Author: Casserly Consulting

Technology is a major factor that can determine your business’s fate, yet some organizations don’t necessarily recognize IT problems before they make themselves apparent. Unfortunately, by the time you notice any issues with your IT, they are usually turning into problems that cause your business considerable troubles. To keep issues from evolving into major problems, it’s up to you to ensure that your technology is maintained in a proactive fashion.

What NOT to Do
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about tech support isn’t necessarily the best option out there. Most users think of a break-fix IT provider, which uses the following formula for providing service:

• Some piece of technology or equipment stops working and it begins to affect operations.
• You contact your tech support.
• A technician is dispatched to assist you.
• You wait for a technician to arrive on-site to fix the issue.
• The tech arrives and fixes your issues.
• You pay the support fees.
• Your employees get back to work.

While this method of IT support certainly gets your problem taken care of, the true cost of such support is that you’re paying every single time you require it. While you pay your IT provider for services, there are plenty of other costs associated with this type of break-fix support. After all, your employees will still have to be paid for any time spent in the office, even if their technology isn’t allowing them to work properly.

Plus, what if the problem is not just affecting your employees, but your clients as well? If they can’t receive the goods or services that you provide for them, then they aren’t going to be happy. If this happens too frequently, they might even consider breaking their agreement with you and moving to a competitor who might offer more reliable services. Therefore, while break-fix IT is certainly a solution, it’s unlikely to minimize damage. You’re better off taking a proactive measure to resolve your technology troubles.

The Right Way to Approach IT
Many organizations are shifting from a dependence on break-fix IT to more proactive solutions, with the primary one being managed IT services. This particular approach takes a much different method of administering IT support:

• One of the managed service provider’s technicians notices that there are components that might experience a critical issue. They then inform your organization of the possible issue.
• The managed service provider then works to resolve the problem remotely while possible.
• If your issue is covered by your service level agreement, then you pay nothing for the service besides your usual monthly fee.
• Your employees get right back to work with minimal interruption.

The managed services provided by COMPANYNAME offer your organization dynamic, enterprise-level solutions that allow you to minimize downtime and take a proactive stand against IT issues. We can monitor and maintain your solutions so that your organization can focus on what it does best, without worrying about whether or not your technology will remain functional. To learn more about managed IT, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

While it’s a security best practice to keep strangers off of your Facebook account, you might feel that it’s understandable to accept an unknown request for the sake of networking or otherwise. This isn’t the ideal way to approach Facebook, but you do have a unique opportunity to allow users to view your profile and follow your public posts, without the need to accept a friend request.

This feature is called “follow,” which limits who can send you actual friend requests while still allowing some users to view your public posts. This is important primarily because hackers and scammers will often create fake profiles in an attempt to connect with potential victims. Their target might be sensitive credentials or other important information, so it’s important to avoid friend requests from people who you may not know.

To allow users to follow your profile and prevent users who don’t know who you are from sending friend requests, follow these instructions.

First, log into your Facebook account. If you’re using a desktop, select the down-arrow in the top right corner of Facebook. Once you’ve done so, click on Settings, which will be at the bottom.

Doing so will open up the General Account Settings. In the left column, notice the sub-categories for Facebook’s settings. You want to click on Privacy first.

In the Privacy Settings and Tools page, you’ll see sections that allow you to control who sees what you post on Facebook. The first option you want to find is the Who can contact me? Section. Click the Edit option and change the setting to Friends of friends. By doing so, you’ll be safe from friend requests from all but those who are currently on one of your friends’ rosters, and you’ll be able to send your own invitations in the same way as before.

If you want to give someone the ability to see what you post without accepting a friend request, you can enable public posts. This lets you share what you post, such as articles from your industry or professional development, without sharing personal posts that are meant for only your friends–effectively allowing you to split up your personal and professional posts. Just scroll down to Public Posts in the left column and open up the Public Post Filters and Tools page. Next, in the Who Can Follow Me section, select Public. Now you can select Public to make posts available to Followers, or Friends for posts meant only for your friends.

Granted, even with all of these measures, you still need to practice healthy skepticism when dealing with users on social media platforms. You never know who your latest friend could be, as it’s easy enough to hide behind the facade of an online account and pretend to be someone else. To learn more about how you can protect your business from online threats, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

How much time is wasted in your workplace just trying to communicate about potential projects? The notable difference between productivity and stagnation is that one is making you money, while the other is costing you money. Employees spend about 80 percent of their time in meetings, on the phone, or responding to emails, so it falls on the business owner to ensure that communications are as easy as possible so minimal time is wasted.

There are different approaches to this problem. The first place where you can cut down on wasted time is the one that you likely have the most control over: meetings.

Let’s face it; sometimes meetings aren’t as productive as they should be. One way to keep this from happening is to consider how you can make more efficient use of everyone’s time. Start by making a plan and considering what exactly is on the agenda. Ask yourself what the purpose of the meeting is, and if the goal of the meeting could be fulfilled more effectively in another way. If the goal of the meeting can be achieved without collecting your entire workforce into the same room, consider doing so.

Once you have determined that the meeting is the most efficient way to achieve this goal, you want to ensure that you communicate the purpose of the meeting to all of those who must attend. This way, everyone knows what they need to get out of the meeting, and nobody will be confused about why the meeting is being held. This keeps wasted time to a minimum.

By remaining cognizant of what your meetings should accomplish, you’ll inevitably save time and even wrap your meetings up earlier. This can even change the way that employees view meetings. Instead of keeping a meeting going long enough to fill in the space on their schedules, they will see that they can get more done since the goal was achieved earlier than expected.

Another way that you can make your meetings more effective is by creating an outline and then sending the agenda out to everyone at least 24 hours in advance. This way, your workforce knows what they can expect, as well as put together their own notes for quality input throughout the meeting. Another way that you can use this to your advantage is send them something to have read before the meeting starts–in essence, assigning homework. By using these methods, your meetings will be less improvised and more focused.

Once the meeting has ended, you can ask your employees for feedback regarding the process. If you take the time to listen to all participants’ feedback, you can then use it to improve the process and meet goals even more effectively next time. Eventually, it will lead to a chain reaction where meetings go by faster and faster, to the point where you have the process down.

When it comes to streamlining any processes in your office, the right technology can make or break the effort. Technology can help you make your meetings more efficient by utilizing video conferencing or voice chat technologies, so that your team doesn’t have to be in the same place all at once. They can even dial in with their mobile devices from their current location.

This strategic approach to collaboration technology can help your organization thrive, as well as focus on creating more opportunities for profit. To learn more about how there are technology solutions specifically designed to improve collaboration, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

Fact: your business will always be susceptible to various security threats in at least some capacity. It’s up to you to counter these threats before falling victim to them. To help you with this, we’ll go over the top five threats that you need to be prepared for.

Viruses
Viruses are bits of code that plant themselves in your system and cause a myriad of problems. Viruses can cause system slowdown, problems with performance, and can even open the way for data theft or downtime. Security software like antivirus is usually enough to keep simple viruses out of your network, but more dangerous variants may be sneaky enough to dodge discovery and cause damage.

Malware
Also known as “malicious software,” malware infects a system and performs whatever its programmed function is. There are all sorts of variants out there, including spyware to watch the infected PC and capture keystrokes, and ransomware that can lock down files until a fee is paid. Malware complicates operations and can potentially put your business at risk of further data breaches.

Spam
Spam messages are both annoying and dangerous. Spam is the hacker’s preferred way of spreading viruses, malware, ransomware, and phishing scams, among other threats. They can effectively use spam to send out countless instances of the same attack to recipients all over the world. Thankfully, you can prevent the majority of spam simply by implementing a spam blocking solution. This can keep spam out of your inbox in the first place, eliminating the opportunity for user error or otherwise.

Phishing Scams
Hackers and identity thieves will use whatever tools they can to steal information from whole organizations, or specific individuals via targeted attacks. They may take advantage of the people or organizations with whom individuals associate themselves with, masquerading as vendors or close personal friends in order to gain their trust. The end result could be someone you think you know stealing sensitive information, like financial credentials or personally identifiable information. Take the time to understand some of the symptoms of these attacks, like poor spelling in messages or out-of-the-blue outreaches from the sender. Other common giveaway signs are unexpected urgent final notices or calls requiring immediate action. COMPANYNAME can help your business successfully identify these scams.

CEO Fraud
Whaling is a trend in which CEO fraud occurs by hackers stealing the identity of a C-level employee. For example, a hacker using the identity of a CEO could send legitimate-looking emails to the finance department asking for an immediate wire transfer. In these cases, the one on the receiving end of the message might not think anything of it and go ahead with the transfer. If you receive such a message, take a moment to question the legitimacy of the request by consulting official records regarding email addresses and telephone numbers associated with the message, or simply contact the CEO yourself. 

Does your business want to take network security to the next level? If so, reach out to COMPANYNAME at PHONENUMBER.

If Google Chrome is your preferred web browser, then you might notice that, just like any other application, its performance may fluctuate. When you experience issues with Chrome, it’s important to keep in mind that you can take steps to remedy the problem.

Here are three ways that you can make Google Chrome work better.

Make Use of Chrome’s Task Manager
Much like your computer’s task manager, Chrome has a feature that allows you to view your computing resources and programs at a glance. With Chrome’s built-in task manager, you can see information on browser tabs and extensions, and how much processing power they are using up. This information can help you diagnose which tabs are slowing down your browser. To open it, click the three-dot menu in the top right corner of the browser and click More Tools. Next, select Task Manager. Or, if you want a more straightforward path, just use the shortcut Shift + Escape.

Once the window opens, you’ll see all of the tabs and extensions that are currently in use, along with statistics concerning just how much resources they are consuming. If you find the offending tab, you can select it and click End Process. If you use this method to end an extension or an open tab, it will stop functioning until you reload Chrome.

Take Advantage of Hardware Acceleration
Before digging too deep into this, we want to make sure that you’re aware that it’s not always recommended that you implement hardware acceleration for your browser, as it depends on how powerful your computer is. If you’re unfamiliar with hardware acceleration and want to know how it can improve your browsing experience, reach out to your IT department or contact COMPANYNAME.

Hardware acceleration works by moving some of the burden off of your PC’s CPU onto the GPU, which can potentially resolve some processing problems by placing the page-rendering burden on the CPU. For this setting, click on the three-dot menu and open Settings. Then go down to the bottom of the window and find Show Advanced Settings. Go down from here and find the System section. Select Use hardware acceleration when available and restart Chrome to activate it.

Reset Google Chrome
If you’re not sure if your efforts have actually led to a better performance from Google Chrome, you can try resetting the browser’s settings. To do so, go past hardware acceleration and you’ll see the option to Reset Settings. Confirm your choice. Keep in mind that Chrome might not reset things like bookmarks, browsing history, or saved passwords, but it will get rid of settings like your default start page, your new tab page, your pinned tabs, and your default search engine.

Does your business have problems making the most of its technology? For more great tips and tricks, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

Downtime is something that no business wants to imagine, but it’s something that is practically inevitable if you don’t prepare for it. You’ll be forced to wonder how long it will take to get back in business, but how this problem occurred is also important to discuss. Understanding how IT downtime occurs within your organization is the first step toward making sure that it can’t happen again.

It’s clear that being able to diagnose IT problems is a great asset to your organization since the issue will be identified and resolved in a timely manner. This information can help you keep issues to a minimum moving forward. The act of getting to the bottom of a problem is called a root cause analysis. An analysis of this variety focuses on basic troubleshooting practices, which begin by looking at the functionality and performance of your technology infrastructure. Since networks typically expand and become more complex over time, your root cause analysis will only grow more challenging to pull off.

Let’s consider how much work goes into performing a root cause analysis for a small business with only one server and a few workstations, compared to a larger organization that implements more advanced solutions such as desktop virtualization or cloud computing. Chances are that finding the root of a problem for a larger business will be more of a problem, as there is simply more ground to cover than with a smaller organization. Plus, ensuring the quality and accuracy of your root cause analysis will be more challenging without an IT expert on-hand to oversee the process.

In these situations, it’s also important to involve IT in the decision-making process when upper-level executives are making technology-related choices. Since IT outages often extend much farther than simple equipment malfunctions, the problem area is frequently a poor IT policy–something that a trained IT professional will be able to identify and resolve as the need arises.

Even something as simple as a hardware replacement policy could be a problem if it’s not up to the requisite standards. Any good IT technician knows that hardware cannot and will not last forever and that it will start to show signs of degradation. Therefore, the need to replace technology before it breaks down and hampers progress is of the utmost importance, so as to avoid data loss and the expensive unexpected costs of replacing servers, workstations, and other major components. If these solutions are being monitored properly by trained technicians, chances are that they will see the problem and address it before it becomes a major concern.

A proper IT technician can identify and resolve the issues on your network so that they don’t grow too large and become major problems. Unfortunately, smaller organizations with less flexible budgets often can’t support this proactive maintenance in house. In situations like this, COMPANYNAME is glad to help with our managed IT services. We can monitor your network and minimize the damage that your organization experiences from hardware failures, downtime, and data loss. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.