With over 17 Billion connected devices worldwide, we all need some help keeping our families and homes safe from online attacks and intruders. Most of us have smart devices throughout our home, and many times we forget that these devices can be a front door to cyberattacks. Bitdefender box is the brute security guard we all need for our homes.

Technology makes working convenient. We set up offices so that employees can work remotely, and it is a huge selling point when hiring. Unfortunately, unless appropriately managed, having access to work anywhere can run you into the ground. As we pointed out in the blog last week, 2/3 of full-time employees admit to experiencing work burnout. That does not include those who are afraid to accept this fact! Working efficiently is challenging as we are always working. So how do we use technology to manage our technology to work smarter and have a healthier work/life balance?

Technology is everywhere. We have access to it 24/7 365 days a year in almost any location. Technology indeed can be a blessing and a curse. It offers us many advantages, although these same advantages can quickly turn into disadvantages. For example, being able to access our data from almost anywhere is helpful but it is also harmful as we can not escape our data and specifically work. No longer are we just working a 9-5 job. Instead, we put in our hours at the office and also check email and many other applications when we should be decompressing at home or on vacation. A recent study found that 2/3 of full-time employees admit to experiencing burnout at work. This is no surprise because we can’t escape work even when we are trying! That is why we are exploring the topic of using technology to manage technology. This might sound counterintuitive but bear with us for a quick read.

In most offices these days, the amount of data maintained is astronomical. This is the reason why data security is one of our highest priorities at Pendello Solutions. To combat a breach of the multitude of sensitive data, we train to be vigilant, back up, encrypt and use multifactor authentication among many other tactics. But what happens if anyone can walk in your front door? In our new Pendello Solutions office, we took this risk seriously. We thoroughly researched what would be the most secure yet straightforward tool for building access. In our research, we found that Open Path fulfilled both of our primary goals. It also provided a great deal of real-time data, and as you all know, we love data!

We hear a lot about the Dark Web and although many of us shudder at the topic, few honestly know what the Dark Web actually is. The Dark Web is not a location but instead a way of searching the internet with anonymity. To fully understand what this means, we need to look at how the surface web works in comparison to the Dark Web.

One of the exciting announcements from last month’s Microsoft SharePoint conference is that Microsoft will soon be releasing Homesites. Homesites will be a fully customizable homepage where the existence of your SharePoint contents will reside. To fully understand the impact that this addition will have, we need to understand the current view of a SharePoint page. To begin, SharePoint is essentially your company’s internal communication site, which is referred to as an intranet. This is where you find all of your saved documents and files. Up until this point, your SharePoint site was fairly generic and not exactly pretty or easily navigable. It essentially is a simple page with a list of files. Understandably, we are beyond excited about this announcement. Now, anyone who currently uses the Microsoft SharePoint Intranet will be able to customize their Intranet “Homepage,” creating an aesthetically pleasing homepage with your company’s voice and branding.

Gone are the days of solely creating slides shows with timed transitions! Microsoft Sway, one of the lesser known applications from the 365 Stack, allows for the creation of interesting presentations with incredible options, fantastic flow and presenter-less presentations. Sway is where today’s presentations are headed, so let’s take a more in-depth look!