Today’s Businesses Shouldn’t Go Without a VPN

Let me ask you a question: how do you balance the prevalence of remote work with the fact that a lot of company resources should only be stored on-site? A VPN—or virtual private network—provides the answer for many businesses. Let’s examine what a VPN actually is, and how it helps to protect your business’ data as you access it from outside of your business’ secure network.

So, What is a VPN? In simple terms, a VPN is a dedicated network connection specifically configured to send and receive data securely. This means that, since you don’t want your business’ data visible to the world, it is critical such a connection is used when your team is remotely accessing your local network. By putting a VPN in place, you can ensure that your entire organization has access to a secure connection that will connect them to whatever data they are authorized to access. How Does a VPN Work? The key to a VPN’s inherent security is the encryption that is applied to your data as it is in transit. By encrypting the data as it travels, all a snooping hacker will be able to see is a jumbled mess, protecting your information. The VPN even hides your location, giving our hypothetical hacker effectively nothing to work with. Why Do You Need a VPN? It all comes down to trust, and the lack of it that you should have for public Wi-Fi connections. While undeniably intended to be convenient, public hotspots like those you’d find in an airport or your favorite coffee place just aren’t nearly secure enough to entrust your data to. Using a VPN allows you to take advantage of this convenience without this otherwise deal-breaking security tradeoff influencing your business. Your data is more than information, after all—it’s what keeps your business going. As such, losing it or having it compromised could mean you could potentially lose your business. Planning ahead can help prevent this, especially with the help of Net It On, LLC and our team of IT pros. We’ll set you up with a VPN and the rest of the technology needed to enable secure and productive work wherever you may be.

Tip of the Week: Adding a Web Shortcut to Your Desktop

Keyboard shortcuts are great ways to make your workday just a little more efficient without much effort. Did you know that you can make a keyboard shortcut on your Windows computer that can direct you to a specific webpage? Let’s go over how you can make it happen.

There are a couple of ways you can make your keyboard Internet shortcut. Manually To manually make your keyboard Internet shortcut, right-click on your desktop and select New > Shortcut. When the dialog box opens, type the website URL in the box that appears, then select Next. You’ll then be prompted to give your new shortcut a name. Once you’re ready, click Finish. Your new icon will appear on your desktop. Now, when you right-click it, you can select Properties to see information about the shortcut. From here, you can change the URL, assign a shortcut key, and change the icon. Click in the Shortcut key box, then type the key you would like to use for your new shortcut. The key combination will then appear in the box. Click-and-Drag To save yourself a step, you can simply click-and-drag the shortcut’s URL to your desktop to make the shortcut a bit faster and more easily. This also assigns your shortcut a name in the form of the website page’s name. From here, you can right-click the shortcut, select Properties, and see the same information that you could see in the above step. And that’s all there is to it! Now you can make custom keyboard shortcuts for your favorite websites. Alternatively, you could just use bookmarks in your browser, but the more tools you have at your disposal, the better.