It’s Friday! What’s everyone’s plans for the weekend? Here are some of our top news stories of the week that include an interview with one of Cisco’s first employees, a feature on how email’s days are numbered and a webcast on how customers are investing in the network as an innovation engine.
Check out Network Trailblazers, a new series that highlights the creators and visionaries of the Internet network. Our first trailblazer is Kirk Lougheed, the company’s first engineer and also a Cisco Fellow. Learn more as Kirk discusses how IOS developed and the future of the network.
We offer a few tips and staying legit to ensure your messages don’t set off spam alerts.
Information is the lifeblood of business. To protect your small business, you’ve put safeguards in place to protect your critical information, such as a firewall, antivirus and antispam software, and maybe even a web threat or intrusion prevention system.
The methods for sending spam continue to evolve and considering that malicious webmail represented 7 percent of all web-delivered malware in March 2011—an increase of 391 percent from January 2011, according to Cisco 1Q11 Global Threat Report, it’s not surprising, then, that you and your customers have spam filters and extra precautions, cranked up to block any potentially dangerous email. So how do you ensure your important communications actually reach those you do business with?
Do you recall what it was like before email? Nah, me neither. If you were around for the pre-email/pre-personal computer era, you may recall sending someone a letter written using a pen and paper. The only way the letter would arrive safely was (and still is) to affix a stamp to it. Feels like ancient history now when it’s possible to email a message around the globe within a matter of moments.
Suffice it to say, technology has advanced the method and speed at which we communicate. But innovation hasn’t happened in a vacuum; the standards governing the technology industry have evolved, too. Just imagine what your digital life would be like if we didn’t create standards. Would you want to put postage stamps on your email messages?
Of course, the question is, how do you balance innovation with standards? Without standards, you may miss out on the brilliant innovations that have come before (security and a framework that keeps things running smoothly, to name a couple). But rely too heavily on standards and you miss out on future innovation.
In our continuing coverage of the Seven Myths Around the Good-Enough Network on Silicon Angle, we explore myth number four--The Standards Myth.
While the IT industry is in many ways moving toward an outsourced model, with the widespread adoption of the cloud and XaaS, marketing has been moving in a similar direction as well. And while PR agencies have been around for quite some time and it has been normal to look to outside agencies for help with creatives, over the past several years a new kind of service provider, the Email Service Provider, or ESP, has emerged from the shadows. Not to be mistaken for cloud-based email security services, ESPs are in the business of sending mass email (typically opt-in), not blocking it. Unfortunately, for many, their first exposure to these companies (outside of an inbox full of enticing offers) has been via news around data breaches, first, in 2010 with Silverpop and now Epsilon.
Every morning before I leave the house, I do a quick security check: Are the windows closed? Is the back door locked? Is the garage door down? I even take a quick look at the front door to make sure my husband hasn’t left his keys in the lock again.
Securing your small business might not be as simple as returning an errant set of keys to your forgetful partner, but it definitely starts with locking down all possible entry points; physical and virtual. You need to install security devices and software at every point on your network by which someone from the outside could gain access to your company data. For most small businesses, the first place to start is email security.
