Tag Archives: The Radicati Group Inc.

About 1695 days ago E-Commerce

Stem the Flood with E-mail Archiving

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At the average business, the day starts like this: Boot up the computer. Open e-mail. Push the “Send/Receive” button and wait for the flood of messages to pour in. And a flood it is. According to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif., technology market researcher, the volume of global e-mail has grown to 210 billion a day and is expected to hit 297 billion by 2010. Radicati predicts that by next year, workers will spend 41 percent of their day handling e-mail. That’s a lot of messages. Once they’re opened and read, what’s a small business supposed to do with them all? In more and more cases, the answer is to keep them. E-mail has become so intrinsic to the way work is done at companies of all sizes, it’s where most business records are stored, says Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, Ohio, an electronic communications consultant and author of a book on e-mail policies due out in December. Federal regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and recent rule changes that make e-mail subject to discovery in the course of a federal lawsuit are also driving companies to archive e-mail, Flynn says. “People incorrectly assume e-mail is only produced as bad evidence,” in a trial, she says. “But it could be evidence you need to save the day.” However, not all messages are created equal. Companies need to come up with policies about what to save, Flynn and other e-mail experts say. Once they’ve sorted that out, they can decide how and where to set up e-mail archives, either on site or through an e-mail archiving service. Creating an e-mail policy According to e-mail experts, a comprehensive e-mail retention policy should include: Which e-mail messages to keep How long they should be stored How they should be purged once they’ve reached their life expectancy How employees should be notified and educated about the policy What types of disciplinary action the company will take if employees break e-mail rules Breaking e-mail rules is no joke. According to a 2007 survey conducted by the ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association, 28 percent of bosses had fired employees for e-mail violations. “We’re seeing more employers put real teeth in these policies,” Flynn says. When it comes to managing e-mail, small businesses have more at stake because they don’t have the deep pockets that a large corporation has to hire a defense team and do records searches should they be sued. “It’s much more cost and time effective for a small business to do the work upfront,” she says. Whether it’s an on-site appliance or hosted service, a small business should make sure the e-mail archive solution they choose: Captures inbound and outbound, internal and external messages and attachments Indexes messages so they can be searched and retrieved with minimum time and trouble Insures the authenticity and completeness of e-mail records in such a way that it complies with regulators and courts Preserves messages in a way that’s secure and tamperproof When deciding whether to bring e-mail archiving in house or go with an outside vendor, companies need to think about how many employees they need to cover, average e-mail volumes, if their company is growing and how much work they want to take on themselves, says Sean Hegarty, messaging senior product manager at Iron Mountain, the information storage company. Once a company’s determined the scope of the needs, they can decide whether they want to take on the task themselves or farm it out to a Web-based -email archiving service, Hegarty says. The former can be capital intensive, while the latter “is more of a gradual predictable cost,” he says. “Five years ago the market was primarily on-site solutions. Now it seems that a lot of adoption is of the outsourcing model.” By all means, don’t let employees save their own messages on an ad hoc basis on their PCs or printed out and stored in file cabinets, ePolicy Institute’s Flynn says. If that happens and the company gets sued, the first thing a computer forensic team does is “look in employees’ inboxes and hard drives for those underground archives,” she says. Sidebar: E-mail Archive Vendors Here’s a list of some e-mail archiving product vendors: ArcMail — Appliance-based e-mail archiving solution. Autonomy — Web-based e-mail archiving and e-discovery, e-mail archive services that are specific to lawsuits. EMC EmailXtender Family — An array of e-mail archiving products, including specialized programs for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino. Iron Mountain Total Email Management Suite — The long-time storage business offers a Web-based e-mail archive service for Exchange and Lotus Domino servers and acts as an online backup service; includes extras such as virus scanning and phishing protection. Iron Mountain offers a separate e-mail storage service for SEC-regulated businesses. MessageLabs — Provides hosted mailbox management, e-discovery, e-mail compliance and supervision archiving along with encryption, anti-spam, anti-virus and other e-mail services. Dell Message One — Complete Web-based e-mail management service, including archiving. Quest Software Archive Manager — A Microsoft-centric e-mail archiving appliance. Symantec — Offers various e-mail archiving solutions, including Microsoft Exchange archive and recovery service for small and mid-sized businesses and Enterprise Vault automatic mailbox management.

About 2303 days ago E-Commerce

The Basics: How Email Works

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It’s nearly impossible to imagine conducting business today without electronic mail. From the early 1970s, when an engineer, sitting at one computer, experimented by sending a message to himself on another computer right beside the first, email has become a crucial tool for communicating in the digital age. The equivalent of electronic letters, written without putting pen (or even printer ink) to paper, billions of messages traverse the globe daily from one computer to another in the same building, or across continents, almost instantaneously. Email use will nearly double in the next four years, as the number of active mailboxes increases from 1.4 billion users this year to 2.5 billion in 2010, according to the Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif. market research firm. Radicati estimates that 183 billion email messages were sent per day by the end of 2006. “There’s no doubt that email in the workplace is the electronic communications tool of choice,” says Nancy Flynn, director of the ePolicy Institute. How email works Early email involved sending monochromatic text from one computer to another, and evolved to allow communication using images, photos, and sound (via attachments). Once relegated to computers running an email application, email is now readily available via Internet browsers, and hence accessible via portable devices including cell phones. The way email works is simple: someone types the address of the recipient, a subject, and a message, hits send, and the message is routed to its recipient.  When the recipient logs in to his or her email account, or the next time the application collects messages, the message will appear in his or her email inbox.  But how does the message get delivered?  An email address is similar to a physical address: it indicates the person and location where the message will be delivered.  In the address user@domain, for example, “user” is the intended recipient of the message, the @ sign separates the individual user’s name from the name of the server or domain, and “domain” is the site where that user’s mail is managed, similar to the street, city, state and zip code in old fashioned “snail mail” (sent using the U.S. Postal Service). Transmission facilitated by protocols  The message is transmitted across wires (or wirelessly) from the recipient’s computer or device, to a business’s server, for example, or a server run by an Internet Service Provider. Software protocols direct the mail to its destination. A protocol called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) forwards or directs mail from the sender to the recipient.  Another protocol called Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) in essence pulls the message down from the server to which it was sent and into the application or browser interface on the recipient’s desktop (or PDA or phone). Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) allows a local client to access mail on a remote server. Most applications support all three protocols, which do the background work to route messages to the correct destination. Besides an email address and email account, an email application is required for sending and receiving email.  Writing a message requires an email application, like Microsoft Outlook, running on a PC or PDA, or an Internet browser that allows a user to gain access to email services running on a host — whether it’s a company’s mail server, or a free email service like Gmail or Hotmail. Regardless of the email application, one thing is for certain: email use has enabled small and mid-size businesses to better respond to customers, do business across long distances, and keep communication costs low.

About 2426 days ago Business Software

The Best Instant Message Programs for Business

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When many people think of instant messaging (IM), they think of teenagers pounding away on the keyboard and chatting throughout the night with friends. But IM has staked its place out in the business world, too. Case in point: According to the Radicati Group, the enterprise IM market is expected to reach $123 million in 2006 and grow to $282 million by 2010. That said, free public IM programs still dominate both inside and outside the office. But they weren’t necessarily designed with businesses with in mind. Small business leader need to be concerned that employees who use free IM clients can unknowingly — or purposely — send company secrets out over the unsecured  Internet without a trace. They could accidentally catch a virus or let a worm make its way from an IM attachment to the company’s network. Or employees could cause their firms legal liability due to the IM activities, such as having chats that violate company policy — or the law. Still, IM is growing up. There are now a number of programs or gateway products that allow businesses to better clamp down on IM to improve security, control content and manage and retain IM records. Here are three enterprise IM technologies and what experts have to say about their benefits: WebEx AIM Pro Business Edition Cost: Free download; subscription for premium services Features: AOL released this free business-minded IM program in 2006. WebEx AIM Pro is free, encrypts messages between AIM Pro users, and allows users to import their public AIM buddy list and Microsoft Outlook calendars. “It’s pretty valuable,” says Chris Hazelton, IDC senior analyst, small and medium business markets,. The program also allows users to share documents, edit them via an IM chat, and do voice conferencing, as well. Businesses can use the program to monitor, log and archive text, voice and video IMs. It allows secure messaging with “AOL federated partners” such as Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) and IBM Lotus Sametime. WebEx plans to charge an additional fee per user for multi-party IM conferences in the near future. AIM Pro Professional Edition, on the other hand, is free and doesn’t include the archiving features, for instance, and requires a WebEx account to host voice or video IM conferences. IBM Lotus Sametime Cost: $55 per user, $475 for IBM Lotus Web Conferencing Concurrent User License, although prices can vary. Features: As a secure end-to-end enterprise IM, Sametime Version 7.5 includes integration with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and about 150 new functions developed by partners. With Sametime, users can imbed 3D models in an IM, which Matthew Brown, a senior analyst for Forrester Research  says, “R&D organizations are very excited about.” Sametime allows users within an organization to see each other’s physical location, phone availability, a detailed company-directory like profile, or the recent e-mails a person sent you when they ping you with an IM so you can more quickly get up to speed about their needs. Users can search for an internal expert or start a discussion forum across the Sametime network. It also allows connectivity with public IM programs by AOL, Yahoo and Google. Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) Cost: $31 per user, $787 per server Features: With LCS, Brown says Microsoft is going for a “unified communications strategy.” LCS allows users to collaborate via IM using other Microsoft products and from within Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server sites. Users can initiate phone calls from the program, too. It allows users to securely IM users of free IM programs such as MSN, AOL and Yahoo, and provides logging and archiving tools for regulatory compliance. LCS has a remote user option so employees can still IM securely when they are not on the company’s network. Like IBM Sametime, Hazelton says Microsoft LCS “is pretty expensive but it can be bundled with Exchange.” If enterprise IM programs are not the right fit, businesses can still add a layer of security to the free public IM programs with gateway products such as FaceTime or IMLogic or by using a hosted enterprise IM service by companies including Omnipod or Akeni. No matter which enterprise IM program a small to medium business chooses, Brown says: “A lot of these IM technologies are starting to converge across all communications technologies. IM is going to make the way we interact and tight-loop collaboration more seamless.”

About 2487 days ago Computer Security

How to Protect Your Business from Spyware and Adware

There’s an old IT diagnosis: “Problem between the chair and the keyboard.” It is more applicable today than ever, especially when it comes to spyware and adware. No matter how much you scan and spam filter, no matter how many warnings you send out, someone, somewhere, will click the wrong e-mail link and potentially cause problems on your network. Spyware and adware, and, to a certain degree, phishing e-mails, are constantly plaguing businesses, in some cases causing massive outages and productivity loss. Companies must be vigilant of spyware, the name for programs smuggled in under the guise of legitimate programs and secretly installed on your computer or your network, and adware, software that displays ads on your PC even when you’re not surfing the Internet. Both spyware and adware can impact data and/or system functionality, occasionally resulting in lost data and completely corrupted systems. Spyware and adware can render a computer sluggish, making even the most routine task, such as sending e-mail or calling up a document, slow. An estimated 30 percent of all help desk calls in companies today are the result of spyware, according to an IDC estimate. The number of small and medium-sized companies investing in security technologies to fight spyware and adware is growing. Spyware now ranks with viruses, worms and spam as among the top SMB IT concerns, according to a 2005 study from Forrester Research. Forrester surveyed nearly 800 U.S. SMB technology decision makers and found that 71 percent planned to invest in additional security technologies by the end of 2005. The Radicati Group, a market research firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., forecasts that anti-spyware spending alone will grow from $103 million in 2005 to more than $1 billion by 2009. The Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group made up of anti-spyware software companies, academics and consumer groups, has published a group of tips for businesses on how to block spyware and adware. The tips include the following: * Training is the first defense — Teach your employees not to click on links or files in e-mails… ever. Get them to sign an “acceptable use policy” stipulate that they won’t access unauthorized programs. Some programmers suggest creating a secure FTP site and use that to trade important files back and forth with customers or use a service like xDrive.com to share documents. Focus on keeping e-mail attachment-free. *Lock down desktops — Desktop anti-spyware applications can find and remove spyware trying to execute on PCs. But maintain software updates, operating system and browser patches and manage desktop security from a central location. If you can, install an open operating system like Xandros or migrate to OS X. It’s not something a lot of IT folks want to hear — or have to learn — but if the office assistant and the boss are both on Macs, they’re going to experience less downtime because of spyware and still be able to handle almost any file type. * Block spyware at the network — Your company can configure gateway proxies and firewalls to prevent spyware from reaching PCs on the network by excluding download from known spyware sites and high-risk sites. They can also scan files at the gateway for known spyware code. Also, analyst logs of PC communications for high-frequency destinations. *Create filtering rules, but be generous — filter attachments, yet tag e-mails with bright and bold HTML messages informing the users how to get them out of your custom attachment lockbox. Also, consider unzipping archived attachments and scanning them immediately. Most spyware can be stopped at the source. * Install a program like SpoofStick — A free program for IE or Firefox, SpoofStick informs you if a website is “pretending” to be another, more legitimate website. In many cases, scams will take you to pages that purport to be a legitimate bank or other business, but are, in fact, fake information-farming pages designed to steal personal information. SpoofStick will blink if a page’s URL doesn’t match its title.

About 2487 days ago Spyware and Malware

How to Protect Your Business from Spyware and Adware

There’s an old IT diagnosis: “Problem between the chair and the keyboard.” It is more applicable today than ever, especially when it comes to spyware and adware. No matter how much you scan and spam filter, no matter how many warnings you send out, someone, somewhere, will click the wrong e-mail link and potentially cause problems on your network. Spyware and adware, and, to a certain degree, phishing e-mails, are constantly plaguing businesses, in some cases causing massive outages and productivity loss. Companies must be vigilant of spyware, the name for programs smuggled in under the guise of legitimate programs and secretly installed on your computer or your network, and adware, software that displays ads on your PC even when you’re not surfing the Internet. Both spyware and adware can impact data and/or system functionality, occasionally resulting in lost data and completely corrupted systems. Spyware and adware can render a computer sluggish, making even the most routine task, such as sending e-mail or calling up a document, slow. An estimated 30 percent of all help desk calls in companies today are the result of spyware, according to an IDC estimate. The number of small and medium-sized companies investing in security technologies to fight spyware and adware is growing. Spyware now ranks with viruses, worms and spam as among the top SMB IT concerns, according to a 2005 study from Forrester Research. Forrester surveyed nearly 800 U.S. SMB technology decision makers and found that 71 percent planned to invest in additional security technologies by the end of 2005. The Radicati Group, a market research firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., forecasts that anti-spyware spending alone will grow from $103 million in 2005 to more than $1 billion by 2009. The Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group made up of anti-spyware software companies, academics and consumer groups, has published a group of tips for businesses on how to block spyware and adware. The tips include the following: * Training is the first defense — Teach your employees not to click on links or files in e-mails… ever. Get them to sign an “acceptable use policy” stipulate that they won’t access unauthorized programs. Some programmers suggest creating a secure FTP site and use that to trade important files back and forth with customers or use a service like xDrive.com to share documents. Focus on keeping e-mail attachment-free. *Lock down desktops — Desktop anti-spyware applications can find and remove spyware trying to execute on PCs. But maintain software updates, operating system and browser patches and manage desktop security from a central location. If you can, install an open operating system like Xandros or migrate to OS X. It’s not something a lot of IT folks want to hear — or have to learn — but if the office assistant and the boss are both on Macs, they’re going to experience less downtime because of spyware and still be able to handle almost any file type. * Block spyware at the network — Your company can configure gateway proxies and firewalls to prevent spyware from reaching PCs on the network by excluding download from known spyware sites and high-risk sites. They can also scan files at the gateway for known spyware code. Also, analyst logs of PC communications for high-frequency destinations. *Create filtering rules, but be generous — filter attachments, yet tag e-mails with bright and bold HTML messages informing the users how to get them out of your custom attachment lockbox. Also, consider unzipping archived attachments and scanning them immediately. Most spyware can be stopped at the source. * Install a program like SpoofStick — A free program for IE or Firefox, SpoofStick informs you if a website is “pretending” to be another, more legitimate website. In many cases, scams will take you to pages that purport to be a legitimate bank or other business, but are, in fact, fake information-farming pages designed to steal personal information. SpoofStick will blink if a page’s URL doesn’t match its title.

About 2791 days ago Computer Security

How to Avoid Scammers, Spammer and the Rest of the Bad E-guys

The first e-mail message was sent sometime in the early 1970s by Ray Tomlinson, an English computer engineer working for the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Nobody remembers what it said: possibly “testing” or “QWERTY.” Tomlinson wasn’t thinking about history; he was just trying to create a quick, informal way for a closed universe of research scientists to communicate with one another. Ease of use was the point, not security. Defense scientists 30 years ago, after all, did not have to worry about armies of malicious nerds with laptops and cable modems. The openness of e-mail, though, the thing that makes it so revolutionary, is also what makes it so vulnerable to viruses, worms, ID theft, denial-of-service attacks, and a host of other threats. Scammers are constantly cooking up new ways to use your e-mail system against you. Phishing attacks, for instance. Your employees or customers get an official-looking e-mail saying there is a problem with, say, their credit card account. Would they please click on the link below, then type in their account or Social Security number? MessageLabs, a security firm that tracks phishing attacks, says the number of phishing e-mails grew to 4.5 million in November 2004 from 337,050 that January. Then there’s spam. The Radicati Group estimates that 45% of all e-mail is spam; other experts think it may be as much as 80%. According to Ferris Research, an e-mail and communications consulting firm, the worldwide cost in lost productivity and resources devoted to fighting spam will be $50 billion in 2005, more than a third of that coming from U.S. companies. It’s not all bad news, though. Anti-spam laws have started to show some teeth. In April, Jeremy Jaynes, who was reportedly sending out 10 million junk e-mails a day, was convicted of felony charges in Virginia and sentenced to nine years in prison. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. As you may have noticed, though, spam, viruses, and the rest haven’t gone away. You still have to protect yourself. Which defense is best for you is a function of how big your business is and how much control you want over your security. Many fixes can help not only with keeping your system safe but also with archiving messages and making sure your system complies with your policies and the law. One solution may not be enough. “You cannot expect to buy a single layer of security protection and sleep at night,” says Sara Radicati, of the Radicati Group. Your choices fall into three main categories. Managed Services Letting somebody else do it is an attractive option if you have a modest (or nonexistent) IT staff. The tradeoff is loss of control: You’re trusting an outsider with a key part of your business. Managed providers offer a range of security services that include spam filtering, virus protection, encryption, mail monitoring for compliance with regulations or company policy, and even archiving. Fees are typically per user, per month or year, and the price generally drops the more licenses you buy. Most vendors offer 30-day free trials. Postini’s Perimeter Manager Small Business Edition (starts at $25 per user per year) includes protection from spam, phishing, and viruses. It also provides defense against directory harvest attacks, in which cyber miscreants try to get your employees’ e-mail addresses by bombarding your server with messages sent to every possible address–jfried@inc.com, johnfried@inc.com, etc.–and seeing which ones bounce back. Perimeter Manager handles only inbound e-mail, however. If you need to keep tabs on internal or outbound mail, too, you can upgrade to Postini’s enterprise edition (starts at $33 per user). SingleFin’s Global Gateway Service includes e-mail, Web, and instant messaging content filtering, as well as archiving ($12 a month, or free for businesses with fewer than 10 users). A light version of the suite, which simply marks spam and forwards it along to you and also filters viruses out, is free for any number of users. MessageLabs offers anti-virus, anti-spam, content, and policy control services. Pricing is based on company size. A business with 250 to 499 employees, for instance, pays a monthly $3.83 per feature per user. Other big players worth checking out in managed services are Frontbridge, Symantec, and McAfee. Appliances Not refrigerators or microwave ovens. These are security hardware systems–literally boxes that contain e-mail watchdog and filtering systems. They are the fastest-growing segment of the security industry, according to the Radicati Group. They are generally easy to install and customize and they leave your own tech people in charge. Appliances are, however, not cheap. IronPort’s C-series comes in four sizes, depending on the number of people in your business. The midline C10 (around $9,000) is designed for companies with up to 1,000 employees and features anti-spam and virus protection, as well as content filtering for policy enforcement and monitoring. CipherTrust’s IronMail appliance (starts at $5,995 for the S-10 model, which is designed for companies with 100 or fewer users) has strong compliance tools. Other companies that make security hardware include Borderware, Barracuda Networks, Mirapoint, and Alladin. Software Security software is plentiful and comparatively cheap. Most security experts, though, say this stuff is most effective when used in combination with an appliance or a managed service. They also warn that given the constant evolution of viruses and other threats you (or your IT staff) may be constantly managing patches and updates. WebRoot’s Spy Sweeper Enterprise ($300 for a one-year subscription with 10 licenses) and PepiMK Software’s SpyBot Search & Destroy (free) will keep your business computers clean of spyware programs, which can steal your data or even turn your computers into spam-generating “zombies.” Symantec’s Norton AntiSpam 2005 ($320 for a 10-user pack) will clean your computer of junk mail; Computer Associates’ Server Protection Suite ($1,055 for five users) offers a range of security tools, including anti-virus, anti-spam, and spyware protection; Clearswift’s MIMEsweeper ($2,628 for 100 licenses) series has a variety of monitoring software solutions; Sophos’ PureMessage Small Business Edition ($2,850 for 100 users) offers protection from viruses and spam; TrendMicro’s NeatSuite for Small and Medium Businesses ($59.34 per user for 25 to 100 users) has anti-virus, anti-spam, and content security.