Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Whenever you see a data breach in the news, it’s never a good thing. Their impact ranges from minor to severe, and depending on the size and scope of the breach, it could even be bad enough to break a business. Let’s go over how you can keep your business from suffering from data leaks.

With Microsoft Excel, you can use visuals to represent your data, providing greater context for the contents of your spreadsheets and making it easier to communicate what it all means. This week’s tip focuses on People Graphs, a feature that can be powerful when used appropriately.

Are you sure that your business can control all of its data? Are you absolutely certain that it can be accessed when needed? Can you guarantee that it’s as secure as humanly possible, wherever it happens to be? You should be able to answer these questions with an unequivocal and resounding “yes,” yet central data management is far from a simple task.

Most businesses create and hold a lot of data, much of which goes underutilized. Thanks to improved developments in data analytics and business intelligence, more businesses can take advantage of their data to make better decisions and improve operations, thereby increasing profits in the process. At the heart of these developments is data warehousing.

Digital storage is one part of computing that has seen astronomical growth over the past several decades, and with the solid state drive (SSD) more affordable than ever, you have to wonder how well your old hard disk drive (HDD) is holding up. Despite the cost difference between the two, the HDD is a viable option, albeit a mechanical one that is prone to breakdown over time.

We frequently write about topics in relation to business IT, but one that we have yet to cover is Schofield’s Laws of Computing. What are these laws, and what can businesses learn about them?

My team and I are big fans of a good spreadsheet, just as a simple way of organizing and contextualizing your data. Therefore, we’re all for sharing some neat ways that you can make these visualizations even easier to communicate your findings through.

Let’s talk about how you can make your Excel spreadsheets into a heat map, giving you this kind of increased visibility.

We talk a lot about best practices that you and your entire workforce need to follow in order to protect yourself, your business, and your customers from data theft. From ensuring that you have strong, unique passwords and making sure two-factor or multi-factor authentication is applied to all of your accounts, to keeping your endpoints updated, a lot of prevention is considered the barest necessities of cybersecurity. It’s worth understanding just how clever cybercriminals are, and just how easy it is to slip up and lose control over your own information.

Regardless of the business attempting it, data migration (or the process of moving data and systems to a new piece of infrastructure) is critical to get right. One way to improve your chances of success is to create and follow a migration strategy, evaluating it as you go. Let’s walk through some practices involved in doing so.

The cloud has become a hugely popular resource for businesses of all sizes to lean on for a multitude of needs, many using it for some form of data storage. While using the cloud for this means, however, it is wise for you to do everything available to secure the data you’ve stored there. Let’s go over a few things that we recommend you do to help protect your data.

It sincerely seems that every other day features news of another cyberattack, and it isn’t uncommon for the word “ransomware" to be tossed around an awful lot. Let’s take a few moments to go over—or review—what ransomware is, and arguably more importantly, how to handle any you or your team encounters.

The headlines hyping up ransomware as a dangerous threat are not exaggerating. It really is as bad as it seems, although there is often a fair amount of embellished information on what ransomware exactly is and what it does. Let’s take some time to review what ransomware is and how your business can handle it in an appropriate way.

Technology is a modern marvel, that much is certain, but it wasn’t that long ago that we were remarkably far behind where we are today. Let’s take a look at data and examine how something so small can be something so incredibly important to the modern business world.

Your typical book holds a lot of data, but now that we have stoked your curiosity and amazement with how much data is held by the Library of Congress, we’d like to put this number into perspective with some everyday explorations. Let’s take a look.

Earlier this year, it became known that almost 2,000 mobile applications suffered from some type of security threat, thus putting a lot of sensitive data on the line. Let’s examine how you can ensure that your business doesn’t suffer from mobile app security issues.

It’s been about a month since LastPass—one of the most well-known and popular password managers out there—suffered a security breach where attackers managed to worm their way into the systems where LastPass stored its source code. Let’s review the situation, and what your response should be.

Mobile devices have cemented themselves in day-to-day life, so much so that people feel uncomfortable when they don’t know where their smartphone is or if they don’t have it on their person. Furthermore, devices can keep track of your location; this goes for the applications on your device, as well. How do you keep track of which devices have these privileges, and what do you do to manage them?

Individual data privacy is finally gaining steam in a lot of places. There are more state laws being passed than ever before and even the businesses that prosper off the holdings of this data are doing more to allow people to protect their likeness online. Today, we want to discuss how to remove some of your personal data from a Google Search result. 

Technology has changed the way that healthcare is delivered to patients, and it has helped to stabilize costs, increase access, and personalize the care delivery process. That said, these innovations have led many to question the privacy of patient data, bringing the issue front and center. Let’s take a look at how IT has changed the way that the healthcare industry functions in regard to data privacy.

A data breach is no joke, and it can take many forms. Whether it’s a case of confidential data being viewed, copied, stolen, or destroyed, a data breach cannot be ignored. Let’s take a look at some of the various causes of business data breaches and what you can do to prevent them from sinking your organization.