Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Here’s an interesting fact: any business that makes money can be successful. It doesn’t matter if you catch and sell fish, offer financial advice, or cut people’s grass, if you make more than you spend, your business will likely stay open as long as demand for your product or service continues. For most businesses, investing in technology can bring with it greater profitability.

Social media is a big part of just about anyone’s online presence nowadays, whether it’s a personal profile or a business page filled with contact information. While the various uses for social media will differ depending on who’s actually using it, it’s not stretching the imagination to think of social media as an extension of either oneself or one’s business. With this, however, comes a need to understand the security ramifications of its reckless use, as well as how it can influence your organization’s reputation.

Communications in the business world are something that’s absolutely critical to success, but goes through so many changes that it can be mind-boggling just to keep up. Thankfully, the latest and greatest solutions make it easy for small businesses to save money while also enabling them to improve the capabilities they already have.

Every business (and every individual, for that matter) needs to be wary of Internet scams and other online tricks. This is because those scammers are wily and have many means of finding a user in a compromising position… or so they claim in a recent scam.

One of the most notorious error screens out there has to be the Windows’ Blue Screen of Death, the devastating fatal error that occurs when something has gone horribly wrong with your computer. But what actually causes this error, and what can you do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again? Let’s find out.

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.

As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to keep an eye on how your staff communicates. Email and telephone have long been staples in this regard, and these solutions come packed with features like file storage and instant messaging. With more organizations taking their businesses on the go, these businesses are trying to take advantage of applications with the ability to integrate with their real-time messaging apps. Enter: Slack and Microsoft Teams, two solutions that hope to change the way business communications work.

Simulations are a common thing in many science fiction movies. Perhaps it’s an image on a screen that dictates what could happen as the result of a particular action. Maybe it’s a simulation of a certain event. Either way, the fact remains that something like this--previously relegated only to the realm of sci-fi--has now been brought to the technology industry in the form of a digital twin.

IT is extremely important for not just enterprises, but small businesses as well. IT administrators are able to save businesses a considerable sum just by monitoring and maintaining network infrastructures. By carefully looking after systems, downtime can be reduced, leading to more resources being available for other purposes. Of course, considering the fact that an organization’s network can quickly grow far beyond expectations, this task becomes much easier said than done.

It takes a lot of work and determination to make a successful small business. There are countless parts that need to be managed and maintained--so many that it can be difficult to assign a priority at times. There are certain requirements that your organization must achieve in order to remain successful, but it takes a little more than just business savvy to keep your organization ahead of the game. Let’s take a look at some of the ways your business can make itself stand out and achieve success.

You would be hard-pressed to find a better-known software suite than Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word probably leading the pack in terms of name recognition. When a solution is so well-known, it can be hard to call anyone who uses it a power user. However, for this week’s tip, we’re doing a deep dive into its capabilities to take your use of Word a few steps up.

Regardless of the policies your company sets, your employees are going to have their mobile devices on them; and, depending on their circumstances, they may be tempted to use them to further their work processes. While this may have been cause for concern at one point, there are now methods, collectively known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), that allow you to leverage these tendencies.

While data backup is a necessary component to any modern business’ success, the idea itself certainly isn’t modern. The act of protecting information dates back to before dates were even an inkling, when humanity was still writing data on cave walls to preserve it and notching animal bones to aid in primitive mathematics. Let’s review the history of data preservation, and how we’ve gotten to our current point.

If you’re like its over 2.19 billion other active users, Facebook has quite a bit of your personal information stored in it, and the risks that this implies only grow if your business is also represented on the social network. If your account isn’t protected as much as it could be, you could find yourself at risk of identity theft or other crimes. This is why we recommend activating two-factor authentication on Facebook.

Technology is critical to the success of your business. You rely on it for productivity, efficiency, and security. Your organization can’t run as intended without constant access to important data and systems. If a business can’t afford to maintain and implement adequate technology solutions, they will often pay untrained employees to do what they can, but this comes with too many risks to be effective.

Data backup has the nasty misconception that it’s only worth having if you actually use it, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Businesses let this misconception get in the way of an important aspect of business continuity, simply because they don’t want to waste money on something that they won’t actually need. Little do they know that data backup is the only thing standing in the way of your organization failing forever.

Every online account will inevitably ask you to create two different credentials: a username and a password, both of which need to be kept as secure as possible. But what exactly is a username used for, and why is it such an important part of computing? For this week’s tip, we’ll take a look at this credential.

Packing for trips can be frustrating because there’s always the chance that you’ll pack either too much or too little. This is especially true if you have multiple devices that you might be tempted to bring with you. It’s important to remember that you don’t always have to bring each and every device you own every time that you leave the office or go on a trip. We’ll help you make sure that you don’t overpack technology whenever you go on a trip.

Businesses of all types have looked to the cloud as a way to receive the goods and services they could use to improve their ability to create revenue, while not having to lay out huge chunks of capital in which to get the dynamic computing infrastructure. Today, developers are creating useful cloud-based applications that not only provide growing businesses the resources they need, they increasingly give workers flexibility, through their inherent accessibility. Today, we will take a look at five cloud-based applications that can really benefit a small business.

Mobile data is extremely important to the productivity and efficiency of modern businesses--especially when employees and administrators are out of the office. The major drawback of this is that it can be an expensive setup, as mobile data transfer can be pricey. We can help you get around this issue by minimizing the amount of data your Android device uses.