Smartphones and tablets 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’re interested in, these vulnerabilities are simple enough to shore up with something called mobile device management.

Microsoft Excel is an extremely useful program for visually displaying data. Having said that, these spreadsheets aren’t exactly the most attention-catching things on their own. Fortunately, Excel has some options built-in that can allow you to display your figures in a more engaging, more expressive, and more meaningful way.

Let’s face it, we live distracted lives. More people than ever have difficulty focusing on tasks due to the prevalence of continuous distractions. Whether the distractions are self-inflicted or not, workers today have to develop a strategy to ensure they are able to be as productive as they need to be. Today, we’ll look at some of the biggest distractions for employees in the workplace, and how people stay productive.

Managed IT services are a great way to make your small business take advantage of a smaller budget while still getting all of the services that are critical to everyday success. One of the best ways you accomplish this is by using proactive maintenance to ensure unforeseen issues are accounted for. If a managed service provider only solved issues after they appeared, then it wouldn’t be any different from your typical break-fix IT solution. We take proactive measures to save your business in the long run.

While it may not be fun to consider the worst-case scenario, it is important that you have a plan to ensure that your business will be able to survive when the chips are down. This plan to ensure that your business will continue is called (appropriately enough) a business continuity plan, and needs to address a few things that we will go over here.

Let’s face it--you waste countless hours on the phone dealing with vendors for all of your business needs. Whether it’s a new software solution or hardware component, you’ll have to go through someone to get it, whether it’s a big retailer like Amazon or your local Mom and Pop computer store but working with your vendors has several unforeseen costs that you might not even know exist.

Thanks to what’s become known as the “as a service” business model, organizations of all sizes can take advantage of great services that once may not have been as accessible. Even better is that they are often provided at an even more affordable rate than ever before. We’ll walk you through the specifics of what you can expect to receive from a using an “as a service” model.

Make no mistake; the Internet of Things is, depending on who you ask, already here, or soon to be on its way. More devices than ever before are connecting to the Internet, which has many security professionals up in arms to protect their networks. Yet, even if the Internet of Things is here, how long can we realistically expect most of these devices to stick around for?

Technology can be fickle at times. When it’s not working properly, it can hold your business back from reaching its maximum potential. Therefore, in order to maximize your bottom line, it becomes common sense to ensure that your technology is in proper working order at all times. The problem lies in the fact that you may not necessarily specialize in technology management, and don’t have the time or budget to perform maintenance yourself. What’s the SMB to do?

For modern businesses, network security should be a priority. Understanding exactly how many ways a network can be vulnerable is a key component to ensuring the security of your network. What follows is a sampling of 16 different vulnerabilities your business may unwittingly suffer from, and how to resolve them.

Businesses these days practically need to expect disaster, as even the most careful and calculated security practices could result in a data disaster. Some businesses don’t fear for their data enough, and this leads them to neglect planning for threats such as hackers, natural disasters, and user error. As the business owner, you need to stay informed about how best to handle these situations.

With so many new trends popping up in today's technology industry, it's only natural that a change of pace, or even a change in strategy, be considered by any business hoping to take advantage of what the world has to offer. Your company needs to adapt to change if it hopes to be successful in the future business world.

Since the inception of software, there have always been software bugs. These nuisances can cause major problems for businesses, especially in numbers. You might think that years upon years of technological developments have eradicated the threats from the world, but that's not necessarily the case.

Every business has some sort of management tasks that requires foresight, and staying up on them can keep headache-inducing situations from constantly causing downtime and costing you time; and, make no mistake, time is money. Being more proactive not only provides sound strategies, it can really mitigate the amount of problems you have to deal with. As we describe what it means to be proactive, and how that strategy will almost always help you save money, consider how you are implementing a proactive approach to your business.

Network security for small businesses is far from simple. There are countless threats out there that want to see your business fall, and it only takes one to see this come to fruition. Unless you take action now to protect your organization, you risk the future of your business. But what is it that businesses need to protect from, and what measures are out there that can accomplish this feat?

Running a business can be a fulfilling and rewarding endeavor, but on the same token, the technology that is needed for it to run can quickly become a stressful obstacle to struggle with. Fortunately, there are some easy steps you can take that allow you to minimize these moments and prevent them from occurring. We’ll review a few basics for this week’s tip!

Technology is so important to the success of your business that it’s really quite difficult to imagine it functioning without it. This prompts organizations to spend a significant portion of their budget on technology. However, some organizations are hoping to offset these costs with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, in which employees bring their own devices to the workplace for work purposes. This has various strengths and weaknesses, but if done right, you can help your organization save money.

Prioritizing tasks is one of the hardest parts of being a business owner. Countless tasks will pile up every hour of the day, and you might be lost trying to figure out how to proceed. Thankfully, you have us to offer you some strategies to approach your workday and be more productive with your time. Let’s get started!

With all the stories in the news about data breach after data breach, it’s easy to get the idea that the only threats to your organization are those that are trying to break in. This can be a dangerous oversight--one that could cost your business’ future. If you ignore the possibilities, you could very well be putting your organization in jeopardy. We’ll discuss some of the major internal dangers that your business could face.

Mobile devices - like smartphones, tablets, and the like - are expected to be used by 2.87 billion people by 2020. That’s a lot of devices, with a good portion of them contributing to business operations. Unfortunately, that’s also a lot of potential security issues if the right preparations aren’t taken in advance.