Zinc Blog

An IT provider can do a lot for your business, but it can exceed your organization’s expectations in more ways than one. A growing business, however, often runs into issues that need to be addressed regarding its technology. We’ll outline some of the major benefits that technology management from an IT provider can offer for a growing business.

As a business owner, it is a great feeling when your business is firing on all cylinders. As revenue grows, the business is forced to take on more employees, and all of a sudden your once-small company is up for contracts/orders that you would never have imagined being possible only a short time ago. With this influx of success, you may find yourself looking at the innovative new technology that once wouldn’t have been practical, but now is both in your price range, and increasingly necessary.

There are quite a few factors that can lead to boosted productivity, but unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Your business’ productivity can be hampered by a variety of issues. Below, we’ll review some sources of productivity deficits, and how these deficits can be eliminated.

Computers are important for just about everything nowadays, but they can be difficult to deal with when they start to act up. If hardware doesn’t connect to a network, or if you have software that fails to respond when you click on it, you’ll likely need assistance to figure out what the cause is. On occasion, however, the issue might be something that a simple troubleshooting procedure can help you resolve. We’ll help you determine whether or not a situation is dire enough to involve professionals, as well as when it’s tame enough that you can resolve it on your own.

The basics are called “the basics” because they are the information you need to know first before you can get a genuine understanding of any concept. In many ways, the basics of network security are extremely important and cannot be ignored. Here are five basic ways you can keep your devices as secure as possible.

One of the best things about computers is that there is always a new way to make something easier: automation decreases a workload, their processors can calculate much faster than the human brain can, collaboration with coworkers becomes almost effortless, and your web browser can even remember your passwords! However, you have to ask yourself: is the ability to save your passwords in your browser really a great idea?

Billboards have been around in one form or another for millennia, starting with the humble handbill in 1450, or under a looser definition, with carved inscriptions on ancient Egyptian monuments. Today, technology allows us to leverage billboards and other forms of signage in new ways. Below, we’ll examine how these technological changes can benefit the small-to-medium-sized business’ use of this marketing medium.

Microsoft has consistently turned out collaboration software of all kinds, but some are more effective than others. We’ll try to single out some of the best and brightest solutions for collaboration in the business world.

With smartphones being so well suited to productivity and on-the-go organization, it’s little wonder that they have become a great tool for note-taking. One application in particular, Evernote, was designed with many features focused toward this very task. For this week’s tip, we’ll review some of the reasons that Evernote is a stand-out note-taking tool.

It’s a scene familiar from many science fiction movies: a simulation pulled up on a screen, the effects of some proposed action being predicted and demonstrated, telling the heroes that their plan just might work. As it happens, this kind of process is no longer relegated to the sci-fi genre, and is used practically in many industries. Here, we’ll discuss the phenomenon of the digital twin.

If you need to make something very clear about a document, adding a watermark to it is an excellent route to take. Microsoft Word 2016 (if you have Office 365, this applies too) makes it especially easy to do so. For this week’s tip, we’ll review the process of adding a watermark to your Word documents.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. File Transfer Protocol. Internet Message Access Protocol. Post Office Protocol. While it may not be outwardly apparent, we certainly rely on quite a few protocols in order to use our computers and more directly, the Internet, as we do. Today, we’ll introduce you to what a protocol actually is.

What’s the point of doing business if you aren’t making money? Processing payments is one of the most critical parts of running a business. To make this easier and more efficient for your company, we recommend working with more effective invoices. This week, we’ll discuss how you can make your invoices more valuable.

If your business isn’t protecting its technology infrastructure, you need to rethink your priorities immediately. After all, hackers aren’t going to wait for your business to secure itself. They will instead seize any easy opportunity to steal your organization’s sensitive data. There are countless threats out there that want to take advantage of your business, or at least see your sensitive data on-sale at the online black market. We’ll walk you through some of the most important factors regarding your organization’s security.

One of the biggest benefits to professional work in recent years has to be the Wi-Fi signal. This simple concept - what if we could connect to a network without a wire - has changed how and where work can be done… assuming, of course, that the connection works. For today’s tip, we’ll go over how to optimize your Wi-Fi signals.

Your data is valuable, and therefore, it has to be protected. One of the best ways to protect your data from any type of threat is by implementing a strong backup program. But how do you go about putting in a backup platform that makes sense for your business. Today, we will talk about enterprise data backup and how to take reliable backups.

A reliable pair of headphones is swiftly becoming an office necessity, and wireless capabilities have improved enough to make a wireless set comparable to its wired counterpart. However, there are plenty of other considerations for you to make when selecting a pair to help boost your productivity. For this week’s tip, we’ll review some of these deliberations.

It’s the end of the day, and you’re faced with a dilemma - shut down your workstation, or simply put it to sleep for the night? This is a topic that is debated quite often. We’ll compare the positive and negative aspects of both approaches to identify which is the better option.

The applications on a mobile device allow us to use that device in a number of ways, from productivity, to entertainment, to networking. However, despite the efforts of Google to keep out the riff raff, the Google Play Store has plenty of malware available to download in the guise of a desired app. Today, we’ll review a few tricks to help you spot them before pressing ‘Install.’

The Internet has long been a great tool for business, but you can’t take advantage of it without putting your sensitive data at risk of threats, like hackers and malware. Granted, when it comes to cyber security, even the most cautious business will have a lot on their plate. We’ll go over eight of the most important security best practices, and how you can implement them for your business.