Washington Works Blog

Let’s say that you're on a business trip. As you travel, you decide you may as well get a bit of work done. You pull out your laptop and are pecking away, and that’s when you notice a growing feeling of nausea rising in your stomach. It gets so bad that you finally have to put the laptop away, having accomplished relatively little, before you are sick.

Fact: There’s a shortage in the IT skills market. Yet, businesses now have more opportunity than ever to make up for this shortage. A simple solution is to outsource your IT services to a managed service provider. You might find that it’s a great way to save time and revenue on a department that’s becoming increasingly difficult to hire for. Here are three reasons why outsourced IT services can resolve the shortage of IT talent.

2016 saw many notorious data breaches, along with developments in malware and other threats to security. It’s always helpful to reflect on these developments so that the knowledge can be used in the future to aid in developing new strategies for taking on the latest threats. How will your business learn from the mistakes of others in 2017?

The cloud lets your business share files easily and efficiently, but regardless of how useful this feature is, you need to make sure that your team understands how and why they’re given access to certain files. Giving the freedom to share files is great, but it can quickly become a hindrance when you have inexperienced users doing the sharing. Be sure to take these three risks into account before handing over the keys to your business’s file sharing.

Your workstation is equipped with all of your necessary software solutions, but sometimes it can be challenging to find a specific app. If you want to see a list of all applications on your device, Windows 10 makes it easy. The key to doing so lies in the Start menu.

In both the home and the business, security cameras are becoming more and more commonplace as a means of preserving security. However, some malware can turn these devices, and others, into cyber security threats.

How many people do you know that can be productive for 8 hours, or more, a day? It’s difficult for the average worker to do this, as their body needs time to relax and recover from the duress of the workday. Thankfully, new technologies provide some semblance of reprieve for office workers in the form of improving the way that they delegate and spend their breaks.

One of the most effective methods to boost employee productivity is to encourage your workforce to work together in order to achieve their goals. Workplace collaboration allows multiple employees to combine their efforts and energies into a common project, adding value to the final product and often completing it more quickly. The benefits don’t end there, either. Here are some of the other advantages gained by encouraging collaboration among your workforce.

It can be easy to underestimate the importance of maintaining permissions on your network. In fact, sometimes it takes a good dose of misfortune to present the consequences of unchecked access to your network. This time, the misfortune befell PA Online, an Internet service provider located in Pennsylvania.

Data might be the most important aspect of your organization, but how well do you protect it throughout your network? Every organization has data like personally identifiable information and financial credentials stashed away somewhere on the network, so security isn’t something that you can ignore. One of the best ways you can safeguard your data is through the use of encryption.