The prevailing bad weather in the United States and Europe has caused varying degrees of production delays in all sorts of industries and business. In circumstances like these, communication is especially important – when all members of the organization need to stay connected to keep operations coordinated and moving forward.

Bad weather or not, there has been an increased demand to maintain constant communication and continue productivity outside the office. With remote and mobile accessibility between all links in a company, efficiency can be maintained through working from remote locations. Your company’s employees – from the worker-bees out in field to supervisors, managers, and CXOs – no longer need to be limited by dependence on in-office resources.

Our services provide solutions that allow people to maintain communication regardless of the weather and other productivity-stalling circumstances. We realize the importance of being able to keep in touch, especially in critical situations such as the current weather conditions.

Please contact us to learn more about our communications solutions.

You expect your computer to work when you turn it on. The last thing you want is to waste valuable time trying to get your email running or wrestling with a web browser that won’t load.

These are frustrations you surely have experienced, and chances are you will again. But you don’t have to. Or, at the very least, you can make them as rare as your refrigerator breaking down or your car battery dying.

To get there, you need to understand how well your IT environment is running. No, we’re not suggesting that you look under the hood to figure out what does what and how. Leave that to the IT people. What we’re proposing is a comprehensive endeavor to document all your IT processes and inventory your IT assets. Identify your best practices – those processes and functions that experience has proven to run efficiently and produce the most desirable results – and document them as part of your overall business practices.

During the process of documenting your IT processes and functions, you’re bound to discover your IT environment isn’t as efficient as it should be – hence, your computer-borne frustrations. You’ll also identify needs that you weren’t aware of. Left unaddressed, these needs cut into productivity (and therefore profits), and can sometimes lead to costly IT network emergencies that would have been a lot less expensive with the right technology and proper maintenance in place.

Let us help assess your needs through this documentation process, and identify solutions that will bring you peace of mind. Some common solutions include outsourcing some of your network functions such as security, backup and recovery, or email, so that they are maintained and updated to keep them running smoothly and prevent costly downtime.

You expect your computer to work when you turn it on – and that is what we want to make sure happens.

Mr Sun can be a pretty mean neighbor. Check out the video below from SOHO (the Solar and Helioscopic Observatory) that complies many such Comet-Sun battles to the death…well, the death of the comet, anyway. These comets just don’t seem to learn.

SOHO Sun-Comet Battles

(Also…my apologies for the cheesy music..)

(Hat tip to Tom’s Astronomy Blog)

Trusteer, a security solutions vendor, recently released the results of their study which shows how successful phishing attacks are, how many users respond to phishing attacks, and how many users submit their login information to criminal websites. The results are alarming. Among them:

• Each phishing attack involves a very small percentage of customers (0.000564%), but due to the large number of phishing attacks, the aggregated number is significant
• 45% of bank customers redirected to a phishing site divulge their personal credentials
• 0.47% of bank customers fall victim to phishing attacks each year, translating to $2.4M-$9.4M in annual fraud losses per one million clients
• Each financial institution was targeted, on average, by 16 phishing websites per week, translating to 832 phishing attacks per year per bank brand

Despite efforts by browser developers and security vendors to protect users from phishing attacks, a small number apparently are still able to bypass anti-spam/phishing protection – and when they do, the results can be damaging.

Let us help you protect yourself from phishing attacks. To find out more contact us today.

Related articles:

• Garlik’s UK Cybercrime Report 2009 Released (pindebit.blogspot.com)
• Chat In the Middle Online Banking Threat (pindebit.blogspot.com)
• PC Users Targeted As Online Fraud Soars (news.sky.com)
• Less than 0.5% of online banking clients fall for phishing scams each year, report says (seattlepi.com)

Quoting research from various industry analysts, Microsoft warned that users who install unlicensed or counterfeit software on their PCs are 73% more likely to suffer data loss or damage than users of legitimate software. The company also cited a 2006 IDC study that found that 25% of counterfeit software attempted to install unwanted or malicious code when downloaded. In response, Microsoft is launching a series of educational initiatives and enforcement actions in over 70 countries to combat the threat. Microsoft is calling its anti-piracy campaign Consumer Action Day. Microsoft has posted additional information about the risks of counterfeit software and its efforts to fight the problem at microsoft.com/howtotell.

Related articles:

• Counterfeit reports climb (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
• Microsoft launches attack on pirates, counterfeiters (seattlepi.com)
• Microsoft Links Malware Rates To Pirated Windows (news.slashdot.org)

In Microsoft Word, you can use mail merge to create a batch of envelopes when you want to use envelopes to send a mass mailing to your address list. Each envelope can contain an address from your list.

Learn how…

A PowerPoint photo album is a presentation that you can create to display your personal or business photographs. You can add effects that include attention-grabbing slide transitions , colorful backgrounds and themes (theme: A combination of theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects. A theme may be applied to a file as a single selection.), specific layouts , and more. After the pictures are in your album, you can add captions, adjust the order and layout, add frames around the pictures, and even apply a theme to further customize the look of your album. To share your photo album with others, you can send it as an attachment to an e-mail message, publish it to the Web, or print it.

Learn how…

A new report by security vendor Cenzic shares research indicating that security flaws found in Web applications continue to grow and should be a major concern for many businesses, including SMEs, as more and more depend on the Web for their business. According to the report, almost 80 percent of more than 3,000 software security flaws publicly reported this year have been in web technologies such as web servers, applications, plug-ins, and web browsers. That number is about 10 percent higher than the number of flaws reported in the same period last year — and 9 out of 10 of the flaws were found in commercial code. The top 10 vulnerabilities for the first half of 2009 included familiar names such as Sun, IBM, Mozilla, Apache, and Safari, where most Web applications were found to have vulnerabilities related to information leaks and exposures, Cross-Site Scripting, and session management.

Are you using the web for your business? Concerned about the security of your data and information? Contact us and see how we can help.

Related articles:

• Web application security is growing problem for enterprises (infoworld.com)
• Firefox flaws make up 44% of all browser bugs? (theregister.co.uk)
• Vulnerabilities Whitehat Security (ecombizcenter.blogspot.com)