The Michigan IT Experts

What Is Your Problem?

There are literally scores of different titles out there that have been created to help companies like yours do business better, but some are better suited to your business than others. Where you should start when attempting to choose a management software is to look at your business’ problems. You need a management software that will help you best solve those problems. 

Typically these problems include: work redundancy, using too much software to keep everything straight, and lack of interdepartmental coordination. By identifying your business’ specific problems, you will be able to whittle down your options. In doing so, the solution you ultimately choose will do a better job of meeting your business’ specific needs.

Workflow Is a Major Consideration

In order to work for your company, your management software will need to support your business’ workflow. It’s important to map out your daily activities, how you track them, and what type of information you would like to collect. Those considerations will drive your decision-making process going forward.

What sets your business apart where you would need the ability to customize your new software? What problems are you constantly having? Which problems would you like to avoid? You’ll need to think about the purchasing of new management software like adding milk to cereal. Once you’ve committed, there’s no going back. The process of migrating your data, training your users, getting used to the new system, ironing out bugs, working around shortcomings, and everything in between can take a lot of time and effort.

Identifying Problems

As mentioned above, your new software will need to solve your business’ biggest problems. Sometimes identifying those problems is the problem. What you will want to do is to rank these issues by priority, with the most crucial issues taking on more weight. This will ensure that you will be making the right decisions when it is time to pull the trigger. Minor annoyances that don’t directly affect revenue streams can be dealt with later, but core issues that require large time and resource commitments need to be addressed here. 

Compliance and Other Qualifications

When choosing a software to run your business, you will need to understand all the requirements that need to be met before the buying process. Does your business operate with certain restrictions due to regulatory requirements? Do you need integrations with management software? Are you considering hosting this solution yourself or are you going to be using a cloud-hosted solution? How will this system help your sales and marketing teams? How will it affect your production teams? How much training will you and your staff need before you/they are proficient with the software? There are a lot of considerations you need to ask yourself before even shopping for the right software to manage your business.

Your Staff and Your Pocketbook 

If your staff is going to have problems with the user experience of a solution, it may be a major headache for your business. This shouldn’t discourage you from getting a solution that is right for your needs, but you should consider their ability to use it before committing. Most developers will provide a free trial of a software, so you should consider taking advantage of that so you aren’t wasting time and money on a solution that won’t be a long-term solution for your business.

That brings us to money. Some businesses would like to have all the bells and whistles that come with an enterprise CRM (Customer Relationship Management) title. The budget may say otherwise. You need to understand that as your business grows, certain software can grow right alongside it, and some are just too much for your budget and your situation at the moment. Be smart and don’t create more problems when trying to find solutions.

Consulting With Experienced Technicians

At NuTech Services, our technicians work day-in and day-out with software that could be right for your business. We can help you ascertain the real problems that are hindering your business’ growth and help you make the right decisions to move past them. We can also give you options that you wouldn’t get if you tried to do this alone. Give us a call at 810-230-9455 and tell us what your goals are and we can help you find solutions to all of your current business problems.

Understanding the Virtual Desktop

Before we go on, we should clarify that we’re discussing a specific variety of virtual desktop.

Most things you hear called “virtual desktops” are the product provided as part of a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. Here, we’re discussing the feature built into the Windows 10 operating system that effectively opens a separate session of Windows 10 alongside your first one. Doing so can provide some significant benefits to your usage of Windows in terms of task organization and application management, along with other use cases that business and personal users alike could find an advantage in.

How to Use These Virtual Desktops

Opening a virtual desktop in Windows 10 almost couldn’t be simpler.

• Start by clicking on the Task View button in your taskbar. If the button isn’t there by default, right-click on the taskbar and select the Show Task View button. Alternatively, Task View is accessible through Windows Key + Tab.
• In Task View, you’ll see the option to add a New Desktop. These desktops are your different instances of Windows 10 and can be switched between by either returning to Task View or using Ctrl + Windows Key + Left/Right Arrow to cycle through your open desktops.

When working in these desktops, you should see no difference in performance. Be warned, some apps can only be opened once in a system, so trying to open another version of these will pull you into the desktop where it is already running. Closing one of these desktops will simply cause any open applications to jump to another open desktop instance.

Hopefully, you have a better idea of what Windows 10’s virtual desktop options have to offer. If you have any other questions about the technology that your business relies on, leave them in the comments or give us a call at 810-230-9455.

Let’s consider how these scams have materialized over the past year.

The Opportunity COVID-19 Gives Scammers

Like most predators, hackers will fully utilize every advantage they have over their intended prey. With COVID-19, this advantage comes in the form of the desperation many still feel for news. As a result, numerous scams have been reported to reference the coronavirus outbreak, adopting a wide variety of methods.

Some of the old tricks that these scammers have adapted include:

• Phishing – While phishing scams are nothing new, and certainly won’t end with COVID-19, scammers have certainly taken advantage of it during these tumultuous times. By sending emails and other messages (as we’ll get into) that appear to come from a trustworthy source or an authority, a scammer can manipulate their target into compliance.
  • Vishing – This form of verbal phishing is conducted over the telephone but is otherwise identical to your more typical phishing scams.
  • SMiShing – Once again, a basic phishing attack, but carried out through SMS texts.
• Pretexting – Basically, this is what occurs when someone reaches out to you seeking out your information under the guise of calling from some trustworthy entity looking for verification. As you would imagine, this has not been uncommon as of late.
• Spoofing – Spoofing is the act of disguising a URL or a profile to appear to link to one location, but take the target to another, generally malicious one.
• Quid Pro Quo – Just as it sounds, a scammer offers someone something in return for their information, but never holds up their end of the bargain. A longer scam, this usually requires some level of trust to be established but can be quite lucrative for the miscreant who carries it out.

How to Protect Your Business from Scams

Like most things having to do with cybercrime, there isn’t really a surefire way to prevent such scams from appearing, which means that the onus to keep data safe falls to the user that is dealing with these scams firsthand.

The biggest thing that you can do—and that you should encourage your team to do—is to verify everything. Any time anyone requests something of you online—whether it seems to be your boss, your coworker, your parents, or the CDC—you need to make sure you’re talking to who you think you’re talking to.

Verify. Everyone. And. Everything.

With so much of modern life now utilizing the Internet, it is nothing if not irresponsible to not have an appreciation for the severity of today’s biggest threat landscape. Keeping a good perspective about how valuable your personal information is and treating it as such with best practices can very much help protect you and your business from cybercriminals.

NuTech Services is here to help you see to your business’ cybersecurity preparedness and protections. Find out more about what we can offer by calling our team of professionals at 810-230-9455 today.