Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Voice over Internet Protocol, also known as VoIP, has grown more popular with businesses in recent years, and it’s hard not to see why. The sheer amount of benefits that it provides to businesses--small organizations in particular--make your traditional telephone system look outdated and inefficient. We’ll discuss some of the greatest benefits today.

It’s nice to get away every now and then, but if you have stayed at any property under the Marriott umbrella, including St. Regis, Westin, Sheraton, or W hotel since 2014, there is a good chance that your personal information has been leaked, a spokesperson from parent company Marriott has said. They said the multinational hotel corporation will begin emailing users impacted by the leak in the coming days.

With the holiday season winding down, business needs to get done, which means that organizations will be expecting their employees to get back to work and make things happen as quickly as possible. Mobile devices make this prospect much easier, as work can be done on-the-go in a flexible manner. Here are some tips to get the most out of your mobile devices post-holiday season.

There are many reasons why a hosted Voice over Internet Protocol telephone solution (also known as hosted VoIP) is popular for small businesses. This is due to the many benefits that a small business can glean from such a solution, both in its security and its overall operations. We’ll review some of these benefits here.

What’s a smartphone without some apps to download to it? With millions of apps to choose from, developers might often have less-than-virtuous motives that put their users at risk for their own benefit. Recently, Google has removed 22 apps from the Google Play Store that were found to contain automated click-fraud scripts. We’ll delve into what these developers were up to with these fraudulent applications, as well as how they would affect the two-million users that downloaded them.

With Windows 10 being a major part of most business’ computing strategy, many people use it at their jobs each day. It has a lot of features not found on any other PC operating system, and more are added regularly. Today, we take a look at four features of Windows 10 that we think can really help your business.

We’ve always been a proponent of preparing for the worst and hoping for the best where a business’ solutions are concerned. That’s why we were happy to receive an email from our friends at the North Pole telling us about a situation they ran into just a few days ago...

The smartphone market is one of the oddest ecosystems in the world today. Divided between east and west, many of the largest manufacturers in the eastern hemisphere are relatively unknown to western consumers. The market slump that the smartphone industry is currently experiencing only makes it more important to closely examine the features and other improvements that these devices offer. Below, we examine five of the best options for a user’s consideration.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for scammers, that is. These kinds of criminals love to take advantage of the gift-giving season. With the right tools for the job, hackers can have a field day stealing sensitive information, like credit card numbers, due to the sheer amount of stuff being purchased by consumers. It’s up to you to stay vigilant and make sure you’re not being scammed, but we have a couple of tricks you can use to stay as safe as possible.

Your Google account is one of your most important assets, regardless of whether you’re a business professional or a casual user. The tricky part of using Google, however, is to make sure that you’re using this asset safely. By securing your account and valuing your Google account credentials, you can make sure your account stays safe.

If you need to condense data into a concise and comprehensible form, Microsoft Excel is tough to beat. This is despite the fact that your average spreadsheet isn’t exactly an eye-catcher. However, Excel provides a few native options that boost your data’s visual appeal, making it more engaging and much more meaningful. We’ll review a few today.

Hardware, software, malware, ransomware. These are all terms that share two things in common - you probably have heard them fairly often, and they all end the same way. This is no accident. To better understand what these programs are, let’s dig into the basics of what we mean when we’re talking about “-ware.”

Sometimes it might feel like your technology never works as you want it to. You might try to open up a software application only to find an error message that keeps you from being productive. The error doesn’t go away no matter how many times you reload the application. How can you eliminate these issues that threaten to derail your productivity throughout the workday?

Antivirus is a crucial component to any network security platform, but do you know how it works? Below, we’ll go over how your security is improved by an antivirus solution.

By-in-large, most of today’s businesses are doing more to move away from their reliance on printed material. That’s not to say that nearly every business still requires the use of at least one printer. Most people believe that when your “ink” is low in your printer, the quality of the print job will suffer. This is true for inkjet printers, but for those that have laser printers, the “ink” isn’t really ink at all, it is a thing called toner. For this week’s technology basics article we will define what print toner is and how it differs from ink.

It’s no surprise that businesses will avoid spending money on things they don’t need at all costs. While it might seem harmless to avoid investing in certain technology solutions that just aren’t needed, one that you absolutely cannot go without is data backup and disaster recovery. A business that doesn’t survive disasters can’t succeed, so if you want a future for your business, it’s important to invest now before you can’t later on.

When discussing the practice of monitoring solutions to prevent threats, it isn’t uncommon for many businesses to put these concerns on the back burner. However, every so often, an example comes around to help inspire businesses to take their monitoring seriously. This time, the example was the arrest of 24 spammers in October for scamming American citizens by impersonating Microsoft support staff members.

Did you know that almost 90 percent of small business owners feel they are completely safe from attack? It’s unfortunate, but the truth of the matter is that half of these businesses will eventually be proven wrong--they too can suffer from a cyberattack. Are you going to risk becoming one of them? You should know now that there is no reason to.

The healthcare industry is heavily reliant on its IT. Before 2009, there were scant traces of information technology making its way into healthcare organizations in the United States, but in 2009 there was a major shift after the 111th U.S. Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) as a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Today, IT in the health industries is prevalent, and mostly expected.

The Internet is incredibly important to the success of not only businesses, but countless users all over the world. In terms of the actual strength of the Internet though, people might not know just how many options there are out there that can provide access to this dynamic and feature-filled network. Thanks to the Internet, businesses all over the world have access to plenty of great services that enable them to accomplish as much as possible.