Category Archives: blog

Level5 Management is South Florida’s leading provider of complete managed IT services for businesses. Need do-it-yourself IT resources or IT services in Boca Raton, Palm Beach County, or anywhere in South Florida? Looking for technology news or tips for solving IT issues?

Level5’s IT for Business blog features tech news from Florida and around the globe, as well as resource articles, and information on IT services for small businesses.

Whether you’re looking for Managed IT Services or just need some cybersecurity awareness tips to print and share with your office, you’ll find it here on the blog. Get tips on IT security, cloud solutions and migration, co-managed IT, IT Governance & Compliance, hardware, and more.

Keep an eye out for our expert advice on IT for the legal industry, healthcare industry, financial industry or a range of other professional services industries we specialize in.

Want to discuss your business’s IT challenges and needs with our experts? Whether your business is local to our headquarters in Boca Raton or across the country, we’re here to help! Connect to a member of the Level5 team live from our homepage, or give us a call at (561) 509-2077.

The Top 5 Smartphones for the Start of 2019

The smartphone market is one of the oddest ecosystems in the world today. Divided between east and west, many of the largest manufacturers in the eastern hemisphere are relatively unknown to western consumers. The market slump that the smartphone industry is currently experiencing only makes it more important to closely examine the features and other improvements that these devices offer. Below, we examine five of the best options for a user’s consideration.

Tip of the Week: Ward Off Holiday Scammers

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for scammers, that is. These kinds of criminals love to take advantage of the gift-giving season. With the right tools for the job, hackers can have a field day stealing sensitive information, like credit card numbers, due to the sheer amount of stuff being purchased by consumers. It’s up to you to stay vigilant and make sure you’re not being scammed, but we have a couple of tricks you can use to stay as safe as possible.

How Service Offerings Can Save Your Precious Capital

Managing and maintaining the plethora of solutions your business depends on can be challenging, to say the least. For some businesses, however, the most difficult part of using multiple solutions can often be not just managing them, but paying for them. Thankfully, there is a great service out there that uses the cloud to make all of this easier for small businesses.

Why Protecting Your Google Account Should Be a Priority

Your Google account is one of your most important assets, regardless of whether you’re a business professional or a casual user. The tricky part of using Google, however, is to make sure that you’re using this asset safely. By securing your account and valuing your Google account credentials, you can make sure your account stays safe.

Get the Technology Your Company Requires

The hardware that makes up your business’ IT infrastructure can be difficult to manage–particularly if that’s not where your specialty lies. While the first step to having a successful IT strategy is to have the proper hardware, acquiring it can be rather challenging at times, especially if your business doesn’t have an in-house IT department. Sometimes an outsourced approach is the best way to gain the best tech for your goals.

Information Technology: How to Handle the Inevitable

Sometimes it might feel like your technology never works as you want it to. You might try to open up a software application only to find an error message that keeps you from being productive. The error doesn’t go away no matter how many times you reload the application. How can you eliminate these issues that threaten to derail your productivity throughout the workday?

Technology Basics: Print Toner

By-in-large, most of today’s businesses are doing more to move away from their reliance on printed material. That’s not to say that nearly every business still requires the use of at least one printer. Most people believe that when your “ink” is low in your printer, the quality of the print job will suffer. This is true for inkjet printers, but for those that have laser printers, the “ink” isn’t really ink at all, it is a thing called toner. For this week’s technology basics article we will define what print toner is and how it differs from ink.

Data Backup Is a Staple of the Modern Business

It’s no surprise that businesses will avoid spending money on things they don’t need at all costs. While it might seem harmless to avoid investing in certain technology solutions that just aren’t needed, one that you absolutely cannot go without is data backup and disaster recovery. A business that doesn’t survive disasters can’t succeed, so if you want a future for your business, it’s important to invest now before you can’t later on.

4 Ways a Managed Service Provider Can Help Your Business

How much does your business rely on technology to keep your organization running forward? As business technology becomes more complex, it’s becoming increasingly popular for organizations to have their own internal IT departments to manage and maintain it. Yet, small businesses don’t often have the necessary funds for such a feat. How can your company afford quality IT service? You can start by pursuing managed IT solutions from a managed service provider.

When it Comes to Security, Two Factors are Better Than One

The password isn’t nearly as secure as it used to be. Hackers have begun to take advantage of extremely powerful solutions designed to brute force their way into accounts by using software to rapidly guessing thousands of passwords per second, making it extraordinarily difficult to prepare yourself for them.

What’s the best way to guarantee that passwords aren’t going to be the downfall of your company? A great start is by taking a close look at password best practices and two-factor authentication.

How to Avoid Becoming the Next Data Security Cautionary Tale

Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues – enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.

Is Your Cloud Solution Actually a Money Pit?

The cloud has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the modern business. Not only does it provide anywhere-anytime access to applications, processing, storage, et al; it also delivers those products as a service, allowing you to budget for recurring costs rather than major upfront ones. This provides your organization with functional, supported, and secure computing environments that eliminate a lot of the support costs that traditional computing environments require. It sounds like a perfect scenario for small and large businesses alike, but things aren’t always what they seem, as a lot of cloud users have found that they have incurred several hidden costs by using cloud platforms. Today, we take a look at these hidden costs.

Why (and How) SMBs Should Strategically Adopt Technology

There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want – building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

In this blog, we’ll examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.

Is Data a Commodity? Maybe Not, but It Is an Asset

The late American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Written in the 20th century, it has been put in practice by 21st century businesses. As the Internet has grown, the amount of companies expanded, and the amount of data that those companies collect has grown exponentially, especially now that there is a market for such data.

Knowing, and Planning For, Your Organization’s Compliance Burden

Despite what detractors say, regulations are in place for good reason. They typically protect individuals from organizational malfeasance. Many of these regulations are actual laws passed by a governing body and cover the entire spectrum of the issue, not just the data involved. The ones that have data protection regulations written into them mostly deal with the handling and protection of sensitive information. For organizations that work in industries covered by these regulations there are very visible costs that go into compliance. Today, we look at the costs incurred by these organizations as a result of these regulations, and how to ascertain how they affect your business.

A Look at Business Computing Costs: Cloud vs. On Premise

Profitability is less the measure of being able to turn a profit, and more the measure of how much profit you can make. For the successful small business, the integration of technology can dictate what kind of annual margins you are looking at. For the new company, however, it can be something even more critical: the difference between setting a course for success, or wallowing in failure. Today we analyze the cost difference between hosting your IT in-house, or choosing to host it in the cloud.