Ferrum Technology Services Blog

 Many businesses have turned to the productivity suite as they’ve added more and more useful tools. Traditionally, the productivity suite came with a word processor, spreadsheet program, note-taking program, and presentation software. Today, we will take a look at the variables that decision makers need to confront when choosing the right productivity suite for their business.

For businesses that are looking to make large shifts in their operational strategies by adding new technology, they may be looking at some problems when the technology doesn’t take as advertised. Today, we will take a look at how technology, as useful as it can be, can also be problematic if the deployment isn’t handled properly. 

With nearly everyone facing a recession in 2021, businesses are going to be looking to technology to keep their businesses afloat. The COVID-19 pandemic made businesses shift their priorities in 2020 and as the pandemic enters year two, these strategies will be equally important in 2021. Let’s take a look at three trends you will see businesses follow this year. 

For the modern business, collaboration has to be one of the priority aims. It can cut costs, produce better products and services, and can help a company provide great customer service.  Some companies just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Today, we will take a look at three reasons why your business  continues to fail at collaboration.

With the technology you use being increasingly important to the success of your business, it becomes crucial that your employees have access to workstations that effectively run the software your business depends on. This month, we thought we’d take a look at the myriad of computing options that the modern business has when it’s looking to buy computers for its staff.

Five months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have resolved to shift their operations and replace a lot of their onsite computing hardware with cloud solutions. While the cloud has proven to be a great method for businesses to obtain the resources they need without investing in the associated costs of a hardware refresh, its other costs could prove problematic. Let’s examine your options briefly and try to establish a sense of value.

The small business owner has to commit to changing the way that you look at his/her business. It’s not always easy. When demand makes you think bigger, your technology spend becomes a major priority. Let’s take a look at some of the changes a growing business has to make. 

A lot of people didn’t take the novel Coronavirus seriously when it was first discovered outside of China in late February. Now four months later, as the pandemic rages on, people continue to work from home, have their hours cut, or be completely out of a job. For the business owner, this period has been filled with difficult decisions, including halting all major IT projects. If your business is looking for a solution to help them add the technology they need at a price that works for this period, here are three useful options.

Over the past few years, VoIP has become an extremely popular solution for small businesses. In fact, 30 percent of today’s businesses use some sort of VoIP platform. There are many reasons why businesses are making the switch to VoIP. Today, we’ll explain a few. 

When it comes to your business, especially its technology, some of the buzzwords you hear floating around can be pretty convincing, almost intoxicating. Unfortunately, like most buzzwords, many of these are aggrandized beyond their worth to the average small-to-medium-sized business. Let’s take a look at how this can impact a business’ perception of its cybersecurity, as well as dig into the reality behind these terms.

There is a saying that you hear a lot in business: Plan for the worst, hope for the best. This is typically related to data redundancy, cybersecurity, or one of any other proactive steps a business should take to control the continuity of their business. What happens when you plan for the worst, but the best comes to fruition? What happens when your business consistently meets demand, prospers without issue, and grows quickly? Today, we will take a look at some issues the small business owner has to deal with when his/her business isn’t so small anymore. 

Could you tell me when the last time your routers were updated? How about when your servers were last maintained? How old is the hardware in your office? Where would someone go to get a new keyboard? If you don’t know the answers to these questions it is possible that your IT is not properly inventoried. This month, we’ll discuss the importance of keeping a technology inventory.

The nature of many of today’s businesses is building one product over and over and over. When you have that level of repetitiveness, it helps people find their niche, yes, but it can also result in the attention given to the task to suffer. While a disengaged employee is nothing new, they can cause some operational problems. By and large, a couple of staff hiccups won’t have a huge impact on your business, unless that lack of engagement impacts your cybersecurity. That’s because there are some threats out there that could absolutely cripple your business’ ability to sustain operations. Today, we’ll talk about how to get your staff to care about malware, hackers, and the like. 

With the development of business technology, tools have been introduced that provide greater and greater benefits to organizations that use them. Perhaps the most useful that we have today, the cloud, has enabled businesses of all sizes to take advantage of far better tools than were available to them before. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.

The COVID-19 outbreak has been a trying time for businesses and individuals, alike. Not much positive has come from it, as people, who typically band together in times of unease, are asked to stay away from each other. This has led to many people turning to their smartphones and Internet connections to communicate with the people they hold dear. With a national reliance on Internet connections there have been some new voices (and some familiar ones) advocating for the return of net neutrality. Today, we’ll remind you what net neutrality is and why this situation has people calling for a change. 

At this point, it’s hard to believe that anyone needs to be told that cybersecurity is important, but some organizations are still doing the bare minimum to protect their network and data. That can’t go on forever. Today, we thought we would discuss how to put together a cybersecurity policy that covers all the bases, and will give you the peace of mind that you are actively combating today’s most present threats to your network, infrastructure, and data. 

If you are a subscriber of this blog, you know that each week we create content that aims to educate people about the value of managed services and the growing importance of information technology. Today, we thought it would be useful to put together a glossary of some terms that we regularly use to ensure our readers understand what we are referencing. 

A business’ data is one of its biggest assets. For the smaller business, large portions of an IT budget can be spent storing data. One way to keep costs down and maintain control over all this data is by utilizing Network Attached Storage (NAS). 

If you were asked to describe your average tech support experience, chances are that you remember a time when you had to either wait around for the technician to come around, dealing with downtime the entire time; or, worse yet, unplug your technology and schlep it across town to the break/fix store only to be told that it may be done in the next few days (code for over a week). Today, we’ll tell you how managed IT services can keep you from playing the waiting game. 

Over the past two decades, business technology was largely separated between information technology (IT)--that is, the business’ computers, networking equipment, and peripherals--and operational technology (OT): all other technology. As IT advanced, so has OT, which today presents many of the same risks that IT always has. Today, we will take a look at how to secure your business by focusing on where your IT meets your OT.