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Preferred Blog

Preferred has been serving the Tinley Park area since 1991, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

3 Types of Regulations Your Business Should Be Aware Of

3 Types of Regulations Your Business Should Be Aware Of

Your business is likely subject to certain compliance laws and regulations depending on the type of data you collect from your clients or customers. Today, we want to emphasize the importance of your business considering regulation and compliance when managing its data and IT resources, as without doing so, you run considerable risk.

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3 Success Metrics for Your Business Technology

3 Success Metrics for Your Business Technology

Your business’ data holds incredible potential for helping you improve operations, but only when it is leveraged properly. To this end, you have to identify specific metrics that you are working toward and establish how these metrics are helping you make strides forward. IT offers plenty of metrics to help you make better decisions about operational efficiency.

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Make Sure You Share These Cybersecurity Tips with Everyone You Know

Make Sure You Share These Cybersecurity Tips with Everyone You Know

Cybersecurity is crucial for everyone to focus on, both in the professional environment and in their personal lives. That’s why I wanted to put together a list of cybersecurity practices you should encourage your team to follow when they aren’t in the office or working remotely, when their time is theirs. 

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The NFL Has Seen a Significant Technical Leap Forward in Recent Years

The NFL Has Seen a Significant Technical Leap Forward in Recent Years

Did you watch the big game this year? Chances are that if you did, you got to witness all of the spectacles that the event had to offer, including a lot of technology that enriched the experience, whether you realize it or not. The National Football League has implemented emerging technologies that have helped solve persistent challenges over the years. Let’s explore some of these technologies.

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What Types of Data Do You Need to Pay Attention To

What Types of Data Do You Need to Pay Attention To

Small businesses, like any other organization, need to protect various types of data to ensure the security and privacy of their operations. The specific data that needs protection may vary depending on the nature of the business, industry regulations, and the types of transactions or customer interactions. Today, we thought we would go through some common data types that small businesses typically need to protect.

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What are Digital Twins, and How Can Businesses Use Them?

What are Digital Twins, and How Can Businesses Use Them?

A digital twin could arguably be seen as a somewhat niche technological innovation. Regardless, they are an invaluable resource to quite a few industries that help the businesses that use them optimize their processes. Let’s go over what a digital twin is, and how it helps a few different business types meet their needs.

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Don’t Share Sensitive Data in Emails

Don’t Share Sensitive Data in Emails

All it takes is one oversight to potentially undo any benefits your cybersecurity protections and other best practices may deliver. For instance, even if you have things like multifactor authentication in place, a phishing scam or even some malware varieties could potentially give an attacker access to your email… and all the data your messages contain, just sitting in your inbox.

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How You Backup Your Data is a Crucial Consideration

How You Backup Your Data is a Crucial Consideration

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery are essential components of any modern business. As businesses become increasingly reliant on digital data, it's essential to have strategies in place to ensure that your data is safe and secure in the event of a disaster. Let’s cover the key components of an effective Disaster Recovery strategy to ensure the safety of your business' data backup. Read on to learn more about Disaster Recovery strategies and how to best protect your business data.

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Important Statistics to Keep in Mind Concerning Your Cybersecurity

Important Statistics to Keep in Mind Concerning Your Cybersecurity

It is so important to keep your business secure nowadays. Statistics show this to be the case. Don’t believe us? We can share a few of these stats and explore what they mean, just to prove it.

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New Technology Can Bring New Perspectives

New Technology Can Bring New Perspectives

Your customers expect not to be inconvenienced when doing business with your organization. Small businesses can use new technology to meet these expectations by offering online ordering, mobile apps, and e-commerce platforms. Such innovations not only improve the customer experience but also expand a business' reach. Let’s look at some of the ways new technology can improve your business.

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What’s the Deal With the Blockchain?

What’s the Deal With the Blockchain?

With things like cryptocurrencies and NFTs flooding the public awareness, the term “blockchain” has been brought up more than a few times. However, this association hardly covers what the blockchain is or what it is capable of.

Let’s briefly review what the blockchain really is, and what the technology can do.

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Sports Franchises All-In on Data Analytics

Sports Franchises All-In on Data Analytics

Sports franchises have changed the way they use data to help them strategize. In the past, businesses used basic scouting to find and develop talent, but with the use of advanced analytics, not only can sports franchises improve their talent bases, they can save money and build a competitive advantage over organizations that aren’t so analytically inclined. 

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The Cloud is Only Helpful if It’s Secure

The Cloud is Only Helpful if It’s Secure

We have not been shy about expounding upon the benefits of the cloud for businesses, as these benefits are both considerable and accessible. That being said, not even the cloud is completely perfect, and there are security errors that can easily be made.

Let’s go through these security errors to see if any sound familiar to your situation.

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Could Zero-Trust Make the VPN Obsolete? Experts Suggest So

Could Zero-Trust Make the VPN Obsolete? Experts Suggest So

When it comes to security, it can be challenging to keep up with shifting best practices. For instance, the use of a virtual private network has long been a staple to secure remote operations, and any decent IT service provider would recommend its use. However, this advice is changing with the growth of zero-trust access protocols.

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The Reasons Why Hackers Can’t Keep Their Hands Off Healthcare Data

The Reasons Why Hackers Can’t Keep Their Hands Off Healthcare Data

When it comes to valuable data, hackers will go out of their way to try and steal it, placing businesses in dangerous situations. In particular, healthcare data is attractive to hackers, and considering how lucrative the prospect of healthcare data is, companies need to take extra precautions to protect it. But what is it about healthcare data that makes it so attractive, anyway? Let’s dig into the consequences of potential attacks on healthcare data.

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Creating a Powerful Backup Strategy

Creating a Powerful Backup Strategy

Data is the lifeblood of a business. In the event of unforeseen circumstances such as hardware failure, malware attacks, or human error, having a well-designed backup and data recovery strategy in place becomes paramount. Today, we try and guide you through the process of creating a robust backup and data recovery strategy, ensuring the safety and accessibility of your data.

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Tip of the Week: Using People Graph in Microsoft Excel

Tip of the Week: Using People Graph in Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a great way for data to be visualized, particularly as it offers various features to highlight the context of the data you’re trying to communicate with. Today, we wanted to walk you through how you can use one such feature—People Graphs—to do so particularly impactfully.

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Keeping Your Data Stored Centrally Offers Significant Benefits

Keeping Your Data Stored Centrally Offers Significant Benefits

Let me ask you: how confident are you that all of your data is in your control? How confident are you that you have access to it as you need it? How confident are you that it is properly secured, wherever it is being stored?

These are all important, arguably critical, questions to know the answer to. They are also all questions that are best answered by storing your data centrally.

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How Schofield’s Laws of Computing Can Benefit Your Business’ Security

How Schofield’s Laws of Computing Can Benefit Your Business’ Security

There are quite a few platitudes that we support, in terms of business IT. Some that we haven’t really touched on, however, are Schofield's Laws of Computing. Let’s fix that today by reviewing where they came from, and what these laws entail.

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Your Business Can Get a Lot of Use from Data

Your Business Can Get a Lot of Use from Data

Businesses can now capture and use more data to help them run an efficient business than ever before. That’s not to say a lot of businesses actually do. In this month’s newsletter, we thought we’d discuss the use of data and how it can be used to improve your business.

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      Your business is likely subject to certain compliance laws and regulations depending on the type of data you collect from your clients or customers. Today, we want to emphasize the importance of your business considering regulation and compliance when managing its data and I...

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      Preferred is rated Best Places to Work - 3 Consecutive Years!

      Preferred has been named as one of the Best Places to Work in Illinois in 2020, 2021 and 2022. The awards program began in 2006 and is promoted by The Daily Herald Business Ledger in partnership with the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, MRA-The Management Association, the Small Business Advocacy Council and Best Companies Group.