Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Workplace meetings have a reputation of being a minor, yet necessary inconvenience. Although, that doesn’t mean meetings can’t be improved upon and made less annoying and more productive. With the following tips and tricks, you can approach your meetings differently and get the most out of them.

What Kristi has to say!

I graduated from Bulter County Community College in 2011 with an Associate in Applied Science (Computer Information Systems - Network and PC Specialist). Currently I hold HDI Support Analyst Certification, HDI Support Center Team Lead Certification, as well as a MAC Integrations 10.10 Certification and an ITIL Foundation Certification.

One of the biggest fears of every smartphone user is having their phone stolen. Compounding this fear is the additional risk of the thief accessing the contents of the device and doing with it as they please. To help reduce the injury that comes from the insult of a stolen phone, security developers have come up with several clever solutions.

Paper documents, manila folders, and file cabinets have long been symbols of office work. Today, these once-proud symbols are looked down upon, due in part to the public being more environmentally conscious, as well as advancements made in cloud computing that make a paper-centric workflow an inefficient option.

Many of those who are responsible for a business could tell you that managing it isn’t an easy task--and when IT is involved, it can very quickly get a lot more complicated. Of course, those that say that are more than likely using an antiquated, break-fix approach. Those who utilize managed IT services, however, will likely have a much different opinion.

Portal and Web Services Upgrade and Maintenance

To our valued Partners and Customers,

The servers our portals are hosted (ferrumit.com, chatassist.net, mysupport247.net) on has been scheduled for an upgrade and maintenance tonight.  Our engineering teams anticipate the down time to be 30 minutes or less, however, please allot for up to 2 hours just in case.

Maintenance Window: February 15th from 11:00 PM - 3:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

If you encounter any problems logging tickets via our portal after the maintenance period, please contact our Help Desk team at toll-free 1-866-573-3282.

Did you know? Today is National Clean Out Your Computer Day! As technology buffs ourselves, we want to spread the word about this annual opportunity to clean out the technology that your business uses on a daily basis. Here are five great ways to make sure that your computers are being properly maintained.

Is your business prepared to deal with network downtime? By this, we mean any situation when your organization’s network infrastructure isn’t operating as intended. Maybe you’ve lost power in your office, or you’ve experienced a data loss incident that keeps you from accessing crucial information. To prepare your SMB for times like this, you need to ask if your organization can handle such a wasteful occurrence.

You don’t have to be a large enterprise to implement a security system in your office, and there are plenty of practical reasons to have one. How would you know if an employee made off with company hardware, or how much time are your employees wasting when nobody's watching? For concerns such as these, security cameras are a practical solution.

How can you use automation technology to leverage profitability and efficiency for your business? Whereas in the past, automating your company’s day-to-day processes seemed out of reach for SMBs, today’s automation technologies are easily accessible. To help you get started with automating crucial aspects of your business, we recommend looking into these three technologies.

As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to account for each and every one of your organization’s software solutions, but do you know the exact value that your business is getting from them? This can be challenging when managing software solutions locally on each of your workstations, but the cloud makes this astronomically easier.

Have you ever been taken aback by a stunning photo that appears when you lock your Windows 10 PC? While it’s nice to look at, you might notice that this photo changes every now and then. Have you ever seen an image so wonderful that you’ve wanted to download it and make it your desktop image? Well, with this week’s tip, you certainly can!

Last year’s United States’ tax season when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was breached and hackers used 464,000 stolen Social Security numbers to successfully E-file 101,000 fraudulent tax returns using false PINs. This incident should cause taxpayers to ask the question, “What’s the government doing to protect my tax returns?”

While many, many people use the Internet daily, for work, leisure, and communication, very few of them actually know how their devices are able to access the Internet in the first place. How does information from miles away make its way to your device? The answer is something called a web server. Let’s take a moment and examine how they do it.

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.

Teaching children a skill can be a difficult job if they’re not having any fun. Therefore, turning kids on to lucrative careers in technology can be challenging, especially since tasks like coding can seem rather dull compared to say, fighting fires and driving racecars. This is why educational apps and tools have been created to make learning about technology fun!

Productivity suites are a common sight, if not being entirely necessary for the modern business. You need the word processing power and the ability to provide an email solution to your organization’s staff so they can communicate internally and externally. We’ll discuss two of the most renown productivity suites--Office 365 and Google’s G Suite--and why your business will need what they offers.

There seems to be a shortage of IT skills in today’s job market. Unfortunately, there has never been a worse time for this to happen, as cyber security threats are more prevalent today than ever before. In response to the demand for highly skilled IT management experience, outsourced IT is a great way to take advantage of the latest security solutions without the burden of hiring an in-house IT department. Here are three ways that outsourced IT is the way to go to resolve the problem of the IT skills shortage.

There are two types of people in the world; those who can read and accomplish work while on the go, and those who can’t. For the folks in the latter camp, it’s not that they don’t want to be productive while traveling, but rather, they physically can’t. This unfortunate condition is commonly referred to as motion sickness, and if you suffer from it, then it’s quite literally “all in your head.”

Did you know that many webcams are infested with RATs? Not unlike their furry counterparts, RATs (or Remote Access Tools) are a nuisance that can cross the line into hazardous. This form of software allows a non-user to spy on a computer, giving them the ability to steal information or even record you and your environment with a PC’s webcam.