LSeven Solutions Blog

Nobody likes thinking or talking about this (except maybe if you are in the insurance business), but businesses are fragile entities. Enough hardship and loss will greatly weaken the foundation that keeps the business running smoothly. What if your business suffered from a fire, devastating flood, or even a misfortunate bolt of lightning that destroys your server? Would you be able to pick up the pieces and start over?

Technology today makes it easy for businesses to let employees work from home. Offering secure remote access gives employees the flexibility to work on the road, at events, or from home as if they were at their desks in the office. Is this good for small businesses?

One of the benefits of managed IT services is allotting time and having the proper tools to effectively monitor an entire network for issues. This allows technicians at L7 Solutions to detect, identify, and resolve issues before they start to affect users.

For those who find themselves struggling with resizing windows and flipping between documents and getting lost in a sea of open applications on their desktop, connecting a second monitor to your workstation can double your screen real estate.

We've seen a pattern over the years as Microsoft releases operating systems where every other operating system is great, while the releases in between are somewhat lacking. Windows 98 was pretty solid, as was XP, however the middle-child Windows ME? Not so much. This kind of progression is usually reserved for Star Trek films. What does this mean for Windows 8, the successor of the great Windows 7?

Fans of Microsoft's note taking application can now use OneNote on iOS devices, Windows Phone 7 Smartphones, and at long last, Android devices. Up until now, Android users have been left in the dark for synchronizing and managing their notes through an official OneNote app.

Server Virtualization has been around for a while but has quickly become more popular for small businesses due to the long-term costs saved when your servers are virtualized. What exactly is server virtualization and how can it benefit South Florida businesses?

Social Media is a tough industry - the only way a good social network can succeed is by being extremely popular, and it takes a lot of criteria for that to happen. A social network site either has it or it doesn't, and Pinterest apparently has it in massive quantities.

Email is a huge part of day-to-day business, and it can take a lot of time out of your day to manage it. Fortunately, Outlook has a lot of great features that will help you manage your inbox and effectively handle your email as efficiently as possible.

If your company has employed a backup solution, what process to you go through to ensure it is doing its job? Backup systems need to be tested regularly to ensure all the proper files are being backed up, and to check data integrity.

Over the past couple years we've seen a huge shift in the reliability and functionality of the tablet PC. What was once was a struggling market of just a few overpriced, bulky, devices that were neither practical nor stylish has become the next big consumer product. Tablets have been making it into the business world, supplementing smartphones as a new addition to mobile arsenals. We're going to highlight the best two tablets on the market that you can buy right now.

Microsoft's Excel may look daunting, but it can be incredibly useful for presenting and organizing massive amounts of data. While it is capable of letting you put together advanced formulas, much of the time it's just nice to see a sum of a column of figures.

The problem with carrying around an expensive, portable piece of equipment is that it's possible for someone to pick it up and run with it. According to LoJack, a security firm that focuses on stolen property, two million laptops are stolen each year. What should you do if you are a victim of laptop theft?

Business owners, this one is definitely for you. You've probably experienced the fact that shaving expenses here and there can lead to more flexibility and long-term savings, but at what cost? Are you limiting your company by nixing those extra services and costs? Sometimes you can get more and still save money. Let's look at a few ways South Florida businesses can do just that.

To most people, computer viruses are things that cause annoyance, downtime, and cost money to fix. That's pretty bad on it's own, but some viruses are much more complex than others and can be far more dangerous. Let's look at Stuxnet, coined as the first weapon made entirely out of code, and why it is so frightening.

Television and films have almost desensitized us to the very idea of dangerous viruses. From nonsensical 'hacker' jargon in crime investigation shows to Jeff Goldblum using a computer virus to save the world from an alien invasion. While they might not have their science down, computer viruses can be crafted to do cause some pretty serious trouble.

Stuxnet is a computer virus that was discovered in 2010, infecting computer databases in power plants all over the world. It has some very specific features that target nuclear reactor, specifically centrifuges that spin nuclear material at Iran's enrichment facilities. Viruses like Stuxnet aren't just fabricated in basements by angry, malevolent computer nerds - hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of data, meticulous research, and even knowledge of very classified internal systems all go into the development.

On top of that, viruses like Stuxnet can be available for anybody to find and toy with - it could be retooled for other malicious purposes.  Check out a short video about the threat of the Stuxnet virus.

Network security is becoming increasingly important for businesses, corporations, and organizations of all sizes. Malicious software is becoming more intelligent and more devastating, and even harder to purge from infected computers. Taking proactive measures is necessary to ensure business continuity.

Is your network at risk of malicious viruses, worms, and malware? Contact us at (954) 573-1300 to get an evaluation of your network's security.

We saw a statistic the other day that really boggled our minds. LoJack, a security firm that specializes in theft, estimates that two million laptops are stolen each year. That's about a one in ten chance that your laptop will fall into someone else's hands. What can you do to prevent that?

We've been blogging a bit about ways to prepare for laptop theft and what to do if a company laptop is actually stolen. Laptop and mobile device theft is a widespread issue for businesses and can lead to data theft which can be extremely costly; much more than the mere price of the hardware. This issue is all too familiar with NASA, which admits that thousands of mobile device theft incidents have occurred over the past few years.

There has been a growing trend where businesses are allowing more employees to work from home or other remote locations. Technology makes this possibly by letting users remote into their work environment securely as if they were sitting at their desk at the office. VoIP phone solutions can even bring the worker's office phone to them, no matter where they are.

If you've been using computers for a while, then there has probably been at least one point in your life that you've lost data. Maybe it was something you were working on when your computer crashed, or maybe a disk failure wiped out some data. Does this bring back memories of frustration and angst?

Whether you are going completely paperless or just want to send digital copies of paper documents, there are a lot of solutions out there for quickly scanning a doc and converting it to PDF for easy archiving and emailing, but most of these devices aren't exactly portable. Here's a quick way to digitize documents with the camera on your Android smartphone.