Grab the popcorn and dim the lights. It's the perfect time to cozy up with your favorite Christmas movie. We gathered the team together to share a few of their favorite holiday films and a few ideas that should top every CIO's Christmas wish list.
Plenty of smiles, full bellies and ugly sweaters at the annual Red Level Christmas Pot Luck. This year's spread featured everything from chocolate chip waffles to Filipino Pancit to extra cheesy mac and cheesy to tangy bbq ribs to mounds of fresh baked goods to a sea of shrimp cocktail to a kettle full of meatballs. We're all fat and happy. This is a great place to work!
Think of the last business partner you selected for your company. Was it your accountant, attorney or financial advisor? Evaluating your IT consulting firm and even more specifically, your managed service provider is one of more important business decisions you'll make. The right managed service partner helps tobuild reliability and performance into your company’s IT environment – and takes problems and support costs out. A study by SpiceWorks done in November 2017, shows the budget breakdown by company size which states smaller companies are more likely to shell out more for managed hosting, while larger companies are more likely to invest in managed cloud infrastructure in 2018. Here is the Managed Services budget portion breakdown for 2018: Managed hosting (12%), managed storage/backup (9%), managed hardware support and maintenance (9%), and managed security (9%). What does it all mean? Managed Services allow you to augment your existing IT staff and infrastructure by partnering with ...
Red Level's offices will be closed on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 23rd. We wish you a Happy Thanksgiving filled with family, football and a tasty feast. We have so much to be thankful for - especially our great team and amazing clients. Our offices will reopen Friday, November 25th, but you are never alone. For emergency tech support, please call 248-412-8210.
For some reason, it seems to be a well-kept secret that public networks are not exactly secure. Just about anywhere you may go in a given day - coffee shops, libraries, shopping malls, office buildings, your hotel – there’s a network just waiting for your device to join it. Convenient? Sure. But from a security standpoint, this is not a good thing. Try telling that to a convenience-driven society that’s grown quite used to shopping, checking its email, dating, doing its banking, and chatting on social media, whenever and wherever it wants to. Despite the publicity given to data theft and identity theft, many if not most people don’t change their online behavior on vulnerable public networks, or even take advantage of even basic protective measures. A recent article in Harvard Business Review outlined the range of threats to public wifi users’ security, describing some of the common tricks the ...
While Equifax made global headlines with their cyber breach, IBM’s research has shown that small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are the targets of 62% of all cyber attacks. That equates to 4,000 SMBs daily¹ – or in more context, nearly 1 in 4 (24.33%) of U.S. SMBs (excluding nonemployers) annually. While an attack on your organization may not create global headlines, the impact to your organization and its’ employees could be devastating. If it extends to your customers’ information and records, it could negatively impact them and shatter your reputation. How devestating? I’ll share a real-world example. …
What is OneNote? OneNote is, as its name implies, an electronic notebook. It excels as a personal tool for recording ad hoc, unstructured information that you need to write down quickly without the need for a lot of planning and organization. Information such as: Names, addresses, phone numbers Outlining/brainstorming documents Research notes Planning schedules and appointments Meeting notes Note that many of these information types may have a better place to record them in a structured way for sharing in the organizations. For example: Contact information can be stored in Exchange, either in your personal contacts or in shared contacts; or in a CRM system. Finished documents should go in a document management repository. Research notes and meeting notes, however, are particularly good candidates for long-term storage in OneNote. Meeting notes also take advantage of a second key feature of OneNote—the power to share notes and even co-author notes with ...
Rough morning? We feel ya. The Red Levelers bought a handful of losing tickets last night too. No one likes coming to work the next day after learning they didn’t win the $700 millions they were so positive they’d win the night before. Sure, a lottery is a tax on people who are bad a math, but the skewness of it all makes it pretty darn fun to dream of buying your own island. If you still want to have fun at the lottery, here are a few quick tips: Play Lotto47. The jackpots aren’t as high, but the odds of winning are much higher – 1 in 10 million for Lotto47 vs 1 in 292 million for Powerball. Play your 401K. Not exactly exciting today, but few things are sexier that compounding interest years down the road. Play smart. Never gamble more than you can afford. Think of the money you spend on ...
Novi, Michigan-August 18, 2017 – Inc. magazine today ranked Red Level at NO. 4648 on its 36th annual Inc. 5000, the most prestigious ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment— its independent small and midsized businesses. Companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Domino’s Pizza, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees of the Inc. 5000. “We are certainly tremendously pleased to find ourselves included in the Inc. 5000 again,” says Dave King, Red Level CEO. “Recognition such as this is certainly a badge of honor, coming as it does from a publication that’s this widely read and broadly respected. We’ve managed to achieve a good pattern of solid, sustained growth in what can be a volatile and unpredictable market; it is gratifying for ...
We’ve all been there – at our desks, frantically working on an urgent deadline or busy with an important call when suddenly a colleague materializes to interrupt, needing help with some critical issue such as finding out where the coffee filters are kept. Or, perhaps in an effort to be considerate, they simply pace back and forth, casting nervous glances at you as you try to focus, succeeding in creating only a partial distraction. Most of us have been on both sides of that desk, as interrupters or interruptees. And most of us have probably thought that it’d be awfully nice if there were some way to let others know that we were busy (or to figure out whether they were) before an untimely disruption torpedoed a million-dollar deal. A company called Kuando has taken a stab at this comparatively minor, but certainly widespread, problem. Their Busylight system is a means of silently, ...
