Tag Archives: Gartner Inc.

About 2214 days ago Wireless Networks

Is Municipal Wi-Fi Right for Your Business?

A few years ago, many towns and cities reasoned that there are advantages to offering homegrown Wi-Fi. For one thing, meter readers and other municipal employees out in the field would have an easy way to file data to the home office. Free municipal Wi-Fi for poorer areas could, in theory, ease the digital divide. Another benefit is that municipal Wi-Fi could provide new revenues if small and mid-sized businesses proved receptive to the idea. So far, the jury’s out on the latter application. Municipal Wi-Fi is still so new that it’s too early to gauge whether it will be a hit with small and mid-size business users. Nevertheless, there are reasons why some businesses may want to consider opting for such services, providing that they understand the risks. The rise of municipal Wi-Fi Municipal Wi-Fi is a growing business. According to MuniWireless, a Garden City, N.Y., integrated media company that tracks the market, municipal Wi-Fi was a $116.9 million business in 2005, but jumped to $235.5 million in 2006 and is projected to hit $459.6 million by the end of this year. “It’s still a fairly young market, it’s still developing,” says Mike Perkowski, chief operating officer of MuniWireless. In communities like Philadelphia, San Francisco and Anaheim, Calif., where municipal Wi-Fi is now available, small and mid-size businesses might want to consider the option, especially if they are looking for cut-rate pricing for broadband Internet access and/or have a lot of employees in the field locally who need to feed data back to headquarters. Chris Silva, an analyst with Gartner Inc., of Stamford, Conn., says small businesses that have employees who are out of the office more than 50 percent of the time most likely already have some form of Wi-Fi, but those with employees that spend about 30 percent of time away should look into it. “It’s not for the traditional road warrior,” he says. “Folks that are thought of as not consistently on the road will be able to benefit from public Wi-Fi.” Cheaper than traditional wireless plans Municipal Wi-Fi tends to be cheaper than traditional wireless plans offered by telecommunications companies. “It’s not cost effective to roll out a $60-a-month plan for every employee,” Silva says, adding that his research shows 30 percent of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees are already using some form of municipal Wi-Fi for at least one employee. So far, the largest third-party contractor for municipal Wi-Fi has been EarthLink, the former dial-up Internet service provider that now offers broadband service. EarthLink offers an entry-level service costs $21.95 for a 1 Mbps download speed, says Tom Hulsebosch, vice president of municipal sales at the Atlanta-based company. “Small businesses do it if they tend to have a lot of salespeople in the field,” Hulsebosch adds. EarthLink has so far rolled out municipal Wi-Fi in New Orleans, Philadelphia and Anaheim, Calif., and plans to launch service in Alexandria, Va.; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Pasadena, Calif., this year. As the list of locations expands, the company is also starting to market a fixed Wi-Fi offering targeted at stationary office environments. Such service starts at around $100 a month for a speed of about 3 Mbps. Hulsebosch says the service is up 99.9 percent of the time, but higher-end offerings will provide even less potential downtime. “We’re in the process of bringing those services online,” says Hulsebosch. “This is just the beginning.”

About 2244 days ago Computer Security

Beware of Botnets and Other New Kinds of Spam

Businesses appear to be falling behind in the eternal war against spammers. Just when they manage to block one variety of unsolicited junk email to their office inboxes, another variety is developed. Until new technological advances come along, the best they can hope to do is use existing technology to stem the flow or outsource the work to companies that fight spam full time. In the last year, the amount of spam rose 250 percent over 2005 levels, according to security software firm SonicWall, in Sunnyvale, Calif. There are two main reasons for this surge: Image spam and botnets. Making it past spam filters Botnets, in which a virus takes over a PC and turns it into a spam-sending machine, have helped increase the overall amount of spam. The way it works is that perpetrators that want to take over other people’s computers for the purpose of sending spam first distribute viruses or worms to mostly Windows PCs. The code also contains a bot, or software robot, that automatically logs onto a server. Spammers access the server and order it to force the PC to send out spam to mail servers. While botnets are dangerous, some businesses try to block bots from being deployed through the use of intrusion prevention systems, either through a hosted service or at the network level. While effective against network-base infections, IPS offers little to defend against infections caused by employees willingly downloading bot infection payloads deceptively marketed as screen savers or browser toolbars. And once infected, these systems won’t stop bots from communication with botnets using standard http and https protocols. Image spam is also proving difficult to combat. Image spam has added to the amount of spam that makes it past spam filters employed by many businesses or Internet providers. Image spam was devised to foil filters looking for words like “Viagra” or “XXX.” When text is presented in a JPEG or PDF, such text-seeking filters are rendered useless. Image spam has been around for a while, but until 2004 or so most of it was filtered out by software that was looking for “signatures” — domains, common words or phrases, bulk recipients, etc. — that were common to emails sent en masse. The spammers came up with “snowflake spam,” in which every image is unique, although they look the same to the naked eye. Spammers quickly discovered the technique works: In 2005, only 3 percent of spam was imaged-based. In 2006, that figure rose to 30 percent, according to IronPort Sytems, a San Bruno, Calif., gateway security provider. Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology for IronPort Systems, says signature-based filters don’t work very well anymore. IronPort does do some image-based filtering, like looking for similar background colors, but the technique is far from foolproof and optical character analysis — the ability to recognize image-based text — is still way too ineffective. How to block the new flavors of spam Another way to address image spam is to simply block all images unless they are sent from an address that has been pre-selected by the recipient. The downside, of course, is that some legitimate emails will inevitably be lost in the shuffle. In addition to of filtering and blocking, many spam-fighters are focusing on “reputation analysis,” that is, assessing the validity of the recipient based on the incoming email address. Such reputation analysis finds out where the spam is coming from and then creates a blacklist. Analysts say while reputation analysis is the most effective ways to combat spam right now, it is far from a total solution. The other problem is that, like with image spam blocking, legitimate emails may be blacklisted. “These are small steps,” says Jeanniey Mullen, executive director of email marketing for Ogilvy, the New York ad agency. “I don’t think anyone has the answer yet.” Arabella Hallawell, research vice president for Gartner Research, of Stamford, Conn., recommends either getting an email appliance to limit a system’s exposure to spam and/or outsourcing -mail management to someone else. Not surprisingly, Peterson agrees with her. “The ante has really gone up,” he says. “In the old days, five to 10 really smart guys could put together a spam solution that’s pretty good. Now we’ve got 30-plus guys working on spam just to stay ahead of what the bad guys are doing.”

About 2244 days ago Printers, Copiers, and Peripherals

Tips to Reduce Printing Costs

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Before you hit “file” and “print,” consider this: The going rate on a bottle of Cristal Champagne is about $350, but if you filled that same 750ml bottle with black ink for your office inkjet printer, it would cost you roughly $1,350. If it feels as if your business is constantly undercut by printing costs, it’s probably not your imagination. Chances are that the costs are eating into the bottom line even more than what you’ve already budgeted. “Printing costs tend to happen under the radar, because so much of it comes out of petty cash,” says Steven Reynolds, a senior analyst from Lyra Research in Newton, Mass. “For example, someone from the office picks up a toner cartridge or a ream of paper at Staples and just gets reimbursed in their next expense report.” Figuring ink into the bottom line Printing poses a quandary for small and mid-size businesses, which rely on in-house printing but are constantly watching costs. The printer business has long been profitable for the leading hardware manufacturers, such as HP, Lexmark, and more recently Dell, largely driven by sales of custom-fit ink cartridges. But the market has been changing more recently as small and mid-size businesses have more options for printing needs, including outsourcing printing jobs, laser printers, and multifunction equipment — the latter of which not only prints but can also scan, copy and fax from a single device. The inkjet printer market in the U.S. is expected to be flat through 2010, as inkjet printer sales decline by a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent while multifunction product sales grow by 2.6 percent, according to Gartner Inc. Still, many major manufacturers are actively courting small and mid-size businesses, by rolling out new printer products with new features. Often, these companies are touting cost-saving features. In February, HP unveiled seven new inkjet printers for small businesses, promising higher quality color printing for 25 percent lower costs than laser printers. HP said the company said these printers could average 1.5 cents per page for black and white and 6 cents per page for color. More options for printing can mean the potential for cost savings for small and mid-size businesses. But where can you cut the fat while ensuring that your business has the tools it needs to grow? Tips for cutting costs Some small and mid-size business owners get pretty creative trying to get around that ink bill. Zelda Cook, a partner with the Austin, Texas-based 9 Point Mesa Land and Cattle Company, still relies on her six-year-old dot matrix printer for all her in-house documents. “Even though I’m ridiculed by some of my more tech savvy friends, I like my printer,” says Cook, who is undoubtedly getting the last laugh. Her Epson uses a $7 ribbon that’s good for about 400 copies, adding up to less than two cents per page. Cook’s advice may not be for everyone. With the new, improved tools on the market today smaller businesses can often take advantage of tools that were once the purview of their larger brethren. Here are five steps that can help you manage costs while raising the sophistication of your business printing: Invest in laser printers. “Laser printers have really come down in price in recent years,” says Joshua Feinberg, of Delray Beach, Fla, author of The Computer Consulting Kit. “And as a general rule of thumb, they are always going to have a lower cost per page than an inkjet printer.” Study those manufacturing specifications on both printers and cartridges. Check things like the duty cycle (the maximum number of pages a printer can handle a month). “You don’t want to overtax a device,” says Reynolds, who warns clients not to challenge that duty cycle load more than a couple of times a year. In addition to avoiding unnecessary machine downtime, look for specifications on the average cost per page on cartridges. Set all your computers to duplex printing. You may not save on ink.  But at the very least, printing on both sides will save a bundle on paper — not to mention storage space for archived documents, says Feinberg. Keep print jobs in-house as much as possible. It’s almost always cheaper to print in-house than to outsource most printing jobs, experts say. Outsourcing print jobs to a print shop on average runs about three times as much as printing documents in-house, according to Gartner Inc. This is especially true for small businesses, which tend to print in small amounts. It may not pay to outsource unless you need a very large quantity — such as 500 multi-page copies or more. Top quality printers have come down in price so much in recent years that a lot of the higher-end print jobs can now be done in the office without a loss of quality. HP advises small business customers to create their own marketing materials, such as business cards or calendars, with the help of their sophisticated models for small business. Beware of hidden costs. There are software programs available to track consumable expenses like ink and paper. But, small and mid-size business owners need to be aware of the “headache factor.” Installation, maintenance, compatibility, and lost productivity during a paper jam are just a few of the headaches, according to Feinberg. It adds up fast over time. Most small and mid-size businesses have come along way in moving away from paper processes and relying more on email and digital archiving. But the move to electronic information hasn’t necessarily cut into printing needs. “It’s a sheer proliferation problem,” Reynolds says. “It’s also because of email, and the Web, they’re finding more to print… you have to look at what and why you print.”

About 2275 days ago Computer Security

Protect Your Business from Phishing

The latest news about “phishing” is not good for small and mid-size businesses. Phishers – people who send fraudulent emails and try to lure unsuspecting recipients into revealing confidential information on a phony website — are no longer impersonating only big commercial banks. They’ve started using the names of smaller companies, too. Phishing is a nightmare not just for the consumer recipients — who have doubled in number since 2004, according to a recent Gartner Inc. report — but also for the businesses whose brand names are being misused. When customers receive a phishing email that purports to be from your company, the company’s good name gets tarnished. That’s not exactly a good way to brand a growing business. And there is always the risk that your company could be sued. Phishing, unfortunately, isn’t going away anytime soon although it is changing in nature. Gartner found that phishing emails are impersonating banks less often and other types of companies more often. Many of those other brands are also big companies like eBay and PayPal, or financial firms, such as mid-size banks, but the threat to more types of businesses is growing. The good news, according to Gartner analyst Avivah Litan, is typically “really small businesses aren’t attacked because criminals don’t know about them.” However, any brand can be at risk. Here’s what you should know to protect your small business: Be the master of your domain Know the domain names that your company has registered and proactively register variations of those names. This way, if phishers try to set up a website imitating your business, the obvious variations on that name are already spoken for and hopefully customers are less likely to be fooled. The best defense, the cliché goes, is a good offense. Eyes wide open Continuously monitor the Internet for suspicious new domain registrations and changes to existing domain registrations, says Todd Bransford, vice president of marketing at online monitoring company Cyveillance, of Arlington, Va. “Early detection of a registration of a domain that’s similar to your organization’s domain could allow you to minimize or even prevent a phishing attack.” If you would rather farm out the monitoring of domain registrations, there are online fraud prevention companies, like Cyveillance and other one called MarkMonitor, that can do this for you. The rates for monitoring companies are typically run upwards of thousands of dollars per month. Teach your clients Educate your customers, suggests Bransford. That means let your customers know how you plan to contact them – via mail, telephone, or email. “Post a clear policy on your site, in plain English describing how you will contact them,” says Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer of MarkMonitor, a San Francisco firm. Felman says also specify “what type of info you will ask for…. and what you will NEVER ask for,” such as passwords. Remind your customers to use the anti-phishing features in some Web browsers, as well. Browse well Alert browser companies and email providers about those fraudulent URLs used by phishers so that each URL you identify is blocked at the browser or when the email is sent, advises Felman. Internet Explporer 7.0 and Firefox 2 do a great job of blocking phishing sites. Litan cautions, however, that this solution is not a cure all. Deter this Have a strong authentication, anti-phishing message prominently displayed on your website, Bransford says. This should include a mechanism for reporting suspicious emails or suspected phishing attacks such as a special inbox (i.e.phishing@yourdomain.com ). Customers are on the front line of these attacks and can be the first to alert you that your business has been targeted. Take that extra step Felman suggests including electronic signatures with your emails so that email providers know when an email sent by your company is really sent from you. Disaster preparedness Have a plan in place in the event your company becomes a victim of phishers. Remember to take care of your customers. Provide those who believe they have become victim information on what to do, such as contacting the major credit bureaus. You might also want to provide them with free credit reports for a certain time period, as a gesture of good will. Remember to alert other customers — put a notice on your website at a minimum and perhaps also contact them by mail – to alert them about the potential fraud. Contact authorities and report the crime immediately. Also contact the Anti-Phishing Work Group. Have a plan in place to notify website owners and Internet Service Providers to get phishing sites taken down, says Felman. Gather the numbers in advance. Just like with stolen credit cards, it can be a real hassle to deal with looking for numbers in the middle of a crisis. If that doesn’t work, monitoring companies can take care of all of this quickly for you, if you hire them after an attack. Cyveillance’s Bransford also suggests having a public relations strategy ready, too, to minimize the damage. The bad news is that there’s nothing a small business can do to provide 100 percent protection from getting hit. If even big companies like PayPal aren’t able to stop it, cautions Gartner’s Litan, that doesn’t bode well for smaller businesses.

About 2275 days ago Computer Security

Positive ID: All About Biometrics

Biometric identification — which instantly authenticates people by unique physical traits such as eye structure, voice patterns and handprints — may seen like something out of X-Men or Star Trek. But it’s neither fantasy nor futuristic. In fact, biometric technology has been around for years. It’s even a growth industry: The worldwide market for biometric devices is projected to nearly triple in the next few years, rising from $2.1 billion in 2006 to $5.7 billion in 2010, according to the International Biometric Group, a New York City-based research and consulting firm. Meanwhile, biometric capability is increasingly available in products that are affordable for even the smallest businesses. More surprising than the devices’ existence, though, are the ways in which some companies are putting them to use. First, a bit of history. Particularly after the terrorist attacks in 2001, security experts were keenly interested in using biometrics for positive identification. The main goal then: keeping unauthorized users from gaining access to government or company buildings, computer systems and information. Today, some organizations are using biometric technologies to keep outsiders out, but others are finding the technology — especially the less-expensive fingertip and hand scanners — far more useful for in-house security purposes. For example: Tracking time and attendance: “Buddy-punching” — when employees manually punch each other’s time cards to falsify their work hours — has been the bane of small businesses for decades. Biometric systems can end that practice by verifying employees’ identities as they clock in and out, most commonly through a fingertip or handprint reader. Added bonus: Many systems also compile payroll data, replacing a tedious manual task. Systems begin at about $350. Replacing or enhancing passwords: It’s no secret that many people’s system passwords are a cinch to decipher. Case in point: In a 2005 in-house security test, a California credit union’s IT team used a tool that cracked about 80 percent of employee passwords within 30 seconds. IT staffers instructed workers to adopt stronger passwords in keeping with the organization’s security standards, then repeated the test. The results weren’t encouraging: The team still cracked 70 percent of the new, stronger passwords. So the credit union began using a combination of fingertip scanners and automatic, randomly generated passwords to authenticate system users. Bank officials say the change greatly improved those security audits and reduced password-administration costs, an expense that IT research firm Gartner Inc. says costs companies an average of $200-$300 per user per year. Fingertip readers begin at around $100 per device. Securing dangerous or controlled substances: Businesses in a wide range of industries use biometric devices — with hand-readers being a particularly popular option — to help monitor access to toxic chemicals, radioactive waste, narcotic drugs and other potentially hazardous materials. Hand-reader security devices range from about $1,000 to $3,000 or more per device, depending on features. Preventing ID-card sharing: Some businesses now use biometrics to keep multiple customers from sharing a single account or pass card. An Oklahoma City-based chain of tanning salons, for instance, installed fingertip readers at all its locations to authenticate paying customers, thus preventing people from simply loaning their membership cards to friends. (A company spokeswoman says the scanners don’t store a complete fingerprint — just a big enough piece to confirm the user’s identity.) Biometric technologies aren’t infallible. Systems may fail to recognize an authorized user or detect an imposter. In one well-publicized case a few years ago, a Japanese cryptographer copied a fingerprint using a gelatin substance. He then tested the duplicate fingerprint on several commercial scanners — all of which “recognized” it as real. In addition, many people view the use of biometric security measures as an invasion of privacy. In testifying before Congress, Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program for the American Civil Liberties Union, has cited biometrics as yet another example of America’s movement toward becoming “a surveillance society.” But for businesses needing to know exactly who’s got their hands on which pieces of company equipment or information, biometrics are likely to be an increasingly attractive option. For additional information: International Biometrics Group LLC U.S. Department of Defense Biometrics Tutorial

About 2334 days ago Business Software

What is Linux?

The beginning of 2007 will see the arrival of a new version of a widely used computer operating system (OS). This latest version will see many new advances over the current editions, and is likely to be quickly adopted in the coming months. This isn’t Windows Vista, the long-awaited update of Microsoft’s flagship computer operating system. This new much-heralded update is actually based on Linux, the open-source operating system. The major launch is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, expected to be commercially available in January. That will be followed soon after by Open Enterprise Server from Novell. And while Linux is still trailing Microsoft’s computer OS in overall popularity, it has a higher growth rate while coming from a small base, according to George Weis, an analyst with Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn. research firm.  Much of this growth is coming in computer servers, popular with some small and mid-size businesses that deal in a high volume of data over a network. “The two OS for the server in the future will be Linux and Windows,” Weis says. “Linux is an economical cost-justified OS for the X86, Intel-compatible platform, and the benefit of Linux over Unix is really closing.” Linux has about $8 billion in annual revenue from server shipments, which is expected to grow to about $13 billion by 2011, according to a Gartner forecast. At the same time, Microsoft’s Windows will likely raise $22 billion in revenue from servers over the same time. But the interesting factor is that the $13 billion in revenue for Linux is in a market for what many people consider free software. History of Linux Linux isn’t a new phenomenon. Linux was developed in the early 1990s as an alternative to an OS called MINIX, itself an alternative to Unix. Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki, wanted to develop something that was both free and open. The result was Linux. During the past decade, software has maintained cult popularity, offering a desktop alternative to Windows or the Apple OS. But its real power as been on the server side. Linux, at its core, was designed to be developer-friendly, and as a result grew with the development of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. Nicholas Petreley, editor-in-chief of the Linux Journal, says the OS has a bit of a dubious past. “It was a popular Web server for pornographic websites,” he says. “It was free and stable, and this proved it was a reliable Web server.” At the same, Linux started being used because it could emulate a Windows file and printer server, and many IT departments essentially “snuck in” the OS to save money, says Petreley. “Once Oracle and IBM supported Linux, it came out of the closet,” he adds. Now, he estimates that 80 percent to 90 percent of businesses use Linux in some way. Business uses of Linux There are different ways that Linux can be used in the small and mid-size business environment: in desktop PCs, servers (such as e-mail servers), and on workstations (such as graphic workstations). Companies need to undertake cost analyses to figure out whether a move to Linux in any of those categories makes economic sense – figuring out the costs associated with upgrading, any new licensing fees and finding technical staff that can shepherd the changeover. However, one of the great misconceptions about Linux is that businesses can just run it for free. While there are plenty of free downloadable versions, most small and mid-size businesses still pay for commercially-available versions that feature the traditional tech support you’d find with Windows or even Unix. For business use, the main downside of using Linux is simply application availability, says Gary Chen, a small business IT analyst with the Yankee Group, a Boston-based research firm. “An OS isn’t really useful without apps to run on top of it. Linux has some good applications but there still exist major holes and in some areas there isn’t the amount of choice as for Windows,” Chen says. “This is changing, but building an ecosystem that can rival the Microsoft system will certainly take a lot of time.” In addition to commercially-available server packages from companies such as Novell and Red Hat, there is a growing body of open-source software available for free that can help a small business develop Web services, host databases, and provide network monitoring. In this respect, Linux is a very solid choice for a small company with a small information technology budget, or a larger company trying to shrug off some painful licensing fees. Another attribute of Linux is that it is generally virus free, and many long time users speak highly of how it seldom crashes. Of course, with every silver lining there may be clouds. Most notably says Petreley, “There is no one to hold financially responsible should you have problems.”

About 2334 days ago Telecom and Wireless

5 Tips to Reduce Telco Costs

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Any business owner who opens the monthly phone bill is acutely familiar with the feeling of anxiety. Telco costs can be a ghastly expense, sometimes rivaling the cost of payroll, and they can get progressively out of control as your business grows. That’s why it’s a good idea to assess your telco expenditures now — and make it a habit to regularly reassess them. The good news is that many companies can cut costs just by starting with a common-sense approach to controlling telco costs and exploring use of new technologies to keep spending in line. 1. Check your bills for errors. This tip is so obvious that many companies overlook it. In fact, Jim Browning, vice president at Gartner Inc., the Stamford, Conn. research firm, said in a recent report that enterprises “typically overpay for six percent to eight percent on their telecommunications invoices because of billing errors. The most common problems are circuits that have been disconnected but continued to be billed, and invoices that do not reflect new, lower rates.” The problem is so pervasive that a whole category of business — telecom expense management (TEM) — has sprung up. You can hire a TEM company to audit your bills and help you find other ways to save, but this service may not be a practical option for smaller businesses with less complicated bills. Just make it your policy to regularly audit your invoices, and don’t forget that even the small overcharges add up. 2. Renegotiate your contracts. If your telecom contract is set for automatic renewal, you might be cheating yourself out of a better deal. Talk to other providers and see if they can beat the price you’re currently paying or can offer more services for the same price. According to a 2006 Gartner report, “When renewing a contract, we have found that enterprises that just renew their contracts do not get deals as good as enterprises that make their contracts competitive. The differential is often as high as 15 percent.” New options from telecom firms are available as cable companies start offering telephone service and telcos start offering cable. There is also the increasing trend to use wireless service for a primary business phone, which can lower long-distance fees and provide you with a fixed monthly rate for service. If you want to stick with landlines, you don’t need to bother with a formal RFP process if you don’t want to, the Gartner report notes: “Just ensuring that the incumbent vendor knows you’re getting quotes from other vendors can improve the price.” 3. Consider VoIP. You’ve probably heard the buzz around voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). It’s already taking the enterprise world by storm, and adoption among small and mid-size businesses is gradually increasing. VoIP enables you to use your data network — which you already use to access the Internet — to place phone calls. It can be much more cost effective than owning your own private branch exchange (PBX), not only because the equipment is cheaper, but also because you can make many of your calls without ever using the public switched telephone network or paying for long distance. Keegan Mills, technology director of Virginia-based consulting group Delta Resources, says his company’s investment in VoIP using an IP-PBX system was a no-brainer. “I don’t know if you’ve done any sort of cost analysis on a PBX, but there wasn’t anything on the market that was even close” to what they could save by switching to VoIP, Mills says. “I almost thought it was too good to be true. But we’re three years into it and we haven’t outgrown it yet.” If you’re not ready to commit to an all-VoIP system, consider letting employees use a computer-based VoIP service such as Skype. Your employees can make computer-to-computer calls to anywhere in the world for free, and they can make computer-to-phone calls around the world for a fee, which may be significantly cheaper than you’d pay for international calling over the traditional phone network. 4. Investigate package deals. Seek out providers that offer multiple services and can give you a deal when you sign up for more than one service. For instance, if you’re not ready to switch to VoIP, you may still be able to use the same provider for both telephone and high-speed data service. Additionally, you should regularly analyze your usage patterns. If your company has grown since you signed up for telephone service, your needs might have changed. You might be suited for a different, cost-saving package. 5. Let employees use instant messaging (securely). Many business owners have banned the use of instant messaging (IM) services because of fears that they distract employees who would rather chat with friends than work. It can be a valid concern, but many companies have realized that the benefits of letting employees connect via IM to conduct business far outweigh the potential drawbacks. If a large portion of your telco spending goes toward communications between branches or offices, consider allowing employees to collaborate over IM when it makes sense. Just be sure to institute rules for how IM is used — and do your homework about how to prevent IM security problems, which can present a threat to your network if not addressed.

About 2334 days ago Mobility Tips and Tricks

Alphabet Soup: What are WEP and WPA?

Wi-Fi is a technology that seems perfectly suited for small businesses: It frees up employees from the constraints of wires so they can be more productive, both in the office and on the road. But because Wi-Fi sends your data through the airwaves where unintended recipients can intercept it, it’s critical that you implement some kind of wireless security. The two prevailing security protocols are Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), but which is more effective to protect your business? You might have run across these two acronyms when first setting up your business router — but they are far from interchangeable. WEP can leave you vulnerable WEP was the original wireless security standard. But it didn’t take security experts long to discover that WEP was full of loopholes that were easy for a skilled hacker to exploit. WEP doesn’t offer authentication, which verifies that a device or person joining a network is actually who or what that device purports to be. The encryption isn’t very strong. In addition, the key — a shared string of characters that enables the sending machine to encrypt data and the receiving machine to decrypt it — never changes, unless you change it manually. So once a hacker figures out your key, he has the key to your kingdom. Even worse, hackers have created software tools that allow just about anyone, skilled or unskilled, to break through WEP protection. So WEP is actually nowhere near as secure as it is being wired. “While WEP is better than nothing, it’s flawed and it’s been known to be flawed for a long time,” says Karen Hanley, senior director of marketing and membership at the Wi-Fi Alliance, a nonprofit organization that drives adoption of Wi-Fi standards. A November 2006 report from Gartner Inc., the Stamford, Conn. research group, says that WEP leaves your business network vulnerable. “Avoid use on company networks, because vulnerabilities and cracking tools have been published. If WEP must be used, it should be configured for 128-bit encryption, and passwords must have a high degree of entropy,” Gartner analyst John Pescadore writes. In other words, passwords should contain as many characters as possible, use special characters and a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, and contain no repeats or strings of characters that might be found in the dictionary. WPA2 is the strongest security available today WPA was released in 2003 to sew up WEP’s loopholes. WPA was the top Wi-Fi security choice until 2004, when WPA2 was released. WPA2, which is based on the IEEE 802.11i standard, is now the strongest security available — stronger than its previous generation because it uses advanced encryption. “It’s really strong security, and some would say that it means that wireless can be as secure as wired,” Hanley says. In WPA and WPA2, a new encryption key is sent for every packet that is broadcast. So if a hacker manages to intercept and decipher the key in one packet, it will be useless when he tries to use it to decrypt the next packet because the network already will have generated a new key that invalidates the old one. WPA encryption is stronger than WEP encryption, and WPA2 encryption is stronger still. In fact, Gartner now recommends that all new wireless network purchases for company offices be capable of supporting WPA2. But most small business owners don’t need to worry about the details of how WPA2 works — just that it works. WPA and WPA2 are the best choices for small businesses There’s no question that Wi-Fi has the potential to boost your company’s productivity and make data sharing more efficient. But as more government regulations require companies to protect customer data and other digital information — or pay steep fines — Wi-Fi security is not an area of the business in which you can skimp. To simplify your search for the right equipment, look the Wi-Fi Alliance’s “Wi-Fi Certified” seal on nearly 700 products that have been tested and proven to implement WPA2. Setting up security on your network equipment is not overly complicated, but services such as Geek Squad and Firedog can do the job for you for a fee. In addition, the Wi-Fi Alliance soon will offer Wi-Fi Protected Setup, a program that it says will simplify wireless security setup for consumers and small business owners. Whatever you do, just remember that the default security on most devices is no security at all. “You have to turn it on,” Hanley says. “It’s a little like the seatbelts in your car: They’re great at saving lives but not if you’re not wearing them.”

About 2365 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Is RFID Right for Your Business?

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If your company ships goods that are perishable or expensive or you’re interested in becoming a supplier to Wal-Mart, Target or the U.S. Department of Defense, you may have reason to consider deploying radio frequency identification (RFID). The truth is that many small businesses may be able to get by without implementing RFID for the next few years. But while you wait, your competitors may already be benefiting from early adoption by realizing return on investment from automating receipt and shipment of goods or by becoming a supplier for one of a growing number of big firms and organizations — Wal-Mart, Target and the DOD included — that have adopted RFID and required their suppliers to do the same. How RFID works RFID is a technology in which small, cheap tags are attached to items or cartons or pallets of goods and are automatically read and tracked by a computer system. Many regard RFID tags as the new bar-codes to help businesses track and trace goods through the supply chain. But there are already several examples of RFID now in use by a wide variety of people, including toll-collection systems like EZ Pass, the microchips veterinarians insert into pets and instant payment credit cards that no longer need to be swiped. For small businesses, the use of RFID is likely to be more along the lines of Grantex, a Grand Rapids, Mich. uniform rental company. In 2001, Grantex bought an RFID system for a little over $1 million. The company now sews the chips into uniforms. When the company washes the garments, an RFID system reads the chips and automatically sorts the uniforms so they go back to the right companies. Doug Singer, Grantex’s president, says that since he installed the system, there has been a 36 percent reduction in labor costs and a 21 percent decrease in uniform costs. Partially, that’s because uniforms can no longer be lost or stolen. Unless you rip the tag out, the uniforms are like a lost dog with a microchip — easy to locate. The company used to use bar codes for the sorting function, but the RFID tags are much tougher, Singer says. “Our goal is to attack grease, oil and dirt and we do a darn good job of it,” he says. “If we had bar codes, they would just come off.” Small firms can get big benefits Singer says RFID lets Grantex, which has about 50 employees, operate like a much bigger company because it can handle a large workload (the company regularly services about 10,000 uniforms). Other small- to medium-size businesses that need to track inventory are also adding RFID. A study by Gartner Dataquest found that 40 percent of such inventory-intensive businesses planned to install an RFID tracking system by the end of last year. But for most small businesses, RFID won’t be a big priority for a while, says Mark Johnson, president of RFID Tribe, a Dallas-based professional association for the RFID trade. “It’s very useful for any organization that has many, many objects to track,” says Johnson. “But if you’re a mom-and-pop, a clipboard and a No. 2 pencil does fine.” Johnson says that a bare-bones RFID system would probably start at $10,000-20,000, but it wouldn’t do enough to make a difference in operations. Realizing ROI from RFID Andy Nathanson, practice director for RFID for Venture Development, a Natick, Mass., market researcher, says most RFID systems will cost around $250,000, but the companies that use it realize ROI within 18 months. The good news is that the prices are coming down. Tags that used to go for 25 cents are “now approaching the 10-cent barrier,” he says. Still, unless you track items that are worth more than $25, are perishable or are easily copied, RFID shouldn’t be a top priority right now. The exception to that is if your firm does business with Wal-Mart or the Department of Defense, both of which require suppliers to use RFID. One way to approach this is what Johnson calls “slap and tag,” that is, just putting tags on merchandise without installing an RFID reading system. But even that can be expensive. “People say it’s only a quarter or so, but we’re talking about millions and millions of products,” he says. “It adds up.”

About 2426 days ago Business Software

CRM for Small Business

About a year and a half ago, Tom Cooke sold his small business to Image Tech Corp. and “like an idiot” agreed to run the company’s sales department. What he found was that the St. Louis corporate event production firm had no way of keeping track of its interactions with customers, potential and otherwise. “We did not have a comprehensive system,” he says. “Intellectual property would be walking in and out of the company every day at five between the ears of our employees.” Image Tech used ACT!, a CRM software program from Sage Software, but Cooke found most sales people were using Microsoft Outlook, which is primarily an e-mail software program, instead. After hooking up with a San Francisco reseller, Cooke had Microsoft CRM installed in May for a one-time fee of around $18,000. Since his employees were already familiar with Outlook, the transition to Microsoft Dynamics CRM was easy, he says. Now the company has what he wants: a central database of consumer contacts that includes information about the contact’s interactions with the company and past purchasing habits. Image Tech isn’t alone. Years ago, CRM might have been designed for Fortune 500 corporations with large call centers. But, these days, small- to medium-sized businesses represent one of the hottest segments of the market. Why CRM Works With some CRM programs, you don’t need any IT staffers. While a small business might opt to install a software program on their IT system for roughly $1,500 per seat, there’s another option: Outsourcing the whole thing through such Web-based companies as SalesForce.com. Outsourcers charge in the range of $50 to $100 per month and buyers can opt out of the service any time. Such ease of use has no doubt been the reason behind the revenue growth at CRM vendors. These companies say that small businesses spent just under $1 billion on CRM software last year, and are projected to spend more than double that by 2010, according to Gartner Inc., the Stamford, Conn. technology research firm. “We’re starting to see an interest from small businesses,” adds Liz Herbert, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, another research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. “They tend to be very resource-constrained and these [CRM programs] are easy to deploy and manage on an ongoing basis. And you don’t need a large number of IT people to initiate it.” What’s the CRM ROI? Microsoft doesn’t quote an ROI figure for its Dynamics CRM software, but Kevin Faulkner, product marketing manager for the line, says that at this point CRM software is a must-have for small businesses. “A CRM system frankly is as central to your business as an accounting system,” he says. “People don’t ask, ‘What’s the ROI on an accounting system?’” Indeed, Image Tech hasn’t yet claimed much ROI on its $18,000. Cooke says that the software has not led to many new sales yet but has led to “more times at bat” so far. “Our batting average is not as good as it can be,” Cooke says, “but now can analyze why a program is not successful.” He’s hardly disillusioned, though. He says he feels that with the increased data about what was pitched, what the competition is offering, and what the prospect’s main issues were, it’s only a matter of time until the effect of knowing the customer better through CRM is felt on the bottom line.