Suffolk Computer Consultants, Inc. Blog

No matter where your business calls home, it will be vulnerable to some sort of disaster, whether it’s a natural disaster that wipes your office off the map or a cyberattack that cripples your data infrastructure. You don’t have to resign yourself to this fate, though; with the appropriate tools, your business can survive just about anything and keep operations going even under the worst circumstances.

There are a lot of threats out there that can place some pressure on your business to think and act a certain way, but unless you are actively searching for threats on your network, you might find yourself coming up short in regards to network security. Why is monitoring your network so important, even with preventative measures in place? It all starts with imagining the worst-case scenario.

Traveling is one way that many of us are attempting to feel less isolated and alone during the COVID-19 pandemic, but a certain level of caution must be exercised when it comes to the technology we use while we travel. Here are some ways you can keep your technology safe and in check while traveling this holiday season.

Just like the other Microsoft products in the Office suite, like Word and Excel, Outlook has several keyboard shortcuts that you can use to be more productive. We’ve put together a handy guide of some of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts you should keep in mind to get the most out of Outlook.

Sometimes it can be challenging to manage your IT solutions, but much of the advice that applies to technology is just general advice for living a good life. Let’s take a deeper dive into these ideas and see if we can apply certain life lessons to a business IT setting.

Unless you live under a rock and somehow missed it, Facebook experienced an outage, an inconvenience that kept users from accessing its services all over the world. Perhaps to your surprise, the real ramifications of this outage have nothing to do with people not being able to share pictures of their cats or yell at each other in the comments.

The people who make use of your products or services, be they clients or customers, are the ones who keep your business afloat. Therefore, you must do your part to ensure that they are happy and satisfied with your business. Thankfully, the right technology can make doing such a thing much easier. Let’s explore some of the opportunities your business has to improve the customer experience through the use of innovative IT solutions.

When it comes to network security, there is a lot that can go wrong for your business and countless solutions that you can implement to combat them. However, there are small practices that you can implement on a daily basis to improve security as a whole, so if your collective staff can implement this one easy trick, you might be surprised by how beneficial it can be for your network’s security. This practice? Locking your computer.

Unfortunately, technology does not last forever, and today’s culture of upgrades means that users of smartphones and other devices are constantly updating even when they don’t need to. This practice can extend to businesses, too. Businesses need to have a strategy in place that they can use when it is time to upgrade from older devices, including the way that you dispose of them. Here is how you can effectively dispose of your older connected devices without sacrificing the environment and your data privacy/security.

Paper documents have always been a major part of doing business, whether it’s signing contracts between you and your clients or employee paperwork from when you make new hires. The thing with paper documents, however, is that they can take up a ton of space in filing cabinets, and depending on your habits, they can quickly become unorganized.

As you read this sentence, think about the current state of your email inbox. Is it clean and crisp with only a handful of new emails on a daily basis, or is it an entangled mess filled with hundreds (or even thousands) of unread and often unimportant emails? If it’s the latter, you’re in luck; we’ve got some tips to help you finally get a grip on your email inbox.

Business communications have seen some significant changes, particularly with recent events being what they have been. Instead of your team members having the opportunity to simply turn to one another in the office, there are now added hoops that they must jump through. Let’s go into how your internal and external communications should adjust to meet these changes.

The most successful businesses are those that are always seeking to improve what they offer—oftentimes, taking a successful element and simply making it more efficient to deliver. In the past, this basically meant that businesses needed to have their employees work more quickly. However, today’s improved technology and the automation that it makes possible have delivered a much more consistent option.

A business’ data needs to be considered a priority, which means that its protection should be prioritized accordingly. One facet of doing so is maintaining a backup with a strategy in compliance to best practices. To accomplish this, your backup should feature something that isn’t often considered a benefit: redundancy.

Part of being a successful entrepreneur is having a positive mental attitude. After all, pessimists wouldn’t make it far. Stats, however, tell a story regardless of a business owner’s perception.  Statistically, most businesses will have to deal with some sort of “disaster”. That is: a situation where your business will be very much at risk. For this reason, we recommend BDR.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses into implementing remote operations, such work had been rising in popularity for a while. As a result, this only makes it more important to consider remote work as an option, particularly as the need to socially distance remains pressing.

We talk a lot—a lot—about “best practices” regarding IT and technology. However, it has come to our attention that not a lot of people necessarily know what this means, especially when it comes from an MSP. We wanted to take a few moments and go over what best practices are, and why it is important that they have a presence in your business’ IT.

There is no denying that “collaboration” is one of the biggest business buzzwords right now… and for good reason, since it is a prerequisite for any business seeking to compete in its market. Let’s take a different tack than we usually would and consider some of the non-technical elements your business needs to incorporate to encourage collaborative work.

Collaboration is widely accepted as a “must-have” in the current, connected business environment… at least, for any organization that wants to remain competitive. Let’s take a few moments and consider what needs to be present for any collaborative efforts to be successful, and the skills you should work to develop in your team members to enhance their capacity for cooperation.

As the summer of 2020 ends, kids are preparing to go back to school… albeit in a much different way than any of us have ever experienced. Instead of going to stores and picking out folders and pencil cases and binders, a lot of kids are hunkering down at home and preparing to learn remotely.