of modern nursery rhyme, not malware that would ravage hundreds of European businesses. Locky seems like the son of Candado de seguridad, a character Medeco would come up with to educate kids on proper physical security. The latest in a long line of funny-named ransomware, SamSam, isn’t a pet name for your pet ferret you perplexingly named Sam, it is one of the worst ransomware strains ever, and it has caught the attention of U.S. Federal law enforcement.

Microsoft is coming to the end of its support for the wildly popular Windows 7 operating system, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t make a contingency plan for those organizations that haven’t yet made the jump to new systems. It just won’t be cheap. We’ll break down the upcoming Windows 7 end of life event, and how Microsoft is offering an olive branch of sorts to organizations that simply haven’t upgraded away from this OS.

Businesses are driven by processes. More often than not, these processes are fairly definitive - do this, then do that, then do the other thing - and require a set order of operations. There also happen to be a lot of these processes, which makes it important that they are well-documented so you and your employees can refer to this documentation later. Here, we’ll offer a few tips on how to best document a task.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) have historically been restricted in what they can do with their technology infrastructures. However, there are now options that an SMB can leverage that enable it to accomplish more with their infrastructure - but this requires the SMB to have a plan in place.

Manufacturing products is still a major part of the western economies; and, like other businesses, manufacturers are using information technology to fuel and manage their supply chains and business processes. We’ll take a short look at what IT manufacturers use, and how it helps them forge their business ahead.

Emails are a wonderfully useful solution, and quite possibly one of the most commonly used ones in the workplace today. However, not everyone is using every capability that their email solutions offer - and it has led to a lot of time being wasted in the workplace. For this week’s tip, we’ll review how to help cut back on the time spent organizing your emails.

The IT guy, Jacob left last month: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. He left without an exit interview, and he didn’t seem very pleased with the way the situation played out. You could never tell if Scrooge cared or not. His demands have never wavered. He expected perfection and when mistakes were made, they were approached as catastrophic affronts to the sustainability of the business, even if that wasn’t the reality.

Automation has been a hot button term for some time. Whether it is in reference to robots that manufacturers use to make their assembly lines more effective, the integrated workflows that today’s customer relationship management software presents, or A.I. crawling through mounds of data to help an entrepreneur better understand his/her business, automation is helping businesses move faster and be more agile. Today, we will look at how organizations are using automation, and how, even if it isn’t a big part of your business strategy today, it will need to be in the future.

Microsoft is just days away from officially retiring their Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems. If your business is, for whatever reason, still using this software, you will need to upgrade by January 14 or face using unsupported software that could quickly become a security problem for your business. Let’s take a look at your options.

All Windows machines are capable of leveraging built-in shortcuts. While it might sound ludicrous, using keyboard shortcuts can eliminate the eight days that the average employee spends every year moving between the keyboard and mouse. Shocking, right? Keyboard shortcuts let you retake all of that lost time and use it to be more productive.