Tag: Data

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Business

Why Your Business Needs to Define Its Ethical Code

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As the technology that businesses have available to them develops, so does the propensity for this technology to be used unethically. This has become especially apparent where data collection is concerned, and what that data is used for after it has been collected. How can you keep operations moving both productively, and ethically?

Collection Concerns
Data collection is one of the current big concerns in technology. With another newsworthy data breach practically every other day, companies that accumulate data for seemingly little reason effectively put their clients and customers at a greater risk of having this data stolen. Reflecting upon this, it is no wonder that 75 percent of consumers are concerned about brands keeping track of their browsing habits.

Facebook has been the focus of some negative attention in past months thanks to these concerns. In addition to the Cambridge Analytica situation, Facebook has adopted artificial intelligence technologies to analyze their users. This analysis is used to predict future behaviors, these insights being sold to advertisers. While this brings up many legitimate concerns about data privacy, it also introduces a different topic: the need for a code of ethics surrounding the use of collected data, as well as how much data is collected.

Why This Is a Real Issue
It should come as no surprise that businesses and individuals have different priorities, and that these different priorities shape their ethics in different ways. Likewise, the primary purpose of any business is to generate revenue through profit. Therefore, it only makes sense that a business as a unit would have the motivation to collect as much data as they can – after all, the more data available, the more insights that could be presumably be gleaned, and the more successful the business would be… in theory.

However, as mentioned above, many businesses seem to collect as much data as they can just so they can have it. This is not a great approach for them to take for a few reasons. Most obviously, because it just enables more data to be compromised if a breach was to occur.

Without the guidance of a code of ethics leading your business decisions, the likelihood of risking your clients’ data for the sake of advancement – be it more insight, improved automation and artificial intelligence, or another business goal – becomes much higher.

Enforcing Ethics
In order to create a workplace that is in alignment with your determined ethics, you need to make sure of two things. One, that you clearly establish and share them within your business so that your employees are on the same page as you are, and two, that you stand by these ethics.

To accomplish this, learning your company’s ethics should be a part of an employee’s onboarding process, with a written document leaving no questions as to what will and won’t be tolerated. Then, you need to make sure that you not only listen when ethical violations are reported, but also allow those reporting them to remain anonymous.

What would be the most important aspect of your policy for employees to follow? Share it in the comments!

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Getting a Better Sense of Customer Relationship Management

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I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how important it is to have a handle on your clients’ needs. After all, how else are you supposed to offer them the level of service that they need to remain satisfied enough to stay subscribed to what you offer? This endeavor is exactly why a customer relationship management (or CRM) system is so crucial.

What is Customer Relationship Management?
Customer relationship management is effectively how a company can gauge and improve their interactions with their clients, gradually coaxing them toward repeated business transactions. By compiling data from the many points of contact that a prospect or repeat customer has with a business, that business can build a profile that will help inform their next steps.

With data able to be drawn from website and social media activity, live chat and telephone conversations, and a customer’s purchase history, CRM software can heavily assist you by constructing a database of customer information. Some can even automate certain processes, assisting a company’s marketing and sales forces in more effectively communicating with customers from a more informed standpoint, or allowing labor to be saved by leading an incoming caller through a precomposed voice menu to direct them to whom they need to reach.

A CRM can also be used to optimize internal tasks, like the managerial responsibilities of Human Resources, processing analytics, and automating certain workflows. Some CRM solutions have even begun to incorporate artificial intelligence to better predict a customer’s trajectory.

Customer relationship management systems can be hosted on-premise or delivered over the Internet as a cloud-based solution.

Putting a CRM to Use
A CRM can be leveraged in any number of ways for your business to embrace. Social media engagement can be monitored to identify which platform is most used by an audience, monitoring keywords and brand mentions. Otherwise, it can be used to assist in addressing feedback over social media.

Speaking of feedback, a CRM system can also be of use in a business’ contact center, collecting data from service calls to inform a company’s sales and marketing efforts, as we mentioned above. This is especially useful in a business-to-business application, as it can help to optimize a business’ journey through the sales and marketing funnel.

If a CRM system sounds like something that your company should implement, reach out to COMPANYNAME by calling PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Attempts to Make Smart Cities Hit a Snag

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At this point, the concept of the Internet of Things is a fairly familiar one, but that familiarity is to the Internet of Things on the micro scale–appliances with capabilities enhanced by an available connection to the Internet. There is another, more macro application to the Internet of Things: as a way to collect data in a municipal setting. However, like the IoT we are familiar with, these “smart cities” are host to many familiar problems.

The Concept of a Smart City
Like many technological developments, the idea of a smart city is built on good intentions. Through the use of technology (much of it based in the IoT), a smart city leverages collected data to functionally serve the public, embetter the services of government, and improve the quality of life for its citizenry.

That’s the idea, at least.

Unfortunately, like many of the ‘smart’ devices that the populace can interact with, the systems that these cities leverage tend to be susceptible to attack.

What These Attacks Could Do
In order to understand the potential ramifications of these kinds of attacks, it is important to first have an understanding of the kinds of systems that a smart city is built upon.

The true purpose behind creating a smart city is to make it a better place to live, and to do that, certain systems need to be put in place. These systems are powered by the data they collect. With that data, insights into correlated problems can be leveraged to solve them.

The sensors that these cities use to collect this data monitor a wide variety of factors, ranging from traffic conditions to the weather and even health-related factors like air quality and radiation. The data that is collected is then used, through the power of automation, to decide how to approach infrastructural concerns. For instance, if traffic is moving slowly in an area, these systems would deliver that data to decision-makers, allowing them to make the call to reroute traffic a different way to ease the congestion. This system just makes the decisions, too.

The big problem with this is that now, if these systems don’t have sufficient security measures in place, they leave the city’s infrastructure vulnerable to attack. Unfortunately, in an initial study of three companies who provide these kinds of smart city systems, 17 basic vulnerabilities were present in their products. These vulnerabilities included things like easily guessable passwords, bugs that could allow malware to be introduced, and opportunities for authentication requirements to be side-stepped.

Why This Matters
The harsh reality is that developing smart cities with these kinds of vulnerabilities is the geopolitical equivalent of intentionally wearing a “Kick Me” sign each and every time you went out in public. The United States of America have already learned this the hard way, as electoral systems and the energy grid have been hijacked recently. If appearances aren’t deceiving, actions are being taken to reinforce these vulnerabilities in these IoT devices, but it certainly doesn’t help if careless oversights are being made in the security of major metropolitan areas.

We’re not saying that bringing the Internet of Things to cities is a bad thing, but the security needs to be there. The same goes for businesses. If your business relies on devices that connect to the Internet, like physical security devices, smart appliances, and networking infrastructure, locking down these devices and keeping them patched is critical to keep your operations running without a hitch.

Give COMPANYNAME a call at PHONENUMBER to learn about the security options we have to offer you.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Increased Network Complexity Necessitates Shifts in Monitoring Strategies

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Businesses of all sizes have come to depend on their IT for productivity. IT administrators that constantly monitor their network and infrastructure reduce downtime, leading to higher resource availability. With the increasingly complex makeup of an organization’s network this becomes quite the task.

What Makes a Network Complex?
First we should mention that computers are complex machines and if you’ve ever tried to fix one without the specific knowledge it takes to do so, you more than likely ended up like everyone else who has tried, and called a professional. The traditional computing network was made up of centralized servers, end points in the form of workstations, and some networking equipment that allowed these machines to communicate with one another. Adding the availability of the Internet to that equation makes the network much more complex, mostly due to the breadth of the Internet as it exponentially increases your business’ exposure to threats.

Expanding that even further with the growing number of endpoints on a network due to the deployment of wireless networks that connect all the smartphones, laptops, and tablets to the network; and, all the other connected devices that are out there today… there is a lot of ground to cover. That’s not even considering virtualized data, cloud platforms, a website, and other higher-bandwidth applications such as video streaming or communications systems.

Network Monitoring Best Practices
Before we start listing ways you can monitor your network and infrastructure more effectively, we should mention that as trained professionals, we recommend entrusting your network monitoring to people who are versed with the makeup of your business’ network and infrastructure. Our managed IT services platform is a perfect complement to a large complex network filled with potential problems.

5 Monitoring Practices to Consider

  1. Pay Attention – This goes without saying, but by keeping the health of your network at the top of your list of priorities and monitoring components in real-time, you can be more proactive in fixing issues before they become downtime-causing problems.
  2. Find an Overreaching Solution – By integrating an end-to-end monitoring strategy, it gives you the power to coordinate efforts and present technicians with one version that they can act upon. Find a solution that handles both wireless and wired networks, virtual and physical environments, databases, and applications and supports all necessary protocols and languages to be able to monitor any device or program.
  3. Optimize Bandwidth – Data flow bottlenecks can absolutely hinder your business’ ability to utilize all the tools effectively. Monitoring bandwidth levels can bring about favorable results.
  4. Prepare to Scale – For the modern business, scalability is key. To ensure that the staff of your business has access to the productivity systems they require, being able to scale up or back–depending on the situation–is essential.
  5. Ensure Your Solution Is Flexible– When you choose a monitoring platform, be sure to choose one that doesn’t have inflexible licensing models as you need it to be able to work across all types of devices and applications.

The IT professionals at COMPANYNAME are experts and monitoring and managing business networks. Call us today at PHONENUMBER to find out more about how we can help you run a more efficient business with technology.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

5G is Still Going to Take A While

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As technology has improved in function and convenience, we seem to demand more and more of it at an increasing pace. Take mobile data as an example: 4G was introduced in 2009, and less than a decade later, there is high demand for 5G. Unfortunately, while 5G has been worked on for some time already, it isn’t likely that it will be commonly available anytime soon.

The technology being touted as the driving force behind 5G has quite a few practical issues, many of which may prove to be too much for the anticipated improvements to offset. Many of these issues are rooted in the proposed use of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) via millimeter wave (mmWave) and the inherent issues with this plan.

Range
A big problem comes from the range of mmWave. Currently, 4G signals can reach anywhere between three and thirty miles, while mmWave can only reach a third of a mile – one ninth of its range now, under ideal circumstances. In order for 5G through mmWave to be successful, there would need to be some major infrastructure updates.

This has been addressed in the planning processes, as it is likely that the cell towers we are accustomed to today would instead be replaced by shorter-range femtocells. These femtocells would be approximately the size of a microwave oven, and could be added to existing pieces of infrastructure, like light poles, traffic signs, and even public transportation vehicles like buses. However, these open up the idea of implementing 5G to more complications.

Connectivity
For example, mmWave signals are incredibly easy to block, which is why there would need to be so many femtocells added to the existing infrastructure. When something as simple as an unfortunately positioned traffic sign can block a signal, signals need to be coming from more than one direction.

There is also the matter of bandwidth that needs to be addressed. Consider how much usage each femtocell would see – they just wouldn’t be able to network as efficiently as necessary for proper use. This would mean that the entire network of femtocells would also need to be connected via costly high-speed fiber cabling, which would be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.

Cloud Confusion
With cloud computing having become such a widely utilized tool, it only makes sense that the femtocell network would be managed via the cloud. By creating a virtual network in the cloud, software-defined networks (SDNs) and network function virtualization (NFV) could be leveraged to manage the 5G network. Trouble is, there are various kinds of SDNs and NFV, with no one standard. The Linux Foundation is working to change this, but this still isn’t an issue that will likely be resolved in the near future.

Regardless, 5G is going to happen – femtocells are inexpensive and, for all their faults, a potentially beneficial way to make it possible. Furthermore, people want better mobile bandwidth. The technology is just going to take some time to develop.

However, if you want to improve your business’ connectivity now, we can help. Give COMPANYNAME a call at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tech Term: Bandwidth

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Here’s a question we want you to take a second to consider…How much do you rely on the Internet? The answer for almost everyone is that it is essential to your current quality of life. Technologies have been developed, industries have been launched, and literally billions of people use it every day, making it one of the predominant inventions in human history. At the heart of this phenomenal technology is bandwidth.

The term bandwidth, in the context of the Internet, is the volume of information per unit of time that a transmission medium can handle. Simply put, the larger the bandwidth your connection has the faster the data can move through the medium. Bandwidth is measured in the amount of data transferred per second, specifically megabits per second (mostly written Mbps or Mb/s). Megabytes, written MB is not typically used in measuring bandwidth as a connection that is advertised as 15 MB is actually 1.875 Mbps since there are eight bits in every byte.

Most Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, will sell packages of a certain megabits, but if you really want to ascertain the bandwidth your computer is running on, your best bet is to use one of the numerous Internet speed test sites like the one at speedtest.net.

The best analogy, and the one that we’ll use, is that of plumbing. It’s said that data is to available bandwidth as water is to the size of a pipe. As bandwidth increases more data can be transferred through it, just as a larger pipe passes more water. Increasing bandwidth, or finding a larger pipe, will allow for even more data/water transfer. For the average user that only uses a couple of apps, a web browser, and doesn’t stream media, a small bandwidth connection will work fine. For tech-savvy families or very small businesses that have multiple devices connected to the Internet at once, they will find they will need more bandwidth to do the things they want to do seamlessly. Larger businesses will need enterprise-level bandwidth of multiple hundred Mbps.

Your Internet connection isn’t the only place where bandwidth comes into play. If you have a website, you will have to pay for a bandwidth level that is commensurate with the traffic and data interaction. In many cases, the more bandwidth you need, the more you will need to pay for hosting.

For more information about technology terms that confuse you, visit our blog, or contact our technology professionals at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Virtualization Has A Place Everywhere In Your Business

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Virtualization is a key player in today’s efficient workplace. Businesses of all kinds are looking to expand and enhance the way that they function on a fundamental level, and virtualization offers never before seen opportunities to cut down redundancies and implement new methods to improve operations.

First, an explanation of what exactly virtualization is. In essence, virtualization is taking a service or solution and abstracting it to the point where it can be run or accessed through the cloud or another centralized location. Examples of virtualization include digitizing servers or workstations, eliminating the need to manage and maintain hardware; storing applications or data in the cloud to allow for more efficient and dynamic access; and so much more. How can your business benefit from this new way of working with business technology?

Here are some of the most effective ways to utilize virtualization for your organization.

Virtualized Cloud Hardware
Businesses often virtualize servers so that they don’t necessarily have to provide the same maintenance and management required of a physical server unit. Virtualizing servers through a service provider like COMPANYNAME lets your organization store its servers on our infrastructure so that we can directly administer maintenance and management as needed. You can access your information remotely through the cloud. Other benefits include the ability to create specific environments for legacy applications and reducing the overall costs of operations due to fewer resources spent on air conditioning or electricity.

Virtualized Desktops
Just like servers, your desktop infrastructure can also be virtualized in order to preserve energy and assets for your organization. For example, let’s say that you replace all of your business’s workstations with thin clients. Thin clients are sort of like basic desktops that call their resources and applications from a virtualized infrastructure. Thin clients consume far less electricity than an ordinary workstation, allowing you to invest these resources elsewhere. This means a user’s desktop and applications are all processed centrally on a server or in the cloud. If your user needs to access their desktop environment from a laptop or another computer, they can typically do so securely without skipping a beat.

Virtualized Software
Storing software solutions in the cloud is a great way to improve their versatility. If you store them in the cloud, you provide access to any approved device through a mobile app or web browser. This can help your employees stay productive both in and out of the office by staying connected to a number of different software solutions, including your productivity suite, email, and even your phone system.

If you can imagine virtualizing a solution, chances are that it’s a possibility for your business. The only way to know for sure is to call COMPANYNAME. To learn more about virtualization, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Security

20% of Customers and Revenue are a Lot to Lose From a Single Data Breach

b2ap3_thumbnail_business_data_breach_400.jpg Data breaches are common problems for businesses of all shapes and sizes. In fact, they often have huge repercussions that aren’t initially seen in the heat of the moment. How can you make sure that a data breach won’t negatively impact your business, even well after you’ve fixed the initial problem?

Cisco, for example, claims that out of all companies that experienced a major data breach in 2016, over one-third of them lost more than 20 percent of their customers, opportunities, or revenue. This clearly shows that your business has far more than just data on the line when it comes to cybersecurity. Simply put, by not taking measures to keep your organization secure, you stand to put the future of your business itself at risk.

This makes sense, especially when you consider a consumer’s natural reaction to a poor experience with a specific vendor or brand. If you were a customer at a store that experienced a major data breach (one in which your financial information was stolen), would you still want to shop there? Many organizations will reassure their customers that the vulnerability has been resolved, and some might even offer to make amends for their careless handling of customer data. Yet, sometimes even this isn’t enough to retain customers, and often times, you won’t find this out until it’s too late.

As a small business owner, can you imagine what it would feel like to lose as much as 20 percent of your current clientele? Large organizations might have enough resources and offerings to make the loss seem more manageable, but chances are that a 20-percent loss would be a huge hit for any smaller organization.

Furthermore, it’s likely that such a loss of customers, opportunities, or revenue would affect long-term growth. If your organization loses 20 percent of its customers, that’s not just lost business for you–that’s a whole bunch of customers who won’t recommend your organization to new clients. What’s worse, they may even tell others about your business, but not in the way that you want them to. Before you know it, you’ll have former customers telling their contacts all of the ugly details about their experience with your business, data breaches notwithstanding.

In other words, not only does a data breach represent a loss of revenue, but also a loss of potential resources that could be utilized to further advance your business in the future.

Thus, a relatively small issue could transform into a major problem that puts the future of your business in jeopardy. Cisco also found that the following problems were concerning for organizations that experienced a data breach:

  • Cyber threats in 2016 increased in power and sophistication.
  • Cybersecurity efforts by organizations aren’t able to investigate all of the alerts they get in a single day (56 percent is the average).
  • However, despite cyber attacks growing in complexity, hackers still utilized “classic attack methods seen in 2010.”

Cyber threats continue to evolve into bigger, more dangerous threats that are harder to counter and prepare for. Despite this fact, it’s still your responsibility to make sure that any potential data breach doesn’t spell the end for your enterprise. It’s clear that, in order to guarantee the success of your business’s future, you need to implement powerful and focused security solutions designed to prevent breaches in the first place.

COMPANYNAME can help your business implement technology solutions designed to limit breaches and manage risk more effectively. With a Unified Threat Management device and remote monitoring and management service, you will have little to fear. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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How To

Tip of the Week: How to Know if You’ve Experienced a Data Breach

b2ap3_thumbnail_breach_of_your_security_400.jpg Your data is vital to the success of your business, and as such, it needs to be protected. Can you identify the warning signs that someone has managed to get past your protections to access your data?

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, or ITRC, there were 781 data breaches in 2015 within the United States alone. This marked the second-highest number since 2005, when the ITRC began to track these occurrences. Of particular interest, the ITRC report noted that, in 2015, the business sector saw the highest percentage of publically reported breaches with almost 40 percent of all reports coming from business organizations. What’s more, motive analysis saw that more and more thieves sought financial gain through accessing sensitive personal data.

Presumably, the report for 2016 should show more of the same.

Business owners should therefore be extremely cautious and prepared when it comes to possible data breaches, not only in terms of preventing them but also in terms of identifying them within their organizations. What follows are some best practices to assist you in determining if a data breach has occurred on your systems.

First, determine what is normal within your systems.
After all, you will need to know what is right to identify if something is going wrong. This can be largely accomplished by familiarizing yourself with the typical goings-on of your employees at different times of day, and with different levels of access.

Keep an eye out for unusual activity.
There are numerous warning signs that a data breach has occurred in your systems. These warnings might be as subtle as a piece of equipment suddenly becoming slower. They may include:

  • Unusual/unapproved programs: If there are suddenly unauthorized programs appearing on the company’s workstations, you may have a breach. You must be diligent in keeping an eye out for such red flags, as well as encouraging employees to do the same by insisting that they report any sudden appearances of new software that were not mandated by the company.
  • Unexplained “employee” activity: Have records suddenly shown users logging on to the system at odd times and from odd locations? Are your accounts being altered without your knowledge or approval? Have employees suddenly had unexplainable difficulties in remembering their passwords? These are also indicators that your system has been breached.
  • Other breach attempts: Have you had to fend off an overt cyber attack recently, such as a Distributed Denial of Service attack? If so, these attempts may have served a secondary purpose as a smokescreen to conceal a more insidious attack. It’s becoming a best practice to assume that an attack isn’t over, even when it’s over (because it may not be).

Educate your employees.
The first and last line of defense against most cyber threats is educated vigilance, including from your end users. Make sure your employees are also aware of the signs of a data breach, as well as other security threats. COMPANYNAME can help you to keep your systems safe from these attacks as well. To see what we can set up to keep you secure, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Can an Algorithm Predict the Next Bestselling Novel?

b2ap3_thumbnail_big_data_bestseller_400.jpg It’s not always easy to identify what will be hip and trendy years from now, but big data is attempting to bridge this gap. In general, due to the unpredictability of human behavior, it can be difficult to spot cultural anomalies before they happen. Despite these challenges, algorithms are being applied to various practices in both the business world and elsewhere. One innovative way in which it’s being used is by attempting to predict the next bestselling novel.

Jodie Archer, author of an upcoming book called The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, claims to have found an interesting way to use algorithms and big data to discover what’s hot in the literature department. This particular algorithm, called the “bestseller-ometer”, looks at what particular qualities make for the most successful fiction. As reported by The Atlantic, the algorithm can identify a bestseller more than 80 percent of the time.

This success is attributed to the algorithm’s ability to identify bestselling fiction from the New York Times bestseller list. Basically, this is one of the many attempts that computing systems have made toward predicting the behavior of the human brain, and it could change the way that publishing companies accept and publish manuscripts. After all, if a book doesn’t sell, why publish it?

The biggest question that this algorithm attempts to answer is: “Why do we all read the same book?” It’s compelling, to say the least. Everyone has different tastes in literature. The academic who carries a pocket thesaurus around in his suitcase might find an escape in a good science-fiction short story or another piece of genre fiction. On the other hand, a book that’s destroyed by critics might be surprisingly successful. Thus, readers find different traits to be more valuable than others.

Aided by English professor Matthew L. Jockers, Archer built the algorithm to find out what makes a reader so interested in a certain piece of literature. The Bestseller Code looks at the various processes and strategies used by the algorithm to identify the context and other important parts of popular fiction. The list is quite long, but it includes a plethora of tropes that are generally found in literature, including:

  • Authoritative voice
  • Colloquial (everyday) language
  • Action-oriented characters
  • Cohesion
  • Human closeness

One other major idea that needs to be taken into account is that of the “zeitgeist,” or time-sensitive concepts. Basically, what’s contemporary is what sells. This adds an element of the unknown and makes it difficult to predict what will be popular in the near future. There’s also the interesting notion of the human element, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to foresee how they will act in the future. In a way, it makes sense that a human should be picking the next bestseller, as the algorithm cannot empathize with characters or be moved by a good story. After all, a computer can analyze semantics as much as it wants, but it’s not the one reading the book. That’s the job of readers all over the globe.

While it’s possible that big data can make strides in the way we understand how humans think, it’s important to understand that humans are unpredictable by nature. Any attempts to predict the future based on statistics or metrics, while seemingly helpful, could mean nothing, as people often behave irrationally or beyond reason. While technology is a great way to bridge this gap, it’s still important to remember that people are people, not machines.

What are your thoughts on using big data to find new audiences and better understand your own market? Let us know in the comments.