MSPNetworks Blog

The workplace is, fittingly, a place for work to be done. While there are a lot of factors that can contribute to a person’s day-to-day productivity, having a space that is conducive to accomplishing their work tasks can be seen as essential. Let’s go over how you can design a workspace that does just that:

Have a Place for Gadgets to Be Out of Sight (and Out of Mind)

While mobile devices have many legitimate and genuinely useful applications in the workplace, the pattern many have to sit and endlessly refresh their social media profiles isn’t one of them. A good rule of thumb to improve productivity is to keep these devices—and any gadget like them—put away. 

Of course, this isn’t a perfect solution to procrastination. People don’t need a device to zone out, and it isn’t as though they couldn’t visit Twitter on their workstation if they really wanted to. However, by reducing the potential for temptation, you and your team members can accomplish more. Pick a desk drawer to keep your phone in, and you may find yourself accomplishing much more.

Invest in the Right Peripherals

This may sound crazy, but giving your team the right tools to use can make all the difference. A good pair of headphones very much helps collaboration and communication if they also feature a headset, and by blocking external sound, they reduce the distractions that make it through to your team members’ collective attention. There are countless similar examples for all of the other peripherals your team may depend on, depending on their role—and there’s nothing wrong with going a little low-tech here, too.

For instance, if you haven’t switched to a paperless office and your team still uses paper documentation, providing each person with a pen and paper to jot down quick notes and a monitor-mounted document holder that allows them to reference other files and notes without shifting their gaze too far can keep their focus where you want it: the task at hand.

Encourage Movement and Personalization

There are also the little ways that you can help keep your team engaged and thereby productive. For instance, if it isn’t overdone, a little bit of movement keeps your team more engaged than motionlessly staring at their monitors all day does. Likewise, a clinical workspace that’s devoid of personality can also leave employees feeling devoid of purpose. So long as it isn’t overdone to the point of distraction, a few personal belongings and other identifiers can contribute a lot to an employee’s engagement (bonus points for plants, which have been shown to boost productivity through their presence).

In a lot of ways, you have more control over how productive your team is than you may think—it’s just up to you to give them the environment and tools they need to thrive. We can help supply the tools and support they’ll need. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today and ask how our managed services can help boost (among other things) your business’ productivity!

While we’re all for efficiency, there are some boundaries that should not be crossed for everyone’s benefit. Take, for instance, the email you use to subscribe to online services. While it may be tempting (or, for some people, automatic) to use your work email address when you sign up for, say, your Netflix account or an online merchant, we wanted to discuss why this is a bad habit to get into that could have lasting consequences.

The reason you shouldn’t use your work email for personal purposes is a simple one:

What Happens If You No Longer Work for the Company?

Seriously, we want to know: what’s your plan if your employment comes to a sudden end?

Let’s say that you were using your work email for an assortment of personal reasons—maybe you used it to subscribe to a few subscription services, or you used it to login to a favorite online retailer or two… maybe one named after a really big river in South America.

Potential for distraction aside (which is itself a whole other can of worms), tying your personal life too much to your work life can have some long-term issues. Let’s say you did choose to use a work email to sign up for a personal service, only to leave that job some time later.

Regardless of the reason you leave—whether you or your position was terminated, you found another job, whatever—one of the first things that any responsible company will do is to deactivate your accounts from their system. Neglecting to do so would be a cybersecurity failure on their part. Good luck trying to recover a forgotten password when the authentication is sent to an email you no longer have access to.

Businesses Should Actively Discourage Private Use of Professional Email Addresses

There are plenty of reasons that a business should want to keep their users from using their professional email accounts for their own personal purposes. We’ll quickly run through the list:

• Corporate accounts are readily available online in many cases, making them easy targets for phishing and spam.
• On a related note, it becomes a lot easier for a cybercriminal to find online accounts that are tied to a business email address and use what they find to craft more effective spear phishing messages—ones that are tailored specifically for a particular recipient.
• Many people still reuse passwords across many different websites and services, so if a website is breached that an employee’s work email was used to access, there’s a good chance that a work password could be stolen with it.

Cybersecurity Needs to Take Precedent Over Convenience

While convenience is an appealing motivator, it is important that your processes are shaped to prioritize your business’ security. Educating your team about password best practices and the actual importance of this kind of work/life balance will be key to shoring up this particular security issue.

We’re Here to Help Strike the Balance

Turn to us for help with keeping your team members from inappropriately merging their work lives and personal lives, as well as our assistance in optimizing the rest of your processes. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.

The past several years have brought about a shift in the workforce, and it’s not one that anyone could have seen coming. More people than ever before are leaving their jobs. How can you keep your employees engaged so they have a minimal chance of leaving their position within your company?

Here are some tips you can use to keep your employees from participating in “The Great Resignation.”

What is Driving The Great Resignation?

Several different contributing factors are involved, the result being 47.8 million voluntary job vacancies in 2021 alone. This was the highest number recorded since 2001, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022 will likely not be any better. In February alone, there were 4.4 million resignations in the United States.

This trend is not exclusive to the States, either. The social media posts about people quitting their jobs with the highest levels of engagement are from all over the world.

But Why Are People Quitting?

Some people who are leaving their positions joined during the pandemic, where remote work policies were in place and the people involved–those in the Gen Z age group, for example–are not interested in a commute to the office. On a similar note, many parents, some of them new, are finding that the time spent at home while working remotely helps tremendously to balance their home life responsibilities.

In fact, some are leaving their positions because they are being urged to return to the office, something which is simply not preferable for some workers. In this case, the needs of workers are being sidelined by companies’ needs to control their workforce. This has ultimately led to workers making sacrifices in their flexibilities and pay just to remain in a remote work environment.

Other reasons to leave might include poor workplace interactions and a lack of work/life boundaries. The Great Resignation has forced many people to look at their own priorities and to shift their focus to things that matter most in their lives, and work does not seem to be among them.

How Can I Avoid Losing People?

Simply put, you can do a lot of good by acknowledging that remote work is a possibility for your workforce, and it will do a lot to aid in employee retention. This will be particularly helpful to keep employees on both the younger and the older sides of the spectrum. You might even consider offering hybrid options if you can’t bring yourself to commit wholeheartedly to remote work options.

MSPNetworks can help you implement the technology needed to aid in this shift. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity is a lot easier to reinforce in the office than it is when your team members are working remotely—and even then, it can be a serious challenge to maintain. However, let’s focus on the remote worker’s situation for a few moments and review a few best practices that can help a remote worker stay secure.

Best Practice: Provide Them with the Tools to Stay Secure

When your team members are working outside of the office, they aren’t going to be protected by the security you’ve implemented into your business network—not without a few specialized tools in place. This is why your remote workers should have fully up-to-date antivirus solutions and virtual private networking (VPN) connections in place.

A VPN in particular is a great tool for a remote worker, as it allows them to access your business’ network from elsewhere without revealing their traffic and data to snooping eyes.

Best Practice: Emphasize Password Security Even More

Spend enough time with us, and you’ll likely be able to recite the advice that we repeatedly share regarding passwords—never writing them down, using a different password for every account, creating passwords (or ideally, passphrases) that will hold up to attempts to crack them, and many more tidbits. Remote employees need to be held to the same standards, and then some.

With your team members acting outside of your office, they aren’t sitting in an environment that actively reminds them to maintain their security standards in general, meaning that their password practices are apt to suffer. Working to keep these standards top of mind will be important for you to prioritize.

Best Practice: Reinforce Physical Protections

Cybersecurity practices go beyond password resilience and antivirus protections—you also need to consider your actual technology and the physical protections you have defending it. Keeping unexamined peripheral devices away from your work hardware, keeping your work hardware secured, and generally keeping it reserved exclusively for your work-related use are essential parts to your overall security posture.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg—there’s a lot more that can and should be done to ensure your remote workers aren’t undermining your business’ cybersecurity. Learn more by reaching out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Laptops are pretty great, I think we can all agree, simply due to their portability. Having said that, the one-screen situation that laptops bring with them can certainly get in the way of productivity—particularly for those who are used to using more than one. Let’s discuss why an additional display is so helpful, and what your options may be for hooking one up to your laptop.

Why an Additional Screen is Worth It

First off, if you haven’t used a second monitor to work yet, it’s time to get on board. The average business workstation really should have two displays, simply because it has shown to provide a significant boost to productivity. Instead of rearranging tabs and windows each time you need something else in focus, double the working area gives you considerably more options. Need to check your email pretty consistently throughout the day? Have it up on one of your monitors, while your current task is up on the other. Need to check data? Have a historical record on one side, with the new version on the other.

Honestly, once you start using multiple monitors, just having access to one feels restrictive.

Plus, adding an additional monitor doesn’t have to be a bank-breaking investment—provided the monitor you’re choosing isn’t too expensive (which, for business purposes, it usually doesn’t need to be). The other hardware you have has probably already been configured to add an additional monitor by adding at least one additional port.

How to Check That Your Laptop Supports Multiple Monitors

In terms of hardware, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

• Does my device’s graphics card support multiple monitors? Nowadays, this is simple enough to determine. All you need to do is visit the manufacturer of the graphics card’s website, find your particular model of graphics card, and check the specifications to see if multiple monitors are supported. Of course, IT can help you with this.
• Does your laptop have the right port available? Naturally, you’ll need a way to plug your additional display(s) into your device. We’ll cover this in deeper detail in a moment.

Once you’ve confirmed that your laptop can support more than one monitor input, all you really need to do is plug in your additional display and—once Windows either prompts you to set it as an additional screen or just does it itself—you’re off to the races.

Otherwise, you can access your Settings, and from there, navigate through System, Display, and scrolling down to Multiple displays, adjust the provided drop-down menu so that Extend these displays is selected.

Which of These Ports Can Be Used?

When it comes to attaching an additional monitor, there are a few different ports to choose from.

VGA Ports

While this is an older option, some devices still have a VGA port (the blue trapezoid with all the little pinholes in it, with two attachments on either side for connecting the cable). Not all monitors will have this option anymore, but VGA to HDMI adapters are also an option. Speaking of which…

HDMI/microHDMI Ports

HDMI (short for High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is more or less the standard, and so can be found on most devices. Similar in size to a USB port, these connections have a unique shape that most modern monitors and even televisions support. What’s more, these cables are quite easy to come by—there’s a good chance your display came with one—and are commonly used by various professional and consumer devices.

Some devices, like the smaller laptops that have become common for business use, might have a microHDMI port available for your use. While cables with a micro HDMI end may be a little harder to come by, this still should not be too challenging. If you can’t find a micro HDMI cable, adapters to standard HDMI are plentiful.

DVI

DVI—or Digital Visual Interface—connectors are very versatile, enabling many different screens to still work with modern devices. This allows a level of backwards compatibility that could potentially save your company a bit of money if you happen to have some older displays in working order. DVI cables come with one of a variety of connector types, so make sure you check with IT to ensure you have a cable that will work with your laptop and chosen display.

DisplayPort Ports

Similar in appearance to the familiar HDMI, DisplayPort ports are the ones with only one beveled corner. These ports will require you to use a DisplayPort cable.

Adding a Dock Could Contribute More Options

Some of the more modern ports that are found on different laptops—namely USB-C and Thunderbolt—also allow you to connect a type of additional hardware to your computer to further expand how many monitors you can use. Plus, a dock makes it far easier to extricate your laptop from all the connections it has when you need to take advantage of the laptop’s inherent mobility.

Of course, this will require you to procure the right dock that has compatible ports with your particular model of laptop. That, along with all the other considerations we referenced in this blog, is how MSPNetworks can help.

Part of our many responsibilities is to ensure that your team has the tools they need to be as productive as possible—and yes, using multiple monitors has been shown to have legitimate benefits to productivity due to the uses we covered at the very beginning of this blog. Of course, there are a lot of ways that we can help you make the most of your technology beyond helping you set up multiple monitors.

For more information about the scope of our managed services, check out the rest of our website, or give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

Typing on your keyboard is something that you do every day, but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. You can give your hands a break and use Microsoft Word’s dictation feature; this lets you use your voice to write in the software. Let’s go over how you might use the feature on a desktop, web browser, or mobile device.

On Your Desktop Application

If you use Microsoft Word on your desktop or a laptop, you can use the built-in dictation feature. From the Home tab, click on the Dictate button. It is the blue microphone in the top-right corner. You can then click on the gear icon to adjust the settings as needed. Some of these settings include auto-punctuation, language filtering, and dialect. You can use the pause or unpause buttons to take a break when needed. There is also a guide available to show you how to do things like add punctuation.

On the Browser Version of Word

The browser version of Word is exactly the same as the desktop version; you just go to the Home tab and use the Dictate button. The settings are mostly the same, too, so just follow the directions as they appear in the previous paragraph. You can click the X to close out of dictation.

On Your Mobile Device

The mobile application version of MS Word gives you an easy-to-use button just above the keyboard for dictation. You’ll see a microphone on it. The same features as outlined above work here in the same way. To stop dictation, click on the keyboard icon that will take the place of the dictation button.

Sure enough, it’s easy to use the dictation feature, and that’s probably by design. However, we do want to make sure you are aware that you should be proofreading your work, as anything voice-related can be somewhat unreliable on its own.

For even more great tips and tricks, subscribe to our blog.

It’s quite possible for employees to overwork themselves, even in a remote environment. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can minimize remote overwork for your employees, especially as the boundaries typically set in place by the morning commute are eroded and work/life balance blurs.

First Off: Yes, Overwork is an Issue

Countless issues and workplace challenges have bubbled to the surface in recent years, including others that are much more divisive, like wage inequality and racial imbalances. However, these issues are much greater and more difficult to address in this format, and overwork presents a different challenge to overcome.

Overwork is a very real issue that can impact your organization in several different ways. Employees can grow fatigued, anxious, and physically ill with symptoms like headaches, pain, and vision problems. Too much remote work can also impact interpersonal communications. Add in the emotional stress and pressure caused by the pandemic and you have many employees walking around like ticking time bombs. All of this can create the perfect storm for destroying even the best worker’s productivity and performance.

The question must be asked, what can we do to help reduce overwork?

How to Help Diminish Remote Overwork

You might not be able to visit each of your workers individually, but you can implement policies that can keep them from overworking themselves in general, and it all starts by thinking about things not in terms of remote work policies, but in-house and remote policies.

1. Support the Use of a Schedule

We are not talking about just setting up a schedule outlining work hours; we also mean that you should help them to establish a workday routine that is manageable. Be sure to emphasize the importance of starting and ending the workday at consistent and appropriate times, and try to reinforce this consistency whenever you can. This helps to prevent employee burnout and overwork.

2. Use Time Tracking Tools

Time-tracking tools can help your team and keep them from overworking themselves, as you can take a look at where all of their time is being spent at a glance. A visual reminder of where they are in their seemingly-endless pile of tasks can be immensely helpful. MSPNetworks can help you implement a time-tracking tool that will help your team stay on task and keep them from working themselves into the ground.

3. Encourage Your Team to Speak Up

Finally, you should empower your team to speak up if they feel their work requirements are becoming unreasonable. If they feel like they are overburdened or afraid to say no to more work, you need to know. Make sure they are comfortable coming to you about any concerns they might have so that you can address the issue at its roots without making it worse.

MSPNetworks can help your team implement the tools it needs to succeed. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

You may have been in a position where you tried to implement a technology solution in the past only to find that your staff is simply not responsive to it in any capacity. Maybe they do not see the value in the solution, or they do not understand what issues the solution resolves for your organization. To help you instill the correct mindset in your employees regarding technology, here are some training tips!

Explain the Value of the Solution

Before breaching the topic of new technology with your staff, it helps to have a bit of context for what issues the solution is actually solving. If your employees understand the value of the solution you are implementing, as well as how it makes their lives easier, they will be more receptive to the solution and more likely to buy into it.

Offer Training Sessions on a Regular Basis

Once employees understand why you are implementing your new solution, they might be ready and willing to learn how to use it. These training sessions should be offered regularly for any employees who want to learn more about the technology and how to use it as effectively as possible for their particular roles. Training does not have to be a one-and-done thing, either; you can cover specific topics, accept recommendations from employees so you are teaching them what they want to know, and reinforce training on a regular basis for those who need a refresher. Training is best done in multiple different ways to accommodate different types of learners.

Use the Solution Yourself and Set an Example

Your employees will only use a tool that you yourself find some value in, so one of the best ways you can make any technology deployment successful is to show them what it looks like in action. Take some time before making the solution readily available for your team to learn the ins and outs of it yourself. This gives you the ability to answer questions about how it might be used, what some of the great features of it are, and what they might be able to expect from using it. Your staff will appreciate knowing that you have done your research and are committed to getting the most out of the technology solution, and leading by example is a great way to make them see this.

Of course, any new technology deployment will come with its fair share of challenges and roadblocks—t just takes a bit of time and effort to overcome them. Thankfully, you don’t have to do this alone!

Let Us Help!

Implementing new technology can be a hassle in and of itself, so don’t let your employees’ reticence to utilize it become a barrier to implementation. MSPNetworks can help your employees understand how best to use their new technology, and we can even offer training sessions to provide them with the support they need to succeed. To learn more, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

If you’ve ever used technology, the power button has had a pretty consistent appearance, and an even more consistent use. However, there’s a reason that the power symbol we’re so familiar with looks the way it does. Furthermore, there’s more that the power button can ultimately do.

What the “Power” Symbol Means

The symbol that appears on the power button looks somewhat unique. However, this makes more sense when you consider that it’s just what you get when you smoosh the “|” for on and the “O” for off into a single symbol.

How the Power Button Can Be Used

Hopefully, you’ve already learned that your power button should really only be used to power up your system, or—if no other options are available—to power off the device after all your work is saved and your programs are all closed out (again, only as a last resort). Whenever you can, it is better to use the shut down option nestled into the operating system.

We take this so seriously because abusing the power button is just a convenient means to abuse the device itself. Improperly powering down your system in this way can lead to file corruption and potentially give the device a hard time when you start it back up.

Of course, with help from a technician, it is possible to remap your power button to do something different when it is pressed if you so choose.

Remapping Your Power Button

You have the capability to change your power button’s functionality, allowing you to set it to do something other than turn off your system when it is pressed—or, if you’re working with your laptop, your lid is closed when it's plugged in or running on stored battery power. In your Control Panel, under Hardware and Sound, find your Power Options and Choose what the power button does.

Your options as to its function include:

• Do nothing
• Sleep
• Hibernate
• Shut Down (when pressing the power button on a laptop)
• Turn off the display (when pressing the power button on a laptop)

Make sure you Save changes so that your settings are properly applied.

Interested in finding out more about your technology and how it can most benefit your business? Give MSPNetworks a call at (516) 403-9001 to find out more.

When looking to present an idea, the first two options people think of are often to use a video, or to use a slideshow (typically, citing Microsoft PowerPoint). Our question is, why pick? Let’s go over how simple it is to embed a YouTube video right into your next PowerPoint presentation whether you’re using PowerPoint 365 or PowerPoint 2016.

In PowerPoint 2016

Here is the process you’ll need to follow to embed a video into your presentation:

1. Navigate to YouTube and find the video you want to include in your presentation. Find the Share option and select Embed from the menu that appears when you click into it.
2. You’ll see a preview of your chosen video’s thumbnail, along with a series of code and some other options that allow you to control the point from which the video starts, whether your embedded video will provide viewers with controls, and the ability to enable a privacy-enhanced mode (which pertains more to videos that are posted on a website). Copy the code in its entirety.
3. Back in PowerPoint, click into the Insert tab and select Video. Select Online Video from the provided drop-down.
4. A box will appear. Paste the code you copied into the From a Video Embed Code field. Alternatively, you could attempt searching for the video you wanted to use using the YouTube search field.

In PowerPoint 365

PowerPoint 365 requires a similar process:

1. Find the video you wish to embed on YouTube and copy its URL from the address bar.
2. In PowerPoint, click into the Insert tab and select Video, then Online video…
3. Paste the URL into the Online Video dialog box.
4. You can also add various effects to the video preview (not the video that plays) via the buttons in the Video Format tab.

Whichever version you use, Microsoft PowerPoint has historically been an excellent tool, provided you know how to use it properly. The same can be said of most business applications available today.

MSPNetworks can help you acquire these solutions, along with the rest of the business technology management services we offer. To learn more about what we can do for you and your operations, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

If your business is like most, you and your team likely rely on a schedule to keep your processes moving along efficiently… while also ensuring that everyone has something to work on at any time. However, this is often easier said than done, which is why there are now cloud-based software options that make your scheduling efforts a little smarter.

Let’s take a few moments to discuss what smart scheduling is, and how you and your team can make the most of it.

What is Smart Scheduling?

Technically speaking, smart scheduling is a specific kind of software intended for use within industries that serve consumers with fluctuating demands and that are strongly influenced by different events that may line up with their operations. For instance, ice cream parlors do FAR better in the warmer months, and anyone who has worked in retail can appreciate how much different the holiday season is from the rest of the year. Smart scheduling solutions help to automate the process of scheduling a team to best fit the business’ need, taking these fluctuations into account.

However, if we look to smart scheduling as a process, rather than as a technology, it suddenly becomes far more applicable to all industries. After all, every industry—and individual business—has those external factors that can and do impact their operations.

Smart scheduling is simply the consideration of anticipated demand and adjusting employee hours and responsibilities to match. It’s knowing that the factory next door is going on lunch break in a moment, and ensuring that there’s an employee at each station of the fast food franchise so that the sudden influx of orders can be filled as quickly as possible.

It’s predicting the most likely scenarios and preparing your business appropriately.

How to Smarten Up Your Scheduling Process

Whether or not you’re using a smart scheduling solution, there are some basic tenets that you can follow to ensure that your business (including the employees that work there) is operating at a sustainable maximum output.

1. Define Your Schedule

Take all of the data that you have, concerning your schedule, and bring it all together. This will make it much easier to balance availability to the workload at any given point. For example: if a large project is coming up, but a holiday is as well, it may make sense to take any employees currently assigned to smaller, less-critical projects and delegate them to tasks on the larger one so it can get done. This makes everyone’s goals clear, which can help motivate your team to accomplish them.

2. Be Open to Communication

Regardless of your industry, communication is an indispensable part of your operations each day. Make sure that your schedule clearly (emphasis on the word clearly) defines where people are supposed to be, when, and what they are to accomplish in that given time. This includes those employees who have indicated that they are not available for a period. Failing to apply that information into your schedule will only cause complications and potentially leave you understaffed for what you planned to do. On the other hand, incorporating these considerations into your scheduling will lead to your staff feeling empowered, while reducing the number of unforeseen absences and tardiness.

3. Implement a Scheduling Platform

Many different software titles now exist that make scheduling your employees a lot easier, whether that means defining the hours they are to come in or assigning the tasks they are expected to tackle throughout the workday. Finding one that fits your needs and implementing it will make the entire process much easier for you and your team alike.

MSPNetworks can help you out with this aspect, as well as any other of your IT needs. To learn more about the solutions we have to offer, reach out to us by calling (516) 403-9001.

COVID-19, or coronavirus, has been a major global health concern over the past couple of months. At this point, it is clear that this disease could have serious impacts on the workplace. We wanted to provide a brief rundown of good workplace and network health practices, as well as a few pointers on how you can handle health-based employee absences.

How to Minimize General Exposure in the Office

Based on what is currently known about the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have some recommendations as to how to keep the potential impact of coronavirus to a minimum:

• Encourage employees who are ill to stay home. This will help to minimize the spread of infection within your business. Make sure that your employees are aware of this policy by reiterating it verbally, and by posting notices around the office encouraging them to stay home if under the weather.
  
  Emphasize hygiene and etiquette. Properly stifling coughs and sneezes and keeping hands clean are surprisingly effective ways to keep your workplace healthier. Rather than using their hands to catch a cough or sneeze, your employees should use a tissue or--if unable to do so--use the upper part of their sleeve.
  
  The CDC recommends that tissues and alcohol-based hand sanitizer should be made readily available. Make sure your employees are washing their hands with soap and water for the recommended 20 seconds.
  
  

• Engage in keeping the workplace clean. There is a chance that coronavirus (and other illnesses) could be spread via infected surfaces. Make sure that all surfaces that are touched frequently, like desks, workstations, and doorknobs, are kept sanitized. Provide your employees with disposable wipes so they can proactively disinfect these surfaces before use.

If you find that one of your employees is confirmed to have been infected with coronavirus, make sure that you inform their coworkers of their possible exposure while still maintaining the confidentiality that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires. These employees and those who are living with a sick family member should assess their risk of exposure using the CDC’s guidelines.

Coronavirus as a Cyberthreat

Unfortunately, coronavirus will also require you to also keep an eye on your network security, particularly if you operate within the healthcare industry. Hackers and cybercriminals have taken advantage of the widespread concern that the disease has caused. For example:

• Scammers have phished healthcare providers with updates that appear to have come from the World Health Organization or hospitals local to their area, but actually introduce keyloggers into their systems.
• Those involved in the medical supply chain have been targeted with emails referencing the coronavirus that install malware to steal information.
• Ransomware has been introduced into consumer systems by promising recipients of an email information about COVID-19’s spread.

While the current climate may not make it easy, these emails and other threat vectors can be overcome through the same best practices that foil other cyberthreats. In addition to comprehensive digital protections, training your employees to spot these threats will be crucial.

Of course, you should also maintain a comprehensive backup in case you need to recover from a successful attack.

How to Maintain Productivity with Your Team at Home

With today’s technology, sending an employee home sick doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be sacrificing that employee’s productivity. We now have many ways that your team can work effectively from home, still contributing to your organizational agenda without exposing their coworkers to their illness.

Equipping Your Employees

Remote access solutions, paired with virtual private networking technology, can allow your employees to securely continue their work from home, safely accessing the applications and data their tasks require through an encrypted connection. As collaboration will certainly be necessary, you will want to be sure that your employees are also equipped with the communication tools that facilitate this collaboration as well.

Network Protections

You will also want to thoroughly secure your network infrastructure to help prevent threats like phishing attacks and other methods from being successful… as well as preparing for a potential breach or emergency with data backups and disaster recovery policies and procedures (including contact information for your employees) to help mitigate a worst-case scenario.

Employee Awareness

Finally, make sure your employees are on the lookout for any suspicious activity that could be a cybercriminal’s attempt at using the coronavirus as a means to an end. Not only should your employees know how to spot these attempts; they should also know the proper procedures for reporting and handling them.

Is the coronavirus scary? At this point, it is safe to say that it is, but does it have to interrupt your business operations entirely? Not if you are properly prepared.

For more assistance in preparing your business for any kind of disaster, reach out to the professionals at MSPNetworks by calling (516) 403-9001.

What is COVID-19?

COVID-19, better known as coronavirus, is a respiratory illness that first appeared in Wuhan, China, and was reported in the United States on January 21st, 2020.

As of March 3rd, 12 states have reported 60 total cases of coronavirus and six confirmed deaths, with no vaccines or specific antiviral treatments for the illness. Symptoms of the virus include fever, shortness of breath, and a cough, while those with complications from the virus can experience pneumonia in both lungs, failure of multiple organs, and death. 

A business’ IT solutions aren’t the kind of thing that you can worry about once and never touch again - this is why manufacturers and developers are always sending out upgrades. However, you also need to have a strategy ready before you go to implement these upgrades. For this week’s tip, we’ll review how to put this strategy together.

Step 1: Determining What Needs an Upgrade, and Why

Naturally, the first step to any upgrade process is identifying that an upgrade is necessary. When a component of your business network requires an upgrade, it will generally be for at least one of three reasons:

• You want your solutions to have an increased capacity or range.
• You want to improve the security of your business and its resources.
• You want an increase in your business’ productivity, with less maintenance required.

If a part of your infrastructure could facilitate any (or all) of these objectives if it was upgraded, it’s probably a good idea to do so. That means that you need to start the next step.

Step 2: Planning and Preparing for Your Upgrade

A technology upgrade isn’t something that can be done on a whim. If you want yours to be successful, you need to have done your due diligence ahead of time. You will want to make sure that your network can support this upgrade in its current state, and any other considerations that come up.

As you’re preparing for the upgrade, you also need to consider any potential negative ramifications that it could have on your users. Will this upgrade be a lengthy one, and will that cause a lengthy interruption to your business’ processes? Proactively considering this will allow you to make plans to decrease the impact of these circumstances. For instance, if an upgrade is projected to create a lengthy interruption, it may be wiser to have it implemented after hours, when your resources are less likely to be called for.

Step 3: Protecting Yourself

While your upgrade will ideally run smoothly and not cause any issues, it is better to be prepared for an unideal situation. This is why an upgrade absolutely should be preceded by a comprehensive backup. With a backup taken, any issues that your upgrade may incur can be easily mitigated - so while you won’t have gained anything, your losses will be minimized.

MSPNetworks can help you manage your technology, ensuring that your upgrade processes are done correctly. Reach out to us at (516) 403-9001 to learn more!

Businesses are driven by processes. More often than not, these processes are fairly definitive - do this, then do that, then do the other thing - and require a set order of operations. There also happen to be a lot of these processes, which makes it important that they are well-documented so you and your employees can refer to this documentation later. Here, we’ll offer a few tips on how to best document a task.