BlackCSI Blog

Business owners try to avoid downtime like the plague, but it’s often a challenge to do so. The impact of downtime can be devastating for even the most stable business, and this is even more so the case when you bring profits and bottom lines into view. We’ll take a look at how you can calculate the cost of a downtime event.

The headlines hyping up ransomware as a dangerous threat are not exaggerating. It really is as bad as it seems, although there is often a fair amount of embellished information on what ransomware exactly is and what it does. Let’s take some time to review what ransomware is and how your business can handle it in an appropriate way.

The prevalence of technology in even mundane, everyday tasks means that more scams are out there to take advantage of unsuspecting victims. Hackers will do everything they can to take advantage of vulnerabilities in your systems, as well as cracks in your employees’ technological know-how. One way you can take the fight to them is by reinforcing appropriate password security measures.

If you find yourself in a position where your business has been hacked, it can be devastating for productivity and efficiency, not to mention the security of your company’s assets—personnel or otherwise. It’s quite easy for even seasoned professionals to expose themselves to these attacks, so how should you respond if you’re the one who has been hacked? That’s what we’re going to discuss today.

It sincerely seems that every other day features news of another cyberattack, and it isn’t uncommon for the word “ransomware" to be tossed around an awful lot. Let’s take a few moments to go over—or review—what ransomware is, and arguably more importantly, how to handle any you or your team encounters.

Even the most dedicated smartphone user will lose it from time to time, which is particularly inconvenient if you are away from the safety of your home or office. To help address this issue, we’ve put together some ideas for what you should do if you ever do lose your device.

The cloud has become a hugely popular resource for businesses of all sizes to lean on for a multitude of needs, many using it for some form of data storage. While using the cloud for this means, however, it is wise for you to do everything available to secure the data you’ve stored there. Let’s go over a few things that we recommend you do to help protect your data.

The smartphone app ecosystems today are extraordinarily vast. The Google Play store has over 3.5 million apps available, while the Apple App store has over 1.6 million apps. The question becomes, with so many different applications available on these platforms, how can you be so sure that the apps you are downloading to your mobile device are secure? Let’s take a look at mobile app store security and why it’s become more than just a security issue. 

Microsoft Excel can be a great tool to help your business organize data, but the default size of the cell doesn’t leave much room for you to be productive. You can adjust the size of each cell depending on the purpose of the data stored within, starting with the width and the height of each column and row. Let’s go over how you can resize each individual cell.

Anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time in a professional occupation knows that meetings come with the territory. After all, running a business requires a lot of coordination, communication, and teamwork, and meetings are opportunities for employees to gather and discuss important business-related ideas. However, the amount of time wasted and misused on unnecessary meetings is a topic of concern.

Smartphones are, in a word, ubiquitous. With 86.29% of the global population owning a smartphone in 2023 (according to Statista), one would think—pretty justifiably—that the smartphone market is doing pretty well indeed. 

The opposite is actually true. Let’s take a quick look at the smartphone market and its decreases, as well as the lack of innovation that is largely blamed for this decline.

There are a few options out there for businesses to turn to for IT management. Many hire an in-house IT team, and many of them suddenly find that their in-house team is exceptionally busy. Some may even find that not everything is able to be accomplished by this team simply because of how many challenges are on the ever-growing docket. Fortunately, these businesses have another great option to turn to, in addition to their in-house team: managed IT services.

Keyboard shortcuts are great ways to make your workday just a little more efficient without much effort. Did you know that you can make a keyboard shortcut on your Windows computer that can direct you to a specific webpage? Let’s go over how you can make it happen.

The best thing you can do for your employees is provide a good work experience, but what do we mean when we say this? In essence, you spend a lot of time trying to find the best fit for your organization, so you want to invest a solid amount of effort into making sure they stick around. This goes beyond compensation; you should consider the following for your business’ work experience.

There is a lot made of the importance of productivity when it comes to running a business. Of course, without a consistent output, revenue growth is impossible. As a result, many workers expect the same kind of effort that they give. When they don’t see that effort, tensions can get high and they can get stressed out pretty easily. Today, we will go through a couple of tips that will help you maintain composure when your job delivers more stress than you’d like. 

Email is crucial to the success of any business, but it also might contain sensitive information that is meant for the eyes of your organization—and its clients—only. Most modern email platforms give you tools you need to secure your email solution, so let’s go over how you might enable these features and what they look like.

With the Internet cementing itself as one of the best tools to get work done, it’s easy to forget just how sluggish it used to be back when it first became available for use. Internet speeds have undergone some dramatic shifts over the years, so let’s remember the good old days when it took ages to do just about anything with it.

Let me ask you a question: how do you balance the prevalence of remote work with the fact that a lot of company resources should only be stored on-site? A VPN—or virtual private network—provides the answer for many businesses. Let’s examine what a VPN actually is, and how it helps to protect your business’ data as you access it from outside of your business’ secure network.

If asked, most business owners would likely rank “improving productivity” as one of their overall business goals—and for obvious reasons. Often less obvious, however, is how to go about accomplishing this particular goal. Here, we’ve put together five different but equally effective ways to do so.

The blockchain is a technology that has really taken off in the past couple of years, with many people asking if the same technology behind cryptocurrencies can be applied to other uses and applications. Let’s consider how the blockchain might be used outside of cryptocurrency and in various industries—particularly for security—in the future.