Cyber attacks generally refer to criminal activity conducted via the Internet. These attacks can include stealing an organization’s intellectual property, confiscating online bank accounts, creating and distributing viruses on other computers, posting confidential business information on the Internet and disrupting a country’s critical national infrastructure.

During the past few years, smartphones, tablets, laptops and other mobile devices have entered the corporate workplace in increasing numbers. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon is one of the most visible incarnations of the wave of consumerization surging through IT.

As a result, major cultural, technological and business shifts have occurred in the relationship between company and employee, facilitating unprecedented gains in productivity, efficiency and collaboration while creating new security risks and information governance concerns.

By Jim Ditmore
www.informationweek.com/

Every medium- to large-sized company must understand today's different cloud computing approaches -- and pitfalls.

We're long into the hype cycle of cloud computing. That means clear criteria to assess and evaluate the different options are critical.

www.devry.edu

Our electronic devices are such a big part of our lives today that it’s hard to imagine what we once did without them. But our constant use of technology to keep in touch, pay bills, stay on top of the news, shop and research things has a downside: Our data can be exposed to criminals who commit crimes such as identity theft and credit card fraud – unless we take the proper precautions.

How mobile technology is threatening your network and what you can do to stop threats in their tracks
By ZIFF DAVIS

A skyrocketing increase in mobile malware is giving new meaning to the term, “killer app.” According to a study from the Juniper Networks Mobile Threat Center, mobile malware rose a whopping 155 percent in 2011.

Most shocking was the dramatic growth in Android malware from roughly 400 samples in June to over 13,000 samples by the end of 2011 – a cumulative increase of 3,325 percent.

Source: www.openforum.com
Author: Courtney Rubin

If you're forced to read this on your smartphone or tablet because your computer has been stricken by the blue screen of death, your antivirus software may be to blame. (Don't have antivirus software? Click here and here for some sobering reminders why you may want to consider some.

Source: www.entrepreneur.com
Author: Riva Richmond

Many small-business owners fall below what some people call the “security poverty line." Bootstrapping entrepreneurs can be especially vulnerable to hackers because they don’t have the money or personnel to buy, install and maintain the fancy security products large companies take for granted.

Having the right kind of email system in place can do wonders for increasing productivity, especially for people on the go. It’s important to note the distinctions and feature differences of the email systems available to you, so you can be sure that what you’re using is the most efficient and cost-effective solution. Whether you work from an office or are productive while on the go, email most likely plays a big factor in the way you go about your business. Unbeknownst to many, some types of email systems have certain limitations that by extension can also limit the level of productivity of your business, and especially for people in the organization who must also work while out in the field. One major issue for many people is synchronicity. Many people need their emails to be accessible on their mobile phones, PDAs, or other mobile devices, and they need them to be properly synchronized with their desktop workstations. The need to constantly update conversations and email threads from mobile devices to desktops with certain types of email can prove to be tedious and unproductive– and some email system types don’t include this ability at all. Depending on the way you use your email, especially when on the go, having full access and full control of your account can define how productive you and others in your organization can be. Besides providing a much better degree of synchronization and integration with mobile devices, certain types of email systems also have features for sharing and collaboration features that allow you to set schedules and share files from your mailbox, as well as central storage for emails that allows you to access your account seamlessly with any mobile device, regardless of where you are located. Of course, having a full-featured email system might not be best for everyone. The key is to know whether adapting a more bare-bones system is cost-effective for your business (especially in the long run). Sometimes the top of the line may be needed, and sometimes all you need is a bit of tweaking on your less fully featured system. Not sure which is best? Call us and we’ll be glad to sit down with you and assess what kind of email system is best suited for you and your business.

The proliferation of websites and social media tools is making the job of monitoring what’s being said about you online increasingly difficult to do. But you need to somehow make sense of the sea of information available in these online tools, because depending on what’s being said — it can have either a helpful or a damaging effect on your reputation or your business. Here are some tools to help you. Besides your own eyes and ears, there are plenty of tools — for free or for a price — available to help you monitor your presence online. The simplest of these is your familiar search engines such as Google or Bing . By simply searching online, you can find where your name or your company’s name appears in various websites. With Google in particular, you can set up “alerts” which will email you when a specific word or term appears in their website index. What words or terms should you use? Start with your name, or your company name, then try the name of your products and/or services, and maybe even the names of your employees, directors, and other stakeholders. It might also be helpful to search for the competition as well. As results come in you can refine your search by expanding or narrowing the scope of terms you would like to search or be alerted on. If you want to be able to search across all different search engines and not just one or two, you can use Monitor This . Next you can use specialized website or social media monitoring tools to search only specific sites or services as opposed to the entire Internet. One example is Greplin , which allows you to search all of your accounts or accounts that you own. This is very helpful to be able to execute highly filtered searches on specific information in your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, or your blog. Another option is Rollyo , which allows you to set up your own specialized search engines that cull content from public or open websites of your choosing. Other more generalized tools include RSS feed readers—which allow you to consume news or information feeds from news sites or blogs. Examples include Newsgator.com , Bloglines.com , Google Reader or Pluck.com . Other generalized tools include those that monitor specific newsgroups or message boards like BoardReader.com , ForumFind.com , Big-Boards.com , BoardTracker.com , iVillage , Yahoo Message Boards , and MSN Money . Still others track changes to content of specific sites ( Copernic Tracker , Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com ), as well as their domain information ( DomainTools. com and BetterWhois.com ). The really interesting new services actually give you an explicit idea of the status of your reputation — especially if you are a relatively well known name or your business has an established brand. In this category are sites like Amplicate , which monitors general feelings or impressions about brands, businesses, or services; Klout , which tries to measure the influence of individuals based on their social interactions; and SendLove.to , which focuses on celebrities and media personalities. There are literally dozens more tools you can use to monitor and manage your reputation online. To find out more, a great resource is here at the Duct Tape Marketing blog . If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to let us know!

Interested in setting up your company’s email in the cloud? Here are two options to consider—one from Microsoft, the other from Google. See how they compare. Google Apps Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB. Calendaring and Task Management . Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability — Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages — potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android. Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology. Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new — being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them — they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices — specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones. Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance — this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with. Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.