XFER Blog

You might wonder how it is possible that people can guess the passwords of others, but it turns out that it’s a bit easier than you might at first think. According to a new study, not only has a significant portion of the population tried to guess someone else’s password, but even more of them are successful in doing so. How can this be, and what can we learn from this trend?

While reading our blog and newsletters, you might come across the word “encrypted” quite a lot. Sometimes it’s in the form of ransomware encrypting data, while other times it might be regarding the encryption of passwords within a password manager. Regardless, one thing is certain: encryption is an important part of the modern workplace.

Disaster recovery is one of those platforms that businesses don’t want to have to use, but need to spend ample time planning in case they do. This is rather unique in business, so only by truly understanding what you need to get out of your disaster recovery strategy can you create the comprehensive DR system that your business requires. 

Every business has vendors and most of them take up more time than they probably should. Some of the relationships are pragmatic and fulfilling, but many take up too much time and effort and tend to distract decision makers from focusing on what is truly important within the business. As far as technology goes, depending on your company, you may have a dozen or more vendors contacting you sometimes a couple of times a month looking for you to expand your investment with their companies. Let’s talk about how vendor management can help your business.

For twenty years, hackers have tried to breach organizational networks by finding or breaking holes in the network’s perimeter, or in exposed servers. This led to the cybersecurity industry creating software designed specifically to stop these threat actors in the act. This, in essence, created a situation where the perimeter of an organization’s network was extremely hard to breach. The problem was that as soon as something was able to get through the outer defenses, there was no end to the devastation a hacker could cause inside a network.

The Internet is a wondrous place filled with countless resources and tools to be more effective in your day-to-day routine or business practices, but it is also home to a plethora of dangers that threaten the very existence of your organization. As an executive and business professional, it is your responsibility to identify opportunities to protect your company. One such way you can do so is by implementing a content filter.

More businesses than ever are using the cloud, and considering the fact that the world has been ravaged by a pandemic for well over the past year, it’s no wonder that this has happened. Still, well before COVID-19 flipped the workplace on its head, there was major change happening in the way companies utilized the cloud. All of this progress toward the cloud, however, has not diminished the importance or desire for on-site data centers. Let’s investigate this phenomenon.

You would be surprised what types of things can disrupt your business’ ability to operate. It could be something as benign as a power or Internet outage, something inevitable like a hardware component failure, or something so nefarious as ransomware. Regardless of what happens, every business should have a plan in place to respond to any situation and recover quickly and effectively. For the business that depends on data, having it properly backed up solves one major issue. This month, we thought we’d go over some of the basic questions you need to answer about your data backup and recovery process. 

How does your business manage its IT resources? Do you have a chief information officer, or CIO, in-house who manages everything related to your technology? If not, who is the one responsible for managing and maintaining your systems? If you don’t know the answer to this question, we have a reality check for you: you need to.

Technology support is a necessity for a business that wants to stay operational. To this end, a quality help desk is vital. Unfortunately, not all help desks have the same level of quality and knowledge on how to best support your business. We’ve put together a list of traits that you should look for when it comes to finding the best help desk support for your business.

Businesses are always trying to be as productive as possible, but the truth of the matter is that productivity is not a constant state of getting things done. It is perfectly natural to have ups and downs throughout the week that ultimately contribute to any progress made on tasks. The question then becomes one of how can you make progress toward goals for the workday. Here are four tips that might help you get more done throughout your day-to-day duties.

There is a misconception going around that the absolute only way you can possibly take care of your organization’s technology is to hire dedicated professionals to monitor and maintain every aspect of it. There is considerable benefit to doing this, we won’t lie, but there is value in applying specific mantras from everyday life to your IT infrastructure. With these small, common-sense practices, you might see some long-term success in IT management even without professionals at the helm.

Access control can be a touchy subject for some employees, especially for those who might feel they can do their jobs more effectively if they were to be given access to certain files or sensitive information. That said, in the interest of network security and data protection, it is your responsibility to consider who amongst your staff has access to certain information and why.

Securing your digital platforms has to be a major point of emphasis for every business. For years, having a password was enough to keep unauthorized entities out of secured accounts. Those days are effectively over. With threats multiplying and getting more and more dangerous, companies have to do more to secure their IT. This month, we thought we’d take a look at some of the best practices in creating passwords and alternatives that can help you better protect your business’ technology. 

Many businesses have started to limit the amount of printing they do, but some companies simply can’t. If your business relies on its printers and copiers, it can be a real challenge to find a reliable and knowledgeable maintenance provider. Sure, you can rely on the support provided by the manufacturer, but you may find that middling, to be kind. This month, we thought we would provide a few tips on what to look for in a printer/copier maintenance company.

Business is all about making the most of the time that you have available to you, and while some employees are great at doing such a thing, others might have silent roadblocks that eat up minutes or potentially even hours of their days. Yes, downtime is a very real threat for businesses, and while some employers are more concerned with nickel-and-diming employees for the short amounts of time they spend in between tasks, real true downtime is much greater of an issue.

If anything has been made clear by recent strings of high-profile ransomware attacks, it is that businesses and organizations simply do not take security as seriously as they need to. We urge you to use this opportunity to reconsider your own levels of network security. Are you doing all that you can to keep your data and assets secure? There are countless threats out there, and they all must be addressed (or at least prepared for) in some way.

Often smartphones are a double-edged sword for businesses: on one hand, they are a great money saver if an employee is willing to use their own for business purposes, but this does leave your business vulnerable in a few ways. Fortunately, if the benefits are something you can't function without, the vulnerabilities are simple enough to shore up with something called mobile device management.

The small business has been really hit hard recently and has been doing some hand wringing about their future IT investments. One of the major considerations is: do you keep your computing resources onsite or do you look to the cloud? Today, we will take a look at this very question.

We are consistently adamant that businesses have a comprehensive data backup strategy to help secure its operational continuity. The threat environment in which we find ourselves at the present time only reinforces the importance of such a backup strategy. This month we thought we’d take a few minutes to review what makes a business’ backup platform comprehensive.