UM seems to be the latest buzz word in the messaging industry. Companies are looking at UM to try to fix many of their business challenges. Every company needs to grow revenue, remain competitive, acquire and retain customers, control costs, improve business processes, and maintain competitive advantage.
However, to implement UM, it takes tremendous amount of resources that businesses do not have. They are limited in personnel, expertise, budget, and solution knowledge.
Why are companies looking to move to UM?
Businesses believe that going to UM will reduce their operational costs. It will reduce long distance charges, maintenance costs associated with updates and additions, and infrastructure due to having common platforms.
It also will improve worker productivity because mobility, voicemail, email, etc will all be tied together. Workers in any remote office or working remotely can use the IP softphones, make administrative changes remotely, and update or move equipment easily. Real life customer studies show that most customers see a return on investment (ROI) within 3 months or less!
What is the downside of UM?
Customers have a hard time seeing the benefits of UM because the end user training is costly and hard to measure. Linking the new technology to business processes is a tough task. IP communication is still an unknown. 55% of financial services firms indicate uncertainty in voice quality as their number one issue to moving to UM.
Cost savings tend to be the largest driver for deployment. However, UM products have high upfront costs. In addition, companies are having a difficult time quantifying any of the productivity benefits. They are concerned with hidden costs and how their technical team will deploy, architect and find the right solution. Deploying UM weakens network security, gives them a single point of failure and uncertain voice quality.
Who and how will companies deploy UM?
Many companies are looking to utilize their partners or managed services to implement UM. 28% cited provisioning, installing, and testing as their main time saver for using managed services. Also, only 27% of the companies feel that they have the ability to implement an IP telephony system. Companies look to managed services to offload their infrastructure applications like messaging, VOIP, and conferencing. The main justification is the reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).
Surveying the customers show that outsourcing or in house sourcing the project is mainly about the perception of the respondents. When asked about why companies would outsource or in-source the project, respondents rated lower operational costs as their number one reason for outsourcing or managing it in-house.
Here are the top 5 reasons.
Why manage it in-house?
1) lower operational costs
2) we have the skills
3) better security
4) corporate policy
5) better job in house
Why use managed services?
1) lower operational costs
2) lower capital costs
3) reduce the risk of obsolescence
4) they can provide better uptime
5) lack of staff to manage the systems
If United Messaging is of interest to you and your customers, 90% of the customers believe that they will use consulting services to implement it. Tremendous business opportunity exists for the partners who already know and consult with messaging products.
Hyun Kim, Bynari Inc.
If you have not heard, we are our own worst nightmare. According to Wikipedia, Zombies(often shortened as zombie) is any computer that has Internet access and has been compromised by a hacker, virus, and/or Trojan horse.
Generally, a compromised machine is only one of many in a distributed group called a botnet. These systems are being controlled by remote users who use them for malicious attacks. Most zombies are home computers that have been compromised, and their owners are completely unaware that their systems are being used for these attacks. Because the owners are unaware, these computers are metaphorically compared to zombies.
In April 2008, 100 Billion spam messages were sent. Spammers, on the average, send 559 Terabytes of content each day. If you were to store all the spam for 30 days, you would consume 16.4 petabytes of storage. This impacts organization’s bandwidth, storage, and productivity of their workers.
In the “old days”, spammers would send out large amounts of spam from a small number of sources. It was easier to track and stop the sources. Today, spammers are motivated by profit and are very sophisticated. They have learned to get around a lot of the anti-spam software. Also, the spammers are using Zombies. As mentioned above, the problem with Zombies is that they are being sent by computers that have been compromised by a hacker or virus, the owners are unaware of them, and small amounts of spam are sent from each of a large number of sources making it harder for ISPs to detect spammers. In fact, more than 85% of spam is sent by Zombies. It also allows spammers to reduce their bandwidth costs and avoid detection by the ISPs.
The Botnets are growing rapidly as more computers are compromised. Spammers rent botnets for content distribution campaigns and are used for click fraud, financial fraud, spam, credit card fraud, and are responsible for over 85% of all unwanted email which equates to 130 Billion messages!
Who is most impacted by Botnets? Everyone! ISPs and MSPs and enterprises suffer the most because they deal with the largest volume of emails.
How do you protect yourself from Zombies? (It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it will help)
1) Update Windows patches frequently
2) Secure your network with a password that is not guessable and hard to break
3) Use Windows Firewall to alert you of processes requesting network access
4) Get a reliable anti-spam/virus product for your desktop
How do you know if your computer has been infected?
Probably the easiest way is to note changes in the way your computer behaves. Sudden performance problems or frequent crashing could be signs of zombie behavior. A more technical approach would be the use of software that monitors network activity and can alert you of sudden increases in bandwidth usage.
Here’s an article about some of the symptoms of a Zombie.
If your computer running slow, check out the processes under Task Manager.
http://tweezersedge.com/archives/2005/02/000534.html
Hyun Kim, Bynari Inc.
I was watching a classic thriller movie a few nights ago; it was the ‘80’s classic, “The Hitcher” starring Rutger Hauer. The story begins as a young man (C. Thomas Howell) is contracted to do a “drive-away” (deliver a vehicle from one place to another) of a new Cadillac from Chicago to San Diego. Ironically, Howell makes a crucial judgmental error when he decides to stop to pick up “The Hitcher”. Hauer quickly unveils his psychopathic plan to do all sorts of evil things to Howell and the movie goes on for another hour or so – thrilling to the end.
There is no question that email has become the information medium of choice for both private citizens as well as businesses. Ever since the first commercial email found its way to the Internet back in 1988, the technology landscape has never been the same. Email is unquestionably the most popular Global Internet-based application – ever.
We all get too much spam these days, and most of us are getting savvier about reducing spam in our Inbox.
In January of 2004, the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) was enacted to set some rules for commercial emailers.
Here’s some information about the law.
Anyone that has had email for more than a day has heard of spam. It seems to come from nowhere and arrive in our mailboxes from people we’ve never met. It is completely indiscriminant in whom it targets; it crosses all socio-economic boundaries, and yet, we can’t get rid of it. The government has outlawed it, prosecuted offenders for it, and yet, it seems to be growing at an alarming rate.
Time spent by employees removing spam from their inbox is time better spent on a task that actually contributes to the growth and profitability of your company. This article goes beyond the basic enablement of Amavisd, ClamAV and SpamAssasin by showing autolearn Bayesian filtering and how to stop the ever so trendy file attachment spam. Also covered is Greylisting and the popular new Razor-agents as well as several options of the postfix UCE Controls section of Insight Server. Do your company a favor and let Insight Server put a can on spam.