Directive Blogs

Hopefully, you’re aware of how important cybersecurity is today—if not, make sure you come back to our blog often for more information on that. The Internet, for all its benefits, can easily be the source of serious threats. With today’s youth growing more connected, these threats can easily target them… making it all the more important to start teaching cybersecurity awareness and best practices early. 

The world is full of people who would try to take advantage of your organization and its employees—or, in less gratifying words, scammers. They will do everything they can to try to fool your company and make a quick buck doing so. How can you make sure that the countless messages and phone calls you receive on a daily basis aren’t crooks trying to scam you out of house and home? It all starts with a little awareness.

We’re coming up on two years since the COVID-19 pandemic changed many workplaces’ operational strategies from in-person work to remote work. In that time, many businesses who hadn’t initially considered remote working to be a viable option have now made it a core part of their onboarding process. This means there are plenty of workers who are now beginning remote work who haven’t really experienced it before. Today, we thought we’d go through a couple of strategies that will help remote employees be as productive as possible as they work from home. 

The holiday season has a variety of famous key players, including the likes of Santa, Rudolph, and the rest of the North Pole crew. Each year, they use their magic to help spread goodwill and joy to all the nice children of the world… but did you know that they are also responsible for protecting those who make the naughty list from Santa’s villainous counterpart, Krampus?

As the official managed service provider for Santa’s operation, we have been cleared to share the story about how we’ve helped defy Krampus to save Christmas.

There’s no way around it; ransomware is bad stuff, plain and simple. The first half of 2021 saw a massive increase in ransomware attacks that made the lives of countless individuals and business professionals difficult. However, a new trend is surfacing, and it’s one that you might be surprised to see: fake ransomware threats.

The holidays are times for people to come together, even in these incredibly stressful times, so you’ll want to make sure that you are taking all the necessary precautions on both a personal level and a technological level. Here are some ways that you can keep yourself safe from a technology perspective this holiday season.

Phishing is one of those threats that has been around for a long time, and as time passes by, these threats only become more difficult to identify. Some businesses can’t tell the difference between phishing scams and actual emails. Here’s how your company can take steps toward properly identifying and responding to phishing emails.

Technology is one element that many small businesses struggle with, but it turns out that a lot of the same advice that you might get for regular life lessons can also apply to IT! Let’s take a closer look at how we might apply some of these lessons and why it just makes good sense to keep these tips close at hand.

A lot of people spend the modern workday with headphones on or earbuds in, listening to music as they work or communicating through a headset. That makes it inevitable that these devices will get dirty. Let’s go over how these devices can be safely cleaned to get rid of the grime that nobody wants to be wearing on their head.

Workplace burnout is a serious issue that can have far-reaching impacts in your business. Therefore, it is critical that you can identify when one of your team members is starting to feel it, and know what you can do to help reduce it. Let’s go over what can lead to burnout, as well as a few ways to remediate it.

What do you do with your old email messages? Do they just sit around in your inbox and collect dust? If so, this is certainly a wasteful practice, as those emails can accrue over time and take up a sizable chunk of space. The question then becomes, what do you do with the emails to keep them from taking up so much space, especially when you might be paying for the space?

The cloud is undeniably an invaluable business tool, so long as you maintain control over your business’ usage of it. This centralized authority over your cloud’s access controls is key to its successful utilization. Let’s briefly discuss what this means, and the ways that this can be established.

The Internet browser is easily one of the most-used applications in this day of cloud-hosted resources and online content… but for all that use, is it also one of the most-secured applications? In some ways, yes… but there’s always a few extra steps that can help you improve your protections.

Whenever your technology is involved in your business processes, it is important that you abide by best practices to see the most effective results. Let’s run through the most effective practices that you should reinforce in your operations.

Regular computer maintenance is part of maintaining healthy IT infrastructure, but one aspect that can often go by the wayside is keeping your computer physically clean. By this, we mean keeping it dust-free, clean and tidy. We’ve put together a shortlist of everyday actions that employees of any caliber can use to keep their workstations clean. This will help your organization take preventative measures over time and (hopefully) prolong the lifespan of your business’ technology.

We’ve all been in a place where the storage on our computer fills up a little too quickly for our liking. While you could delete or store unused files in the cloud, there is another method that you can use to quickly free up a little extra space that you might not have realized is there. If you can delete temporary files, you might find that you suddenly have a lot more storage space to play around with on your computer.

While the right IT solutions can be a major benefit to your business and its processes, this will only be the case if your team members are trained to use them correctly. Let’s go over some of the training that you need to prioritize in order to ensure your team is ready to use your technology the way it should be used.

For decades, technology has been the driving force behind some of the biggest and most radical shifts in business. Therefore, it makes sense to assume that the keys to your organization pushing past its limits and becoming truly exceptional lies in the implementation of new technologies that change operations in a profound way. The process of digital transformation does not have to be difficult, but it is important in a business environment so that you can stay competitive.

Your business’ technology is the best tool for its success… or it can be, at least. In order for you to see the kind of value from your tech that you’d expect of it, you need to approach it by making good decisions. We wanted to go over a few ways not to do so, to help you avoid undesirable situations.

It is a well-known and unfortunate fact that technology does not last forever, and in today’s era of upgrades, no time has this been more true than in the modern day. Therefore, it makes sense for businesses to have a plan in place for when it does come time to replace older devices. This, of course, involves the proper disposal of connected devices, a practice that could very easily be done in a way that is both destructive to the environment and devastating for data privacy if done improperly. We’re here to make sure this doesn’t happen.