OnSite I.T. Blog

As technology advances and improves at an exponential rate, it is little wonder that today’s youth are growing up with a closer relationship to technology than any other generation before them. While this has opened up many beneficial opportunities for them, it can also be the source of many serious issues without the proper supervision.

A backup is a critical consideration for any business, in more ways than one. We have a tendency to immediately jump to “business-ending disaster” whenever we mention a backup. However, we’ve realized that this may have the unfortunate side effect of lulling you into a false sense of complacency - after all, what are the chances of being struck by a “business-ending disaster?”

2017 was chock-full of security threats, attacks, and breaches. Therefore, 2017 was also chock-full of lessons to be learned regarding business cybersecurity. For this week’s tip, we’ll review a few lessons that hopefully weren’t missed.

It’s no secret that a business relies on its data. Therefore, it only becomes more important that this data is protected, especially in light of the predictions that have been made for the rest of the year concerning ransomware. Read on for a closer examination of these predictions, and suggested actions that you can take to protect your business and its data.

Email is a solution that needs to be protected, lest you expose important information to any onlookers while messages are in transit. Encryption is one of the key ways you can make sure that your messages are safe, but email hasn’t always used this method to secure messages. In fact, it wasn’t until relatively recently that encryption became a staple of the major email providers.

Does your skin crawl with the thought of what would happen if you lose track of your smartphone? These days, a lot of users keep a plethora of personal information on their mobile devices, which makes a loss all the more dangerous for them. How can you make sure that your mobile device doesn’t accidentally become a treasure trove of information for any hackers or thieves who might try to steal it?

The Internet is gaining quite the reputation as a dangerous place. It hosts countless threats, many of which hide behind links that shield their intentions. Considering how much is on the line for your business, you need to make sure that you know which links are safe to click on, and which ones are best left ignored.

Computers are important for just about everything nowadays, but they can be difficult to deal with when they start to act up. If hardware doesn’t connect to a network, or if you have software that fails to respond when you click on it, you’ll likely need assistance to figure out what the cause is. On occasion, however, the issue might be something that a simple troubleshooting procedure can help you resolve. We’ll help you determine whether or not a situation is dire enough to involve professionals, as well as when it’s tame enough that you can resolve it on your own.

If you subscribe to Murphy’s Law, you understand why it is so crucial for every business to have a backup solution planned, put into place, and prepared for the worst. However, not every business should go about putting their backup strategy together in the same way. After all, their needs will be different, based on their industry, the data they store, and a variety of other factors.

What’s the point of doing business if you aren’t making money? Processing payments is one of the most critical parts of running a business. To make this easier and more efficient for your company, we recommend working with more effective invoices. This week, we’ll discuss how you can make your invoices more valuable.

Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues - enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.

Anyone that has lost their smartphone knows it is a rather traumatic experience. Not only is your entire life on the phone, likely so is your work. With smartphones becoming a major part of doing business, and their use for business purposes, a lost device can cause major headaches. Today, we will go over some strategies you can implement to mitigate the damage if/when you or one of your employees loses a device with sensitive company information on it.

It’s the end of the day, and you’re faced with a dilemma - shut down your workstation, or simply put it to sleep for the night? This is a topic that is debated quite often. We’ll compare the positive and negative aspects of both approaches to identify which is the better option.

The applications on a mobile device allow us to use that device in a number of ways, from productivity, to entertainment, to networking. However, despite the efforts of Google to keep out the riff raff, the Google Play Store has plenty of malware available to download in the guise of a desired app. Today, we’ll review a few tricks to help you spot them before pressing ‘Install.’

Saving a little on your technology can go a long ways, but cutting too many corners can lead to additional problems and expensive downtime. Here are a few ways you can cut costs without creating long term issues.

When you mention the term 'disaster recovery,' most people think about the big ground-shattering events like earthquakes, fires, floods, tropical storms, etc. While these natural events are certainly disasters and devastating in their own right, smaller things can constitute as a disaster for your business, and they aren't seasonal.

Sometimes when your workstation feels bogged down, a relatively cheap and simply hardware update can make a huge difference in performance. Adding more RAM (Random Access Memory, often just referred to as memory) can be a game changer for your bogged down PC.