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What will it take the city of Baltimore to recover from its recent ransomware attack? Over $18 million. Atlanta won’t be surprised: it cost $17 million for them to recover from their attack last year. There’s a reason we keep seeing more and more about ransomware infections in the news: they have proven to be…

What one tool directly influences your business’s ability to attract and retain top talent, minimize risk, and gain competitive advantages? Your technology. While many executives are tempted to stay out of their IT altogether, we’ve reached a point in time where leaders must pay mind to how our organizations are using technology, and what effect…

On the surface, replacing the phones at your office probably seems like a fairly straightforward project; in the grand scheme of technology projects, this one is pretty simple, right? There are of course far more complex initiatives for your business to take on, but make no mistake: if you don’t approach the selection of your…

Did you know that 95% of all successful cyberattacks begin with a phishing scam? And that’s just one type of social engineering, a hacking method that puts us, our families, and our businesses at risk on a daily basis. The unfortunate truth is that our personal information has a hard dollar value, and bad actors…

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 to come from a…

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…