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Even just one year ago, working from home was a fairly boutique concept. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has, out of necessity, taken remote working from a fringe idea to the mainstream. According to an August Gallup study, 13% of telecommuters and 5% of all workers in 2019 said that they worked from home 20 days per month, while 2020 figures have increased to 45% and 22%, respectively.
If you haven’t taken the time to go through and update your passwords lately, particularly the one protecting your Google account, you should do so… despite it undeniably being a pain. After all, Google serves various purposes and is attached to many accounts for most. Considering the number of data breaches and other cybersecurity issues this potentially contributes to, you will want to ensure your Google account is properly locked down.
Businesses of all sizes have been able to successfully overcome operational challenges by rethinking and adapting the technology they utilize. Let’s consider a huge example and look at what The Lego Group (as in the building blocks) has done to address some of their technological challenges with improved solutions—as well as how your business can do the same.
Information technology is a critical tool for many businesses today, which means \\it is crucial that your IT is compliant to a few key best practices. Let’s go over these practices so that you have a roadmap to ensure that your operations can remain secure and productive.
Your business’ software is one of its critical assets, so it really can’t also host many risks to your security and business continuity. Therefore, keeping your software up-to-date and fully patched should be a priority. Let’s go over what patch management entails and why it is so important.
GoDaddy—the domain registrar and web-hosting company once famed for its risqué advertisements—is facing some significant backlash for a much different reason. On December 14th, GoDaddy’s employees received an email that appeared to be from the company, promising a holiday bonus. However, while the email was from the company as it appeared to be, it was actually a phishing test that the hosting provider decided to run.
The Google Play Store is the Android operating system’s primary source of applications and widgets and can do a lot more than many might first think. Let’s consider a few useful tools and tricks that are incorporated into the Play Store that you should keep in mind.
In the United States, the political atmosphere in 2020 was extremely testy and one element that we typically keep our eyes on is the net neutrality rules that seem to change every few years or so. Today, we thought we’d revisit the issue and tell you what to expect over the first few months of the new administration.
In short, an IT management company known as SolarWinds was breached back in March, affecting a massive number of organizations—18,000 in all. These organizations include the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, and FireEye, as well as many states and federal organizations, including:
Before we start, we should identify the parts of the business where IT is typically deployed. The purpose of IT is to make operations more efficient, allow for collaboration, automate simple aspects for cost reduction, protect business against disaster and more. The most important role that IT has in any business is as a worker interface. Most workers today work exclusively with digital systems and when they are deployed with purpose it can provide a standardized working experience where people can get more things done and collaborate more effectively.
At first glance, VoIP is almost indistinguishable from the telephone services you are used to using—in fact, you’ve likely used it before.
Data backup is a critical process that every business that depends on their IT needs to have. If data is the lifeblood of your business, then you need to protect it. Your business most assuredly has data that, if lost, would put you back. Why risk it when a solution for this problem is a simple fix? You need data backup.
These attacks work similarly to how a phishing attack or a spoofed email would, as a user is promised one thing but winds up receiving something very different. While a malicious application may perform the task it claims to, it also may redirect the user to a phishing website or ad (making the cybercriminal some money) or simply steal some of the user’s information, like their birthday or email address.
Taking a sip of cocoa, Trinket leaned back from his computer and let out a long sigh. Here it was, barely after 9:00 in the morning, and his agenda was already impossibly full. Around him, Santa’s Workshop was in full swing, the other elves frantically working to ensure that all the deliveries were prepped for the Boss before the big day came.
Perspective is a valuable thing, especially when your job is to figure out solutions to problems. Not only are there occasionally real-time issues to resolve, there are also plenty of recurring problems and challenges. Perspective is only helpful if it can be applied practically, however. A successful support team understands how a business needs to operate and provides them with the IT services that facilitate that.
On a very fundamental level, managed services and tech support are very different due to the way they operate.
Traditional tech support, also referred to as break-fix IT, are those that most people think of. Whenever a piece of technology breaks down or has some other issue, an IT technician is called to fix it. This was the predominant—and really, the only—option to receive any level of IT support for some time, despite the expensive repeat visits and prolonged operational interruptions that came with it. For larger enterprises, hiring full-time IT staff solved this problem. It’s still costly, and often too costly for small businesses, but it does lead to faster turnaround times and ongoing support.
The virtual private network is a tool designed specifically to protect data as it is transferred over the Internet. The best way to describe it is as an encrypted tunnel that protects the interception of data that is being sent from one place to another.
Smartphones can certainly be a distraction and largely are a hindrance to productivity. Some businesses deal with it more than others, but a study conducted suggests that employees spend an average of 67 minutes per day on their phones. That means that productivity is at the very least 10 percent lower than it should be… until you factor in the other way that smartphones affect an employee’s performance.
Let’s start off with a very basic description of what “managed services” are, as compared to the common impression of “tech support.” Whenever one thinks about “tech support” or “IT,” they’re likely thinking of the break-fix version: some piece of information technology breaks or malfunctions, so IT is called in to fix it. While this proved effective enough, it also led to a lot of repeat visits… oftentimes for things that were relatively simple to fix.
Chrome Actions take the familiar address bar of the Chrome Internet browser and add some extra utility to it. Rather than specifying a webpage or network location to visit in the address bar (known as the “omnibar” to very few of us), Chrome now accepts very basic commands as input, and will follow these commands when they are entered.
Coleman Technologies has been serving the British Columbia area since 1999, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses. Our experience has allowed us to build and develop the infrastructure needed to keep our prices affordable and our clients up and running.
If you didn’t know Windows can save a list of the text and images you copy, I feel for you—you’ve missed out on a simple trick that could’ve saved you a lot of time. But don’t worry, it’s easy to set up, and I’ll show you how.
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