Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

The following story and events are true, however, to protect the families of the innocent, all names have been changed. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or businesses, is purely coincidental. Enjoy and happy Halloween!

What was the name of your first pet? What is your favorite TV show? What was your mother’s maiden name?

Here’s the real question: what do you think questions like these are actually going to do to help secure your important accounts?

What’s your favorite website, or the one you use most frequently? You can set this website as your Homepage to quickly access it using the Home button in the Google Chrome window. You could also just use a bookmark, but rather than sifting through your list of bookmarks, the Home button makes it quick and efficient to click on.

How often do your icons get cluttered on your Windows desktop? Sometimes it would just be nice to delete some of them or hide them from view so you can focus on being productive. Let’s go over how to accomplish this with your Windows PC.

Cyberthreats are difficult enough when they aren’t trying to steal your hard-earned capital, and with digital payments making up about 41.8% of all payments made worldwide, you bet there are plenty of opportunities for fraud to occur. Let’s take a look at how you can ensure that your payment cards are protected.

Let me ask you a question: how well can you multitask?

Regardless of what you may claim, I already know the answer, and it’s “not very well at all.” Multitasking just isn’t how the human brain is wired to work. So, why am I discussing the limits that our brain’s physiology places on it? Honestly, because it’s related to a major benefit that managed services provide that tends to fly under the radar.

Printers…we love to hate them, particularly when they start presenting operational issues. I mean, come on…it has one job, and it can hardly do that half the time. But why is that?

Let’s dive into what causes this phenomenon.

We might place the onus on business technology solutions on this blog, but once in a while we like to talk about technology that is just plain cool. Today is one of those days. With this new wearable utilizing artificial intelligence technology, you can monitor your health, making for a very interesting application of the technology.

Unless you have moved to a paperless office, it’s likely that your business spends a considerable amount of capital on printing costs. How many times have you or someone in your office printed out a large document while forgetting to check the double-sided feature? Let’s go over how you can do this in Microsoft Word so you don’t forget how to do it ever again.

The hard but honest truth is that every network has some level of vulnerability. Having said that, there are ways that you can reduce these vulnerabilities so that your business and its network are relatively safe. Let’s go over some of these methods now.

It isn’t a secret that cybersecurity is critical for businesses today, at every level of their infrastructure. However, some recent data has been shared that very clearly outlines just how important visibility into your infrastructure really is. In case you hadn’t picked up on this, it’s very important.

A reliable and skilled IT department is integral for the success of your business. If your IT team is burnt out, overworked, or dissatisfied, operations will suffer and your network will experience one IT emergency after another. Just as you expect your IT staff to use best practices, as a business owner, you need to manage your IT staff as best as you can in order to ensure that your network will operate at maximum efficiency.  

How often do you find random USB flash drives while you’re cleaning up your office? Even with cloud storage as common as it is, there are still times and places for USB drives, so it’s not uncommon to find them out and about. The problem, however, is that you don’t know what’s on them until you plug them in… and depending on the contents, you might be in for a world of trouble.

We know we hype up multi-factor authentication, or MFA, quite a bit on this blog, and for good reason. When implemented correctly, it can be an effective deterrent for many cyberthreats out there. However, as they often do, hackers have found ways around MFA. Let’s take a look at how hackers find ways around MFA protection.

If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, you might have noticed that most of your important messages get grouped into an inbox titled Focused while others get directed to the Other inbox. While this might be helpful for some users, perhaps you want to turn off this feature and use Outlook the old-fashioned way. Let’s go over how you can do this.

Everyone has been in a situation when their mobile device’s battery is too low for comfort, but if you know the right tips, you can prolong your battery’s life well beyond what you might expect. Let’s go over some of these methods.

Imagine this scenario: you have just purchased a new computer, and you boot it up all excited to get right into setting it up, only to find that it is extremely slow and bogged down by all kinds of applications you didn’t know were pre-installed on it. This type of unwanted software can be a problem, especially for businesses when they want to get their new technology up and running as soon as possible.

Downtime can be deadly to a business in excess, and it is an unfortunate reality that businesses with poor technology maintenance practices experience more downtime than others. The more often your technology breaks down, the more you spend in wasted time and reactive maintenance, so it’s a best practice to take care of your technology before it becomes a liability. One tried and true way to do so is with some help from an outsourced provider to aid your help desk.

We don’t often talk about mobile malware, but that doesn’t make it any less scary! An Android banking malware called Sova has once again been making the rounds, this time complete with additional features that make it scarier than the last time. What can you do to protect yourself from this threat?

You might see articles on the Internet discussing “patches” and “updates,” and you might even be forgiven for thinking that they are the same thing when they are, in fact, not. There is indeed a difference, and it’s a big one. Let’s talk about how you might think about patches and security updates so that you might best deploy them month after month.