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Three years ago, we would tell our clients that they needed an antivirus. That some were better than others. That’s about it. Three years ago, we would tell our clients an anti-spam system would take care of most of their concerns. Three years ago, we were worry free… Hackers took advantage of our sluggish state to make their comeback. And they succeeded. More than 95% of breaches are related to phishing. Were you ready for this? Not us.

As technology has become even more central to business operations, hackers have grown in proficiency and are posing several new threats to business owners.

Digital technology has profoundly transformed the way we shop, work, and communicate. Increasingly sophisticated collaborative platforms continue to emerge, integrating different business functions. These multiply the ways professionals can connect, collaborate on projects, and organize new business logistics. A true social and industrial revolution, digital tech disrupts traditional practices, pushing companies to alter their management methods. So how do you embrace digital tools and integrate them into business operations?

Whether it’s a natural disaster, a computer virus, physical damage, or human error, a fortuitous event could eventually disrupt your business operations.

We all know we need an antivirus (AV) solution but what type to buy and how much to pay for it are tough questions.

“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.”
- XKCD.com

So, you think your IT is secure and you’re fully protected? MafiaBoy says, “Not so much.”

Did you know that your Millenium Micro Group (MMG) affiliate reseller can serve you in any of your locations in Canada through our network of service centers? Did you know that this network of experts can complement the team of your local dealer for a particular project?

For nearly 10 years, VoIP telephony has revolutionized corporate telephony. But what is VoIP telephony? In short, it is a telephone system that only uses your internet connection to make your calls.

We would like to share with you these essentials in order to make business managers aware of the risks involved when one or more of these elements are neglected or missing.

Over the next 2 years, 4 Microsoft products, which are still heavily used in companies, will reach end of support. Do not wait; because when you want to change the computer or server operating system, now’s the time to start your planning.

Digital signage is probably the most productive tool companies have to communicate effectively with their employees. Digital screens, placed in strategic places, relay almost instantly news of the company, safety messages, and dashboards of analysis of the company’s performance in real time. This is why digital signage and interactive displays are essential for business communication and HR specialists.

It’s Thursday afternoon, things seem to be going well, and then, it happens. You get an email from an employee telling you he found a copy of the HR file using a search engine. You stop for a moment. This can’t be true. Sure enough, you find the same information. There is a document online listing employees accounts, payroll, address, emergency contacts, and details on health benefits. This is bad. Right now, the only thing you know is that you’ve had a privacy breach.

It was a Wednesday after noon this past February when a CEO of one of SIRCO’s clients received a disturbing phone call from one of his long-time customers. His client told him that he received his quote for the products and services but that he received an almost identical quote from another competitor but with only a dollar difference about 30 minutes later.

Office 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity applications and services offered by Microsoft as a subscription.

Backing up your systems’ contents is an important part of protecting your data.  Everyone hopes never to resort to their backups, assuming that:

• The building will never burn down.
• The computers will never crash.
• The hackers will never find you.

Acomba X is the new generation of Acomba, the accounting software that has been supporting Canadian SMBs for over 25 years. Acomba X offers the same great benefits that made its predecessor successful, while adding a touch of user-friendliness, performance and new features.

Cyber attacks generally don’t come from the outside. Your employees are the ones who, without realizing it, trigger the different cyber attacks within your network, putting your company’s survival at risk.

Read this and discover top tips for choosing the right desktop display.

What do nursery rhymes, memorable movie phrases and great song lines have in common? They make great passwords. And there is not a single number or special character in them. The requirement to make complex passwords using special characters and numbers is being re-thought.

Festivals are well represented in Québec, and summer is the season when the majority of them are held. The needs are great and so are the expectations of the festival-goers. Organizations are also sensitive to technologies that are increasingly present in our daily lives to attract and accommodate visitors.

La Grande Roue de Montréal: a brand new, gigantic observation wheel. Standing 60 metres high and offering a 360-degree view (equivalent to that of a 20-storey building) from tempered cabins, it is the tallest wheel in Canada, and sister of the Chicago Wheel. Built with a framework normally reserved for oil rigs in the North Sea, it can withstand tsunamis and the strongest of earthquakes.

Many of our clients start out the same way, a small group of core people taking care of a lot of different things. Your best sales person is also helping with ordering, you're busy running finance, as well as the company, and your engineer also helps out with IT. Over time your business grew, you hired an accountant because you recognize the importance of keeping accurate financial information, and you now have a team of sales people and separate shipping receiving staff.

In today’s world we see so many different threats against our safety and security. However, one of the biggest and growing is cyber threats. With the world running on technology, this is the one thing that can grind a company to a halt in seconds.

Nowadays the biggest memory provider in Canada, GB Micro has developed its expertise in the import and distribution of memory and electronic products mostly to Canadian consumers, since its creation, in 1983.

Most companies take measures to protect their IT data, and with good reason. However, the increasingly critical role of IT in business models tends to increase the vulnerability of enterprises to disasters.

When looking at transforming your business from traditional phone lines to Voice Over IP (VOIP) the greatest fear is quality, the second is reliance on your internet connection. There are excellent, free tests you can use to determine if your internet connection can support your telephone traffic. In addition, your network can be configured to prioritize telephone traffic.

The concept of a paperless office was promised at the beginning of this millennium, but we are still awaiting its arrival.

The Domain Registrar is where it all starts. The Registrar is the organization where your domain is sourced (if available!) and ownership is established. They can register and create top-level domains such as .com, .ca, .net, etc. The Domain Registrar creates the domain, (ie. mycompany.ca) establishes the registration and technical contact information (this can be hidden) and points the domain name to a Domain Name Server(s). As a small business owner, you should make efforts to ensure you own the registration record.

At home and at the office we have expensive electronics. The value of the data and productivity offered by those electronics is substantially greater than the equipment price. So why do we often find these electronics protected by the cheapest surge bar or Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)? The answer is usually that no one has explained the difference between various power management solutions to small business managers, IT professionals and home owners.

Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) is a concept that has been taking the IT industry by storm. The philosophy of HaaS is simple; the provider owns the hardware and leases it to the client for a monthly fee. There are many benefits for providers and clients when considering a true HaaS procurement model including tax benefits, standardization, and scalability. 

Digital signage consists of a display of images or videos onto a screen (which can be tactile for increased interaction), or onto a projector. In fact, it is the transition from traditional paper signage to on-screen display. 

Recent studies have shown that close to 35% of Canadian organizations have been attacked at least once by ransomware in the past twelve months. Of that number, 43% suffered significant loss of revenue and 25% of these businesses had to halt their operations because of an infection of this type. The major problem with ransomware is that it now pays for hackers to attack you. 

Each summer, many small and medium business owners take the risk of spending a few weeks without their key resources. Whether it’s a system administrator, a person with expertise on specific applications or even an employee dedicated to the help desk, all have a vital role to play. 

About every other year, a colleague and I attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Yes, we have some fun, but the primary intent is to pick up on industry trends for future technologies coming to a workspace near you. For those not familiar CES, it is the largest trade show in the world, with close to 20,000 exhibitors displaying all manner of devices and technologies to 150,000 industry attendees. It runs for 4 days and if you don’t dawdle, you can just about walk the whole show by the time it ends; sore feet notwithstanding.

Managed Services is a well known term to those within the industry, yet is virtually unknown to those outside of it. Even to those that know the term, it is not always understood or appreciated. With the IT industry becoming more complicated every day, I can understand why one might choose to remain only slightly knowledgeable about IT and how it plays such an important role in todays SMB world. Today’s SMB owner need not be experts in the IT industry nor do they have the time. That is the singular purpose of the Managed Service Provider.

THE NEW FACE OF CONSUMPTION…

For some time now, a certain trend has grown consistently stronger in our lives: the emergence of subscription-based products and services.

We still encounter small and even medium size businesses that manage their technology internally or are supported by a one person service provider.  Despite investing significant resources in IT and other related services these organisations tend to be operating with only “out of the box” setups and frequently are using a small fraction of the capabilities available.  Given the complexity of technology today organisations need access to a team with diverse skills and expertise.

The data centre market is constantly the focus of advertisements these days. Its service offering continues to expand, but how do you find your way around it?

One thing every business has in common is that they just want their IT systems to work; everyday, continually.  No outages, no viruses sneaking in, no equipment failures.  In fact they want everything to work so well that they don’t even have to think about it.  

Making your IT infrastructure virtual and migrating it to the cloud is likely to bring you significant gains. However, the elimination of IT management isn’t a part of that! 

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re part of a small business (according to Industry Canada, 98.2% of businesses in Canada have less than 100 employees).  Your business also likely suffers from the same issues that plague many other small businesses: small budgets.  You might now be thinking: what does this have to with Virtualization?

If your organization is like many in the Small and Medium Business (SMB) market segment, your core business is providing products or services other than Information Technology (IT), whether on a for-profit or not-for-profit basis.  After your initial start-up, your IT expenditures are likely entirely reactionary to breakdowns or new needs that arise suddenly.  

So you’re purchasing a new server? Read this before you do!

When choosing between servers in the cloud and local on-site servers, what is the best solution for your business? Which solution is cheaper and would be most effective? These are common issues for leaders of small and medium businesses, and they reoccur year after year. To help you make the right decision, we’ve studied both options.

The cost of I.T. is a very difficult concept to understand no matter the scale of your businesses infrastructure. This cost of any I.T. infrastructure is not limited to the initial purchase of equipment but extends into operational costs that can often be overlooked. Costs such as electricity, maintenance, and equipment age are all examples of what affects the overall cost of ownership for a business. 

Life Cycle Management is a critical component of an optimized IT service.  By keeping it in mind within the context of your purchase and support decisions, you can count on getting better value for each dollar of your IT spend, over a longer period of time going forward.  

Is your web site responsive? In order for your web site to be responsive it needs to offer an easy viewing and interaction experience from any device, such as a mobile phone or an electronic tablet as well as a computer. What responsive web design is all about is enabling your web site, its structure and content to modify itself according to the size of screen you are viewing it with to allow for an optimal viewing without losing any content.

Computer technology provides new options for telephony that we would have never expected to be so efficient just a few short years ago.

Productivity occupies an important place in your company in order to stand out from the competition. Technology contributes much to productivity, so identifying single failure points in your production system is imperative.

There are three misconceptions in the digital word today; Windows 10 is the last Microsoft operating system, robots will soon do everything, and giving employees new software will make them more productive. Wrong. Wrong. And probably wrong.

Businesses may wonder how the new version of Windows, Windows 10, released on July 29, 2015, will benefit them. 

Our world is now full of screens; from desktops and smartphones to tablets and digital signage.  The ability to harness and distribute everyday operational information, emergency alerts, security and environmental information can not only improve life safety but generate improved customer satisfaction and productivity to boot. 

As much as 75 percent of a company’s intellectual property is contained within email and messaging systems, according to Osterman research. And that makes email more than just a vital business communications tool; it constitutes an electronic substitute of legal business documentation. In other words, that message from Phil in accounting could one day be used as legal evidence.

There is ample documentation in the public domain on selecting and sizing UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) capacity for the load it will carry; this article assumes you have already selected and sized yours appropriately, and focuses on a couple of considerations that many small and medium-sized businesses overlook to their peril.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re part of a small business (according to Industry Canada, 98.2% of businesses in Canada have less than 100 employees).  Your business also likely suffers from the same issues that plague many other small businesses: small budgets.  You might now be thinking: what has this have to with Virtualization?

Routers, Firewalls, ID Ses, Ip Ses, BPNs, the list of appliances and technologies we can use to protect our networks to the outside threat of the world (wide web) is extensive. 

Boardroom, conference room or training room, these spaces represent the apex of an organization’s audiovisual investment.  Important decisions are made here, clients are met, contracts negotiated and instruction is delivered.  These activities require the presentation of clear, concise information, and everyone in the room needs to get their voice heard.

More than 10 years ago, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 technology hit the market to meet the needs of businesses. After so many years of service, Microsoft will no longer offer support for Windows Server 2003/R2 beginning July 14, 2015.

IP (Internet Protocol) based phone systems are commonly referred to as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems. The term suggests that new phone systems no longer use traditional Bell phone lines, but in fact are capable of using both and many times are used together.