Author Archives: Level5 Management

The good old days, the timeless oldies, there’s no school like the old school… A lot of us fondly look back on the simpler times, but technology typically pushes forward. In fact, if we look back at what we were collectively doing with computers back in the 80’s and 90’s, it’s practically embarrassing. Sure, the music and television shows of our formative years will never be topped, but less can be said for the technology. Unless you are a Boeing 747…

Smartphone users know how hot their devices can get, seemingly without reason, and how unnerving that can be. No wonder—these heat levels can damage the device itself. This means it is very important to try and control its temperature as best you can. We’ve put together some tips to help you keep your phone from overheating.

A business’ employees are perhaps its greatest weakness in terms of its cybersecurity, although they also have the potential to be one of its greatest advantages if trained properly. To demonstrate this, let’s consider a few examples that exemplify either case.

Spreadsheets are a supremely useful tool for businesses to use, but it is important for you to consider which option will work out best for your particular needs. Let’s consider the biggest two spreadsheet applications available today—Microsoft’s Excel and Google’s Sheets—to familiarize yourself with your options.

In modern business culture, productivity reigns supreme. So much so, in fact, that the concept of a break is unofficially frowned upon and seen as an indicator of an unproductive employee. Breaks can actually benefit the productivity of your team. Let’s go over the perception of a break, and what the reality is.

Traditionally, when you talk about employee health, issues come up about health insurance and workplace safety. With the COVID-19 pandemic six months old, new considerations have to be made. The pandemic has caused many businesses to reassess the way they go about doing things to ensure that their workforces aren’t exposed to the virus, and that employees can handle their jobs with the pressures brought forth by the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Today, we’ll review some of the considerations business owners have to make to keep their workforces safe. 

Cybersecurity is challenging enough… you don’t need issues coming from one of your key applications. However, since a bug was found in some of the most popular Internet browsers today—potentially risking billions of people’s data security—you could very well see these kinds of issues. Let’s go over this vulnerability, and what you can do to address it.

Wireless Internet connectivity is an indispensable utility in today’s modern office. However, implementing one that will perform optimally is far from a straightforward task. Here, we wanted to offer you some tips to make the planning process for your Wi-Fi implementation both simpler, and more productive.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major effect on business. Despite this fact, we’re starting to get to the point where most businesses are at least being allowed to attempt to conduct business in a somewhat normal fashion, but it’s definitely a new world out there. Business owners in all lines of business are looking for that tool that can improve productivity, make their operations more efficient, and spit out the metrics they need to tweak them. 

I want you to take a moment and consider something: is your business prepared to survive any kind of data disaster? If you aren’t, you need to ensure that your systems—all your systems—can recover from whatever feasible event might impact them. This is what is known as IT resilience. Let’s dive in a little deeper.

While remote work can be a hugely popular and successful strategy to ensure your business’ goals are accomplished, remote meetings can often offer up challenges for those that aren’t used to them. For this week’s tip, we’re offering three ways that you can help make these meetings easier to manage.

So many organizations continue to use a decade-old operating system, and they really, really shouldn’t.

Here’s the thing: Windows 7 is dead and gone… and yet, as of July, it still had a market share of about 23 percent, making it the second-most-popular operating system. Here, we’ll be going over just why it is—if your company is still using Windows 7—that you need to update to Windows 10 immediately (if not sooner).

The impact of COVID-19 to businesses has been such that we will not likely return to the way business was run before all of this happened. A major factor to this is how businesses once made use of their technology. The shifts that have occurred in the last few months will not likely go away, even after the pandemic ends.

As remote work has become more common, so have tools that assist mobility and Bring Your Own Device strategies. Considering this, businesses need the means to keep control of their data and the technology that can access it. To do so, Mobile Device Management cannot be oversold as a benefit.

Five months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have resolved to shift their operations and replace a lot of their onsite computing hardware with cloud solutions. While the cloud has proven to be a great method for businesses to obtain the resources they need without investing in the associated costs of a hardware refresh, its other costs could prove problematic. Let’s examine your options briefly and try to establish a sense of value.

Remember a few months ago when Google and Apple joined forces to come up with a system to help state and local governments establish a COVID-19 Exposure Notification system? If you didn’t, you aren’t alone. A lot has been going on lately. Just to catch you up, the two tech giants recently pushed out an update across nearly all modern smartphones so state and local governments can deploy apps to notify people when they may have been exposed to COVID-19. Let’s do a deep dive on what this means for your privacy.

While there’s been no “official” date set for the release of Android 11, there have been plenty of indications so far of its features in its ongoing beta tests. We decided to look forward into the near future to see how some of these features could help us to be productive.

As people have increasingly shifted to working remotely, the importance of accessible support for their devices has risen substantially. This has led many businesses to use managed IT service providers, or MSPs, like us to provide this kind of support. To do so, we’ve invested in a series of tools collectively called remote monitoring and management software (RMM). Let’s share some of the reasons that you want an IT support provider that uses RMM to their advantage.

We’ve come a long way since 1879 and the invention of the cash register. Today, point-of-sale (POS) solutions offer massive benefits to businesses who take advantage of their capabilities. Let’s go over how these capabilities can help the modern business and its owner.

While stocking up ahead of time may be a sound strategy for things like breakfast cereal and toilet paper, the same cannot often be said in your business. In fact, excess inventory can sometimes cost your business a lot of money. That’s why we figured that we would discuss how an inventory strategy can help prevent redundant spending in your business.

Like many other businesses, COVID-19 has foiled the big plans you had for 2020, but it has presented a different set of opportunities. Many businesses had deliberately avoided providing remote work opportunities for their employees, mostly out of the fear that their teams would become inefficient, less productive, and present management and security challenges. Now, after a few months with little choice but to suddenly embrace it, the major challenges are actually delivering the resources your nelly remote workforce needs to produce results in line with expectations.

If your business uses as much technology as the average business, you will need to ensure that it is properly documented. Today, we’ll go through what a managed service provider includes in their documentation practices.

Google—the name that has become synonymous with searching online, it is (if we’re being totally honest) the go-to means of seeking out the information we need. We’ve all used it, but did you know that there are tricks to make your searches more efficient? For this week’s tip, we’ll go over these tricks so that you can use Google Search that much better.

Business reopening is proving to be relatively difficult as COVID-19 isn’t going away. To ensure the health of your staff, while still reopening your business to create revenue, you will need to carefully weigh all your operational decisions. Today, we have outlined some best practices in which to do so. 

Your business’ data is extremely important to the livelihood of your business and as a result, you need to have plans in place to protect it. Sure, you can invest in all the top notch cybersecurity tools and services, and they may keep you from getting your data stolen or corrupted, but what happens if something terrible happens to the servers that it is stored on? No level of threat detection is going to save a server if it is charred, under water, or its components are completely fried.