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How to Minimize General Exposure in the Office Based on what is currently known about the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have some recommendations as to how to keep the potential impact of coronavirus to a minimum: Encourage employees who are ill to stay home. This will help to minimize the spread of infection within your business. Make sure that your employees are aware of this policy by reiterating it verbally, and by posting notices around the office encouraging them to stay home if under the weather. Emphasize hygiene and etiquette. Properly stifling coughs and sneezes and keeping hands clean are surprisingly effective ways to keep your workplace healthier. Rather than using their hands to catch a cough or sneeze, your employees should use a tissue or–if unable to do so–use the upper part of their sleeve. The CDC recommends that tissues and alcohol-based hand sanitizer should be made readily available. Make sure your employees are washing their hands with soap and water for the recommended 20 seconds. Engage in keeping the workplace clean. There is a chance that coronavirus (and other illnesses) could be spread via infected surfaces. Make sure that all surfaces that are touched frequently, like desks, workstations, and doorknobs, are kept sanitized. Provide your employees with disposable wipes so they can proactively disinfect these surfaces before use. If you find that one of your employees is confirmed to have been infected with coronavirus, make sure that you inform their coworkers of their possible exposure while still maintaining the confidentiality that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires. These employees and those who are living with a sick family member should assess their risk of exposure using the CDC?s guidelines. Coronavirus as a Cyberthreat Unfortunately, coronavirus will also require you to also keep an eye on your network security, particularly if you operate within the healthcare industry. Hackers and cybercriminals have taken advantage of the widespread concern that the disease has caused. For example: Scammers have phished healthcare providers with updates that appear to have come from the World Health Organization or hospitals local to their area, but actually introduce keyloggers into their systems. Those involved in the medical supply chain have been targeted with emails referencing the coronavirus that install malware to steal information. Ransomware has been introduced into consumer systems by promising recipients of an email information about COVID-19?s spread. While the current climate may not make it easy, these emails and other threat vectors can be overcome through the same best practices that foil other cyberthreats. In addition to comprehensive digital protections, training your employees to spot these threats will be crucial. Of course, you should also maintain a comprehensive backup in case you need to recover from a successful attack. How to Maintain Productivity with Your Team at Home With today?s technology, sending an employee home sick doesn?t necessarily mean that you will be sacrificing that employee?s productivity. We now have many ways that your team can work effectively from home, still contributing to your organizational agenda without exposing their coworkers to their illness. Equipping Your Employees Remote access solutions, paired with virtual private networking technology, can allow your employees to securely continue their work from home, safely accessing the applications and data their tasks require through an encrypted connection. As […]
Find the Right Apps If you are like most of the rest of the world, you have all manners of apps that you?ve downloaded on your phone. There are the normal apps like the email app, the browser, the app store app, and the messaging app. Then there are social media apps, games, productivity apps, dating apps, retail apps, and a slew of other apps that you don?t remember downloading as they have no purpose for you. To use your smartphone as a productivity tool you will want to eliminate most of the distractions. Sure, you can still spend hours scrolling through the app stores looking for the right apps, but we?re guessing if you are making a conscious effort to use your smartphone for productivity, that you won?t be doing that. By eliminating a lot of the extra apps you currently have, you will be able to focus on the apps that remain, the ones that allow you to be productive. Additionally, once you have the apps you want on the device, you then will want to arrange the apps in a manner that makes it simple for you to navigate to the apps that you need. For example, you can group social media apps together to keep them in one place rather than have them strewn about the device. This organization will come in handy when you are looking for the apps you need. Disable Certain Notifications Notifications are super useful, until they are a horrible distraction. Turning some of the more useless notifications off won?t hurt you, but leaving them on will hurt your ability to be productive. Turning off mobile notifications for your social media accounts (unless you need them for work) and your remaining mobile games is a solid practice that will cut down on distractions. Update Software Regularly The smartphone is increasingly being targeted as an attack vector to get onto business networks. For this reason you will want to ensure that your mobile OS is updated regularly and that the applications you depend on get their patches and updates. Typically, this process is handled automatically, but it?s smart to be sure to check. If you don?t use the app anymore, just get rid of it! Smartphones will just become a bigger part of business in the future. For more great tips and tricks subscribe to our blog.
It sounds ludicrous, but turning your computer off doesn?t accomplish the same thing as restarting it does, at least not anymore. Let?s take a look at the differences. What?s the Difference Between the Shut Down and Restart Processes? In older versions of Windows, up until Windows 7, shutting your computer down and restarting it resulted in the same process. The computer would shut down, RAM would be reset, and once you started the computer back up, you?d start with no elective processes running. With the introduction of Microsoft?s first ?metro? OS, Windows 8, this process changed. In these OSs, Microsoft has a new startup process called Fast Startup. With this feature, shutting down a device and restarting a device have two separate processes. Shut Down The presence of Fast Startup shortens the process of starting up your machine, it does this for shutting down as well. When a user commands the computer to shut down, their programs and files are shut down, but their OS is placed in standby mode. This shuts the computer down, unlike the hibernate and standby options, but it also makes Windows faster to reactivate. Since most of the computer?s processes aren?t stopped in their tracks, the issues that got you to shut it down in the first place will still be there when it is rebooted. Restart When a user selects to restart, however, the devices puts a stop to all processes. This is why it takes a little longer to restart than it would to just shut down. It is a fresh boot at the motherboard level. The difference is in the shutdown process. Funny enough, by ?shutting down? a computer, it actually leaves more components active than a restart does, making a restart the recommended process to use when troubleshooting an issue. Next time you hear ?turn your computer off and on again,? or ?reboot,? you?ll know that restarting your computer is the way to go. If you would like more information about how your operating system works, or any other technology issue you always wondered about, subscribe to our blog.
Let?s consider these positions, and why they are only becoming more important for a company to fill ? officially, or unofficially. How Technology is Represented in the C-Suite CIO Chief Information Officer When a company selects someone to be the CIO, that person is then responsible for everything IT within the company. From maintenance, to policy making, to every other consideration, the CIO will probably have their hands in it; and, as technology has grown in importance and impact in the workplace, so has the importance of having someone serve as a CIO. This importance is only exacerbated by the prevalence of cyberattacks and other threats today. Companies have had their eyes opened to the importance of comprehensive defenses, and therefore want to have an informed person somewhere near the top to help prioritize these defenses. As an executive, the CIO is more focused inwards, toward the company itself. Their job is to work amongst the departments, vendors, and service providers to make sure that all goes smoothly and that their organization?s needs are met. CTO Chief Technology OfficerOn the other side of the coin, the CTO focuses outward, focusing on how technology can be used to improve what they offer (rather than how their offering is delivered), boosting the top line rather than the bottom. With remote data storage and cloud computing rising in popularity, CTOs have seen a similar upswing. To effectively fulfill their responsibilities, a CTO will need both the background with the technical side of technology solutions as well as the creative spin to take these solutions to new areas in unique applications. As such, a CTO also needs the ability to cultivate relationships with their engineers and developers to better work together to visualize and achieve their goals. On a related note, vendor relationships are also a huge component of the CTO?s wheelhouse, as these relationships are key to ensuring the supply is there to accomplish the goals that the CTO has envisioned. CDO Chief Data OfficerFinally, you have the CDO, whose role has developed as data?s importance has increased. The CDO is effectively the gatekeeper over your data, ensuring that it is up-to-date and protected, while still accessible to your employees. This data can be used to add value to their offering, gain insight into their ecosystem, and to better measure quality through more in-depth analytics. Admittedly, this c-level position is a controversial one, as many businesses feel that their tasks aren?t the kind that require an additional c-level position to be ?created,? so to speak. Nevertheless, more organizations are leveraging a CDO to help them better lock down their use of their data, as well as its security. What Does This All Mean? In so many words, the fact that these c-level positions are popping up so often is indicative of the clearly apparent shift toward technology and its true importance to modern businesses. This shift is permeating businesses at all levels, from small shops to global enterprises. However, it is also important to acknowledge that adopting technology is often simpler for larger businesses, with their larger resources and much larger budgets. Small businesses can have a tougher time adopting these more-and-more-needed solutions, which is where the services of a managed service provider can be beneficial. With the budgetable services that an MSP […]
Server-Based LAN Let?s say you are a small business that is in the market for its first server. Up until now your LAN was just made up of what we in the IT services industry call workstations. No matter how powerful a PC is on a LAN, if it?s set up as an end-point, it?s a workstation. A server, on the other hand, is in the center of the LAN. Each workstation can access the server to get the resources on the server, whether they be communications, data storage, or access to applications. This allows for better collaboration, more efficient computing, and the improved ability to secure digital resources. What?s more, a server can be set up to allow for remote access, meaning that your employees will have the ability to have their work with them anywhere they are. You may be surprised just how much value this feature can have for your business. If everyone on your staff produces five percent more, that?s more available capital to invest in your business. In fact, if you don?t currently have a server, deploying one just for file sharing will provide a rapid and substantial ROI. Server Options There are several server options that come with varying degrees of capital outlay. Firstly, you will need to establish what exactly you need the server for. Are you implementing a company-wide email system? Do you need central file sharing and storage? Would you like to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? Whatever purpose you plan on rolling out a server for you need to understand that buying, setting up, running, and managing a server at your business comes with additional costs. In fact, you won?t find an inexpensive part of running your own server, but with the prolonged boost in productivity it should pay for itself pretty rapidly. An option that businesses have if they are unsure that their major capital outlay will produce enough profitability is to deploy a cloud server. Solutions from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace all are decent and reliable options if you were to go this route. The benefit of hosting a server in the cloud is that you don?t have to make huge capital investments on hardware, management, utilities and security. These are provided as a part of a service. These companies offer virtual servers that provide generally the same purpose, but billed per month. Essentially, this method transfers the capital costs associated with buying and running a server into operational costs. Cloud-hosted servers are more reliable than ever, but they don?t give your business the end-to-end control over data and resources that hosting your own servers can. Moreover, if for some reason your business was to lose connection to the Internet, you wouldn?t have access. This downtime can cripple even a rapidly-growing business? progress. Not to mention the reliance you then have on your level of bandwidth, another cost consideration that may make hosting your own server a little more attractive. Regardless of how you decide to roll out your company?s first server, it is an exciting time for your business. Call the White Mountain IT Services IT professionals if you have any questions regarding your organization?s information systems or IT management. You can reach us at (603) 889-0800.
