Cisco Blog > Small Business
When employees use their own devices for work, there’s no such thing as a personal security breach
It’s no exaggeration to say that mobile smart devices have changed the way people work. With smartphone in hand, employees now expect to be able to check email from their kid’s baseball game, finalize financial transactions on the fly, and log into cloud-based services at the gym—not to mention play Angry Birds whenever they want. The downside to this round-the-clock connectivity is the security risk it can introduce to your network and, because devices are personally owned, the difficulty of locking them down. These days, there’s no such thing as a personal security breach. A security incident on a personal device can put your entire network at risk.
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Tags: security, security_breach, small_business, Smartphones
May 7, 2012 at 9:06 am PST
There’s a lot of buzz in industry circles these days about the impact of “showrooming” on brick-and-mortar brands. Witness the excellent overview by Ann Zimmerman in the April 11 US edition of the Wall Street Journal, “Can Retailers Halt ‘Showrooming?’”
Ms. Zimmerman notes the anti-showrooming efforts of such retailers as Target and Walmart, and the challenge of meeting-and-beating pure play pricing and assortment breadth.
And, she also gets to the core of the issue: It’s not about competition between stores and pure play websites. It’s about competition between the websites of brick-and-mortar brands, and the websites of the pure plays.
We live in the era of Google, an era of web-based search, an era where just about any detail of just about anything can be found on the Internet. Studies of recent shopper behavior show a steady climb in the number of US shoppers who begin their purchase journey with online research. Nearly two-thirds of US adults do so regularly.
The Internet is the front door to all retail brands these days – not just the pure plays. It’s where shoppers are initially won or lost – and where store traffic is increasingly generated.
This means two things to brick-and-mortar brands:
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Tags: Ann Zimmerman, e-commerce, Jon Stine, mobile shopping, multi-channel retailing, omni-channel retailing, research online buy offline, retail technology, ROBO, showrooming, Smartphones, wall street journal
By Roland Klemann, Director of Service Provider Practice, Western Europe, Internet Business Solutions Group
Although the coaxial cable may have been born in 1929, predictions of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
While traditional models for consuming television are indeed under siege—from time-shift TV, over-the-top video, and an ever-expanding array of new devices—cable remains highly relevant, even in an age of exploding data traffic. In fact, with savvy deployment of Wi-Fi services, cable providers can seize an opportunity—not in spite of the mobile data deluge, but because of it.
After all, that sleek new iPad—introduced last week while I was attending the Cable Congress in Brussels—boasts dazzling video resolution. But for network operators, it only adds to a growing problem. They are already reeling under the burden of a massive upsurge in traffic, from tablets and IP-enabled devices of all kinds. What’s worse, they are still at the low end of an ongoing mobile data explosion. Cisco’s Virtual Networking Index predicts an eighteen-fold increase in mobile traffic from 2011 to 2016.
As a result, two things are breaking down: 1) the physical capacity of the networks, and 2) their economics. Theoretically, mobile carriers can build enough macro cells to carry all the traffic in the world, but in reality, that gets prohibitively expensive—fast. No wonder some are feeling an encroaching sense of doom.
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Tags: broadband, byod, cable, carriers, Cisco, data, IBSG, mobile, Networks, offload, providers, Service Provider, Smartphones, Tablets, traffic, tv, video, wi-fi
In 97 countries around the world, there are now more mobile devices than people. No wonder mobile networks are clogged with massive amounts of new traffic! Mobile operators are struggling with how to provide the mobile broadband experience customers expect, in a cost-effective, scalable, and profitable manner. I believe that Wi-Fi, the “silent sleeper” of wireless access networks, may hold the answer.
The mobile industry is on the brink of a fundamental change. Just think of some recent key developments:
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Tags: broadband, Cisco, IBSG, integrated providers, mobile, mobile operators, service providers, Smartphones, wi-fi, Wi-Fi network providers, wireless access, wireless network
February 20, 2012 at 9:39 am PST
The conference call buzz of past weeks confirms that one of the retail tech topics du jour is the quest for a “mobility strategy.”
Requests from good retailers. Meetings with smart folks hard at work identifying use models and value-creation plays for both associates and consumers.
No question that it’s important.
But every retailer should be asking how important – especially consumer mobility. Especially in today’s world of cross-channel shopping.
Let’s look at the numbers.
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Tags: Catch ‘Em and Keep ‘Em, Cisco, cross-channel shopping, interactive shopping screens, Jon Stine, mobile shopping, mobility in retail, multi-channel retailing, retail, retailing, Smartphones, tablets in shopping
