Info Advantage Blog

Your wireless router is critical to your business’ online infrastructure and provides your team with precious wireless Internet connections throughout the office. You need to ensure that the signal can reach your entire office. Here are some tips to help you figure out where to put your router, and to ensure that its signal is as strong as possible throughout your office.

Put Your Router Out in the Open
Some people don’t like the appearance of routers. They fashion them an eyesore and try to hide them away in cabinets or elsewhere, away from where people can see them. This is often both counterproductive and dangerous, as the device can potentially overheat in a place with poor air circulation. If you store your router in a cabinet, you’re also weakening the signal, which can make it spotty and difficult to use.

Instead, we recommend that you keep your router out in the open, where it can get plenty of air and keep the signal as strong as possible. This is a best practice for your technology, including workstations and servers that generate a lot of heat naturally by functioning properly.

Use a Central Location
While it might be tempting to just put your router in a far corner of your office and forget that it exists, chances are that the other half of your office won’t be receiving a very strong wireless signal. To avoid this, you need to set your router up in a central location where it can broadcast its signal to the entire office. Depending on your office’s setup, you might even need multiple access points to allow each of your employees to access the Internet.

Also of note, you should elevate your router slightly to ensure that the signal isn’t being blocked by furniture that sits on the floor. File cabinets, desks, and other objects, could all get in the way of the wireless signal.

Review Your Bandwidth and Internet Service Agreement
Sometimes the placement of a router won’t have anything to do with your problem, and the issue is with your network connection instead. In this case, the problem would be with your modem or your Internet service agreement limiting your bandwidth and the flow of data. If you’re having wireless problems, and you’re sure it’s not your router, it’s worth looking into the problem on the ISP’s side of things.

Upgrade Your Router
Are you using the same old router that you picked up when you first started your business? If so, there’s a strong chance that your router’s hardware or firmware is outdated. Since you actually have control over your router, you’d do well to investigate the issue before you purchase a new one. It’s recommended that you go with a router that’s capable of supporting both 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz bands. This will help you keep your network strong and healthy. Plus, sometimes all it takes to resolve connectivity issues is to upgrade your system’s firmware.

For help optimizing your business’s wireless network, reach out to Info Advantage at (585) 254-8710.

With today’s great technology solutions, working remotely is no longer just a dream. Many businesses have either a partial or a complete remote staff, and it’s all held together by modern technology solutions. However, even with the latest tech, the remote worker still has to invest in their own success. If you work remotely, here are four ways that you can maximize your productivity and keep yourself from getting in the way of your best work.

Have a Dedicated Office
You might have your own cubicle or office space at your workplace, but when you work remotely, you often have to get creative. You could turn a booth at a restaurant into a workspace, or your living room sofa into your office. However, this is often counterproductive and distracting. Instead of hoping to get work done away from your desk, you should arrange to have a dedicated home office with lots of space and privacy. This should be the place where you go to get good, solid work done; where all of your files and technology solutions are located. Also, it helps to avoid working in busy public places whenever possible, like coffee shops and restaurants.

Set Specific Rules for Your Family and Visitors
If you’re going to work remotely, this will often mean setting up a home office where you can go to get your best work done. If you have a family that’s always at home, it can be distracting. You need to set clear boundaries so that they know when it’s a good time to drop by your office. Furthermore, it’s a good idea to limit what you should be doing during the workday. It’s one thing to take a short break to handle some minor chores, but another entirely to get distracted by multiple large tasks. Working remotely is a privilege, and as such, you need to stay productive in order to retain this flexibility.

Keep Working Until the End of Your Shift
When you work remotely, you might have the impression that taking an early-out might not be a big issue. However, this can be a slippery slope; one day you’ll start taking more and more time off of the end of the day, and before you know it, your work performance will suffer and you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself. Plus, if you continuously abuse this privilege, you might ruin the opportunity to work remotely for the rest of your coworkers.

Use the Right Technology Solutions
Remote workers are only as effective as the tools that they use to get work done. This is why businesses often have to implement proper technology solutions, like virtual private networks and Voice over Internet Protocol communications, to ensure maximum protection for their investments and productivity for their employees. If your organization could use a tech revamp to accommodate remote workers, Info Advantage can help.

For more information about how to keep your remote workers productive, contact us at (585) 254-8710.

Mobility is proving to be a major pain point for businesses, especially when it comes to implementing new technology solutions. It’s become crucial to consider how mobility can influence the growth of your business and improve operations, particularly with the cloud gaining ground and mobile devices becoming omnipresent in the workplace. How will your business learn from this influx of mobility?

Here are four ways that mobility trends have infiltrated the enterprise environment, and why your business can (and should) apply them to its own technology strategy. Doing so keeps you one step ahead of the curb on this important industry topic:

• Security is important: Regardless of what types of devices your business uses, it’s primarily how they access data that you need to be concerned with. Data security is crucial, especially for mobile devices that may be connecting to unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots while out of the office. A virtual private network, or VPN, is a valid choice to mitigate the risk associated with potentially dangerous connections, while a mobile device management solution can allow you to restrict access to sensitive corporate information on a per-user and per-application basis.
• Increased focus on the cloud: The cloud lets your business store data and applications in an online environment, where they can be accessed from any location with an Internet connection. This makes collaboration and communication much easier, as no matter where your employees are, they can connect to your base of operations and access the resources they need to do their jobs.
• The convergence of desktop and mobile: Windows 10, Microsoft’s latest operating system, was an attempt by the software giant to create an OS and applications that work on a myriad of different devices, be it a desktop workstation, or a smartphone. This suggests that solutions that work on a universal level can improve the productivity and flexibility of a workplace. After all, you can get more done with a full version of an app built for a smartphone than you would with a watered-down version.
• Regulation and oversight are critical: Your business needs control of its data if you want to thrive. Mobile devices might have the benefit of flexibility, but you need to ensure that users can be held accountable for their actions - including how and why they use sensitive corporate data. In most cases, it’s important to restrict access to data in order to protect it from those who have no business viewing it.

There’s certainly a lot to consider when implementing mobile technology solutions, but you don’t have to do it alone. Info Advantage can help your team make an educated decision about how to use mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to their advantage. To learn more, reach out to us at (585) 254-8710.

More organizations are revamping their traditional IT infrastructure to favor new technology that allows for greater mobility. Not to be outdone, even major government departments are making this move, like the U.S. Department of Education.

This move toward mobility is designed to replace the department's current IT infrastructure, known as EDUCATE (Education Department Utility for Communications, Applications, and Technology Environment). EDUCATE was implemented in 2007 by Perot Systems after they won the bid for $400 million. At the time, this was a bold move because it effectively transferred oversight of the infrastructure from the government to a contractor.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education has a new set of priorities that they would like to see out of their infrastructure. According to Jason Gray, Chief Information Officer for the Education Department, the technology landscape has changed so much since 2007 that a revamp is in order. Gray says that these new infrastructure objectives should encourage innovation, optimize the cost to benefit ratio, and show flexibility to make integrating changes in requirements simple.

These objectives are spelled out in a new infrastructure plan named PIVOT (the Portfolio of Integrated Value-Oriented Technology). Unlike the previous model, PIVOT looks to have each aspect of the infrastructure (like oversight, hosting data, printing, network services, technical management and integration, and mobile services) written up with its own contract.

The primary goal of the Department’s new infrastructure is increased mobility. They look to achieve this by moving away from a permanently established office space, and instead, take advantage of teleworking and hoteling (where workers use mobile devices to move about an office instead of being limited to their desk). This kind of move is in line with a federal government initiative to reduce its real estate footprint. In keeping with this goal, PIVOT has the potential to free up 6,200 workers from the traditional office environment.

There are lots of benefits to be had by the U.S. Department of Education from a move like this. What about your own IT infrastructure? Has it been updated in recent years to take advantage of the advancements of mobile computing? Or, are you still doing business like it's 2005 with a workforce tied to their desks and limited to bulky workstations?

To revamp your own IT infrastructure, give Info Advantage a call at (585) 254-8710 and find out what we can do for you.

While security experts tend to focus the brunt of their discussions on desktop OS vulnerabilities, there are plenty of mobile malware threats that fly under the radar. One such malware is called Hummer; a trojan that installs unwanted apps and malware on a device, and can be found on over a million phones worldwide.

About Hummer
The Hummer malware family has increased over the past year. At its peak activity, Hummer infected nearly 1.4 million devices every day. It’s thought that Hummer originated in China, and it has been known to infect over 63,000 devices daily in China alone. Granted, the spread of infections has dramatically decreased, but this hasn’t stopped Hummer from infecting about 1,190,000 devices.

As reported by TechRepublic, here are the top five countries and the number of devices that are infected by the Hummer malware:

• India: 154,248
• Indonesia: 92,889
• Turkey: 63,906
• China: 63,285
• Mexico: 59,192

What It Does
Hummer roots devices that it infects, which can unlock the operating system and allow for administrator privileges. Once it has infiltrated the device and unlocked it, Hummer will install malware, unwanted applications, games, pornographic applications, and other malicious and annoying programs. Since Hummer roots the device, your traditional antivirus and anti-malware programs aren’t going to be enough to get rid of it.

Yet, perhaps the most dangerous part of this malware is that you can’t uninstall the unwanted apps. Well… you can, but the trojan will just reinstall the apps, which is both frustrating and a terrible use of your mobile data. Cheetah Mobile ran a test on the Hummer trojan and came to some shocking results: "In several hours, the trojan accessed the network over 10,000 times and downloaded over 200 APKs, consuming 2 GB of network traffic." It’s clear that you don’t want this malware installed on your device, as it could jack up your phone bill and become an immense annoyance.

How to Fix It
To make matters worse, wiping your device won’t even be enough to get rid of the trojan. Cheetah Mobile claims that the factory reset won’t remove it. Users could also flash their device, but this can get complicated, and we don’t recommend doing so if you have no clue what you’re doing.

Hummer isn’t the first mobile malware, and it certainly won’t be the last. Users of smartphones have to be just as cautious and vigilant as desktop users. To learn more about mobile malware and other threats, reach out to us at (585) 254-8710.