SCW Blog

One of the great advantages of the Internet is the connectivity that it offers the world, which allows communications and business transactions to take place almost instantaneously. Yet this connectivity comes at a price as cybercriminals can also use this connectivity to interfere with businesses much more easily and effectively. As a matter of good business practice, it is necessary to have protections put in place to defend your systems against an external threat. One such measure your business needs is a solid antivirus solution.

Many businesses may be holding themselves back by not committing to the proper use and maintenance of their technology. As a result, worker productivity suffers and consequently, so does the business’s return on their tech investments. Is your technology holding your business back from maxing out profits?

The technology your company uses has to come from somewhere, and if you’re like most companies, that somewhere will be from technology vendors. To prevent your company from being taken advantage of, we recommend establishing the following practices to best deal with your vendors.

Well, it’s official: out of anyone who claims that 2016 was a rough year, Yahoo had the worst. The technology company was discovered to be the target of two of the largest data breaches on record.

There’s no doubt that Samsung took a hit with its exploding Galaxy Note 7, but there never seemed to be a truly definitive answer as to why it exploded in the first place. To find that answer, a manufacturing engineering company dissected the device. What they found explains a lot.

Your firewall and virus protections could be fully updated, your network sealed tight, your privacy and permissions measures comprehensive--and you could still be vulnerable to security breaches. What’s more, this vulnerability would come from the single element of your security solution that can’t be updated with a few clicks: your end users.

If someone kicked in your business’s front door, swaggered over to your data storage and uploaded all of your private data, it’s almost certain that you’d want to press charges against them. If someone were to do the same thing, but digitally, you’d likely want to do the same to them. However, prosecuting cyber crime is much easier said than done.

If you’re a user of the ridesharing app Uber, you might be surprised to know just how much the company knows about you, thanks to their updated privacy policy. For example, the app will now continue to track a rider’s position even after the ride has ended and the rider has left the car.

It’s not an uncommon phenomenon--being at a workstation in the early afternoon seems to make even the most diligent employee suddenly sluggish and disinterested. Fortunately for the busy business owner, there are a few different strategies to help address this perfectly natural occurrence.

So you’re in the market for an IT provider. What is it that you look for? Do you want a provider who waits until your technology is broken before taking action, or would you prefer one who prevents this from happening in the first place? Chances are that you’re of the former mindset, and you’re not alone. More businesses than ever are switching from break-fix IT to managed IT services.

It isn’t often that it’s acceptable to be alerted of an attack on an online account long after the attack has taken place, but Google might just have a rational reason for doing so. Unfortunately, this can often make the details and motive behind the attack unclear, as many leading journalists and professors have found out.

Let’s say that you’re going about your daily business when you receive a phone call from an unknown number. You never know who it might be, so you decide to answer it. The man on the other end of the phone has a thick accent and asks if you’re having trouble with your computer. Now that he mentions it, you might have sensed a slight slowdown with your PC. You decide to hear him out and see what he has to say.

Enough has been said about how revolutionary cloud technology can be for a business, that making the switch has become a no-brainer. Nevertheless, recent statistics are showing some odd patterns when it comes to businesses and the cloud. A flash poll conducted by InformationWeek reveals that a relatively significant 35.9 percent planned to direct their largest technology investments into cloud technologies during 2017.

When you go into business nowadays, it has essentially become a prerequisite to claim a social media account to represent you, sooner rather than later. The city of Denver, Colorado, has delivered a relatively harmless but still resonant example of why this is.

In a busy business, everyone from the CEO to a new hire could use more hours in the day. Whether clients are in need of improved service or their internal systems need attention, many businesses find that not enough can be done towards achieving all of their goals within the allotted amount of time. However, one productivity expert may have a solution.

Where businesses are concerned, IT vendors are a necessity--after all, workstations and other pieces of equipment have to come from somewhere. However, while vendors can be of great service to your business by providing it with its necessary technology components, sometimes they can be a hassle to deal with. This is especially true when something goes wrong.

We often think of encryption in terms of the computing sense of the word. Data is scrambled to prevent it from being stolen and used for nefarious purposes. However, encryption has been around for quite some time, dating back to ancient times. At its heart, encryption (a type of cryptography) must be defined as the protection of secrets.

With predictions putting cloud computing spending at $55 billion in 2026 with expectations of steady growth up to that point, the cloud is clearly a popular solution to implement. After all, why wouldn’t it be? Companies can host critical applications on it, store their data on it as a defense against on-site disasters, and mass-update applications and software.

Be honest: how do you feel when a snag suddenly pops up in the IT systems your business has put in place? It’d be a surprise if you answered with anything more than an irritated groan at the thought of another issue. If having to manage your solutions feels (at least to you) more like a problem, you aren’t alone.

What role does cash have in your business? Whether you sell widgets using cash registers or just keep some petty cash on hand for miscellaneous expenses, a recent study has shown that using cash actually costs businesses money, and that’s not all.