As with most emerging technologies, BYOD (bring your own device) is now something that is accepted among most businesses. BYOD policies benefit both the workers who bring their own personal devices into the workplace and the businesses that allow for it.

In light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), companies are looking for a means to offer employees the ability to work at home to maintain "social distancing." With employees hunkering down to remain healthy, Microsoft is helping companies by offering Office 365 E1 licenses for six months. This version of "free Teams licensing" provides unlimited chat, built-in group and one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. You also get real-time collaboration with the Office web apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. 

Organizations that move to Office 365 still need to use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) relay to route mail from a line-of-business app or scans from a multifunction device to either internal or external recipients.

Ransomware has quickly become one of the most troublesome issues that businesses deal with nowadays. In the US alone, ransomware attacks cost organizations more than $7.5 billion in 2019, and there are no signs of them slowing down in 2020. Multiple city governments, hospitals, and businesses have all been victims of ransomware attacks.

The threat landscape has grown so large that attackers can now buy and sell ransomware as a service. Couple this with the fact that new strains and variants of this type of malware are added on a frequent basis, and it becomes evident that ransomware is a threat you have to take seriously. And you must do so immediately.

What is a Wi-Fi heat map? Put simply, a Wi-Fi heat map visually represents your wireless signal strength and coverage. It uses a color-coding approach to do this, with green typically representing strength and red representing weakness, with yellow and orange in between. These colors correspond to the rooms or areas in your building. To ... Read more Best Wi-Fi Heat Mapping Tools

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As companies scale and the volume of service requests increases, service desk software can significantly improve service operations and ensure customer satisfaction. Help desk software assists technicians by automating routine tasks such as ticket creation, assigning tickets to specific technicians, and tracking service tickets until closure. In fact, adopting the right service desk software can ... Read more Spiceworks Help Desk vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk Comparison

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Not so long ago, plain-text log management was a widespread, grueling, and lengthy process. Plain-text data isn’t without its uses—in fact, under certain circumstances, it can be of great value—but it can’t replace a sophisticated log management solution when it comes to complex analysis and gaining advanced insight into infrastructure. If you want to optimize ... Read more 12 Best Log Monitoring Tools and Event Logging Software

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One of the most frustrating things when working on a laptop or other computer device is when the Wi-Fi won’t connect. Employees may end up walking around the office, seeing the number of bars go up and down. At home, these issues can be annoying, but at work they can lead to large amounts of ... Read more Best Wi-Fi Monitoring Tools

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The success or failure of your customer service systems directly impacts everything else in your business. If your customers are unhappy, it’s unlikely you’re going to be especially successful in the long term. For the sake of business continuity and continuous improvement, monitoring and managing your customer service solution is of paramount importance. Leaving it ... Read more 5 Best Free Help Desk Software and Ticketing Systems – DNSstuff

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Benchmarking the environment of a new network is a crucial part of ensuring its success when it goes live. This includes stress testing and generating traffic on existing networks, both of which help you to identify any potentially flawed or vulnerable areas—for example, drops in connection and packet loss. As we know, network traffic is ... Read more Best Network Traffic Generator and Simulator Stress Test Tools

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This SolarWinds® SFTP Server review is to give you some insight into what this free tool can do for you. Like me, you may be naturally skeptical about free IT tools. They can be seriously hit or miss, and even if giving them a try doesn’t put you out of pocket, familiarizing yourself with any ... Read more SolarWinds SFTP/SCP Server – Free Tool Review

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Whether public or private, organizations need to keep pace with evolving technology best practices if they want to be competitive in their field. From rolling out new products or services to updating their internal IT infrastructure to become more efficient, they need to be able to make changes confidently and quickly to be successful. However, ... Read more Ultimate Guide to ITIL Change Management Process – What Is Change Management + Best Steps

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From keeping track of IT inventory to handling help desk tickets on a daily basis, IT service management (ITSM) has become a mission-critical aspect of operating a successful and growing organization. Accordingly, businesses and other organizations have to be sure they’re giving their IT teams the tools they need to effectively respond to help desk ... Read more Jira Service Desk vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk Comparison

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Packet loss causes network disruption, lags, and losses in connectivity, ultimately impacting business performance. In this article, I’ll discuss packet loss testing, concluding with a list of my favorite packet loss test tools. Table of Contents What Are Packets? What Is Packet Loss? What Causes Packet Loss? How to Check Packet Loss How to Test ... Read more Packet Loss Test – Best Testing Tools and Ultimate Free Guide

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IDC research revealed statistics showing that 42.4 percent of global IT infrastructure spending is expected to be spent on traditional non-cloud IT infrastructure environments by 2023, down from 51.9 percent in 2018. Of course, no one is surprised at the growth of cloud infrastructure—including those businesses that have yet to embark on their cloud journey, which is clearly a shrinking subset.

If you are unfamiliar with the term operational intelligence, you may think it is another aspect of the data-driven decision-making bandwagon. At a high-level view, you would be correct; operational intelligence relies on data to help you make better decisions. However, unlike business intelligence, which measures data with a lag of hours and sometimes days, operational intelligence is measured in real time so you have an accurate look at what is going on at any particular moment in time. 

Admins need to be able to handle and track IP addresses across their network. As I’ll explain below, this task is best handled by an automated tool, because keeping tabs on IP addresses can be time-consuming and confusing. If you’re looking for an enterprise-level tool for tracking IP addresses, I suggest starting with SolarWinds® IP ... Read more Best IP Address Trackers in 2020 – Free and Paid Versions

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SolarWinds® NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) is a multi-purpose tool useful for a wide range of bandwidth monitoring and management purposes. It integrates with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to provide a comprehensive network monitoring tool. NTA Key Features Installation System Requirements Installation Process Best Practices for Network Traffic Monitoring Configuration and Using NTA SolarWinds NTA ... Read more SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer Review

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In a business environment, you may hear colleagues wonder: how does an IT audit differ from a security assessment? These two terms are tossed around interchangeably, along with IT risk assessment, security audit, and so on. However, IT audit vs. IT security assessment mean different things, and it’s important to understand the nuances. If you ... Read more How Does an IT Audit Differ From a Security Assessment?

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As all IT teams know, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) management and monitoring is crucial because without proper DHCP management, your networking environment can end up as a complete mess. DHCP underpins all the distribution of IP addresses and is a key part of configuring subnet masks, default gateways, and DNS server information. DHCP servers ... Read more DHCP Guide: Everything to Know About DHCP Management, Monitoring, and Configuration

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Table of Contents Router and Switch Configuration Benefits What Is a Switch? How to Configure Router Settings Switch and Router Configuration Management for Business Changing the settings on your router can feel like a daunting task. But as most IT professionals will know, default settings aren’t necessarily the best settings, even if abiding by them ... Read more How to Configure Router and Switch – Best Basic Configuration Settings to Know

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IT service management, also known as ITSM, is a way for organizations to combine their business operations with their IT services. In an increasingly digital age, this process is becoming more important than ever. However, ITSM isn’t a new concept. In fact, it dates back to over 30 years ago when it was used in ... Read more What Is ITSM? 2020 ITSM Meaning and Framework Guide

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Do you use a subnet calculator to help manage your network? An IP subnet calculator is responsible for returning a range of information regarding subnets, subnet masks, network addresses, usable host ranges, IP class, and much more. What a subnet calculator does differs between tools, which is why it’s so important to carefully consider which ... Read more 5 Best Subnet Calculators in 2020

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Information Technology Infrastructure Library, also known as ITIL, is a framework of best practices that helps to deliver high-quality IT services. The approach ITIL takes is intended to combine processes, people, and technology to support service delivery, evolution, and maintenance for end users or customers. Business success can depend significantly on the stability, agility, and ... Read more What Is ITIL? 2020 Guide to ITIL Process Standards

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Wondering if your IT infrastructure is secure? You may need to consider an IT security audit, which can provide invaluable information about your security controls. Risk management audits force us to be vulnerable, exposing all our systems and strategies. They’re uncomfortable, but they’re undeniably worth it. They help us stay ahead of insider threats, security ... Read more What Is an IT Security Audit?

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A robust monitoring strategy can help you keep local area networks (LANs) running in a streamlined and efficient way. By implementing a LAN monitoring tool, you protect your network from lags, congestion, and downtime. A LAN monitor like SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor is designed to provide you extra insight into highly complex LAN environments, which ... Read more 8 Best LAN Monitoring Tools

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Businesses rely on data for just about everything they do. No matter the industry, access to real-time data is necessary to make decisions, identify patterns of behavior, determine root cause analysis, and so much more. So as a business leader, you need to ask yourself where will all of this data will live—in the cloud or in an on-premises data center? Both options have their advantages, and they both have their drawbacks. The question can only be answered by looking at the pros and cons of each to determine which is best for your specific scenario.

Over the last two years, 60 percent of companies that suffered a breach determined that the culprits were systems that were not updated properly, according to research from Dark Reading. The practice of patching software, servers, computers, and other endpoints has long been one of the most tedious, albeit most important, things an IT team needs to do. The report from Dark Reading just emphasizes that point. In fact, in an age when most updating and patch management is able to be automated, there is little excuse for so many breaches to be attributed to this cause.

If you’re as tapped in to the computer software community as I am, you might’ve noticed some chatter about JBoss. Red Hat, ASRC Federal Holding Company, and other multimillion-dollar software companies use JBoss application server as a framework for their products. So, what is the JBoss enterprise application platform? How do you use a JBoss ... Read more What Is a JBoss Application Server? Ultimate JBoss Tutorial

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The popularity of the cloud has resulted in an influx of IT administration tools, all of which are still relatively new. Sorting through the vast range of programs on the market, working out the differences between them, and selecting the right one for you can be difficult. I’ve put together this guide of the top ... Read more Best Helpdesk Tools and IT Service Desk Software

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If you manage lots of servers or work in an IT environment for a large enterprise, having high-quality and comprehensive server hardware monitoring software is a must. Hardware monitoring software provides tools to help you ensure your devices don’t overheat, malfunction, or shut down. Usually, monitoring software will keep tabs on your CPU, memory, hard ... Read more Best Server Hardware Monitoring Software

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Safeguarding the security of your IT infrastructure is no easy task. There are so many components to protect, and no firewall is entirely foolproof. Cyberattacks are constantly evolving, with the express intention of breaching your defenses and compromising your systems, and more come to light every day. Keeping pace with these developments requires your security ... Read more 7 Best Intrusion Detection Software and Latest IDS Systems

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From lean businesses to growing enterprises, companies of all sizes should have reliable tools to make sure they communicate effectively, hit project deadlines, and put their best foot forward with clients. However, the way we now work—from home, on the go, and in branch offices around the world—makes it more difficult than ever for team ... Read more Best Workflow Management Software

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IIS, or Internet Information Services, is a multifaceted and layered subject. I’ve put together this guide to help those of you who are new to IIS understand what it does, how it does it, and how you can make it work for you. I have also provided a list of tools for IIS management. By ... Read more Ultimate Guide to IIS Server: What Is IIS? 2020 IIS Tutorial

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MySQL is an open-source, relational database management system based on Structured Query Language (SQL). MySQL is used by dev teams in a wide variety of use cases, most commonly in data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications. However, its most popular deployment is in web databases, since it’s highly flexible, reliable, and scalable. It can be ... Read more Best MySQL Tools for Real-Time Monitoring Server Performance of SQL and MySQL

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Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), a component of the Windows Server operating system, is a free tool that scans your operating system and Windows software and determines whether anything needs to be updated or patched. Though useful, it’s limited in its functionality—not least because it applies only to products from Microsoft. When you’re trying to ... Read more 6 Best Microsoft WSUS Alternative Patch Management Tools

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Access management, sometimes referred to as identity and access management, is the umbrella term for the processes involved in certifying your team members have appropriate access to IT resources. This includes preventing unauthorized personnel from accessing certain resources and information. Access rights management is of critical importance to the security, efficiency, and regulatory compliance of ... Read more 7 Best Access Rights Management Tools

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You might describe ports as gates into your hardware. These gateways exist in the network and can be points of vulnerability. Your hardware is constantly managing multiple activities and tasks at once, and many of these will require network access. The issue with this is usually devices only have a single network interface. Ports are ... Read more 5 Best Open Port Checkers and Scanners in 2020

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According to Statista, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are expected to increase their spending on technology to $684 billion by 2021. This is a significant uptick from the $602 billion spent in 2018. However, as SMBs continue to spend on new technologies, they often run into the issue of not having someone on staff who is able to effectively manage that new technology. Having to rely on outside resources is a growing trend, and IT services in Boston are in high demand as a result. Finding the right partner to help with managed IT services takes a bit of work, though. Knowing some of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to managed IT services can help you find the right team to come in and assist.

When it comes to data breaches, the numbers don’t lie. The most recent Cost of a Data Breach Report from Ponemon shows that the average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million, and the average size comes in at over 25,000 records lost.

SMBs are no longer safe from the crosshairs of cybercriminals, either. According to Fundera, 43 percent of cyberattacks target small businesses, and three out of four SMBs don’t feel they have the personnel to properly address IT security.

As a network grows, ensuring it’s functioning correctly becomes increasingly difficult. Managing IT infrastructure requires knowledge of the devices connected—the inventory—and continuous and regular insight into their health, performance, and availability. Some networks will have hundreds of connected devices; others may have thousands. As the network increases in size, the number of components to be ... Read more 7 Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools + Best Practices Guide

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SQL statements are the primary means through which businesses and organizations retrieve information from the database. However, these statements aren’t always as efficiently composed as they could be, which can lead to slowdowns from the server. That’s why you hear so much about SQL query optimization—it’s a necessary process if you hope to ensure high ... Read more How to Check and Improve Server Performance With SQL Query Optimization and Tuning

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In this article, we look in-depth at both synthetic and real user monitoring and pit these two monitoring methods against each other. We discuss what you can expect to test and track, what insights you can expect to glean, and how you can use this knowledge to improve the performance of your website. After reading, ... Read more Synthetic Monitoring vs. Real User Monitoring: Which One Is Right for Your Project?

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The IIS web server is a central element of any Windows IT structure. SharePoint, Outlook, and general web activity all rely on IIS server availability and performance. Maintaining high-quality IIS performance is integral to ensuring uptime, reliability, and security. If there’s a problem with your server, your web presence will be negatively impacted, and end ... Read more IIS Performance Monitoring and Logging – 5 Top Tools You Should Know

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Virtualization technology has been revolutionary in the world of server computing, and in a several other aspects of computing, including storage, applications, desktop virtualization, and cloud computing. The use of virtualization and cloud computing has given rise to several new, flexible services, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and ... Read more Benefits and Advantages of Server Virtualization Technology

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Network security predominantly falls into two different categories: on-premises and cloud-based. Enterprises choose which one they use to protect their system by considering several factors including individual needs and operational costs. Both approaches are concerned with keeping a network as secure as possible, but cloud security measures get the most scrutiny. So, which is it? ... Read more Is Cloud More Secure than On-Premises Security? Cloud vs. On-Premises Security Tools

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Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems are used for collecting data from your entire network or enterprise environment. By scanning logs and other data from across your system, they then can analyze the event data to help determine security threats potentially facing your organization, so your security teams can appropriately prevent and respond to ... Read more Top SIEM Use Cases for Correlation and SIEM Alerts Best Practices

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Remote access technology is an incredibly useful tool, enabling IT support staff to quickly access and control workstations and devices across vast physical distances. When deployed effectively, the technology has the potential to maximize the efficiency of IT departments and provide rapid, responsive support for an organization’s end users. However, like any other networked connection, ... Read more What Is RAT? Best Remote Access Trojan Detect Tools

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Joomla is a powerful content management system that enables users to create stunning websites to exact specifications. The control over your site, and the customization options using a CMS like Joomla gives you, is second to none. However, alongside the flexibility Joomla offers, also comes the extensive selection of choices—add-ons, tools, extensions, and more. While ... Read more Joomla Essentials – Add-Ons and Extensions You Should Know

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DNS is one of the most crucial internet services. It’s the communicator and concierge of online experiences. Everything, from the web content you browse and the email and chat services you use to social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, depends on DNS functioning on a round-the-clock basis. Given its importance, it’s no surprise this fundamental ... Read more 7 Best DNS Monitoring Tools + How to Monitor DNS Server

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