ATECH MSP Blog

Employees are without a doubt the most unpredictable resource within your business. Nothing can be more catastrophic to data security than a careless or untrained worker. Enforcing safe practices and policies doesn’t have to feel like a chore, if training is handled properly. In fact, employees typically become eager to learn how to avoid the latest and greatest cyber-related threats. These threats plague not just our work lives, but our everyday lives as well. Today, we will discuss what you and your employees should be aware of in today’s connected world. 

Regardless of what you do, it’s a good bet that your business creates a lot of data. Some of which is completely essential to its sustainability. In order to protect it against data loss and disaster, you will need data backup. Today’s best options leverage cloud computing to ensure redundancy and availability. Today, we’ll take a look at data backup and how choosing one that incorporates cloud services can actually save your business.

Ever since it started to be looked on as a reliable computing option for businesses, cloud computing has been exceedingly popular. Businesses and individuals use cloud computing platforms for their infrastructure needs, their application deployment, their file sharing and storage, and for redundancy to protect their business, but have you ever wondered how the cloud platforms themselves are kept up to date? Today, we will look into it. 

Many business owners like to crunch the numbers in order to fully understand where their hard-earned money is going. Essential business communication tools are just one of the things that are under your expense's category. However, phone service is dwindling across the globe, much in part due to the benefits associated with VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. 

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with social media. A particularly controversial platform we discuss quite a bit on our blog is Facebook. Privacy is a monumental concern in the digital age, so today we thought we would go over settings you might not even realize are enabled on your Facebook profile. 

If you haven’t read part one of our Facebook privacy blog, it wouldn’t hurt for you to go back and read that one first. Today, we will be building off of that blog, teaching people how to properly configure their accounts to give them the best chance to lock down their private information.

Of course, Facebook, being one of the predominant web-based services in the world, has a checkered history when it pertains to individual’s privacy. In fact, I think a fair share of its ongoing troubles when it comes to individual privacy have a lot to do with their overwhelming success.

Would you consider Facebook to be popular? It’s an interesting question. It’s like asking people if they think McDonalds is popular. These days Facebook is used by one in every four people in the world, yet there are very few people that will actively come to the social media giant’s defense, let alone admit to spending nearly half of their time online on the site (either via an Internet browser or via an app).

While most businesses need the same basic technology to support their operations, some industries have additional, more specific needs that require a more specialized tool to accomplish. As we leave this series behind, let’s briefly consider how a managed service provider can be a valuable resource for a business operating in one of these industries.

Modern businesses can now make use of increasingly powerful technology solutions… as long as they have a means of obtaining and incorporating these solutions into their operations. The services that a managed service provider can deliver include procurement assistance. To wrap up our series on the value that managed services can provide, let’s discuss this aspect.

Your business’ data is a key component to its success, and with a managed service provider on your side, it becomes even more beneficial for you to put to use. As we carry on with our series describing the value of a relationship with a managed service provider, we’ll look at a few ways that your business can benefit from the data services that this relationship can provide.

Every so often, you may encounter a need for experience that nobody you currently employ actually has. While you could hire an employee with the desired skills, there’s no guarantee that you could find one in a timely fashion - or that they’d be a good fit. So, for the third part of our series on a managed service provider’s added value, we’re examining their consulting services.

It wasn’t too long ago that in order for business technology to be fixed, or to undergo general maintenance, it either needed to be brought to a specialist’s location or for the specialist to come to yours. Nowadays, this isn’t so much the case. As we continue our blog series on the benefits offered by a managed service provider, let’s consider the support options available.

In business today, productivity is one of the most focused-upon metrics out there. One of the most effective ways for businesses to optimize their productivity is by taking advantage of some of the value that managed services provide. To kick off our blog series on how managed services can be a valuable addition to any business, we’re looking at how being proactive can protect this productivity.

When so much to do with business nowadays relies on collaboration, it only makes sense that the solutions that enable this kind of cooperation would be seen as assets. Take video conferencing solutions - while many of their benefits may seem obvious, they have additional impacts that may not be initially apparent. Let’s review some of these benefits.

Know it or not, your business takes in and creates a lot of data. Most of this data, like most items and information, isn’t worth much. Some of it, however, is crucial to your business’ ability to operate. If a situation comes along where you are faced with the prospect of losing your data, it will be much better to have a backup plan in place than not.

I’m sure you’re familiar with those neat images that can look like multiple things at once - there’s the one with two faces that is somehow also a vase, the rabbit that is also a duck, and many other examples. Sometimes, our technology can seem to be the same way - take IT security and IT compliance. While these two considerations are definitely related, as they both contribute to risk mitigation, they are not the same thing.

A person’s smartphone is more than just a phone to most people. In fact, smartphone use is now so expected that companies are now trying to find a way to utilize their employees’ use of their devices rather than keeping them from using them. Today, we thought we would take a look at the current smartphone market. 

iMessage is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, and iPhone/iPad users get a nice, seamless integration across all their Apple products. With so many iPhone users using Microsoft Windows 10 PCs, we thought that there must be a way to send and receive iMessages in Windows 10. There are, but it comes with a lot of risks.

One of the most crucial resources in any business are its human ones - the employees that keep the wheels turning, day in and day out. However, like any of your business’ resources, you need to be careful when handling your employees. There is the very real possibility of an employee experiencing an unpleasant state known as burnout.

We spend a lot of time on this blog discussing cybersecurity. Understanding the effects of full-scale cybersecurity attacks is useful, but will only motivate a person or business to do things that will work to keep their network secure. The problem is that when it comes to public computing resources, there isn’t enough being done.