March 24, 2006

Internet Resources

Korky Koroluk

Assessing your security risks

Time and money seem to be the two things that are always in short supply for small businesses.

You’d buy a new piece of machinery if you had the money. You’d bid more jobs if you had the time. And as for your computers — well, they seem to swallow endless time and money. So as long as they seem to work fairly well, there is a tendency to leave them alone.

But small businesses can’t afford to avoid dealing with things like data backup, virus protection, system patches and mobile workers.

You can try to do all these things yourself — if you have the time. Or you can shop around local computer stores and find an IT service to look after your system for you — if you have the money.

So now WebEx, which you likely know as a system for holding online meetings, has come riding over the hill with something called WebEx System Management Service. It’s an on-demand service that specializes in dealing with several problem areas.

It’s run on the ASP model — application service provider — which means you pay a monthly subscription fee, without having to purchase and install more software, which in turn would mean learning how to use it and keeping it up to date.

It also means a lot of things are automated. For example, keeping track of software vulnerabilities as they are discovered and fixed can be a pain. The WebEx system’s patch management feature is designed to close security holes caused by viruses, worms and bugs. It does this by automatically assessing security threats, then finding and deploying patches to networked computers, whether they are office desktops or laptops used by employees working in the field.

Many small companies expect, or hope, that employees will keep their virus software up to date. It’s a leap of faith companies shouldn’t make. This new system looks after virus protection, which is based on the corporate edition of Symantec Antivirus, which identifies virus vulnerabilities, then installs the newest virus definitions. It does this automatically, without any intervention by you.

Also automated is the process of backing up your data. This can be a time consuming and troublesome chore if you do it yourself. But if it’s done automatically, and your data stored at a secure data centre somewhere, there’s nothing to it.

WebEx provides this system through an outfit called Iron Mountain, which is the company Intuit QuickBooks uses for the automated backup service it sells — a service I’ve used for several years now, and which I swear by. It has saved my bacon when a hard drive died. And it has provided an easy way to move files to new computers.

People were wary of the early ASPs, and justly so. In some cases, companies sprang up almost overnight and promised the moon, then failed to deliver. In some cases, data were supposedly stored in some safe place, but were lost when the service provider went belly-up. An outfit called Red Ladder became something of a cause cel<0x00E8>bre when it went down the tubes, taking customers’ data along for the ride.

Those days are gone now. For a start, after a shake-out, only strong firms remained. Then new Web technology made everything more secure and easier to use.

So outfits like WebEx now can act as an integrator, gathering products from a number of different vendors and offering them, either individually or in packages, using Web services technology to deliver them.

That means customers need deal only with one company — WebEx in this example. The fact that other vendors are actually providing the services is both irrelevant and invisible to users.

You can find lots more information by going to www.webex.com then clicking on the System Management button.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com.

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