XFER Blog

With over $101 million in jewelry stolen, the recent Louvre heist was a costly success for criminals. However, French publications suggest the thieves may have encountered less resistance than an organization of the museum's stature should provide, thanks to a documented history of severe cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

This history offers a crucial lesson for all businesses: Foundational security flaws can undermine even the most complex physical protections. Let's examine the documented oversights and what they imply about the museum's current security posture.

Every day, your small-to-medium business handles sensitive information: customer names, credit card details, employee records, and vendor contracts. This data is valuable, not just to you, but to the hackers and regulators who are paying attention. The old idea that "only big companies get audited" is completely outdated. Data privacy compliance has moved from a niche legal issue to a core operational requirement for every SMB owner and manager.

If you’ve played with AI for any purpose, but particularly for your business’ benefit, you may have found your results less than impressive. One of the biggest challenges of working with artificial intelligence is our assumption that our instructions are sufficient, even when they are vague or non-specific.

A prompt of this caliber will not produce the quality responses that you need. Instead, you need to use “prompt engineering” to come up with a request that will. Fortunately, you can improve your prompts considerably by simply remembering three things.

Let's be honest, we're all living through some wild times. Social media is everywhere, and nearly everyone uses it to one degree or another. We've all seen a simple online discussion devolve into relationship-ruining conflict; and it happens fast. The key to not letting it wreck your life is to use these digital spaces with purpose.

This month, we're dropping some simple tips to help you build a healthier, more meaningful online presence. Let’s get started:

Cybercriminals don’t always go after the toughest targets—they go after the easiest ones. Businesses without even the most basic protections are at the greatest risk.

This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s the perfect time to revisit your defenses and make sure you’re not leaving the door open. Here are the essentials to get started—and the next steps to take your security even further.

Our phones are basically an extension of our hands, and social media is where many people connect. Whether you're building a personal brand, keeping up with friends, or just doomscrolling, these platforms have become a huge part of our lives. To help you navigate the digital chaos, there are six rules you should live by on social media.

Updates are critical for the continued utility and security of any computer system or program. That said, updates aren’t always perfect. It’s possible that even a routine update could sideline your critical applications. If this happens, you’re dealing with downtime and failing to serve your customers… all because you were trying to do the right thing and maintain your technology.

Make no mistake: updates are crucial, so to make sure they don’t disrupt your business, they need to be approached with strategy and discipline.

Having trouble diagnosing issues with your computer? It could be the operating system, or it could be a piece of software you installed on it, OR it could be a driver or another peripheral connected to it. How do you know what the issue is, and how do you address it? That’s where Safe Mode comes in; you can boot your operating system in its most basic form, allowing your managed service provider to more easily determine the problem.

Did you know the oldest known lock ever discovered is thought to be 4,000 years old? Discovered in the Khorsabad palace ruins in modern-day Iraq, it used wooden pegs to keep a large wooden bolt secure. For millennia, we've understood the need to protect what's valuable.

You probably wouldn’t want to rely on wooden pegs to secure your business, but modern businesses are still using a lot of outdated and ineffective physical security measures. Modern solutions bring a wide variety of benefits beyond just keeping your doors locked; they offer accountability, automation, and accessible analytics. Let’s take a look at some critical physical security mistakes many business owners make and how modern solutions can truly safeguard your organization.

Having a backup is always a smart idea, but it is essential to remember that there are different levels of backup that a business can implement. It’s one thing to be protected against a server crash; it’s quite another to be protected against a disaster that destroys your servers, as well as those of every business within a five-block radius. While local backups serve a purpose, they cannot be the only thing you rely on. Real resilience means looking elsewhere to achieve redundancy.

Nowadays, technology isn't just an advantage; it's an essential part of everything you do; and with endless new tools appearing, how do you decide which tech investments are genuinely good for your business and which are just distractions? Saying yes to everything can drain your budget, while saying no to the right innovation can leave you behind.

Navigating this is difficult and needs a smart approach. Here are key tips to help you know when to embrace new technology and when to politely decline:

Even though it’s incredibly helpful, technology can be frustrating—sometimes to an absurd degree. Businesses can’t function without it, so they have to learn to live with it, but it doesn’t have to be hard. You can develop some habits by using these tricks to reduce some of the friction in your workday.

A good data backup system is like having insurance for your data. Yes, you hope you never have to use it, but you’ll be glad to have it if you do. Today, we want to cover three of the biggest components of any modern data backup system and how we can use the latest technology to make your data backups as seamless a process as possible.

You should actively be asking yourself if your technology is helping your business grow, or is it just another set of bills to pay? For many businesses, technology, with all the constant attention it needs and frustrations it can bring, can feel like a constant, confusing expense. IT has a rare ability to be essential and costly at the same time; but, it really doesn't have to be.

Hackers don’t sneak in through backdoors—they stroll right through your inbox when someone on your team clicks the wrong link. With the average breach now carrying a price tag of nearly $4 million, arming employees with the right knowledge isn’t optional… It’s essential.

Running a business means you’re juggling a lot — from day-to-day operations to keeping your team on track. Regardless, one area that can’t be overlooked is your IT policies.

While they might seem like a “nice-to-have,” they’re actually a must-have for protecting your business, your data, and your reputation.

Think of IT policies as the rules of the road for how your team uses technology and handles sensitive information. Without clear guidelines in place, your business could be at risk from unexpected security breaches or compliance issues.

Business owners have a lot going on in their workday, and with so many duties and responsibilities, adding technology troubles to the mix only makes it all the more frustrating when your IT doesn’t work the way it should. That said, you cannot let the laissez-faire attitude prevail. In fact, lazy IT practices can make real problems significantly worse.

Is your business still gazing at the cloud from afar, wondering if it’s truly the promised land of IT efficiency? For many organizations, a move to the cloud for mission-critical operations can be complicated. Hesitation, while understandable, can be the biggest drain on your future potential. Let’s go through why those cloud migration worries might just be myths in disguise, and how we can help you shift into high gear.

Think of your business information that includes customer details, sales figures, product lists and more. All of that data is stored in your business’ databases. As a result, you need to understand how they work and what you need to do to best manage them and the data they contain. 

Here at XFER, we help businesses in Michigan make sense of their technology every day. We’ve noticed folks often have similar questions about databases, so let's clear them up with some simple answers. Did you know, by the way, that the first "databases" were essentially just well-organized paper records? We've come a long way!

Cybersecurity solutions are all well and fine, but your team also plays a significant role in keeping your business safe. You need to acknowledge they are a potential threat and take steps to prepare them for the bevy of threats they’ll face. Today, we want to discuss why your employees are a cybersecurity threat and what you can do to mitigate it.