►Surveillance NOT
Just for Spies
By Tammy Wellbrock, Nex-Tech

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Terms such as surveillance, undercover and covert conjure up images typically seen in a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie. These days, however, there are practical yet affordable surveillance applications and equipment businesses can use to creatively save time and money.

Practical Application #1: “Eyes” for Blind Areas in a Business or for Off-hours.
Picture the typical car dealership with vehicles spanning several rows and often around corners. If some cars are located out of the front desk’s view, a monitoring system can allow employees to multitask more effectively between office paperwork and customer visits. This same dealer could also utilize a camera system to record customers visiting the dealership when closed. If employees recognize a shopper, they can possibly turn missed opportunities into sales.

In addition, businesses selling easy-to-grab and easy-to-hide items, can utilize video surveillance to help alert them when customers enter blind spots. Employees are then able to assist customers while possibly reducing shoplifting concerns.

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A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween.

~Erma Bombeck
 

►Just for Laughs

Server virtualization is a great way for your IT organization to battle today’s economic challenges. You can reduce costs through server consolidation—which in turn increases ROI as you run multiple workloads on a single server. Plus, the ability to deploy new applications—and scale them up or down—boosts business agility.

But be mindful of pitfalls that can undermine these advantages. As companies large and small have learned the hard way, you can negate the cost-saving benefits of server virtualization by choosing an inefficient SAN storage solution that does not properly support the advanced requirements of virtualized environments.

What to watch out for
While you ride out this recession, you need to make the most of your virtualization investments. It literally pays to be aware of the right storage choices. Here are some things to keep in mind:

Designed to meet the needs of small and midsize businesses, the Windows® 7 Professional operating system delivers a powerful combination of innovation, improved performance, and productivity. 

We’re ready to help focus on what matters most, your business, by providing you with a solution that:

• Works the way you want. Fast, reliable, and compatible, Windows 7 Professional delivers a solid foundation for running a business in today’s competitive environment.
   
• Helps you get more done. Find what you need quickly, easily connect to your networks, and be more productive—whether you’re at work, at home, or on the road.
   
• Safeguards your work. Keep your business up and running with new security and recovery options that help prevent security threats and data loss.

Contact us to find out how Windows 7 Professional can benefit your business today.

One aspect often overlooked when securing our information is physical security. The goal of physical security is to control who can walk up to the information and touch it. The idea is to prevent unwanted information disclosure, loss, or corruption, the same as when securing the information across the network or from the internet. The difference is that physical security deals with the “real world".

For most of us, this doesn't mean training your Chihuahua as an attack dog or outfitting your employees with dark shades, cheap suits and sleeve microphones; it simply means using some common sense.

Before we can take measures to physically secure our information, we need to know what type of information needs to be protected. There is no need to post armed guards around your product catalog after it's been published: it's meant to be seen by others. Before it's published could be a different story as you may not want your competition getting a sneak peek. In other words, we need to classify our information.

While there are many excellent information classification schemes, they all boil down to one question: who needs to have what level of access. The rest is deciding how to limit access to just those people. With this in mind, there is one common sense step we can take to beef up our physical security in the typical small office. Lock it up.

While it may be true that "a locked door only stops an honest man", locks go a long way towards letting people know what is out of bounds. If the file cabinet has sensitive information in it, lock the cabinet or put it in a locked room.

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