TechNet Task Group Blog

The past year has been tough on many businesses. If they’ve learned anything it is the importance of staying flexible. The COVID-19 pandemic has created the need for organizations to move their operations offsite for fears of spreading the virus. With several different pharmaceutical companies now testing and pushing out vaccines for the virus, it seems that offices and other places of businesses will be opening back up, right? 

While phishing awareness is an important practice to teach to a business’ employees, some methods are better than others, as GoDaddy—the domain registrar and web-hosting company notorious for its run of risqué ads—is learning the hard way. On December 14, GoDaddy’s employees received an email that seemed to be a holiday bonus from the company… only to find out (the hard way) that it was a phishing test that their employer had run.

Uh oh—your mobile device is missing.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, time is of the essence… particularly if you have reason to believe that your device was stolen. To help prevent things from getting messy, we’ve put together a checklist for you to run down in case you suddenly can’t find your smartphone or tablet.

It isn’t like anyone actively means to lose their smartphone, but stuff happens. After all, many of us have our device in-hand for most of our waking hours, so there’s plenty of opportunities for it to be left behind somewhere. Fortunately, there are ways that you can set up your smartphone to help track it should it be lost, whether it’s an Apple device or on the Android platform.

With nearly everyone facing a recession in 2021, businesses are going to be looking to technology to keep their businesses afloat. The COVID-19 pandemic made businesses shift their priorities in 2020 and as the pandemic enters year two, these strategies will be equally important in 2021. Let’s take a look at three trends you will see businesses follow this year. 

People are constantly using Wi-Fi. In fact, 87 percent of people admit to using public Wi-Fi connections, which consequently is one of the most common ways to get data stolen or devices inundated with malware. With so many people depending on Wi-Fi, and your business looking to use it for enhanced collaboration, we thought we should discuss a few hot tips to get you started in the right direction.

Your business relies on its software, so if that software presents major security issues, it can be really concerning. In order to keep software from being a point of entry for hackers and scammers, you need to update and patch your software. Today, we’ll briefly discuss patch management and why it is a policy that you should be actively pursuing. 

The holidays are a great time to give technology to your loved ones. One of the most popular smart devices for each of the past few years is the smart watch. While they are extremely useful and make great gifts, they may have an effect on an organization’s cybersecurity.  Let’s take a look at some of the possible threats smartwatches may present for IT administrators.

Despite all the attention we try to direct toward cybercrime and awareness of the risks out there today, hacks and scams are still impacting businesses. With so many professional duties and activities carried out online, your business’ cybersecurity needs to be considered paramount. Here, we’ve listed six things to prioritize in your business to help protect it from such activities.

Honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising that 2020 has come to an end with news of a massive cyberespionage attack—the biggest ever, as a matter of fact. Let’s dive into what we know, and what it signifies.

There is no denying that, as far as Christmas days go, 2020’s is much different than most of us are used to. Instead of visiting with family and friends, most of us are remaining at home and awaiting the normalcy that a vaccine to COVID-19 will bring. With that normalcy, we also anticipate a return to something like typical business operations.

If you’re at all familiar with us, you’re probably aware of how highly we rank data backup. If your business creates or stores any data (which we guarantee it does) you need to have a backup to protect it, as simple as that. Let’s take a few moments to review how a BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) can benefit your business and its long-term continuity.

2020 is finally coming to a close. It has been an extraordinarily long year for most small businesses. Even if yours hasn’t seen a lot of the financial problems that thousands of businesses are seeing, you've definitely had to make some major adjustments that often come with additional cost. Through it all, one part of your business has been a rock, your people. 

Regardless of what you use it for, having the right amount of bandwidth to support your business’ needs is extremely important. Not only does it support enhanced productivity, collaboration, and business efficiency, it removes the bottlenecks that can stymie a business’ progress. Today, we will take a look at bandwidth, and tell you how to determine the bandwidth you need to support all of your business’ Internet-facing needs. 

Collaboration is an important capability for your team to share, particularly with the recent upsurge in remote work. Fortunately, many of today’s solutions are designed to facilitate this critical collaboration. Let’s review some of the tools available to your business that can help support its operations.

Phishing attacks are growing in number and it presents a major challenge for businesses. The many different forms that these attacks come in just exacerbates the problem. Today, we will take a brief look at phishing to help you educate your staff on what they entail and how to mitigate the massive risk that comes with them. 

We’ve all had those days when motivation eludes us, and they can be extremely frustrating. Fortunately, there are ways that you can rejuvenate your drive in either your personal or professional life. Let’s go over some of these tactics to try and keep burnout at arm’s length.

There is a whole section of the workforce who forgoes the stability of a full-time job and contracts themselves out by the job. For many of these workers, the boom in application development has given them endless opportunities to make money. This all changed in March as government officials put forth stay-at-home orders, effectively putting millions of people out of work, and millions more displaced from their workplaces. This has had a dire effect on many of the gig workers that were making a living as more people are now trying to do whatever they can to make ends meet. Today, we thought we would look at the gig economy, how it functions, and how COVID-19 has exposed the gig economy.

2020’s holiday season is going to be much like the rest of 2020: distanced. Most people are taking precautions and therefore have put the kibosh on much of their holiday shopping trips, choosing instead to do a majority of their shopping online. By avoiding one risk, people take on others. Today, we thought we’d outline some of the problems people may experience when shopping online and what to do to reduce your risk.

Every so often, we come across a bit of news that helps to teach not one, but two cybersecurity best practices at the same time. With the recent news of a cache of hacked Spotify accounts, we find just such an opportunity. Let’s review the two lessons to be learned.