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What’s Parallelism?

On the surface, multitasking and parallelism might look extremely similar. Parallelism is the practice of enabling progress to be made on more than one task or project, simultaneously. Despite this perceived similarity, there is one key component to parallelism that sets these two processes apart.

Parallelism doesn’t require your attention to be devoted to both tasks.

Take breathing, for example. For most people, this process is absolutely instinctive, and requires no focus on their part to continue. In fact, it requires more focus to stop breathing than it does to continue. This is why we, as human beings, are able to accomplish anything. Since we can rely on our bodies to continue breathing, we can go about other tasks that do require our attention, like reading a blog post or calculating a budget.

Of course, breathing is one thing… how can we leverage parallelism to increase our business’ productivity?

Examining the Description

Well, based on how parallelism has been described thus far, it would seem that the idea is that one task can be completed automatically, while attention is devoted to the other task.

Our business’ processes can have the same strategy applied through automation.

With the right solutions in place, you can have repetative responsibilities removed from an employee’s workload, allowing them to accomplish more of their focus-driven tasks in the meantime.

Of course, there are other ways to adopt organizational parallelism, too. Delegation has been a very popular option in business for a long time now. By having one of your employees focus on one element of a task, and another focus on a different one, you can effectively accomplish the same amount of work twice as quickly. The same concept works among different departments, as well. As long as one resource’s work doesn’t rely on another’s, you have a great number of ways that you can leverage parallelism - without putting the stresses associated with multitasking on your workforce.

Interested in adopting automated solutions to start becoming more parallel in your processes? Reach out to Digital Seattle at (206) 709-9556. We can recommend the solutions that can greatly boost your productivity by allowing you to direct your focus elsewhere. Reach out today!

Step 1: Determining What Needs an Upgrade, and Why

Naturally, the first step to any upgrade process is identifying that an upgrade is necessary. When a component of your business network requires an upgrade, it will generally be for at least one of three reasons:

• You want your solutions to have an increased capacity or range.
• You want to improve the security of your business and its resources.
• You want an increase in your business’ productivity, with less maintenance required.

If a part of your infrastructure could facilitate any (or all) of these objectives if it was upgraded, it’s probably a good idea to do so. That means that you need to start the next step.

Step 2: Planning and Preparing for Your Upgrade

A technology upgrade isn’t something that can be done on a whim. If you want yours to be successful, you need to have done your due diligence ahead of time. You will want to make sure that your network can support this upgrade in its current state, and any other considerations that come up.

As you’re preparing for the upgrade, you also need to consider any potential negative ramifications that it could have on your users. Will this upgrade be a lengthy one, and will that cause a lengthy interruption to your business’ processes? Proactively considering this will allow you to make plans to decrease the impact of these circumstances. For instance, if an upgrade is projected to create a lengthy interruption, it may be wiser to have it implemented after hours, when your resources are less likely to be called for.

Step 3: Protecting Yourself

While your upgrade will ideally run smoothly and not cause any issues, it is better to be prepared for an unideal situation. This is why an upgrade absolutely should be preceded by a comprehensive backup. With a backup taken, any issues that your upgrade may incur can be easily mitigated - so while you won’t have gained anything, your losses will be minimized.

Digital Seattle can help you manage your technology, ensuring that your upgrade processes are done correctly. Reach out to us at (206) 709-9556 to learn more!

As a result, endpoint security has become a major consideration for nearly every organization. There are strategies and solutions that businesses can implement that will not only give IT administrators the resources they need to protect the company’s data and computing infrastructure, but also trains their staff in the backhanded way these hackers try and infiltrate the business’ network with their legitimate credentials. Let’s take a look at some different forms of phishing and what you should be teaching your staff to keep them from messing up, and making your business just another negative statistic.

Deceptive Phishing

As the most common type of phishing scam, deceptive phishing in a name is pretty obvious. The name of the game for this attack is to pull the wool over the eyes of an unsuspecting end user. In essence, a deceptive phishing strategy is one where an email or message is created impersonating a legitimate company or person to flat out steal personal access information. With this access, the illegitimate party has some time to pick and choose what he/she wants to take, or gain access to. By having legitimate credentials, the illegitimate party doesn’t immediately trigger any red flags.

Most deceptive phishing messages are ignored, caught by filtering technology, or disregarded when accessed; but, the one that works to fool the end user is worth the hundreds or thousands of emails they’ve sent using the same method. To ensure that your organization doesn’t have to deal with a data breach, or malware associated with that phishing attack, it’s extremely important to lay out the ways that these deceptive emails are different from legitimate emails.

Phishing emails traditionally have misspelled words and hastily thrown together construction. Typically, users will have to download some attachment. So if there is an attachment that an email prompts you to click on, be sure to check the URLs by mousing over the links to determine if the email is from a legitimate source. One thing every user should be cognizant of is that if the email is from a financial institution demanding payment, it is likely a phishing email. Email, while being a popular form of communications, is rarely used for such purposes.

Spear Phishing

These types of phishing attacks are personalized to a specific user. This can cause a lot of people to forget what they know about phishing and let their defenses down. The goal - as fraudulent as it is - the same as a traditional phishing attack, except it will be harder to decipher that it is, in fact, an attempt to trick the user into providing network access. The spear phishing email will often feature the target’s name, their title, their company, even information like their work phone number, all with the same aim: to get them to click on the malicious extension or URL sent with the email.

Users of the social media site, LinkedIn, will likely come across spear phishing if they utilize the service regularly. Since you provide certain information for networking with other like-minded industry professionals, you unwittingly provide the hackers with the information they need to build these messages. Of course, we’re not suggesting that you stop using LinkedIn, or any other social media because of the risk of hackers, but be careful what information you have shared within these profiles and ensure that any personalized email is, in fact, legitimate before you click on anything.

Pharming

With more and more people becoming savvy to these types of phishing attacks, some hackers have stopped the practice altogether. They, instead, resort to a practice called pharming, in which they target an organization’s DNS server in order to change the IP address associated with the website name. This provides them an avenue to redirect users to malicious websites that they set up.

To ward against pharming, it is important to tell your staff to make sure that they are entering their credentials into a secured site. The best way to determine if the website/webtool a person is trying to access is secure is that it will be marked with “https” and will have a small lock next to the address. Also having strong, continuously-patched antivirus on your organization’s machines is important.

With proper training and solid security solutions, your company can avoid falling for the immense amount of phishing attacks that come its way. To learn more about how to secure your business, and what tools are best to help you do just that, call the IT professionals at Digital Seattle today at (206) 709-9556.