InfoStreet In the News

By: Siamak Farah (external link)

THE FAMED CHILDREN’S fable, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, tells the story about the Grinch who attempts to ruin the holidays from the children of Whoville by stealing their gifts and decorations. As in most fables, the Grinch’s diabolical plot is foiled. If only it was that simple in the real world.

2011 has been challenging for most small to medium businesses and business in general will enter 2012 under a cloud of uncertainty. While some industries are seeing an increase in demand, most businesses are trying to hold out, awaiting an improved climate. There seems to be little opportunity to raise prices in a market where customers are demanding lower prices on goods and services (See “The Economic Squeeze” at http://www.infostreet.com/blog/ small-business-management/the-economic-squeeze/).

As businesses recognize that 2012 won’t likely see increased revenues from a raise in pricing/fees, the pressure to reduce costs will continue to grow.

Despite the fact that there is a large pool of unemployed people, most businesses have actually seen an increase in their cost per employee. This has been as a result of reducing staff that are either undertrained or not required for survival, and in turn providing a raise to keep critical and trained employees. Not to mention, these key employees have by and large been asked to fill the gaps created from the reduced worked force.

While on the surface this increase in cost does not seem logical, it is in fact vital. The loss in valuable, trained employees can have a long-term negative impact on any business. “The productivity gained by maintaining a welltrained workforce, even in difficult financial times, can’t be overstated. When machines, desks or computers sit idle, productivity will eventually flatten and it could be nearly impossible to recover your momentum (external link).”

So where is a business to cut? Fixed costs won’t change, we can be assured of increased healthcare costs, and given the gridlock in DC taxes remain the great unknown for the foreseeable future.

Talk about the Cloud seems to be the topic du jour today as it provides a formula for reduced fixed costs, increased per employee productivity, and a PAYGO model. Yet a survey from ITC service provider found that 57% of businesses are undecided about adopting Cloud services (external link). The reluctance is reported to be centered on concerns for security, reliability, and a fear of the unknown. The term ‘the Cloud’ might be daunting but in truth, most businesses already rely on the Cloud for many services (email, online payments/billing, file sharing, banking to name a few) and employees are using the Cloud, with or without their employer’s permission.

37% percent of workers claim that they’ve used their own PC or smartphone for work, 26% have purchased work-based software or other technology with their own money, 15 % of users have downloaded unauthorized applications to their work computers in the past year and off those users, 67 % have used two to five unauthorized applications for work (external link).

As with any critical purchase, security and reliability concerns need to be addressed by selecting a vendor that has the history, reputation, and a loyal customer base. Companies such as InfoStreet have been providing SAAS services to small business and enterprise companies since 1994 and provide their customers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. In addition, businesses rely on their Cloud vendors’ security expertise since they often don’t have enough security personnel on staff, if any, and realize that while it might seem comforting to keep your cash under your mattress, relying on the expertise of our banks to manage financial resources is smarter.

Perhaps we need to look at the Cloud as a utility and not as a product or a service. Years ago, we dug wells for water and fueled our factories with coal burning furnaces. Now, you turn on the tap and get all the water you need and plug an extension into the wall and electricity is there. We pay only for the utilities we use, increasing and decreasing as demand dictates. Think of the Cloud as a wireless plug for all your computing solutions.

As was noted in a recent article from the Harvard Business Review (external link): “One simple example is when a service is needed only 10 hours per day, 5 days per week. The cost of owning the servers and applications the 118 hours/week they are not in use is not a good allocation of funds for many businesses. Many Cloud providers allow bringing up services when they are needed and bringing them down when they are not.”

Most small businesses and enterprises don’t require their Cloud provider to handle voluminous End-of-Month runs that are required for enterprise companies, but the cost benefits are the same. Take a company that, in order to secure a new contract needs to partner with another vendor on a one-time basis. The project requires the company to build a new intranet to host the CRM, Knowledge Base, Conference Calling, and File Sharing to be used by a large team for a fixed period of time. To purchase these tools would add costs and implementing them would take significant manhours. Utilizing the power of the Cloud, all this could ramp up within hours and the company only needs to pay for the apps needed for the length of the project. And since all the data is in the Cloud, these partners are not required to be under one roof; they can share the data, collaborate, and ramp down when the project is done. Your business can compete against larger competitors for projects without investing significant dollars.

This is the time of year where we are inundated with talk about gifts: what to buy, where, for how much, and for whom. The Cloud provides small businesses and enterprises with the gifts of money (reduced costs), time (increased productivity), mobility (the freedom to work from anywhere, from any web enabled device), immediacy (you can provision a new service instantaneously), and control (you pay only for what you use).

The Cloud provides a competitive edge that can make the difference between a stellar 2012 or a repeat of 2011.

The Grinch from the fable tried to steal the joy from the Who. Don’t let the hesitant Grinch steal your business’ 2012.

 

By Siamak Farah (external link)

To understand the significance of the purchase (external link)of RightNow by Oracle Corp (external link). (Nasdaq: ORCL), you need to go back only three years to when Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, trashed the cloud, calling the idea "gibberish".

The shift in Ellison's perception is understandable. According to IDC, revenue from public IT cloud services is expected to hit the $55.5 billion mark by 2014 -- a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 percent, or roughly five times that of regular IT products.

The continuing economic downturn has accelerated adoption of the cloud by businesses that are looking at the cost savings it provides. The cloud eliminates dependence on hardware, ends the war of PC versus Mac software compatibility, and reduces the cost of software purchasing. In addition, one of the most compelling reasons companies are moving data, storage, and applications to the cloud is that they can rent what they used to buy.

Yet the savings go beyond the obvious reductions in IT expenses. By 2020, US companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion, or enough oil to power 5.7 million cars for a year.

The word "cloud" may have had a different meaning to most people only a few years ago. Experts looked at the cloud as hardware-as-a-service, and laymen may have been puzzled by it or at best thought of it as software-as-a-service. Today, thanks to the awareness brought to the public by the news media, the cloud has a definite meaning and value. To most, a solution is either on the premises, where they can physically touch the hardware, or in the cloud.

A Samsung study examining how workers actually use IT in the workplace and how this affects things such as productivity, health, and security found that employees spend an average of seven hours a week fixing IT headaches. Such issues are drastically reduced by utilizing cloud-based applications, since IT support, patches (external link), and upgrades are handled by the cloud vendor.

In the past, companies primarily bought cloud solutions if they had remote staff. It was their way of connecting all their workers. However, today so many app developers have focused on cloud-based offerings as their flagship product that many companies are using cloud services when all their employees are under one roof. Companies receive better apps and have fewer headaches.

Companies as diverse as General Electric Co (external link). (NYSE: GE), Wells Fargo, Mercedes- Benz, and Medtronic utilize cloud-based applications to create a consistent user experience across all devices, including tablets, benefitting from the shift to a pay-per-use model.

Last year President Obama signed the Telework Enhancement Act (external link)into law, requiring all government agencies to determine which employees are eligible to telecommute and to develop policies and processes allowing them to do so. Agencies are turning to the cloud to find the tools and applications that will help teleworkers do their jobs seamlessly.

Security issues are often cited as a significant concern, but most cloud-based services are more secure than legacy systems maintained by agencies or corporations. Money under a mattress may be closer to you, but money in a bank is safer, because the bank has experts in charge of security. Cloud services may not have CIA-level security, but they are by far more secure than laptops and servers in back offices.

Companies such as InfoStreet (external link), a leader in cloud-based services, have been providing platforms and applications to enterprise customers since 1994. Their customers have lowered direct and indirect costs, reduced IT headaches, and equipped themselves with the tools for a mobile workplace. Oracle, Microsoft Corp (external link). (Nasdaq: MSFT), and Apple Inc (external link). (Nasdaq: AAPL) built their companies on the sale of hardware and proprietary software. Yet they are all accelerating their cloud services, either through acquisition or invention, because of customer demand for precisely what InfoStreet has been providing all along.

By Greg Masters (external link)

Like any small-business owner, Syreeta Saunders-Keys relies on speed and efficiency to sustain and grow the operation of her real estate business. Time spent doing anything other than prospecting for new business is time wasted, she says. That's why she went shopping for a solution that allows her to maintain files and company operations in a streamlined manner. She also wanted to be able to centralize all email traffic. Even more important, she desired the company's IT solution to be scalable so that it could grow without reinventing the wheel or take an inordinate amount of time to bring staff up to speed on processes.

The business that Saunders-Keys owns, the Keys2Day Real Estate Team based in Columbia, Md., consists of three salespeople, one marketing manager and one assistant, with an IT staff of one. While the staff is small, the business encompasses several Maryland counties. So streamlining its various operations was essential.

“The goal was to develop a solution that solved all of our known issues and even some we were not aware of,” says Saunders-Keys (left), the recipient of a number of sales awards. She has also appeared on a few real estate TV shows.

A search led by the team's marketing manager and CEO began, but they were unsatisfied with the options they were uncovering, which offered only pieces of a puzzle that would have involved several different vendors.

“The costs were a big issue in the selection process, says Saunders-Keys. “In today's environment, you have to watch every penny. But you still want as much value as you can get.”

Secure transactions in the cloud

Using this solution, security can be broken down into three major components, InfoStreet's Thomas says.

The first piece is user-related errors, such as losing a laptop or mobile device, going to a website that contains malware, or not updating anti-virus software.

“By using our system and moving to the cloud, one eliminates this error as the user is no longer interfacing with the machine, but rather with a cloud system,” he says. “Using cloud-based applications creates a layer of protection and less IT headaches.”

The second piece is the security of data traveling to the cloud. “One can protect data transport by adding an SSL certificate to a system, which is an option for all system users,” Thomas says.

The third layer of security is data in the cloud. For that, the company offers implemented monitoring, intrusion detection and multiple other measures to protect stored information.

Deployment went smoothly

The deployment of the solution by Keys2Day sailed through, says Saunders-Keys. “We were very pleased. Actually, the product is not meeting our expectations, it's exceeding them. We're very happy with the day-to-day operation, and if we ever have questions, InfoStreet is right there.”

In addition, the new installation assists the company with its compliance requirements.

“We're already talking with InfoStreet about incorporating other applications, such as web conferencing,” she adds. “This will allow us to reach out to our client base in a whole new way.”

And, she believes the solution adds a level of trust, both for her staff and the company's clients. “We are certainly concerned with the rise in cyber infiltration,” she says. “Our clients entrust sensitive information to us and we aim to keep it safe. We're confident in Info-Street being a secure platform.”

When asked what differentiates the solution from the competition, InfoStreet's Thomas responds, “Very simply, access control. With our system, every application is provisioned based on what the administrator for the company chooses that each individual needs. The sales team may need our customer-relationship management (CRM) module. However, an outside consultant may just need access to the file-sharing area. In both cases, the administrator, in just a few clicks, establishes a custom environment to fit the users' unique needs.”

Further, updates to InfoStreet apps are free. The company enables them for all users and provides a one-week alert notifying of the enhancements, he says. Since the software is in the cloud – and not on a local machine – nothing has to be done by the user.

“We're just happy that we've found this solution with this particular company,” says Saunders-Keys. “They are truly everything they say they are and more. This is a cost-effective solution with big benefits. As small business operators, we've heard every promise you can imagine about the better mousetrap.”

By JD Speedy (external link)

With a small team spread over a huge province, Pheonix Investigations looked to SaaS and the cloud for an upgrade to its system

When Fred Boettger, general manager of Kitchener, Ont.-based Phoenix Investigations Group Inc., looked to upgrade his company’s network, he took his time. Between the sensitivity of the data Phoenix employees handle to the duration its projects remain active, Boettger felt his needs were very specific.

He spent days in his office, scouring the Internet and demoing product after product. Boettger put a lot of time into finding the perfect SaaS (software as a service) because, as he put it, “we’re in the investigations business, that’s what people pay us to do. We’re paid to be clear and concise and keep track of things and know things.”

Not only that, he said “when people called you, they expected you to be using cutting-edge technology.” Whether the image is conjured from heist movies or pulp fiction, he acknowledges an impetus to keep upgrading to the next best technology.

Before Boettger was shopping for a cloud (external link) solution, he remembers buying the first production cell phone at a former job (the size of a briefcase) and the first commercial video camera (for a whopping $16,000).

Today, the core of Phoenix Investigations business comes from process serving. "We might serve in between 8,000 and 10,000 people a year,” he said.

Needless to say, serving legal documents in this volume involves a lot of man-hours and a lot of paperwork. Boettger said moving to the cloud was a simple decision as, it could allow employees to access its database easily and from anywhere and, “if you can save some time, and give your client a better product, that’s obviously what you want to do.”

Once he found StreetSmart, Tarzana, Calif.-based  InfoStreet (external link) Inc.’s suite of cloud apps for business, he was 90 per cent sure his search was done. The other 10 per cent came after his employees began playing around with the system.

As opposed to the old days, where employees worked on one investigation for weeks at a time, Phoenix employees work on location, in all different parts of Ontario, on a number of different projects at once. On top of that, no project has a fixed duration. “It might take 10 minutes, it might take two days, but they have a lot more assignments,” he said

So, the fact that all of his employees, including the less tech-savvy ones, learned the system well enough to use it effectively for the last six months, without a tutorial? Boetter is calling that a win.

"Keeping track of everything you have done so you can report to your client effectively and concisely” is vitally important, he said.

"Some cases don’t go to trial for five, six years,” he said. That means that documents, video, and anything else pertinent must be available in their system for years into the future. Phoenix keeps a detailed record of every person they’ve ever served.

“If I serve you today with legal documents, I might serve you again in a year, two years, five years, 10 years down the line,” he said. In that event, Boettger said it’s nice to know things like who is prone to evade being served, who has a giant maneating dog or who is a veteran hunter and gun nut.

Rick Chapman, managing editor and publisher at Softletter, an online software industry newsletter, said it’s no surprise a company like Phoenix would turn to StreetSmart and SaaS.

"If you’re doing surveillance…you might be in a situation where sometimes a computer gets damaged or broken. How are you going to access the database and update it? Buy another computer and reinstall the applications or go to a system where you’ve got a web browser and access the application via a smart phone?”

That’s precisely the thinking Boettger had and now employees of Phoenix Investigations can access their database through computers or company-provided iPhones, from anywhere in Ontario.

Boettger does acknowledge that StreetSmart might not be the only software that could be fit to his company’s needs.

“Yes, there’s other programs out there that can do a lot of these things, but not for the money we’re paying,” he said.

By Lisa Phifer (external link)

A decade ago, secure remote access was a right enjoyed by a privileged few: road warriors, executives, sales forces, etc. But ubiquitous high-speed Internet connectivity, coupled with explosive growth in mobile devices, have increased expectations. Meanwhile, new mandates continue to accelerate demand for safe, anytime, anywhere access to corporate networks and services. According to Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe routinely conduct at least some business offsite. A recent Microsoft study found the average teleworker spends four days per month working from home. Many more "day-extenders" log back in at night and on weekends. Adding fuel to this fire, the Telework Enhancement Act (external link) that went live June 9 requires federal agencies to draw up policies to govern and promote teleworking.

Between teleworkers, day-extenders, and new mobile devices, IT departments are being challenged to enable secure access by ever larger, more diverse populations while simultaneously grappling with shrinking budgets and compliance mandates.

To help them with that challenge, we consider five emerging alternatives that can help businesses enable more cost effective but safe remote access by this rising tide of users.

Let business needs drive deployment : Many companies have legacy remote access infrastructure that dictates who can receive access, from what kind of device. Perhaps it's an older VPN that requires software on trustworthy endpoints and is thus incapable of delivering safe access from home PCs or smartphones. Perhaps it's a mobile access gateway that offers authenticated, encrypted wireless access but only to one kind of smartphone.

Of course, there are limits to every secure remote access solution. But it can still be very helpful to take a step back, inventory business access needs and associated risks, and then map those onto potential solutions and acceptable use policies. Some use cases might be met more effectively by non-traditional secure access alternatives such as those identified below. But you cannot determine that without a top-down needs and risk assessment.

Consider secure cloud apps : Remote access users have long fallen into two camps: those requiring secure network access and those requiring secure application access -- primarily messaging. The latter are usually given TLS-secured Outlook Web Access and Exchange ActiveSync; solutions that satisfied immediate needs but cannot be directly leveraged to support other applications.

As broader capabilities become necessary, employers may move users and their smartphones and tablets onto the corporate VPN. However, given growth in cloud services, it could make more sense to move selected applications instead.

"For many SMBs, renting a secure cloud app is easier than installing that application in-house," said Siamak Farah, CEO of cloud provider InfoStreet (external link) . "Cloud solution providers can deliver endpoint-agnostic secure access to most of the applications that SMBs need from email, CRM, and calendars to ERF, file-sharing, and teleconferencing. While this might not meet all enterprise [remote access] needs, for SMBs it can be a significant improvement because applications can be added quickly with the server side secured by the provider."

In addition to cloud applications, consider cloud Intranets that let remote workers collaborate securely without tunneling back into the corporate network.

Focus on corporate assets, not devices : As Farah noted, endpoint device independence (or lack thereof) can play a huge role in facilitating (or inhibiting) remote access. But enabling access from a broad range of devices does not mean ignoring device type or security posture. To that end, many remote access VPNs (external link) can now detect endpoint device characteristics, assess risks, and install required security programs or settings -- often without IT or user assistance.

However, these "look before you leap" VPN best practices can still be limited by device type and ownership. Smartphones and tablets may never support the same deep checks that laptops and netbooks do; users may have reasonable expectations of privacy on non-corporate-owned devices.

To avoid circling this drain, consider refocusing security policies on protecting corporate assets instead of the devices used to reach them. For example, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) alternatives (e.g., Citrix XenDesktop (external link), VMware View (external link), RingCube vDesk (external link)) can completely insulate the work environment from the endpoint device by leaving that environment inside the data center.

Keep your eye on data : While VDI can be a good alternative in some cases, it is not an efficient or even practical solution for others; especially disconnected users who require corporate data access. In those cases, VPNs protect data in transit but must be paired with endpoint measures (e.g., device PINs, remote wipe, disk encryption) to protect data at rest. This is why IT departments have long devoted so much effort to securing the laptops used for remote access and why the specter of devoting similar effort to lock down smartphones and tablets looms so large. Before heading down this all too familiar path, evaluate secure access alternatives that compartmentalize business applications and data from the rest of the endpoint. Products like Good for Enterprise (external link), NitroDesk Touchdown (external link) and Enterproid Divide (external link) create encrypted sandboxes on mobile devices, giving IT a cleanly segregated work environment to configure, monitor, and delete when the device is retired or lost.

For personal or public laptops PCs, a conceptually similar approach is a bootable secure environment such as MXI Stealth Zone (external link). These alternatives still employ conventional over-the-air protection (i.e., VPN tunnels, SSL-encrypted ActiveSync) but terminated at more manageable and trustworthy "virtual endpoints."

Build for mobility : Forrester recommends adopting a "mobile-first" mindset when planning new content and collaboration tools. Extending this sage advice to security, perhaps it is time to stop thinking of secure access as "remote." Today's endpoints are mobile, roaming from home to office to hotel throughout the business day. Expecting all "remote" access traffic to enter the corporate network through a perimeter device (VPN or messaging gateway) is no longer a given. Moreover, risks vary as devices roam between public and private networks so consistent, gap-free protection must be ensured.

When evaluating any secure access expansion or alternative, consider how well an approach will work both on- and off-premise. For example, VPN clients like Cisco AnyConnect (external link) and JunOS Pulse (external link) are location-aware; transparently switching between security policies appropriate for each network (e.g., maintaining an always-on VPN tunnel unless connected to the corporate WLAN).

When roaming occurs, minimize security impacts on usability, using mobility aids to keep users logged in through coverage gaps. Finally, fragmented and duplicated policies not only frustrate users they're costly to maintain and lead to mistakes. Look for unified policy management that can help IT enforce consistent access rights as users roam throughout the enterprise.

Lisa Phifer owns Core Competence (external link), a consulting firm focused on business use of emerging network and security technologies. A 28 year industry veteran, Lisa enjoys helping companies large and small to assess, mitigate, and prevent Internet security threats through sound policies, effective technologies, best practices, and user education.