Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Security is always a business priority, and with so many business needs now fulfilled digitally, it is critical that cybersecurity has a strong presence in organizations big and small. Nowadays, collaboration solutions have also had even greater importance in the workplace, making tools like email completely essential. Unfortunately, this gives cybercriminals an increased opportunity to use it as a means of attack.

While remote work can be a hugely popular and successful strategy to ensure your business’ goals are accomplished, remote meetings can often offer up challenges for those that aren’t used to them. For this week’s tip, we’re offering three ways that you can help make these meetings easier to manage.

Ransomware has been a real problem for the past several years. This is a result of a shift in the ways hackers approach their craft. Once known for breaching networks directly, the establishment of uncrackable encryption left hackers looking to change their strategies. Today, they use scams to get people to give them access to network resources. If they are successful, it can deliver more than headaches for a business. Let’s look at what makes ransomware so dangerous and how your company can combat the constant attacks that come your way. 

With businesses trying to feel out the situation, there is going to be some anxiety, some indecisiveness, even some fear about reopening too early (or too late). It may be a perfect time, however, to start to look at ways you can innovate your business. One way you can do that is by reinventing your business’ communications platform. 

Let’s take a look at a real-world scenario that I ran into a few weeks ago with a family friend. For the sake of this story, let’s call him Bob. Bob lost access to a pretty important online account.

Let’s face it - you’d be hard-pressed at this point to find someone who wasn’t fairly confident about their use of email in the office. However, the way they are currently using their email may not be the most efficient. This week, we’re focusing our tips on how to better use your email.

Email is a presence in almost every business, but some businesses use it better than others. Some use it as a be-all, end-all business communications solution, while others use it for correspondence that isn’t time sensitive. No matter how your business uses email, managing it properly will go a long way toward improving your efficiency and productivity.

With technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence entering further into our daily lives, what was once science fiction is becoming fact - assisting our lives (which most would agree is better than threatening our lives). For this week’s tip, we’ll show you how to leverage machine learning in a very basic way: in the Android version of Gmail’s Smart Compose feature.

Ever get an email with the subject line “No Subject” and not feel compelled to open it? Us too. Your email subjects are crucial to getting a user’s attention and helping them understand what the email is about. We’re here to help you develop more effective email subjects to ensure your messages are opened and responded to.

Communication is imperative to the success of your business, but sometimes it’s easier said than done--particularly if your organization relies on technology-related communication that can make context and subtext difficult to detect. Here are some tips to ensure that your employees are as clear and concise as possible with your communication mediums.

The cloud has helped a lot of businesses overcome the boundaries set by the physical workplace. Employees can access data and applications on a variety of devices that were previously thought to be nothing but time-wasters, allowing for an improved workplace experience and much more flexibility. In particular, cloud-based email allows for enhanced connectivity between your organization’s internal and external resources.

If we asked you to identify the biggest risk to your business’ network security, what would you think it would be? Some might think that the countless threats on the Internet are the biggest issues your organization will have to deal with, while others might think natural disasters represent the biggest problem for your business. Many others, however, see the end user as the biggest threat to their business, and they are right… to an extent.

Due to the popularity of email in the business world, it’s an extremely popular method of attack for hackers. They can easily send countless messages to targets all over the world with the click of a mouse. Therefore, you have to take email security very seriously. The repercussions of not doing so could be swift and severe. This week’s tip is dedicated to informing your employees of email best practices for the office environment.

Are your employees putting your organization’s security at risk due to poor email practices? This is a question that all business owners need to consider--especially if you deal in sensitive information. We recommend that all businesses utilize a two-pronged approach to email security, including both technology measures to secure communications on the technical side and training to secure on the human side.

There is a famous thought experiment devised by physicist Erwin Schrӧdinger, describing a very particular paradox in quantum physics through the experience of a cat. While Schrӧdinger’s cat was initially intended to demonstrate a very different phenomenon, it can also be applied to something that all businesses need to consider: their email security.

Email is arguably the most popular method of business correspondence in existence. It’s fast, economical, securable, easy to store/archive, and searchable in a way that traditional, physical records can’t compete with. With billions of emails sent every day from all over the globe, there is a considerable amount of sensitive information transmitted within these communications. The criminal element is looking for every opportunity to steal and exploit personal data, as well as take advantage of vulnerabilities to gain access to a company’s data or network.

Your email inbox can quickly become an overwhelming mess without the proper management, but who has the time to sort through their email inbox on top of all of their other, more urgent responsibilities? Fortunately for Gmail users, the program provides the answer with its filter feature. For this week’s tip, we’ll show you how to regain control of your inbox with filters.

Does your business use Microsoft Outlook as its preferred email client? It’s likely that you have already noticed how dynamic of a solution it is for your business purposes, but little do you know that the most recent version of Outlook is stacked with some of the best features out there to make your user experience even better.

Most businesses rely on email in at least some capacity. Nowadays, organizations often choose to outsource the management of their email servers, including their hosting, to other organizations, most notably cloud providers for ease of use. Here are some of the benefits that you can gain from switching your in-house email management to a cloud-based email server.

Back in 1995, scammers pulled the first phishing attack. They took the identity of AOL employees and requested the billing information of users through instant messaging. More sophisticated phishing attempts have evolved over the years, culminating in the commonly-seen email phishing attack, which tricks users into handing over personal or sensitive information. Phishing attacks can be seen through, so we’ll show you how you can identify threats before they become a problem.