Businesses that implement VoIP (voice over IP) telephony systems on their local or wide area networks must ensure that they have effective protection against the growing incidence of VoIP hacking. That’s according to Graeme Victor, CEO of telecommunications solutions company Du Pont Telecom who says a small Johannesburg company was left with a telephone bill of more than R100 000 recently after criminals hacked into its VoIP telephony system over a weekend. VoIP is steadily […]
Cloud Computing
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It may seem counterintuitive, but a downturn like this is the best time to make strategic IT investments for the future of your business, writes Graham Fagan. It is well recognised that periods of economic prosperity create substantial waste and bad practices, as organisations tend to be too busy chasing growth and are less focused on their own business efficiency. IT, in particular, can suffer during such a period in an organisation, as the market […]
What is cloud computing? The goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and ICT services without having to own and manage assets like servers yourself. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted ICT services over the internet, and as such a consumer of these services needs nothing but a personal computer and internet access. They are usually described as being Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) […]
Cloud computing is an on-demand, integrated, configured, ready-to-use combination of compute, storage, network, platform and application software available as a standardized set of service offerings on a pay-as-you-use pricing model. Cloud computing is altering the IT service delivery by providing rapid service delivery – provisioning resources takes few minutes instead several weeks, on demand scaling – businesses can scale up or scale down resources based on needs instead of provisioning for peak demand, consolidation of […]
Technology leaders in the White House have promoted greater use of cloud technology at the federal level almost from the start of the Obama presidency. Now the administration has issued its strongest backing yet for cloud technology with the release of the Federal Strategy for Cloud Computing. Officials are using the strategy not only to pull together various cloud initiatives into a coherent package, but also as a directive to federal agencies to actively pursue […]
Cloud computing is a massively hyped but hard to pin down concept. It has existed in one form or another for some time now: Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure as a Service, business process outsourcing and third party administration all fall under the cloud umbrella. In fact, many people use cloud services without even realising it: streaming on-demand movies or music, storing files online, or even a webmail service like Hotmail or Gmail are forms of interaction with […]
Here are the results from a recent Virtual PBX survey that asked more than 600 SMBs about virtual office use — along with the perceived effectiveness, costs, and technology needed to support a virtual business. The most popular drivers for using a virtual office included: employees’ flexibility (61%), business cost savings (54%), geographic distance of staff (42%) and the desire to reduce commute time, cost and pollution (41%). More 60% of respondents work from a […]
The Information Security Forum (ISF) has identified the “seven deadly sins” of cloud computing implementations in a new report, and has offered guidance on how to tackle them. The ‘Securing cloud computing: addressing the seven deadly sins’ report aims to help organisations move quickly to developing business-oriented systems to securing cloud services. The seven deadly sins outlined in the ISF report are: -Ignorance – cloud services have little or no management knowledge or approval -Ambiguity […]
The last 24 months have brought an explosion of new devices, Web applications and social-media platforms. Chief information officers (CIOs) are under pressure from other employees, including senior executives, to open corporate networks to consumer devices and allow access to more of the Web. This migration of consumer devices like smart phones and tablets into enterprise computing is making CIOs very nervous. The risks to data security are obvious and real, and the loss of […]
If you’ve heard people talk about VoIP (Voice over IP) but you are not entirely clear what it is, or you’ve heard people say you can save money with VoIP but you are a little suspicious, this is the guide for you. Read on for a simple, quick explanation of what VoIP is and how a VoIP phone system can help you save money. So here’s the basic idea: You are a small business and […]