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SMBs Can Cut IT Costs by 75% by Using Hosted IT Infrastructure Services
For small businesses, it no longer makes sense to own and operate your own IT infrastructure. That's because you can cut your IT costs by as much as 75% by using hosted infrastructure services. By leasing rather than buying IT resources, you get the latest in technology without the costly maintenance and staffing requirements of an in-house approach, so you can:
Outlook might be the busiest application in the Office suite because it does so much. But the downside of all that functionality is that easy tasks aren’t always intuitive, and some menu commands are buried under layers of choices. To be productive in Outlook, users must be able to see and view the data they need when they need it. Here are some tips to help them take advantage of various Outlook features and shortcuts. Read More... 50+ keyboard shortcuts for moving faster in Windows XP The point and click interface has made computers accessible to the masses, but IT pros know it's much faster to use keyboard shortcuts than to point and click. These 50-plus shortcuts will help you navigate Windows XP faster than ever. Print this list and post it near your keyboard as an at-a-glance cheat sheet. Read More... SPAM Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers. There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, "Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam…" Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunchmeat Spam:
Spyware is any technology that aids in gathering information about a person or organization without their knowledge. On the Internet (where it is sometimes called a spybot or tracking software), spyware is programming that is put in someone's computer to secretly gather information about the user and relay it to advertisers or other interested parties. Spyware can get in a computer as a software virus or as the result of installing a new program. Data collecting programs that are installed with the user's knowledge are not, properly speaking, spyware, if the user fully understands what data is being collected and with whom it is being shared. However, spyware is often installed without the user's consent, as a drive-by download, or as the result of clicking some option in a deceptive pop-up window. Software designed to serve advertising, known as adware, can usually be thought of as spyware as well because it almost invariably includes components for tracking and reporting user information. However, marketing firms object to having their products called "spyware." As a result, McAfee (the Internet security company) and others now refer to such applications as "potentially unwanted programs" (PUP). The cookie is a well-known mechanism for storing information about an Internet user on their own computer. If a Web site stores information about you in a cookie that you don't know about, the cookie can be considered a form of spyware. Spyware is part of an overall public concern about privacy on the Internet. Many Internet users were introduced to spyware in 1999, when a popular freeware game called "Elf Bowling" came bundled with tracking software. Phishing Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. Typically, the messages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites. Web sites that are frequently spoofed by phishers include PayPal, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, BestBuy, and America Online. A phishing expedition, like the fishing expedition it's named for, is a speculative venture: the phisher puts the lure hoping to fool at least a few of the prey that encounter the bait. Phishers use a number of different social engineering and e-mail spoofing ploys to try to trick their victims. In one fairly typical case before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a 17-year-old male sent out messages purporting to be from America Online that said there had been a billing problem with recipients' AOL accounts. The perpetrator's e-mail used AOL logos and contained legitimate links. If recipients clicked on the "AOL Billing Center" link, however, they were taken to a spoofed AOL Web page that asked for personal information, including credit card numbers, personal identification numbers (PINs), social security numbers, banking numbers, and passwords. This information was used for identity theft. VOIP VoIP (voice over IP) is an IP telephony term for a set of facilities used to manage the delivery of voice information over the Internet. VoIP involves sending voice information in digital form in discrete packets rather than by using the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). A major advantage of VoIP and Internet telephony is that it avoids the tolls charged by ordinary telephone service. Functionality VoIP can facilitate tasks that may be more difficult to achieve using traditional networks:
A virtual private network (VPN) is a private communications network often used by companies or organizations, to communicate confidentially over a public network. VPN traffic can be carried over a public networking infrastructure (e.g. the Internet) on top of standard protocols, or over a service provider's private network with a defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider. A VPN can send data (e.g., voice, data or video, or a combination of these media) across secured and encrypted private channels between two points. Authentication mechanism Virtual private networks can be a cost effective and secure way for different corporations to provide users access to the corporate network and for remote networks to communicate with each other across the Internet. VPN connections are more cost-effective than dedicated private lines; usually a VPN involves 2 parts: the protected or "inside" network, which provides physical and administrative security to protect the transmission; and a less trustworthy, "outside" network or segment (usually through the Internet). Generally, a firewall sits between a remote user's workstation or client and the host network or server. As the user's client establishes the communication with the firewall, the client may pass authentication data to an authentication service inside the perimeter. A known trusted person, sometimes only when using trusted devices, can be provided with appropriate security privileges to access resources not available to general users. Many VPN client programs can be configured to require that all IP traffic must pass through the tunnel while the VPN connection is active, for increased security. From the user's perspective, this means that while the VPN connection is active, all access outside the secure network must pass through the same firewall as if the user were physically connected to the inside of the secured network. This reduces the risk that an attacker might gain access to the secured network by attacking the VPN client's host machine: to other computers on employees’ home network, or on the public internet, it is as though the machine running the VPN client simply does not exist. Such security is important because other computers local to the network on which the client computer is operating may be un-trusted or partially trusted. Even with a home network that is protected from the outside internet by a firewall, people who share a home may be simultaneously working for different employers over their respective VPN connections from the shared home network. Each employer would therefore want to ensure their proprietary data is kept secure, even if another computer in the local network gets infected with malware. And if a traveling employee uses a VPN client from a Wi-Fi access point in a public place, such security is even more important. However, the use of IPX/SPX is one way users might still be able to access local resources. Other news from CBR Online: |
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