The Internet is Very Different From Place to Place

 While it seems decidedly commonplace nowadays, the Internet is undeniably a miracle of the modern age—shrinking the world in a way never seen before. Of course, this has complicated things considerably in terms of the rules that the Internet must comply with, based on regional regulations. Let’s reexamine the impact that these laws, regulations, and restrictions have had on how the Internet appears across the globe.

How the Internet is Dictated by Politics

Geopolitical considerations have had a ton of influence over the way that the Internet has been shaped—something that runs more or less counter to the foundational idea of the world wide web. Seeing as how critical the Internet is to modern society, is it so surprising that some governments want to impose their own will over it?

Of course not, which is why we see the following events and more happening all the time:

• The United States government has considered blocking TikTok and WeChat, as they are hosted in China.
• The Indian government has blocked dozens of applications (including these two) for similar reasons and are now looking critically at Twitter.
• The Australian government was at odds with Facebook over a proposed law, leading to Facebook changing its functionality in the country until an agreement was struck.

These Internet companies and the disputes they have with these governments have made it so that the Internet is notably different depending on the region you are accessing it from. The global spread of nationalism over the past decade has only made these differences even more pronounced.

The Changes

Consider Facebook: when it first went global, so many people were given a taste of freedom that some societies had never had—only to have some nations (like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China) immediately restrict this access. Regardless, Facebook spread around the world at a pace rarely before seen.

However, all these years and countless Facebook-inspired headlines later, many countries are clearly having second thoughts about these companies having so much influence and actively working to rein them in.

Let’s consider the situation in Australia. When the country’s government passed a law that was meant to require technology firms and social networking platforms (notably, Facebook) to pay for the privilege to share certain content, many news organizations and charities found their ability to use the platform hindered. While a short-term solution was agreed upon, the underlying concerns regarding Internet governance remain.

Could Global Regulations be Incoming?

Many have taken up the call for a unified standard in terms of Internet use and regulation, but any progress towards this end has been slow. It certainly doesn’t help that the Internet is a more critical aspect of everyday life in some countries over others, and so there are financial motivations in play to complicate whatever standards may be suggested.

But what do you think? Should the Internet be treated as a global resource, standardized by one set of rules? Should individual nation-states have different amounts of power over the use of the Internet within their borders? Let us know what you think so we can keep the conversation going.

A.I. Can Sell Pastries and Diagnose Cancer

 Artificial intelligence is one of the most intriguing technologies that has come down the pike. For the small and medium-sized business, it may seem more like science fiction than a solution to their business’ operational problems. Today, AI is more accessible for the SMB than ever, and today, we thought we would share with you a situation where the technology—designed to help out in a bakery—is being used to diagnose cancer. 

Why Would a Bakery Use AI in the First Place?

In Japan, where the technology was developed, they have a lot of cafeteria-style restaurants. An AI-aided software was developed to automate the role of cashier. Instead of having a human cashier on staff to count out the shopper’s selections at checkout, an attendant simply instructs customers to place the baked goods they want to buy out on the counter. Once they are ready to check out, the whole process takes seconds. The AI effectively identifies the pastries, calculates the price owed and calculates a total for the customer. This allows each customer to be rang up much more quickly.

By streamlining the process with automation, these Japanese bakeries, which usually carry large selections of items, were able to check out more people and it increased their revenue. It also cut down on the packaging required as the AI would identify each individual pastry. The development of this AI-integrated application was spearheaded by BRAIN Co. Called BakeryScan, it is now in over 400 retail establishments in Japan and costs around $20,000 to deploy. 

By the way: if you’re worried about the prospect of unwrapped baked goods being sold in the past year or so, the technology has since improved to recognize pastries through protective wrapping just as accurately.

This technology has obvious benefits for retail organizations, but what you won’t expect is that nearly the same software could find another use: Diagnosing cancer.

A doctor at Kyoto’s Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research saw a segment on TV and the connection was made. Turns out that some baked goods look similar to some cancer cells observed through a microscope. Making an association with the utility of the BakeryScan AI, it was repurposed as AI-Scan, a medical tool. 

AI-Scan can spot differences in cancerous urinary cells with its Cyto-AiSCAN offshoot (with accuracy measuring over 99 percent), and has been adopted for many other purposes. Today, organizations are using it to distinguish pill types, one company uses it to identify bolts and other fasteners that may have some problem. Toyota has also started using the technology to help design more effective airbags. 

This gives you a good idea about how AI is being adopted to further the technology used to improve the outlook for humanity, but it can also be used to help your business. Today, there are a number of software solutions that have integrated an AI or machine learning system that can help you streamline processes or, like AI-Scan, change the way you view your business.

Why Every Business Should Seriously Consider Virtualization as an Option

 Business hardware is never a small investment to make, so for a business to make the best use out of their invested funds, their hardware needs to be seriously considered. One way to do so is to use a virtualized environment, whether that environment is hosted onsite or in the cloud. Let’s consider the inherent benefits of virtualization.

The Shift in Business Computing

It wasn’t all that long ago that a business’ options were limited. Smaller businesses that wanted to expand their infrastructures had to purchase a new server and use it for a specific purpose. Given the hardware, data, and application control this gives the organization, it makes the most sense for a business with an IT support team onsite—assuming the business has a budget that can support it.

This is because a server used in this way doesn’t make use of its full capabilities. With each server dedicated to a single, specific purpose, there are a lot of resources potentially going to waste each time. However, in a virtualized environment, this hardware can be used for multiple processes, helping to vastly reduce the investment needed to support them all.

How Does Virtualization Work?

Instead of dedicating an entire server to each application you’re hosting, several virtual servers can share the resources on one piece of hardware. This means that the same processes that would once require four separate servers could now be accomplished with one.

Some Benefits of Virtualization

While virtualization does bring some significant up-front costs, the overall reduction in hardware costs can make these expenses worth it for many organizations, with the added accessibility this strategy provides serving as a nice externality. Not only can you reduce the infrastructure required to support your processes, but you can also reduce the need for your entire team to congregate into one place. These factors can combine to help result in hardware cost reductions ranging from 40-to-60 percent, with the cost of management, business utilities, and maintenance also reducing.

Businesses can then take these cost savings and reinvest them into forward-thinking initiatives while also making use of their improved capabilities. With new environments able to be created in mere minutes, and backups and security management consolidated substantially, efficiency is gained.

Cloud-Based Company Benefits

A virtualized environment can also be hosted in a bigger virtualized environment, as cloud resources are now more accessible, affordable, and secure than ever before. Pairing the benefits of cloud and virtualization can deliver even more substantial advantages for the cost of a modicum of data control.

Profiting Off Your IT Investments

 Revenue generation is the name of the game for every business and sometimes technology is looked on as more of a hindrance to profitability than a tool to cultivate it. To turn this notion around, a business needs to make strategic investments that will return some type of benefit, whether that be the availability of alternate revenue streams, a boost in productivity, improved collaboration, and more. Today, let’s take a look at some ways that businesses can invest in their IT and improve their profitability as a result. 

Using IT to Boost Operational Efficiency

One of the things technology is great at doing is making inefficient systems more efficient. Today, many of the problems small and medium-sized businesses have are that they lack the efficiency in their human resources to make gains on the balance sheet. Automation can change any business’ fortunes in this regard.

Think about it this way, one of your employees has to produce something in order to be viable, right? If half of that person’s job is working on the business, whether it be small mundane and repetitive tasks that waste their focus or their time, or if they are being asked to support the same product they are charged with creating, they won’t be nearly as productive as they should be (or they would like to be). Go on like this for a while and anyone can be frustrated.

By automating some of the things they do--that is, using computer-run systems to take over those mundane and repetitive tasks--they will be able to truly focus on the job you hired them for, and therefore you can expect a happier, more productive person. Additionally, all those little tasks that kept them from being more productive will be done without error, every time, building efficiency and keeping downtime to a minimum. 

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The technology your business uses is expensive, this much is true. Servers, workstations, networking: they all cost an arm and a leg to purchase, but also to monitor and maintain properly. One way that the modern SMB can avoid these massive capital expenditures is to utilize the numerous IT-related services at their disposal. 

Considering cloud computing is a great way to start. Today there are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings that require next to zero capital expense. You can get all the computing and services from cloud vendors and you will pay per month or per gigabyte for them. This means that your business’ computing resources can be an operational expense, easier to budget, and available from anywhere on nearly any device. 

For those companies that like to have their IT onsite, outsourcing your IT support and management to a managed service provider (MSP) is a great way to get all the value of having a dedicated IT staff, at a fraction of the cost. Not only does the MSP keep your technology running effectively, minimizing downtime, it also offers a myriad of useful services including backup and disaster recovery, patch management, vendor management, and more. If you want to take a chunk out of your IT support costs, while maximizing your business’ ability to function by reducing downtime, managed IT services are a great option for any SMB.

Considering the Current State of Phishing

 We will never pass up the opportunity to draw attention to the importance of cybersecurity awareness, as it is a crucial element for any business to consider. One serious issue that has caused significant stress amongst businesses is phishing. Let’s consider some recent statistics to evaluate where we stand right now, specifically in terms of the prevalence of phishing attacks.

What is Phishing, Again?

Let’s break down the basic idea of a phishing attack (if only briefly):

Rather than relying on fancy coding or malware, a phishing attack targets the user to try to fool them into handing over their credentials, financial information, and other valuable and sensitive data rather than undermining their technology in some way.

These attacks are, in a word, effective… and in another word, prevalent. After all, around the world, a full 88 percent of organizations experienced a direct phishing attack (known as spear phishing) in 2019—which actually marked a decline in phishing’s popularity amongst cybercriminals. In 2020, phishing resurged once again to make up approximately one of every 4,200 emails or so sent, and Google has registered over two million phishing sites as of January 17th of this year (compared to just over 1.6 million at the same point the year prior).

These attacks have resulted in lost and stolen data, compromised accounts, malware and ransomware infections, and of course financial losses.

Unsurprisingly, Phishing Has Exploded

While phishing has always been an issue, the events of 2020 made it particularly impactful. 75 percent of organizations worldwide were targeted by phishing of some kind over the year, while 74 percent of United States organizations were successfully attacked. Considering the cost that phishing attacks can incur for a business—$3.92 million on average—and the variety of ways that these costs are incurred, phishing can safely be referred to as one of the biggest issues that businesses face on a regular basis right now.

Naturally, this is not good, and strongly suggests that more needs to be done to help prevent successful phishing attacks from taking place.

Strong Backup Practices is as Easy as Counting to Three

 Individuals are increasingly understanding the value of their data, and that is a good thing. Unfortunately, a lot of small and medium-sized businesses are operating today without any type of data backup protecting their business’ data, and that, of course, is bad. It is important that if you don’t have a dedicated data backup and recovery strategy in place, that you work to fix that immediately. Today we’ll tell you why. 

Keeping Redundant

Typically, you don’t want to be redundant. But when it comes to your business’ data, you absolutely do. The reason is that there are numerous (countless even) ways where your business, if it loses its data (or even control of it) would be in great peril. Redundancy means that you have your systems backed up and ready to restore should something terrible happen.

The 3-2-1 Rule Spells R-e-d-u-n-d-a-n-c-y

One of the best ways that you can ensure that your business has built a proper level of redundancy is by subscribing to the 3-2-1 rule. This is a guideline that every business should adhere to. Essentially it means keeping (at least) three copies of your data. Two are stored onsite and one is stored offsite. 

Our clients have their working copy, which is the data they use everyday; then they have an onsite backup, which is stored in a specially-designed Network Attached Storage (NAS) device called a BDR; and finally, they have their offsite storage, which is uploaded to offsite storage in the cloud. The redundancy built effectively ensures that whatever happens to your business, you will have a way to restore your data. The BDR also allows for incremental backups, which means that as you work, the changes are backed up to the BDR periodically (every hour and as often as every 15 minutes). Doing so provides you with a copy of your data that is up to date and ready to restore regardless of the circumstances that require you to restore your data from your backup platforms.

Tip of the Week: How to Identify and Address Workplace Distractions

 Technology might be a great tool to enhance productivity, but we need everyone to understand that it can only do so much for an unproductive user. It’s not uncommon for users to bounce back and forth between tasks, and this can lead to unfortunate bouts of unproductive behavior. Let’s discuss some ways that you can help your team overcome these obstacles.

How Do These Distractions Impact Productivity?

The average worker in the United States gets distracted from their work every 11 minutes or so, and it takes 25 minutes to regain focus on whatever they happen to be working on. As you might expect, more complicated tasks will require more time to refocus due to the greater mental effort required to shift focus back to the more challenging work.

Considering how most workplaces want to squeeze out all of the productivity they can, this turnaround rate is far from ideal. Therefore, minimizing distractions is an important part of making the most of all resources available, including your employees. In order to make this happen, it’s critical that you acknowledge how big a problem distractions can be. There are two different types of distractions: external and internal.

The Difference Between Internal and External Distractions

One might argue that distractions are bad no matter what they are, but there are benefits to understanding the difference between internal and external distractions, as well as their impact on productivity.

External distractions are all over the place in the business world. These kinds of distractions come from emails, phone calls, instant messages, and sudden meetings, all of which come from a place external from the user. These external distractions are compounded by internal distractions, those that come from within the user themself. These come in the form of various mental blocks that keep the user from focusing on the task at hand, such as the inability to prioritize tasks or weigh options accordingly. You can compare it to looking at a restaurant menu. If there are too many choices, making a decision can be difficult. Smaller menus, on the other hand, encourage quick decisions.

Many workplaces set the schedules of their employees, so this naturally isn’t a perfect comparison. We think it is a fair assessment that these internal distractions stem from an inability to prioritize tasks assigned to team members. This isn’t always their fault, though; if everything is identified as an important or high priority, who can blame them for not knowing which task is the higher priority? This all creates a situation where employees do not know how to identify the most important tasks, leading them to make decisions that are not as efficient or are done out of order.

Other internal distractions manifest themselves in the form of wandering thoughts or trying to plan for the future without adequately focusing on the present. All in all, internal and external distractions make true productivity a rarity in even the most dedicated employee. Still, despite these challenges, it’s possible to help your employees overcome their distractions, and it all starts with sharing some best practices with them.

How to Minimize Distractions

Eliminate Options

Let’s revisit the menu scenario we brought up earlier. Too many options make it difficult to focus on the task at hand, so if you can eliminate options that lead to more work or an inability to focus, you can improve productivity. For example, spending a few minutes clearing your area of distractions or thinking about the most important tasks can save quite a bit of time down the line. It’s a classic case of saving a lot by spending a little upfront.

Set Limits

Just like how having a clear goal in mind can help you work toward it, so too can having a set endpoint for a specific task at hand. Give yourself a set amount of time to work on something, then transition to the next task. Even if the task is not completed within that time frame, keeping your mind fresh and focused by switching things up can be beneficial. On the other side of things, you might actually get even more done than you anticipate.

Control Your Environment

If you can control your environment, you can control your ability to focus on your work. If there is a lot of noise, for example, you can try to use a pair of headphones to drown out the noise. If there is something distracting going on in your office, you might try to work from a different room with a laptop. If the room smells, it can be quite the distraction, so do your best to avoid situations like these that make focusing on tasks difficult.

If you can successfully identify these distractions, you can more effectively avoid them in the workplace, leading to more productivity overall.

What are some of the worst distractions you have found in the workplace, and what have you done about them? Subscribe to our blog for more great ways to overcome common workplace obstacles using the power of technology.