Ferrum Technology Services Blog

The holidays are a great time to give technology to your loved ones. One of the most popular smart devices for each of the past few years is the smart watch. While they are extremely useful and make great gifts, they may have an effect on an organization’s cybersecurity.  Let’s take a look at some of the possible threats smartwatches may present for IT administrators.

Despite all the attention we try to direct toward cybercrime and awareness of the risks out there today, hacks and scams are still impacting businesses. With so many professional duties and activities carried out online, your business’ cybersecurity needs to be considered paramount. Here, we’ve listed six things to prioritize in your business to help protect it from such activities.

Honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising that 2020 has come to an end with news of a massive cyberespionage attack—the biggest ever, as a matter of fact. Let’s dive into what we know, and what it signifies.

There is no denying that, as far as Christmas days go, 2020’s is much different than most of us are used to. Instead of visiting with family and friends, most of us are remaining at home and awaiting the normalcy that a vaccine to COVID-19 will bring. With that normalcy, we also anticipate a return to something like typical business operations.

If you’re at all familiar with us, you’re probably aware of how highly we rank data backup. If your business creates or stores any data (which we guarantee it does) you need to have a backup to protect it, as simple as that. Let’s take a few moments to review how a BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) can benefit your business and its long-term continuity.

2020 is finally coming to a close. It has been an extraordinarily long year for most small businesses. Even if yours hasn’t seen a lot of the financial problems that thousands of businesses are seeing, you've definitely had to make some major adjustments that often come with additional cost. Through it all, one part of your business has been a rock, your people. 

Regardless of what you use it for, having the right amount of bandwidth to support your business’ needs is extremely important. Not only does it support enhanced productivity, collaboration, and business efficiency, it removes the bottlenecks that can stymie a business’ progress. Today, we will take a look at bandwidth, and tell you how to determine the bandwidth you need to support all of your business’ Internet-facing needs. 

Collaboration is an important capability for your team to share, particularly with the recent upsurge in remote work. Fortunately, many of today’s solutions are designed to facilitate this critical collaboration. Let’s review some of the tools available to your business that can help support its operations.

Phishing attacks are growing in number and it presents a major challenge for businesses. The many different forms that these attacks come in just exacerbates the problem. Today, we will take a brief look at phishing to help you educate your staff on what they entail and how to mitigate the massive risk that comes with them. 

We’ve all had those days when motivation eludes us, and they can be extremely frustrating. Fortunately, there are ways that you can rejuvenate your drive in either your personal or professional life. Let’s go over some of these tactics to try and keep burnout at arm’s length.

There is a whole section of the workforce who forgoes the stability of a full-time job and contracts themselves out by the job. For many of these workers, the boom in application development has given them endless opportunities to make money. This all changed in March as government officials put forth stay-at-home orders, effectively putting millions of people out of work, and millions more displaced from their workplaces. This has had a dire effect on many of the gig workers that were making a living as more people are now trying to do whatever they can to make ends meet. Today, we thought we would look at the gig economy, how it functions, and how COVID-19 has exposed the gig economy.

2020’s holiday season is going to be much like the rest of 2020: distanced. Most people are taking precautions and therefore have put the kibosh on much of their holiday shopping trips, choosing instead to do a majority of their shopping online. By avoiding one risk, people take on others. Today, we thought we’d outline some of the problems people may experience when shopping online and what to do to reduce your risk.

Every so often, we come across a bit of news that helps to teach not one, but two cybersecurity best practices at the same time. With the recent news of a cache of hacked Spotify accounts, we find just such an opportunity. Let’s review the two lessons to be learned.

Look, we get it… it’s one thing to hear it from “those IT guys” about how important software updates are. We’re into this stuff, after all, so we worry about things like that more. However, we’re hoping that a warning from Homeland Security to update Google Chrome will have a little more weight.

Windows 10 has seen a slow growth in its market share since it first appeared in July 2015, still rising throughout 2020 to now. As of this October, the operating system had finally reached a 72.2 percent market share. Let’s discuss why this benchmark matters, and why you need to update any devices in your organization to bring that share up even more.

Considering the current popularity of remote operations, the security of your business’ resources should be one of your greatest concerns. While this process isn’t necessarily easy, it isn’t something you can afford to neglect. Let’s take a few moments and walk through some of the most critical considerations to your office and its data security.

Businesses are in a tough spot right now, which makes their costs an even bigger issue for them to keep in mind. Luckily for businesses everywhere, however, many technologies are available now that can greatly benefit their operations—without being unattainable due to their price. Let’s consider five such technologies and strategies that can bring productivity and efficiency without sending you into the red.

Despite all that has gone on, many businesses have managed to stay open by embracing the remote capabilities of today’s technology. This is undeniably fortunate… however, it is crucial that we also acknowledge the importance of cybersecurity as these actions are taken.

Flash Player is going to be going out of support, the 24-year-old software being retired at the end of this year. That's a pretty big deal: Flash Player, at least initially, was a solution that most users have used at one time or another. What will this loss mean for your business’ processes?

A VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) signal uses the Internet instead of using a traditional phone infrastructure. Let's review the concept of VoIP and how companies can use it to their advantage.