Walsh IT Group Blog

When you eat food, it’s nice to know exactly what you are putting into your body, be it good or bad. This helps you make better, more educated decisions for the future. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that with your business’ technology, too, just by glancing at the label? Well, a new initiative may do just that for certain Internet of Things devices.

Isn’t it incredible how some people can build bad habits over the span of several years, then break them and replace them with better ones? It might look like it’s easy, but the reality of the matter is that building bad habits and replacing them is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming process. The brain literally undergoes physical changes during this process, and it’s all thanks to a neuroscientific principle called neuroplasticity.

With so many employees still working remotely, it’s easy to see how lost or stolen devices can create problems for your business. Therefore, like any security issue, it is critical to take it seriously before it happens rather than react to it as it occurs. Here are four preventative measures you can take today to decrease the odds of a lost or stolen device becoming a major problem for your business.

IT solutions have the potential to be major problem-solvers for your organization, but they are only as effective as the team members using them. This means that all employees must not only be trained on the solutions, but also must embrace them as the efficient solutions they are. Here are some ways that you can train your employees to make sure that your team is efficiently using new technology solutions.

There is no greater tool for your business’ success than the technology it uses, at least in theory. If you want to maximize the value you get from your technology, you need to make the correct decisions, which is easier said than done. Let’s go over some of the things to not do with your business technology.

There comes a time when every good piece of technology needs to be replaced, whether it’s due to hardware failure or it’s simply obsolete. When this happens, it is critical that you take measures to safeguard data located on your old devices by properly deleting it. But before we get into that, let’s discuss some of the steps you want to take prior to deleting your data, as well as what the process entails.

At this stage, you don’t need us to tell you that ransomware is bad. This threat has gone from being an emerging problem to one that is now sensationalized and commonplace in headlines and news stories around the world. According to a recent study, even organizations that do pay the ransom when they get infected by this threat are playing with fire.

The cloud has proven to be a valuable asset for businesses of all kinds, and more organizations are buying into it as a solution to some of the most notable problems in the professional environment. Transitioning to cloud computing comes with its own fair share of challenges, however. Here are some of the most common challenges that organizations migrating to the cloud face.

Any organization that holds medical records or other healthcare-related sensitive data needs to consider legislation and organizations that govern the privacy of those records. In this case, we are referring to HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and HITRUST, the Health Information Trust Alliance. These two acronyms are incredibly important for healthcare providers in the United States to understand.

No matter how new a device is, the unfortunate truth is that it will not last forever. Eventually, you will need to replace your device; the question then becomes what you do with your old technology. While you could just throw it in the trash, this is not only wasteful but also a security risk. In order to protect both your personal data and the environment, you must go through the proper channels to make sure that e-waste gets properly disposed of.

Business technology can be a complicated topic, and with it appearing in more and more aspects of daily operations, it is important for organizations of all sizes to be sure that they have a complete understanding and awareness of how they put their IT to use. These considerations make it imperative that certain best practices are made part of your standard operating procedures… and for this to be accomplished, company leadership will need to lead by example.

Remote work is a lot harder than it sounds, which took many workers by surprise when lockdowns suddenly made working from home the safest way for many companies to operate. As weeks and months have passed, there has been a growing tendency for these newly-remote workers to (putting it mildly) explore their other employment options… something that doesn’t bode well for your operations.

One of the most terrifying situations your business can encounter is when it’s clear that you’ve been hacked. It can cause extreme anxiety regardless of what size of a business you run. The most important thing is to know how to react to mitigate the damage to your business’ network and reputation. Let’s go through a few steps you need to take if you’ve been hacked.

Workplace burnout has been discussed quite a bit in the last year—which in and of itself seems funny, considering how relatively little time many people spent in the workplace this past year or so. However, just because the conventional workplace was altered doesn’t mean that the potential to experience burnout has been at all.

If there is one kind of online scam that people need to be more cognizant about, it would be phishing—where a scammer tries to hack the user instead of the computer, tricking them into sharing sensitive information. Phishing can come in enough forms that it has splintered into a few different varieties to watch out for. Let’s go over what a basic phishing attack looks like, some of the different types you may encounter, and how to deal with such an attack appropriately.

We’re not telling you anything you don’t know when we say that productivity is important for every business. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, there was widespread fear that productivity would drop to levels that would ruin the economy. Today, we’ll talk about the change in strategy that kept that from happening, by looking at the past year’s numbers. 

Technology is a staple for business improvements, which is why it is always important to keep a few basics in mind as you go through your operations. Let’s go through a few key strategies, just to really drive their importance home.

Passwords are a crucial element of your online security in terms of keeping threats from being able to access your accounts and resources. Unfortunately, for fear of accidentally locking themselves out of their accounts, many users have gotten into the unfortunate habit of taking shortcuts when it comes to their use of passwords. Let’s try to fix this by going over a few ways to design a password that is both memorable and sufficiently secure.

Preserving cybersecurity requires the person responsible for doing so to consider every component and connection associated with their technology, down to the smallest minutiae. Let’s consider a sizable example that comes from a narrowly avoided disaster in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that could have potentially left millions of Internet users exposed to serious threats.

Technology has helped countless businesses, big and small, approach their operational challenges and overcome them. As an example, let’s look to what global toy producer The Lego Group did to resolve some of the technical hurdles they were encountering with improved IT solutions, before we consider how your business could do the same to scale.