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Telecommuting: Is it the Wave of the Future or On the Way Out?

By: Debra Littlejohn Shinder

I’ve been working from home for over 15 years nowTelecommuting-300x200 – but then, I’m a self-employed sole proprietor.  Most of the people I know work for small/medium businesses, corporations or government entities. For a long time, I was the envy of all those friends and relatives who had to get all dressed up and fight traffic to make it to their workplaces on time every day. However, over the past several years, more and more of them have joined me in the ranks of “home workers” – without giving up their jobs and venturing out on their own.

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Email Security in a Corporate or Small Business Environment

Written by: Bruce Naylor November 4th 2013

Cyber attacks against small businessGFI_Logo establishments as well as corporations are very common and many small business firms find it difficult to bear the financial loss created by such attacks. It has become all the more necessary to adopt effective steps at workplaces to ensure security of the computers. Many companies introduced training programs for the employees on how to ensure digital security. As the first step the employees are trained how to avoid spam as well as the attachments of the spam messages, how to avoid outside instant messaging clients etc. Improper and ineffective uses of E-mail through the company’s computers in many places have led to litigation in many cases. E-mail manners are quite essential for smooth running of a business.

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The Problem with Patching Is – Not Patching!

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Patching is not something that the IT department really enjoys doing. It is complicated and ongoing. It takes forever and it doesn’t add any actual business value.

Meanwhile you have myriad systems to patch, and endless patches to test and then install. Then you have to do it all over again. And again. And again.

No wonder a recent study by the UK-based Federation of Small Business shows that little more than a third (36%) of small shops patch regularly. Then these shops wonder why they got compromised, or blame their software vendors, especially Microsoft® – a common security punching bag!

Patching, well, patching properly, solves the majority of security problems. In fact 90% of successful exploits are against unpatched systems.

Even environments that should presumably be highly secure too often fail to patch. Last year an audit at the U.S. Department of Energy found that some 60% of their desktops lacked important patches.

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Patch management: Fixing vulnerabilities before they are exploited

Introduction

Managing and administering software updates remains one of the most challenging and resource-intensive tasks an IT Department undertakes on a daily basis.

While software updates serve many important roles, be it delivering feature improvements or fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities, they bring with them a number of potential challenges for the IT Department in terms of ensuring systems are up-to-date, that new problems are not introduced by patches designed to fix things, and updates do not create compatibility or instability issues. All this needs to be done while ensuring that updates are pushed to PCs as quickly as possible to prevent vulnerabilities being exploited. The constantly evolving software landscape makes patch management an important consideration for all IT decision makers,regardless of organization size.

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Email Archiving Doesn’t Have to be a DIY Project

The “do it yourself” craze is big, and there’s a good email-not-DIY-300x243reason for that. You can learn a lot, save money, and ensure that things get done your way. But there’s a down side, as well. The success (or not) of DIY depends on both the nature of the project itself and on the person(s) doing it. While DIY might be a great choice for minor home improvement projects such as putting up wallpaper or laying tile, it can turn into a disaster – or even turn deadly – when amateurs decide to tackle electrical work or knock down structural walls. And painting a mural on your wall might turn out great for a do-it-yourselfer with some artistic talent, whereas it might not end up so well for someone who has never had an aptitude for art.

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The Hidden Security Threat

Although not all stories in the tech press are IP-security-300x225directly related to security, they often highlight issues that can be excellent educational material. A recent story in The Register about a researcher who wanted to map the Internet caught my attention.

The researcher had a Herculean task to complete: to scan billions of IP addresses using the few computers he had at his disposal. He obviously needed help but where does one find that level of assistance? The researcher gave this some thought and decided to try and exploit insecure systems connected to the Internet. That surely would help.

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GFI EventsManager® Now Includes Proven Active Monitoring Functionality

GFI EventsManager, the company’s esm-logo21-300x173 award-winning log management software, now includes the established active network and server monitoring capabilities found in the company’s popular GFI NetworkServerMonitor®solution. This new functionality, combined with GFI EventsManager’s existing log management capabilities, gives IT administrators a holistic view of their infrastructure’s performance.

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