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This past Cyber Monday, consumers spent nearly $8 billion online, with over 54% of purchases made directly from smartphones. Two days prior, on Black Friday, online sales surpassed $6 billion. The holidays are, of course, prime time for purchases in general, and are an extreme example of the amount of shopping we do online. But…

After being in business for almost 30 years, we at Optimal aren’t strangers to the IT industry. We’ve seen many Managed Service Providers (MSPs) come and go in the local area, and many of the companies we’ve worked with over the past few decades have expressed their thoughts on particular providers—what they liked, what they…

Previously we’ve published several articles about email phishing scams and how to best avoid them. We even put together an infographic on the Top 5 Phishing Red Flags, which you can take a look at here. What we haven’t yet discussed is a different kind of scam that doesn’t rely on email to capture your…

Did you know that 95% of successful cyberattacks begin with a phishing scam?   “Phishing” is an umbrella term used to describe an email scam where the sender tries to trick you into handing over valuable information such as account credentials, banking information, social security numbers, or other sensitive data.   The email will appear…

When it comes to rolling out a new technology solution at your organization, there are a lot of boxes to check from both a tactical and a strategic perspective.   Time and time again we hear from organizations who had identified what they believed to be a perfect solution for their organization ‑ a new…

Are you considering Slack at your organization?   It’s a smart question to ask. Slack, an incredibly popular communication platform, now boasts: 500,000 organizations on board (70,000 paying) 8 million daily active users (3 million paid) 10 hours of average use per day   We’ve been using Slack at Optimal for about a year and…

If you’ve been reading any sort of industry publications these days, you have heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the supposed threat it’s posing to the legal profession as a whole.   First, let us say this: we don’t expect lawyers to become completely obsolete in the face of AI. But we do anticipate some…

Between 2014 and 2015, investors poured over $800 million into blockchain startups. The market for blockchain is expected to reach $7.7 billion globally by the year 2022, up from $411.5 million in 2017.   And in 2018, no one can seem to stop talking about it.   What, in plain English, is blockchain, and how…

According to RightScale’s 2017 State of the Cloud Survey, companies now run 79% of workloads in the cloud on average.   After nearly three decades serving the IT needs of law firms, associations, and small businesses in the DC Metro area and beyond, we’ve seen (and, in many cases, initiated) this shift across our client…

Over the past 25 years our company has seen cyber threats evolve in a nasty way. Last year a startling 4,000 ransomware attacks occurred every day. One out of every 131 emails sent was malicious. Businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees now have a 90% likelihood of a breach costing them over $216,000. Needless to…