Blog
Protecting Your Customers’ Credit Card Data
You are opening up your own business, or your small business has decided to start accepting credit cards to make purchases more convenient for customers. What steps will you take to garner your customers’ trust that their credit card data are secure and remain confidential? PCI Data Security Standards First, as a new business accepting […]
What’s the Difference Between Virtualization and Cloud Computing?
So which is right for your business: virtualization or cloud computing? Do you know the difference? No? That’s okay; a lot of people who don’t work in IT don’t know the difference either. The word “cloud” is thrown around so often that sometimes people aren’t sure how “virtualization” fits in, and the two get confused […]
Improvements to GoogleNow Well Received; More Updates Coming
GoogleNow’s service has now been listening to, learning from and directing people for nearly three years, and the newest round of improvements reflects all of that time spent collecting information. As GoogleNow continues to develop, the goal is that it will become more and more like interacting with a human. While Siri did pioneer the […]
Four Technologies of Today That Will Help You Build Your Small Business
You might not want to keep up with technological advances, and that’s understandable. Everything changes so quickly that sometimes it can be quite overwhelming, especially when you have a business to run and employees to manage. However, sometimes a technology will make running your business so much easier that passing it up would be a […]
Facebook Changes It Up With Messenger & Video
The biggest social media platform in the world is, yet again, changing things with its services. While sometimes these changes are things that hardly even go noticed, this time that might not be the case. Mark Zuckerberg and team recently had a keynote where they discussed upcoming changes with Messenger and video on Facebook, and […]
Do You Need an Email Autoresponder?
Some people believe that autoresponders are just a little too impersonal and that they don’t convert or result in any good except for a click or two. Sometimes they don’t even result in that and you get stuck in the spam folder. All of the hard work you put into your autoresponder was for nothing, […]
Ashley Madison – The Latest Victim of Hacking
Anyone who’s even loosely associated with the tech industry knows that there’s no such thing as privacy on the web. Most government agencies have, at this point, been hacked. Private companies from banks to insurance firms, with state-of-the art protection have been breached, data stolen, customer trust destroyed. The independent TOR project, whose primary goal […]
Apple Moves to Become More “Green”, New Initiatives in China
Apple has not classically been known for being a company that considers the environmental factor of their production, and in fact, the company has gotten some flak for it in recent years. However, it did not take these accusations lightly and the phone and computer company has started to move towards greener pastures, so to […]
All About Microsoft 2016’s New Business Features
It’s here: Microsoft 2016 has finally come to greet businesses and individuals alike, and while the program is essentially the same as the last release, there are still some major changes. Some of the new features include tons of new productivity-boosting tools that anyone who may stray from tasks a little too often will love, […]
Features Any Work Laptop Needs
Once upon a time, it was rumored that the de facto standard of excellence for a business work laptop was the IBM ThinkPad. There are those who may disagree with this, but even when IBM sold off its laptop business to Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, the ThinkPad was still highly sought after on the basis of […]
A Visionary Approach to Your Security
The purpose of an IT partner isn’t just to fix something when it is broken, it is to keep your people working and your data secure. Astral moves beyond traditional managed services by addressing all the key areas of cybersecurity in today’s complex landscape.
