First Column IT blog

Have you ever run into this scenario? You are out of the office working with a customer, or perhaps at a trade show or event, and you really need to deal with an emergency with an upset client. You pull out your phone and give the client a call and make things right. All goes back to normal for a while. A few weeks later the client wants to discuss something else and calls your cell phone directly instead of using the proper channels. You politely try to direct them to use your business line, but as the months go by, they start racking up more and more calls to your cell phone, taking your valuable time when any one of your employees could have helped them.

Do you ever feel as though technology is letting you down? You aren’t alone, every day there are things that happen with our IT here and in the course of managing other business’ IT that makes me think to myself that if they just disconnected all this stuff, they’d be doing all of us a favor. In fact, I have a story I want to tell you to put this in perspective. 

Data privacy is the kind of issue that people don’t ever want to deal with. In fact, many of the organizations that we come in contact with have a lot of personal data on file, and some of them (even some of the most reputable) are at risk to have that data stolen from them. This month, we’ll go over what constitutes personal information, why it is constantly being targeted for thefts, and what you need to do to keep your personal information as secure as possible. 

Growth can be very exciting for a business. It generally means that all the hard work that has gone into getting the business to that point has paid off. For some in your organization however, it can be a very stressful time. This is because once you commit to pay new employees, there’s some pressure to get them up to speed quickly. After all, what are you paying them for?

Patching your software is one of the most important, yet ignored, tasks in computing. Keeping all of your software up to date with the latest threat definitions can help your business’ IT stay secure. Recently, in a somewhat atypical move, Microsoft has announced that they have released an emergency out-of-band security update to fix two critical security issues.