Washington Works Blog

Today is Christmas day. In normal years, you would be bundling up to go to visit family and friends or preparing to host them.

Smartphones are everywhere. You go to the supermarket, people are on their phones, you go to the gym, people are on their phones. Go into the office? People are constantly on their phones. All that phone use cannot be in the best interest to organizational profitability. The question becomes, do smartphones help or hurt business? Let’s get into it.

The small business owner is always looking for a way to either cut costs or to get more value out of their technology. Today, many businesses are looking to automated tools fueled by AI to do just that. Today, we thought we would talk a little bit about AI for small business and how it works to help increase business productivity.

For all the attention that we (and many others) give to cybercrime, people are still falling victim to hacks and scams every day. With most businesses operating more in the digital sphere than ever before, it stands to reason that they need to do more to keep from being a victim of a data breach or worse. Here are six things your business should do to keep from being a victim of a cyberattack.

Let me ask you a quick question: when was your critical business technology last updated? When do your software licenses expire? When did your printer last have any maintenance performed on it?

With how business is conducted today, the capability of your workforce to stay connected while mobile is important. However, it can be equally important that this connectivity doesn’t come at the cost of their manners. Let’s go over a few ways to be more polite as you work remotely using a mobile device.

Quick, off the top of your head, how many network switches are in use at your office? How many wireless access points? How many routers are past their warranty or no longer getting support?

That’s not a question most business owners are asked on a regular basis, and we don’t really expect you to be able to rattle off the answers. You should have all of that information documented though.

The strangest year in our lives is coming to a close and the holidays figure to be just as strange. With the COVID-19 pandemic still roaring away, there probably won’t be a lot of the events that are typical this time of year. That doesn’t have to ruin the time of year, however. Today, we thought that we would take a look at five cool tech gadgets and services that won’t break the bank, but will also be a cool addition under the tree or for your secret santa. 

PDFs have been around for a while and they have become an extremely useful file format for business. One of the best features of the PDF is that it is useful for securing signatures so that contracts can be handled over the Internet. Today, we’ll go over how you go about signing a PDF in Windows.

Despite the name being mildly amusing, phishing attacks are no laughing matter. These scams, in all their different forms, wreak havoc on businesses—ranking as the top breach threat in the 2020 edition of Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report, and successfully impacting 65 percent of United States organizations in 2019 as reported by Proofpoint’s 2020 State of the Phish Report. Avoiding them requires you to be able to spot them, so let’s go over the different varieties of phishing that can be encountered.

Nowadays, social media companies have a lot of power and influence, which is part of the reason that so many of today’s largest businesses have adopted social media as a critical promotional tool. With the average person spending about two hours and 24 minutes on social media and messaging applications per day, this makes social media a clear opportunity for any sized business to embrace. Let’s consider a few ways this can be accomplished for these different businesses.

Businesses have many problems they need to solve. With technology, the process typically starts with identifying a problem, researching solutions, and finding one that will successfully work to solve the problem. Traditionally, when dealing with technology, a company would procure the hardware and hire technicians to implement the solution and deploy the services needed. If they had to borrow money to do it, they would because the profits would presumably be more than the payments even with banks tacking on interest. 

While this time of year is always huge for online retail, there is likely to be a much larger number of people turning to the Internet for their holiday purchases than usual… and, it would seem, a larger number of people taking security into consideration as they do so. Let’s examine how consumers are taking their data into their own hands and what this means for your business.

There are times when people take their technology for granted. One of the most under-the-radar, yet still critical parts of a business’ technology infrastructure is the networking equipment. By this we mean the hardware that connects your business to the Internet and to your network. We are talking cables, switches, and routers. This month, we will take a look at typical office networking found in 2020 and the technologies that are primed to replace them. 

We realize that it’s one thing for us to tell you how important it is to update your software. After all, we’re tech guys, so we worry about that kind of thing all the time. Hopefully, it’s quite another matter when Homeland Security does it, which is why we’re really hoping that you take heed of this warning and update Google Chrome.

For most businesses, inventory is a big deal. That’s why it is so surprising that many of the same businesses that depend on their inventory and supply chain fail to properly inventory their technology. This month, we’ll discuss the importance of keeping a technology inventory.

As serious as they are, cyberattacks aren’t always given the most serious-sounding names. We are, of course, referring to “phishing”: the manipulation of the user, rather than of a computer system, to gain access to data. Phishing can come in many forms, with some—like phishing someone via SMS message—doubling down on the silliness of the name. Let’s examine this variety, and why “smishing” is not something to trifle with.

When there’s a computer problem, downtime ensues, and productivity suffers. It’s really that simple. Your staff isn’t running on all cylinders because they are always having to restart, the software they need isn’t working properly, or they simply forgot their password.

Ever since Windows 10 debuted in July of 2015, it has slowly risen in its market share. This has continued throughout the tumultuous times that 2020 has provided, as the OS has now reached a market share of 72.2 percent as of October. Let’s go over why this matters, and why—if you haven’t done so yet—you need to add your organization’s PCs to that number.

Automation has helped many businesses improve their output and efficiency, but what is the cost to the people that work for these organizations? Many systems rely on the autonomy of artificial intelligence systems to keep certain tasks and workflows on point. Automation could replace up to a quarter of the current workforce in the next ten years, so people are naturally skeptical and worried about how safe their jobs are going to be with more and more businesses utilizing software automation.