ATECH MSP Blog

When it comes to creating spreadsheets, the go-to option for many businesses is Microsoft Excel. There are a few little-known tricks that can make creating your Excel spreadsheets even faster. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a few.

The oldest retailer in the United States disclosed that they had malware installed in their point-of-sale systems that was stealing their customer’s data for a year. 223 Brooks Brothers locations in the United States and its territories were affected by this attack.

The small business owner has so many issues to manage that when it comes time to add employees, it can be a difficult endeavor finding the right person to fill the position. For the growing business, it’s important to find the right people for the job, but with such a shortage of trained and experienced workers on the open market, business owners need to have a strategy in place so that the onboarding process doesn’t cost their organization more than it has to. Understanding what to look for in a new hire can go a long way toward helping you make good personnel decisions, and keep the costs of training down.

We’ve all been there before: you’re walking out into the parking lot, in a hurry to get somewhere, and cannot for the life of you remember where you parked. While this used to be a time-wasting problem for many, Google has added a feature to Google Maps that allows you to avoid the desperate race against the clock to get to your vehicle in time to get to your next destination.

Remember when the biggest concern society had about car byproducts was regarding CO2 emissions? While reducing emissions from vehicles will always be a priority for the environmentally-conscious, on the horizon there looms an even bigger challenge that car manufacturers are responsible for. Namely, what’s to be done with the vast amounts of data to be generated by autonomous cars?

To give you an idea of what the near future of Big Data holds, consider that a single autonomous car can generate as much as 100 GB of data every single second, this according to Barclays analyst Brian Johnson. This could mean as much as 4TB of data generated by a single autonomous car each day. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sees the immense challenge that this deluge of data presents to the automotive industry and says that it will require “an unprecedented level of computing, intelligence, and connectivity.”

Granted, autonomous cars are a novelty that few of us have encountered on the roadways, and far fewer actually own. However, this won’t be the case by 2020 when autonomous vehicles are expected to enter mass production, according to Topology. By the same year, 75 percent of the world’s cars will be connected to the Internet via embedded Wi-Fi.

While a human-controlled car that’s connected to the web is unlikely to generate quite as much data as its self-driving counterpart, these connected cars will nevertheless generate vast amounts of data in their own right--data relating to in-vehicle (such as fluid levels, speed and acceleration, GPS positioning, etc.), driver/passenger (use of infotainment systems, HVAC, seat preferences, driving styles, etc.), and environment information (such as LiDAR scanner, cameras, and sensors). All of this data presents value to groups like automakers, insurers, government agencies, marketing firms, and even makes for an improved driver experience, and therefore, must be stored and analyzed.

Contemplating just how much car-generated data this trend is on track to produce is an exercise that absolutely boggles the mind. Johnson has done the math and shared his findings with CIO:

“If extrapolated out to the entire U.S. fleet of vehicles -- 260 million in number -- autonomous cars and trucks could potentially produce about 5,800 exabytes. In other words, on a daily basis, there would be enough raw data to fill 1.4 million Amazon AWS "Snowmobile" mobile data center tractor-trailer trucks with 100 petabytes of storage each, for a convey reaching 11,000 miles long.”

Now consider that autonomous cars are just one “thing” of the Internet of Things; a trend where manufacturers are finding new ways to connect new devices to the Internet. Predictions vary widely as to just how large the Internet of Things will balloon to by 2020, being as much as 30 billion devices. In 2016 this figure stood at 6.4 billion devices (which doesn't include smartphones, tablets, and computers) and the number of new devices connecting to the Internet grows every day. The inconvenient fact remains that the sheer amount of data that will be generated over just the next few years will increase exponentially.

It’s also worth noting the glaring sense of irony to be had from generating mountains of data every single day, seen especially in the automotive industry’s push for connected cars. In that, these data centers that are constructed to house all of this information consume massive amounts of energy and leave behind no little environmental footprint. Therefore, going back to our opening example of cars historically having a CO2 emission problem, it would seem that purchasing an “environmentally-friendly” autonomous car is a misnomer, due to the simple fact that you would just be swapping out one problem for another.

What’s all of this mean for your business? At the very least, being aware of this trend means that you can better prepare your organization for the IoT revolution, already at hand. For example, if your IT infrastructure is currently at capacity, well, then your operations will experience a significant bottleneck because of it, sooner rather than later. Having accurate knowledge of this trend will also help you better plan for cloud services. By being able to gradually adopt more cloud services (especially data storage), you’ll grow your business in a way that keeps up with the deluge of data that society is guaranteed to experience in the upcoming years. This has the potential to be a make-it-or-break-it difference for your company, especially if your competitors are scrambling to keep up.

For assistance preparing your business for the upcoming data revolution, give Atech MSP a call at (888) 814-4843.

Despite the rise in digital documentation and connectivity, the ability to print hard copies of documents is still a requirement in many businesses. However, if not handled with care, printing can quickly become an expensive endeavor. This is just one of a few reasons that a single network printer is a better option for many organizations than a series of local printers.

Windows Updates are generally issued with the intention of improving your user experience, but sometimes they can cause complications. This is why most IT departments will opt out of implementing them and will instead review the issued updates before doing the work themselves. However, for the average PC user who simply wants to postpone updates from interrupting your day, read on and find out what you can do about them.

Run your Windows Updates and be very skeptical about opening unsolicited emails. Failure to do so may result in a very dangerous strain of ransomware that could infect your entire network and spread to your clients, partners, and prospects.

As a business owner, you’re constantly looking for new ways to improve customer interaction with your website, and your company in general. In the old days (the early-to-mid aughts), market research required a lot of phone calls and legwork. Today, thanks to the rapid growth of technology, numerous applications and software feature real-time analytics that can help you gather instant feedback and statistics on your clientele. Here are three technologies that can make market research a cinch.

There is no denying the value that an in-house information technology resource can offer a company. However, many small and medium-sized businesses might have a difficult time finding room in their budget to hire additional in-house resources. In cases like these, turning to other, external resources can provide a helpful boost to your IT.

While your employees will certainly need devices upon which to complete their work, this need can be a point of some contention. After all, every employee will have a preference when it comes to their device and its operation, a preference that doesn’t line up with the device you would supply them with. However, this tension may be relieved by implementing a BYOD policy.

The use of chip implants in humans has long been a controversial topic of discussion. Up until this point, chip implants could only be found in various works of dystopian fiction. But given the speed at which new technology is developed, it was only a matter of time before these implants were actually created and utilized. Thanks to a group of innovators in Sweden, fiction has now become a reality.

Managed IT services are all the rage in the business world, and for good reason. They allow businesses of all varieties the ability to focus on their goals rather than their IT maintenance. However, it’s not always easy to understand what every single service offered by MSPs like us provide is. Here are three great services that we can provide for your SMB.

As technology improves, it’s important that businesses that wish to stay competitive implement these advancements. Otherwise, they risk falling behind the curve where the ability to keep up with the demands of the market is concerned. However, many businesses may find that the biggest pushback against incorporating new tech comes from their existing employees.

At a young age you learned about the circle of life. Despite the fact that computers aren’t alive, they do have a life cycle all their own. Every user should be aware of their PC’s life cycle, since you’ll care for and interact with your computer differently at each stage. To help you make the most out of your PC’s lifespan, we’ll go over all four cycles.

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.

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.

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.

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.

Email is (and has been) a prime method of communication for businesses of all sizes. With email comes a whole slew of issues that are essentially synonymous with the technology; spam, information overload, phishing, and information privacy. Even Bakersfield small businesses that only do business locally are at risk of these issues. Personal email accounts are equally at risk. Employing proper precautions and practices whenever communicating via email is very important to prevent the risk of security compromises, monetary loss, and even legality issues.