Ferrum Technology Services Blog

How does your organization manage its IT? For some businesses, it’s not an easy choice or even a remotely affordable one. Some companies are forced to endure subpar services from break-fix IT providers that don’t necessarily have the tools available to prevent issues from happening. Others try to prevent issues from evolving into major concerns. These others are the organizations that have the right idea behind technology maintenance.

Whether a person works in a factory or in an office environment, people have assumed that machines will eventually come for their jobs. This idea has bred a fear that machines will eventually become smart enough to do what they want to do rather than what we want them to do. This is mostly false, so we want to dispel these fears and explore how automation and other technologies can make your job easier and more efficient.

Everyone loves a gadget. The office space has been home to some of the coolest tech, and today there are literally millions of devices that people can use in their workspace. Today, we thought we’d introduce you to three separate gadgets that may be useful in your office. 

Today’s business is always searching for a leg up, and this often means doing what it can to improve their operational efficiency. Companies can approach this in several ways. They can try to cut out redundancies, they can invest in training, or for many businesses, it means leveraging innovative new technological tools that are designed specifically for this purpose. 

How often do you look at your email solution and think, “Wow, managing this thing takes up so much of our time. What would it be like to take that time and apply it elsewhere?” Today, businesses have all kinds of options for managing their email communications, one of which is email hosting provided through a managed service provider.

Automation is a great tool for businesses of all types, even smaller organizations that might have limited access to tools and resources. Through the use of time-saving automation solutions, even a small business can empower employees to save time and focus on other aspects of their duties by automating specific tasks and processes. Here are five ways small businesses can use automation to make operations just a little easier.

With today’s ever-expanding remote workforce, there is all the more reason to implement technology solutions that empower your organization to increase its range of options for working outside of the office. We’ve put together three of the key technology solutions we think your organization could benefit from to improve its remote capabilities and take business on the road.

With the Internet of Things growing at a rapid pace, there are many opportunities for your business to reap considerable rewards from its proper utilization. It can automate certain processes, save you capital, and mitigate human error. Let’s examine how your business can use the Internet of Things to its benefit without breaking the bank.

The idea of digital transformation can be an exciting one, especially for a small business. Let’s go over how you can make the transformative power of technology work for your company’s benefit, as well as how you can go about implementing some of these innovative new solutions.

Hardware procurement is a challenging part of running any business. When you consider that the hardware is often what keeps your business running–--your servers, workstations, networking components, and so on–--the idea of finding the right hardware at a reasonable price becomes of paramount importance. How can you make sure that your business isn’t throwing away money on unnecessary hardware procurement? It all starts with a network audit.

We just wanted to provide a public notice that Microsoft intends to increase the price of its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 offerings. If your business relies on these tools in its operations, you can expect to see your costs for them go up, regardless of where they are sourced from.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, we can help you get the greatest mileage out of these solutions… potentially by introducing you to capabilities that you have yet to take advantage of.

Last week, we committed one of our blogs to examining some of the most impressive new flagship smartphones to be found on the market—the creme de la creme, if you will, with price tags to match. This week, we wanted to focus on a different market: those looking to get a great value for less than half of what the flagships demand. If you aren’t the type to finance a phone, here are three options to consider for less than $500.

The smartphone has ushered in a revolution for communication and productivity, and in today’s world, it’s critical that we keep an eye on the developments in smartphone technology to ensure workers stay competitively productive and ahead of the game. Let’s examine three of the flagship smartphone devices for early 2022.

Investment in communications is one way that any company can improve operations and everything that comes along with them. There are many options out there to improve communications, but few have the same impact on your bottom line as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

When budgeting capital for your company’s technology, it isn’t always simple to know how much to allocate. In fact, a lot of times it can be a convoluted and troublesome experience. Our consultants spend quite a bit of time and effort working out workable budgets for our clients and today, we thought we would talk about how we come about our figures to comprehensively support a business’ technology.

If your business could make money based on its process, you’d never need to worry about results. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. You need to bring a product or service to market and sell it in order to make enough revenue to continue doing business. With the results-based nature of things, it becomes essential for the good of your company that you optimize your team’s ability to get things done. Today, we’ll talk a little bit about how collaboration gets better when your team is organized. 

Nowadays, every company relies on some kind of software. It has immense value as it can be used to make business more efficient and help reduce costs. In order to get the most out of your software, it has to be continuously managed. This is done with three steps: leveraging the assets available, testing your strategies, and understanding what it is you have.

One of Google’s latest updates allows users to change many of their menus to Microsoft’s Windows 11 style, and while this might seem a bit surprising at first glance, it should come as no surprise that Google and Microsoft might work together to push both of their products. Microsoft’s Surface Duo smartphone, for example, runs Android technology, and now Chrome can be customized to the tune of Microsoft software.

Technology changes so rapidly that it can be difficult to gauge whether or not you should be upgrading right away or examining other options for the same purposes. How can you avoid investing in the wrong solution as a result of the excitement that a new idea or concept can bring? It all starts with knowing what within your organization needs to change.

Network security is not the easiest thing to implement for your business, and you definitely need someone trained in this topic to be the one behind the wheel. Thankfully, the correct solutions can make this much easier to pull off. Here are some of the best and most important security solutions you should be considering for your organization.