Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Printers, along with every other piece of equipment that is on your network, require careful configuration and regular upkeep to ensure that they aren’t putting your data and users at risk. Security researchers recently discovered two massive vulnerabilities in HP Officejet All-in-One printers that make it incredibly easy for hackers to spread malware and gain access to a company’s network.

Vendors can be impossible to deal with, and this problem escalates when you have quite a lot of them. Every service or product your business takes advantage of comes from a vendor, and if you have to work directly with them every time something goes awry, you’re looking at a lot of wasted time and effort. Thankfully, there’s an easier way to work with your vendors, and ironically, it involves not working with them at all--but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a process you need to go through before you can most efficiently take advantage of vendor management services.

Microsoft Office 365 might look like Microsoft Office, but it has many other features that allow you to make your documents and services more accessible and collaborative than the standard desktop application would. This week’s tip is dedicated to helping you get the most out of the features of Office 365--particularly in regard to Microsoft Word.

Technology support is critical to the success of businesses, but investing in these solutions presents an entirely different problem--whether or not your business can afford an in-house support team. Depending on the budget, businesses often find themselves investing in IT support that’s both counter-productive and costly. We’re here to tell you that remote support and a help desk solution can mitigate costs and help you achieve a higher return on your investment.

Machine learning has become a big deal in a variety of industries, healthcare being a prime example. There are a variety of applications for machine learning in this incredibly important field, all of which show great potential in improving patient care. Below, we dive into just a few examples of how machine learning can improve healthcare.

If you’re not tech-oriented, the mere sight of a server room might be a lot to take in. With wires everywhere and mechanical boxes filled with moving parts, you’re looking at the life’s blood of your business and the heart that pumps it through your business’ veins. While proxy servers are a little different from your standard server, this doesn’t change the fact that you probably shouldn’t mess with it. What is a proxy server, and what does it do?

When you’re making important decisions for your business, you need solid data to back them up. Through the use of business analytics, you can take advantage of your quantifiable data to find the right decisions for your business. We’ll discuss the process of using business analytics and how it can be used to your business’ advantage.

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.

The best way to access the Internet is to use a web browser. Today, we’ll discuss five of the most helpful basic tricks we can think of to help you make the most of your web browser.

It’s fair to say that today's organizations are faced with more online threats than ever before. To properly manage the information systems that they depend on for productivity, redundancy, and operational management, they need to ensure that they are doing what they need to do to mitigate problems stemming from the continuous flow of threats.

Sports are a very popular thing around the world, which means that these athletic contests gather many fans to them. In turn, this means that these events are chock full of potential targets for a hacking attack. Today, we’ll examine the assortment of hacks that have taken place around sporting events.

In your time dealing with files and folders on computers, you may have encountered some that have been marked as “read-only.” What is the significance of these files, and what does that marking really mean? That’s the topic we’ll explore below.

As headlines shout about Hurricane Florence approaching the East Coast later this week, with Helene and Isaac also stirring in the Atlantic Ocean, it seems as good a time as any to discuss preparing your business for hurricane season; and, really any adverse weather effects that could negatively influence your business. Preparing your business for events like these is key to its survival, making it crucial that you know what your responsibilities are when awaiting a potentially devastating event such as a hurricane.

As the cloud has increased in popularity, companies have moved a lot of their computing off of their local networks to cloud-hosted environments. Because of this trend, it’s become an extremely popular choice for data backup and disaster recovery solutions. In fact, it’s the preferred use of cloud-hosted systems, but unless you know why these types of environments are great for data backup and disaster recovery, you might not realize its full potential for backup and collaboration.

Commerce has been fully embraced by the Internet, with online stores slowly phasing out many brick-and-mortar establishments. While you may not be in too much danger, depending on what you offer, you may also have the opportunity to leverage this trend in your favor. Below, we’ve outlined a few factors to help you decide if e-commerce is the right fit for you.

When a computer is new, it seems to blaze through tasks at unbelievable speeds… but this doesn’t seem to last very long at all. In short order, a computer seems to slow to an excruciating crawl. What makes this happen, and how can it be fixed? We’ll go over this below.

You provide a good or service to your clients, and therefore, could be considered a vendor to them. Similarly, your organization depends on the goods and services of other organizations, making your business a client as well. All of this can become quite complicated and convoluted, which brings up the question of how you’re managing all of these loose ends. Are you keeping your vendors managed as well as you should be?

In today’s medical field, technology is a big player. With regulations dictating that even independent practices attempt to make the jump to a dedicated EMR/EHR. An EMR/EHR, or electronic medical record/electronic health record interface, provides physicians and patients a way to connect to promote efficient healthcare delivery and organizational profitability. Today, we will look at how smaller healthcare providers are utilizing EMR/EHR solutions that are hosted in the cloud, bucking the trend of hosting their patient information locally.

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.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, has been widely accepted by the business community as an excellent communication tool. This is due to both the cost savings that VoIP offers, as well as the many, many features that are inherently bundled into the solutions available. There may be more of these features than you may realize. Here, we’ll review some of these features, and disprove some misconceptions along the way.