Articles Tagged ‘online collaboration’

Considering the financial forecast for the upcoming business year, it is unsurprising that small businesses are tightening their belts and purse strings. The unfortunate reality that most small businesses face is the fact that you have to spend money to make money. Fortunately, there are ways to spend less money and still realize a positive cash return. A great way to cut costs and save time is to reassess how meetings are handled.

Traditionally, the face-to-face meeting has been the most valued way to collaborate on projects of any nature. The primary drawbacks to in-person meetings are the rising costs and lost time due to travel. Another difficulty of in-person meeting is trying to find a convenient time for everyone to meet. While face-to-face meetings are still ideal, travel expenses and scheduling issues can be reduced if a business is flexible and utilizes online collaboration.

Online collaboration allows people to meet and work together by using the internet. Three popular solutions are document services, customer relationship management services, and web conferencing services. Google Docs and Box.net are document services that provide online office programs that simplify document sharing. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics are customer relationship management programs that keep track of information relating to clients in an online database. WebEx and Microsoft Office Live Meeting are web conference programs that allow participants to meet online in real-time.

Not only does online collaboration save time and money for small businesses, it also benefits the client. After initially contacting a prospective client, WebEx meetings can take the place of initial and follow-up sales calls. Sales calls are often difficult to schedule around everyone’s calendars, but web conferencing provides near immediate gratification since meetings can be set up quickly. Online meetings also save the small business and the client travel expenses and time. When the business saves money, the savings can be passed on to the client. A client that knows he is getting a fair rate for services is a happy client.

Also consider combining online collaboration with telecommuting. Document sharing is a terrific way to work with employees who do not make it into the office frequently. Anyone can create a project at their convenience and post it through Google Docs or Box.net and other teammates can comment and revise the work at their convenience. When collaborative sessions no longer require group scheduling, project completion times become shortened. Once again, saving time means saving money.

The benefits of saving time and money by using online collaboration solutions cannot be overstated. Various vendors offer programs that meet the needs of the small business. Every program offers increased productivity while saving time and money. Choosing to use an online collaboration program is an easy choice to make. Choosing which program is the best solution for your small business may not be so simple. Please contact All Covered and let an expert help you select the best online collaboration program to fit your small business needs and help you save time and money.

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Small businesses continuously seek creative ways to decrease financial expenses without compromising service. This is especially true during a recession. Telecommuting is an innovative option that enables employees to work away from the physical business site on a part-time to full-time basis. Flexible scheduling enables multiple employees to share physical office space, computers, network resources, and phones, while also reducing the cost of utilities.

Working away from the business site guarantees benefits for both the small business employer and employees. When employees telecommute, travel times are removed and availability is no longer dependent upon the caprice of rush hour traffic. The employer will realize increased revenue when the employees are consistently available as scheduled. Many telecommuters apply their newly liberated hours to work projects, allowing them to be more productive. Most employees that telecommute realize a better quality of life, increasing job satisfaction and encouraging job retention.

Telecommuting is viable option for many small businesses, especially when the employees deal with information, as opposed to physical labor. Employees, who are tasked with computer programming, data entry, sales, accounting, and duties of a similar nature, frequently work alone or by telephone and do not need to be in the office on a daily basis. Usually, these workers require large amounts of uninterrupted time to complete projects and rarely do they need daily physical interaction with peers and management. Telecommuting decreases interruptions that routinely occur in a busy office allowing employees to be more productive.

Setting up remote work space does not need to be expensive. The small business will need to install either a virtual private network (VPN) or a terminal server. The VPN is a secure connection between an offsite computer and the office server that allows data to be physically stored and manipulated at either site. A terminal server provides a virtual operating system to offsite computers while keeping business resources securely in the office.

Once the onsite system is set up, offsite needs are minimal. Employees will only need a few tools to work remotely. Most already own personal computers, phones, and have internet connectivity which are the basic tools required for working remotely. If printers, copiers and fax machines are required, employees may use the network resources when they work from the office.

With minimal effort and negligible cost, telecommuting can effectively reduce small business expenses. Please contact All Covered and learn how telecommuting can enhance your company-s bottom line.

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To ease connection difficulties, many popular IM clients are adept at navigating traffic through well-secured network environments by using unauthorized ports in corporate firewalls. This access allows additional entry points into the network for viruses and rogue protocols – bypassing corporate authentication systems and controls.

With Internet accessible “listening” services such as IM running from inside an organization, these applications are increasingly being targeted by hackers and spammers. The spate of recent vulnerabilities within IM clients by all the significant vendors leaves integrity and confidentiality of corporate information at risk – potentially allowing any data a trusted employee can access to also become accessible to a hacker, abusing flaws in the IM client application.

Without proper management of an IM environment, uncontrolled installation of consumer-grade messaging clients may make an organization vulnerable to the following security issues:

1. Client Vulnerabilities – Just like many other software applications, IM clients have a history of common security vulnerabilities. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may take the form of denials of service (e.g. maximum network bandwidth utilization and workstation crashes), “bother-ware” notifications and nuisances threatening productivity, access to unauthorized host data, or complete host compromise and subsequent loss of data integrity.
2. Insecure Network Traffic – Typically, the corporate networking environment is protected by a perimeter defense system (e.g. Firewalls, IDS/IPS, content filtering, anti-virus, etc.) that is supposed to block all malicious network activity initiated outside the network. IM clients effectively perforate the firewall and provide an alternate conduit for viruses, spam and other unauthorized files.
3. Open Connections – When engaging in file transfers, voice chat, or other file sharing activities, the IM client reveals the users true IP address. With this information a malicious user may concentrate on the host system for the purpose of hacking in to it or as a target for a denial of service attack.
4. Identity Theft – IM clients commonly use little or no encryption for the transmission of login credentials. Guides exist on the Internet providing best advice on how to intercept and capture this. Stolen credentials can thus be easily used to impersonate someone else.
5. Data Theft – The ability to tunnel through perimeter defenses makes for an efficient method of transferring confidential materials out of an organization. Internal users may use IM clients to transfer binary data such as customer databases and development source code to external contacts without alerting internal security or audit teams. With some IM clients, this may be achieved inadvertently through poor configuration of file sharing services.
6. Loss of Privacy – The common failure to implement any form of encryption of the data means that all messages must travel in the clear, meaning that an observer can easily intercept and read this information. In the case where non peer-to-peer connections are made, all messages must travel to a central server before being forwarded to the recipient where they may be logged and stored (note that users within the same office may be unaware that their traffic is being routed over the Internet). Similarly, the message recipient may also log and store this information for later use.
7. Absent Authentication – As each user may choose their own identity, there is no guarantee that the message recipient is genuinely who they claim to be. An employee may think that they are messaging a work colleague, while in actuality he is communicating with a competitor. In addition, because these online identities are not created or managed by the organizations IT department, tracking messages to an actual person within the organization may prove to be very difficult.
8. Social Engineering – The informal nature of the communication medium lends itself to common social engineering techniques and trust relationships. Users may be tricked into disclosing confidential business information, compromising the security of their own system, and sending or receiving unauthorized content (e.g. pornography, internal documents, etc.).

The consequences of these security threats may also be more subtle. Within heavily regulated industries such as financial services and health care, IM carries a high potential for liability. Many industries are required by law to regulate and safeguard the flow of confidential information. In the USA for instance, to comply with SEC, HIPAA and NASD requirements, organizations are required to record all customer interactions for possible future review.

Without centralized management of IM services, organizations cannot guarantee that all communications are recorded in an appropriate manner. Undocumented communications regarding personal data may occur without the organizations knowledge – leading to a breach of access requirements – possibly invoking heavy fines or legal action.

Excerpted from Windowsecurity.com/Instant Messenger Security: Securing Against the Threat of Instant Messenger by Gunter Ollmann. Copyright 2001-2005 Gunter Ollmann

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