SaaS
Ode to the “Cloud”
Wed, 07/07/2010 - 04:54 | 
admin
A few months ago I posted an entry about cloud computing. Since then there have been lots of start ups and lots of new services provided by some of the old players, like Microsoft and Google, the latter needed no mention here but what’s done is done, needless to say for small businesses and even larger organizations these services allow you conduct business in ways you never have before.
While I have been keeping tabs as best I could on the progress of various cloud services, and believe me at this point there are way too many for just one person to keep track of, I also took the time to test a few of them to determine whether they may have a place in KCCS and/or can be recommend to our customers for use. Now before I continue this post I should probably admit a few things,
- I am still not drinking the Cool Aid
- I still love traditional desktop/ server applications
Recently I made a big push to move our most common used applications to a cloud version or a cloud alternative. For example things like CRM, Support Ticketing, Invoicing and even Project management, as a result we are about 90% cloud based. But being the none trusting type there is also a traditional application on our servers that serve the same purpose and before you point out the fact that it just doubles the workload I will say this, most of the services we use also integrate in some way with our desktop applications like Office, meaning that changes made using either the cloud of the desktop application will reflect on the other.
To give you a general insight to what I am referring to I will give a break down of what service we use and how we use them.
Tags: Who is attempting to attack your company?
Sat, 02/27/2010 - 19:13 | ryan
Today with the advent of cost effective small business high speed internet access and movement of many traditional brick and mortar businesses now moving to the online realm. Companies are dealing with more and more data than ever before.
More companies are also doing mobile computing via VPN and other remote access technologies. While some Software as a Services (SaaS) solutions come with things like SSL encryption. However more companies like ours are hosting our own applications such as CRM and various other mission critical applications almost all of which can be accessed over the public internet with little or no encryption, even though you can do things like using none standard ports, hackers can still use tools like Nmap or other port scanners to find these open ports in order to hack your network and destroy this precious information or use keyloggers and other exploits to capture confidential customer data such as credit card numbers.
How do you stop or at least give your self a fighting chance to prevent such attacks? Get an enterprise strength firewall with Intrusion Detection (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention(IPS). The trouble with these systems is that up until recently these appliances have cost thousands of dollars, Until now. Because of the growing trend in network based attacks we at KCCS have spent countless hours researching and testing various hardware solutions and are proud to announce that we have built a custom solutions that is specifically designed for small businesses.
