ATECH MSP Blog

Microsoft is a huge player in the business world, providing businesses from all over the world with the tools they need to be successful. From small businesses to large enterprises, Microsoft provides the software that many businesses use to get through their day-to-day tasks. If you need to make a decision regarding your organization’s software needs, you might encounter terms like Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft’s Office 365. Wait… Aren’t those the same things? Not quite.

It feels like only yesterday when the only action you needed to take to protect a computer was to install antivirus software. Back in the year 2000, there were around 50,000 known computer viruses. Today, that number is over 185 million unique malicious threats.

Have you ever heard someone refer to an activity as “yak shaving?” Also known as “bikeshedding,” this is effectively a way to describe a specific kind of procrastination. For this week’s tip, we’ll explore how a freshly barbered yak relates to your business’ productivity, and how to keep you and your employees on the right track.

The smartphone has changed the world as much as any physical product over the past decade-plus. Today, people have near-ubiquitous access to the riches of the Internet. They can communicate in a multitude of ways. They have applications that can help them live the life they find most fulfilling.

Any business that wants to have sustained success needs to have a strong communications strategy. Typically, businesses used a telephone service from the telephone company, an email server they hosted themselves, and their official company letterhead that they’d use for all their formal correspondence.

Depending on what your preferences are for a productivity suite, you might find that the conventional options are slightly less optimal for your needs. Google’s G-Suite solution for businesses can offer your organization a great way to access common applications for a multitude of purposes.

Every so often, we encounter an IT solution that could prove to be intensely beneficial to businesses when it can be fully adopted, but also has a few obstacles to its complete implementation. Here, we’ll review how augmented reality can be used practically in the future, and the challenges that will need to be overcome in order to do so.

Studies have shown that email still has a safe place in the business world, with an estimated 124.5 billion business emails sent and received each day. However, are the emails that your business is actually receiving safe? If you aren’t adopting the following practices in your daily business operations, they probably aren’t.

It is not unusual for the business that has been in business for a while to have used a number of software titles that either are completely ineffective, or are known to be security risks. The use of cheap, or free, software is prevalent among individuals and organizations that don’t realize that it pays to have a software strategy in place. For this week’s tip, we’ll talk about software and how something so crucial to the success or failure of a business needs to be taken seriously.

People use all types of payment options. With more people moving away from cash as a payment option, businesses have to accept and process more payment card transactions. Depending on your business, it could put you in a very precarious position. Today, we will look at payment card statistics, and how the increase in payment card usage could end up be a devastating problem for the modern business.

From an objective point of view, the amount of trust that people put with companies based on the Internet is pretty astounding. In addition to providing whatever product or service they offer, these companies are often given highly sensitive information with hardly a second thought from the consumer. Here, we’ll review how millions of people learn that this trust was misplaced each year, why these companies want all this data in the first place, and how important it is to follow a few data collection best practices in your own business.

Passwords have always been important to businesses, but they are priorities for organizations in certain industries. Government-based organizations in particular need to be concerned about using secure passwords. Of course, not all businesses are government-based, but there’s a thing or two your own can learn about some of their password practices.

The past few years certainly haven’t been very good for Facebook. After going public in 2012, Facebook acquired several organizations and applications to make waves in the market. The company is now responsible for a considerable amount of data, which has led to several data breaches, exacerbating the media and creating skepticism toward the social media giant.

Technology has helped many industries push beyond their limits and embrace new operational methods that may not have been possible in the past. One of these industries is healthcare and medical IT. Thanks to these advancements, patients have more options now than ever before in how much control they have over their records, but providers must be wary of these changes in order to take advantage of them.

Communications can be difficult to manage, especially in today’s business world where workers are more mobile with more devices than ever before. How can you make sure your business’ infrastructure is prepared for the new developments in modern technology solutions? You can start by making sure your team is equipped with the applications and devices they need to stay in touch during the workday.

If there’s a single concept that modern businesses are being built around, that concept would have to be collaboration. Group effort and communication are increasingly central to the workflows of today - but there is more to collaboration than just these features. Here, we’ll review what the term collaboration really means, and how it can be leveraged in all its forms.

The smartwatch has quite a few benefits, but anything that one might bring to the table is offset drastically by its position as a threat magnet. Vulnerabilities in smart watches and other wearable technology makes using these devices somewhat risky behavior. Today, we will look at some of the features of the modern smartwatch, how hackers are utilizing them to be disruptive, and what you need to do to protect yourself from the risk posed by hackers.

Some documents contain more sensitive data on them than others, making them important to protect. When it won’t do to have documents containing boatloads of sensitive data available to anyone who obtains the document, you can turn to Microsoft Word to have a feature that protects them: password protection.

Data security isn’t the easiest thing in the world to plan for, especially if your organization doesn’t have any dedicated security professionals on-hand. While protecting your data with traditional methods, like passwords, firewalls, and antivirus, is important, what measures are you taking to make sure a thief or hacker isn’t just walking into your office and making off with your technology?

The modern office can be a pretty monotonous place. When people do similar tasks over and over again, their attention to detail can wane. That may be a problem for your operational efficiency, but depending on what the expectations are, it likely won’t end your company. Ransomware, on the other hand, can be a major problem for any organization it affects. Today, we will share with you how to get your staff to care about the looming threats that target businesses from over the Internet.