Washington Works Blog

We’re right in the thick of the holiday season, which means two things: one, there’s a lot of data being exchanged between businesses and consumers, and (on a related note) two: there’s ample opportunities for cybercrime, targeting business and consumer both. Whichever side of the coin you are on at any moment, you need to be aware of the risks, and how to mitigate them.

As the modern gift certificate, the gift card has become an institution, especially around the holidays. Thousands of companies offer statically-priced and reloadable gift cards. With that much cheddar flying around it isn’t a surprise that there is big business in gift card theft. The FTC has stated that gift card scams are up a whopping 270 percent since 2015. With so much money at stake, keeping yourself out of the way of the scammers has to be priority one.

While smartphones and tablets can help businesses quite a bit, they can also be quite detrimental to their success. If you can get past the issues related to employees bringing their own devices to the workplace, then you’ll be able to save a considerable amount of time and resources on device procurement, but you certainly want to make sure you have a mobile device management policy put in place first.

Even if we’d like it to last forever, business technology can’t possibly do so for a number of reasons. Due to the fact that businesses and their technology are constantly upgrading and changing, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll have to upgrade your technology at some point, whether it reaches its end-of-life event or just simply becomes obsolete for your organization. In fact, failing to update your infrastructure from time to time can have serious negative side-effects for your business.

The modern office is filled with distractions, and that’s to say nothing about the everyday user’s life. With so many devices and notifications interrupting focus for users all over the world, it’s more important than ever before to have a strategy for how to deal with these issues and become as productive as possible in the workplace. Today, we’ll be discussing some of the biggest distractions in the workplace and how your employees can overcome them.

Windows 10 isn’t just a great operating system for getting things done--it’s also jam-packed with features that you might not even have known about. This week’s tip is all about some of the handy features that Windows 10 can provide for your office.

Many industries depend on their IT working properly to function as intended, and healthcare is among them. Prior to 2009, information technology had failed to take root, but with the passing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), the health industry is much more involved and reliant on IT than it has ever been before.

A lot is made about antivirus as a part of a comprehensive network security platform, but how does the system really work to eliminate threats? Today, we will take a look at an antivirus solution to show you how it goes about removing unwanted files and other code.

When you’re talking about something to do with a computer, you’re going to start hearing about some word that ends with “-ware.” You could probably list off a few yourself, but have you ever stopped to think about why they’re all described as “something-ware?” For this week’s Tech Term, we’ll take a peek at why we refer to things that way.

If you’ve been in business for a while, there are devices on your network that see little to no use. Even for the most frugal business, due to the fact that technology eventually winds up being arbitrary thanks to the continued development (and deployment) of more powerful solutions, there will always be situations where you have devices that do nothing but take up space. You can reduce the chances of this happening by finding the right IT for the job the first time, while sparingly implementing only IT solutions that will provide a return on your investment.