Advanced Automation Blog

Data is at the heart of all successful modern businesses. The information you collect and store can help you make better decisions, plan better strategies, and gain a competitive advantage. Let’s look at how your raw data can be refined into more meaningful insights through the use of business analytics tools.

Hackers are always on the lookout for personally identifiable information, or PII, as it’s an immensely lucrative resource. You’ll need to protect it if you want your business to continue operating safely and efficiently. Let’s go over what PII entails and what kinds of data you might find under this term.

As technology seeps into every part of everyday life, the market for technology has exploded. This has led to technology companies growing to be massive and seemingly uncontrollable entities. Let’s take a look at big tech and its effect on society. 

Your business is likely subject to certain compliance laws and regulations depending on the type of data you collect from your clients or customers. Today, we want to emphasize the importance of your business considering regulation and compliance when managing its data and IT resources, as without doing so, you run considerable risk.

Your business’ data holds incredible potential for helping you improve operations, but only when it is leveraged properly. To this end, you have to identify specific metrics that you are working toward and establish how these metrics are helping you make strides forward. IT offers plenty of metrics to help you make better decisions about operational efficiency.

Cybersecurity is crucial for everyone to focus on, both in the professional environment and in their personal lives. That’s why I wanted to put together a list of cybersecurity practices you should encourage your team to follow when they aren’t in the office or working remotely, when their time is theirs. 

Small businesses, like any other organization, need to protect various types of data to ensure the security and privacy of their operations. The specific data that needs protection may vary depending on the nature of the business, industry regulations, and the types of transactions or customer interactions. Today, we thought we would go through some common data types that small businesses typically need to protect.

All it takes is one oversight to potentially undo any benefits your cybersecurity protections and other best practices may deliver. For instance, even if you have things like multifactor authentication in place, a phishing scam or even some malware varieties could potentially give an attacker access to your email… and all the data your messages contain, just sitting in your inbox.

It is so important to keep your business secure nowadays. Statistics show this to be the case. Don’t believe us? We can share a few of these stats and explore what they mean, just to prove it.

Your customers expect not to be inconvenienced when doing business with your organization. Small businesses can use new technology to meet these expectations by offering online ordering, mobile apps, and e-commerce platforms. Such innovations not only improve the customer experience but also expand a business' reach. Let’s look at some of the ways new technology can improve your business.

We have not been shy about expounding upon the benefits of the cloud for businesses, as these benefits are both considerable and accessible. That being said, not even the cloud is completely perfect, and there are security errors that can easily be made.

Let’s go through these security errors to see if any sound familiar to your situation.

When it comes to security, it can be challenging to keep up with shifting best practices. For instance, the use of a virtual private network has long been a staple to secure remote operations, and any decent IT service provider would recommend its use. However, this advice is changing with the growth of zero-trust access protocols.

When it comes to valuable data, hackers will go out of their way to try and steal it, placing businesses in dangerous situations. In particular, healthcare data is attractive to hackers, and considering how lucrative the prospect of healthcare data is, companies need to take extra precautions to protect it. But what is it about healthcare data that makes it so attractive, anyway? Let’s dig into the consequences of potential attacks on healthcare data.

Data is the lifeblood of a business. In the event of unforeseen circumstances such as hardware failure, malware attacks, or human error, having a well-designed backup and data recovery strategy in place becomes paramount. Today, we try and guide you through the process of creating a robust backup and data recovery strategy, ensuring the safety and accessibility of your data.

Let me ask you: how confident are you that all of your data is in your control? How confident are you that you have access to it as you need it? How confident are you that it is properly secured, wherever it is being stored?

These are all important, arguably critical, questions to know the answer to. They are also all questions that are best answered by storing your data centrally.

There are quite a few platitudes that we support, in terms of business IT. Some that we haven’t really touched on, however, are Schofield's Laws of Computing. Let’s fix that today by reviewing where they came from, and what these laws entail.

When security breaches and data breaches are mentioned in the same breath so often, it’s easy to look at them as one and the same. However, we want to take a moment to explain the differentiating factors between the two, as it could be all the most important for protecting your business in the future.

There’s no beating around the bush with this one; moving data from one place to another, also known as data migration, is critical to get right the first time. If you create and follow a migration strategy, evaluating here and there to make sure it’s all going according to plan, you’ll see great success in this effort. Let’s go over how you can make it happen.

When you suffer a data breach, you might wonder how you can possibly come back from such an event, especially if it leads to a network compromise. Can your business rebound effectively, and if so, what do you need to do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again? It all starts with understanding how much data you need to function, as well as how much downtime you can afford to suffer from.

It’s incredibly important to keep your personally identifiable information secure, but what exactly constitutes PII? Today we offer a definition and suggestions or strategies to help you keep your PII safe.