Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Implementing a cloud solution is a difficult choice for many businesses, primarily because it represents a change in the way your organization functions. If you make a rash decision before doing your research, it might lead to downtime or a decrease in operability. Therefore, it’s important to understand why businesses move to the cloud, as well as what’s available for implementation.

Social Media allows businesses to share their brand with the outside world in entirely new ways. While the benefit of social media is that everyone and their mother is on it, the problem with social media is that everyone and their mother is on it. People put all sorts of information on their accounts, which translates into a major security risk in the form of targeted phishing attacks.

Cyber threats are everywhere. If you’re one to travel, then you’ll encounter many of these threats on public Wi-Fi networks. Therefore, remote workers need a secure way to access company files. Here are three tips to protect your digital assets while traveling.

Every business is different, and will require technology solutions specifically designed with their organization in mind. However, it can often be difficult to implement new solutions, especially if you don’t know what your options are. By taking a careful analysis of your current IT assets, as well as where you plan to be in the next few years, you can accurately gauge your business’s expectations and implement the right solutions.

As we hear news about large-scale hacks and data breaches, there’s a temptation to picture attacks like those in television shows and films like Mr. Robot, Live Free or Die Hard and other works of fiction. These attacks are often carried out by criminal geniuses or nefarious nation-states, utilizing of a crippling zero-day vulnerability or superbug to bring society to its knees.

So you have elected to relocate your operations to a new office space. While this can be a great way to make progress toward a variety of goals, there are important considerations you need to take into account during your search to find a space that is just right for you and your business’s needs. What follows is a list of factors to keep in mind as you narrow your real estate search.

Big data continues to be a big topic for businesses, as organizations stand to gain much from analyzing data and identifying trends. This can help you understand how your business will function in the future, but there are two topics of concern that you need to consider before using the data: how exactly do you want to use the data, and will the data that you’ve collected help you in achieving that goal?

As a business owner, we understand that you’re an exceptionally busy individual. Even when you’re not keeping operations moving forward, you have other important matters to attend to, like your real life. However, science has (almost) proven that there’s one activity that you may (or may not) do that can inadvertently improve the way you do business: read literary fiction.

Back in 2011, Facebook released their Messenger app. It was designed to be a chat system that could be used to communicate outside of the Facebook app. Since then, Facebook has provided Messenger with much more functionality than your average everyday messaging system. In fact, Messenger might now offer features that could be helpful for your business.

When Facebook first created a splash online, the business world was slow to climb aboard. Businesses thought that social media wouldn’t benefit them. Yet, many companies have had great success through social media, spreading their brand and establishing a more powerful online presence. Therefore, it makes sense that Facebook would invest in ways to make its services more friendly to the business sector, and Messenger is a great example of the social media giant’s evolution.

Here are eight ways that Facebook Messenger can provide value with its business-friendly features:

Use the Facebook Messenger Website for Desktops
Messenger is typically seen as a mobile app, and as such, businesses might be reluctant to use it. Facebook has moved past this with a standalone website specifically for use with Messenger, allowing those working on desktops to use the app on their PC without dealing with Facebook and all of its distractions. You can access the Messenger website here: https://www.messenger.com/

Use Messenger to Share Files
Your business shares files all of the time, and Messenger makes doing so simple enough. Click on the paperclip icon, upload the desired file, and click send. In this way, it works similar to an email. However, this only works if used on the web application version of Messenger. Mobile users will have to consider other ways of sharing files. Messenger supports plenty of different file types, including Microsoft Word files, Photoshop files, PDFs, and so much more.

Hackers are known to go after data of all kinds, but sometimes they have other goals in mind. With one of the biggest events in world politics fast approaching--the 2016 United States presidential election--it’s thought that this event could potentially be influenced by hackers.

If we asked you to tell us how many hours a day you actually work, what would the figure look like? Chances are that you as a business owner put in a little more than the average worker, but would it total over the requisite eight hours? A recent study shows that while eight hours of work 200 years ago was considered revolutionary, it might be a bit on the long side to expect good work from good employees.

The Internet is a great place to find information on a technology solution before going all-in on the purchase. Yet, sometimes you’ll purchase a hardware component that doesn’t quite meet your expectations. While it’s sometimes possible to go through the hassle of returning it, you can avoid this problem altogether by renting the technology rather than purchasing it immediately.

Halloween is a great time for people of all ages to let loose and embrace their spookier, darker side--even though they aren’t. For hackers, however, every day is like Halloween, but with ill intentions. Hackers will pretend to be someone they’re not in order to scam you out of sensitive data or personal information. By identifying their tricks, you can keep hackers from getting their treats.

Botnets are a growing concern for businesses all over the world. Between massive DDoS attacks that can knock out servers, and hordes of remote-controlled zombie computers that are subject to a controllers’ whims, businesses have a lot to worry about. Has your business fallen victim to a botnet in the past, and what can you do to keep it safe in the future?

Have you ever tried lugging around two smartphones? It’s not as fun as it sounds, especially since having two devices means double the chance of losing one. Often times, this two-phone dilemma results from having both a work-issued phone and a personal phone. Thankfully, merging two phones is easy to do.

Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, continues to grow into one of the most accepted practices within an organization. Yet, one major problem has always plagued BYOD in the form of security. Thankfully, with the help of mobile device management, businesses are able to minimize this risk while leveraging the benefits that BYOD offers.

When it comes to your most-used solution, is the mobile application a more secure choice in terms of user privacy, or does the website offer superior protection against leaked information? Researchers from Northeastern University sought to answer this question in a recent study comparing the app versions of programs against their web-based counterpart on Android and iOS devices.

It’s important that your workflow allows you to get the most success out of your workday, yet this is often easier said than done. Everyone has different routines and practices that might work for them, and no one else. If you’re looking for ways to improve your own productivity processes, why not consider these four famous individuals with unorthodox practices?

Decision makers for small and medium-sized businesses certainly have a tough job. Each choice they make on the behalf of the business has repercussions, which could potentially influence the rest of the company, for better or for worse. Therefore, we’d like to take some of the pressure off of the decision makers with a recommendation: if you haven’t done so, consider utilizing Office 365 for your business’s various needs.

Not long ago, a group referring to itself as the Shadow Brokers distributed hacking tools utilized by the United States National Security Agency (NSA), on various publically-accessible websites. While the motives of the Shadow Brokers are a story for another time, an investigation seems to have locked in on a particular theory of how the Shadow Brokers came into possession of the tools in the first place.