Ferrum Technology Services Blog

While email remains an important facet of professional business communications, the instant message is of rising importance in office environments everywhere. While any one of many factors may contribute to this shift, it provides those businesses that adopt it great advantages to their internal processes, and might even aid in their cybersecurity.

The Internet contains countless articles and bits of information that you can absorb on a daily basis. More likely than not, you have a couple of go-to websites that contain information you find more valuable than the rest, and that’s perfectly normal for a busy business owner. However, you can save valuable time by creating bookmarks to help you more readily access the information found on the Internet.

You know just how essential your company’s IT is, but do you have any idea how your employees feel about the technology you provide them? In order to get the productivity your company needs out of your staff, meeting their computing needs becomes a fundamental requirement. Today, we’ll go over some of the determining factors you have to consider when purchasing computer equipment for your staff.

At the time of this writing, it has only been about a half a year since the Meltdown and Spectre exploits became public knowledge. Fortunately, patches were swiftly rolled out to mitigate the problems that these exploits could cause, but that doesn’t mean that these exploits are dead and buried. Let’s look back at Meltdown and Spectre to help us establish where we stand today.

Every business has IT projects they want to complete. Whether it is a small change like introducing a public cloud platform, or a large one like migrating all your data from four servers onto one, you have to expect situations will arise that will make you want to pull your hair out. To overcome the challenges that come with any major IT project, consider these four points.

If you’ve ever managed a major IT project, you’re probably well acquainted with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Every project is going to have some rough patches. The key to overcoming these challenges lays not with the execution of the plan, but with the preparation. Here are four things to consider when you’re planning out your next long-term IT project.

It would be hard to find someone who has never experienced the feeling of a time crunch, a situation where someone has more to do than they had hours to do it in. This feeling can be reduced by enhancing productivity through better time management. For our tip this week, let’s discuss some methods to improve time management within your office.

Chances are that you, like most business owners, have assembled your staff very carefully, looking for people who are the best-in-class, willing to work their hardest for the good of the company. However, this staff will be made up of humans, and will therefore make mistakes. As such, you need to make sure that your data is managed in a way that keeps it safe.

Smart business owners always look for ways to improve the way their organization functions. Digital transformation is one of these ways, as it allows for organizations to use technology to minimize waste and enhance workflow. To help you with digital transformation, we’ll walk you through what it is and how it works.

There are a lot of moving parts in a business, but overall the goals are simple. If you make more money than you spend in operational costs, you’re considered a success story. However, it’s not always easy to achieve this balance--especially when you’re a small business with a limited workforce and budget. How can you cut costs and increase your bottom line?

How do you refer to your group of employees? If you’re like most businesses, you call your employees your ‘team.’ This only makes sense, as a team is meant to work together toward a common goal. But what if your team isn’t acting very much like one?

It can be hard to accomplish work in a timely manner when your technology is a haphazard mess. To help with this, we’re devoting this week’s tip to three ways you can improve workflow by organizing your technology.

Despite cash having been king for centuries, many businesses today have elected to implement cashless payment options as their customers increasingly rely on the mobile payment technologies that their personal devices allow. These businesses are the ones making the smart choice, as there are many factors that encourage the adoption of alternative payment technologies.

Collaboration can present a great many benefits for the modern business. With technological innovations making it simpler than ever to cooperate, today’s business owners and executives need to know how to leverage these technologies into greater organizational efficiency. For this week’s tip, we give you five points of emphasis every manager has to understand in order to make new collaborative technology work for your business.

There are remarkably few people on the planet capable of filling an entire workday with 100 percent productivity. The human body simply needs to be refreshed. Fortunately, there are a variety of techniques and technologies that let you do just that!

Even though taking a break from work seems like something that everybody would want to do, many cogs in the corporate machine choose to forgo breaks in the name of productivity. Oddly enough, this is a counterproductive move, seeing as taking breaks actually makes you more productive by improving your job performance.

Let’s face it; the office is a pretty distracting place most of the time. You have people in meetings, discussions happening around every corner, the phone ringing every thirty seconds, and emails hitting your inbox left and right. With so much happening around you, how in the world are you supposed to get anything done?

Some days, productivity comes naturally and you can destroy tasks like it’s no one’s business. Other times, distractions seem to pop up everywhere and you need all the help you can get, just to get anything done. Here are four productivity tips, proven to help you regain focus at the office.

Naturally, businesses put a lot of time, energy, and resources into growing their sales figures and bottom line. All of that is great, but if business owners don’t also plan for how success is going to add new pressures and challenges to their IT infrastructure, then a lot of time will be wasted reacting to growth-related network issues. Scenarios like this can be easily avoided by planning your network to grow alongside your company.

What if you can have one employee who’s dedicated to receiving calls and answering tech support questions from the rest of your staff? Essentially, someone having this role would be like a help desk for your business. If you don’t think you can afford filling in a seat like this, consider how much time/money a move like this would save you if employees didn’t have to waste time seeking out needed information.