MBA Geek

There’s a lot of noise in the media at the moment about Chinese hackers making their way into western computer systems, particularly into systems of large commercial organisations like Google and Cardinal Health Inc. The reality is that as soon as you connect your network to the outside world you are exposing yourself to this risk and you need to find ways to control and mitigate these actions.

The question that’s always worth asking is if you can get away without having to open yourself up. If you’re a health organistaion for example, you could have your website showing nutrisystem reviews, but you don’t actually need to be online, especially if your workforce doesn’t need Internet access. Obviously, this may not be an option in most cases, but it’s worth understanding the risk and taking all the steps you can to reduce them.

Do you use a Smartphone, maybe an iPhone, a Blackberry or an Android phone? If so, you’re the target market for one of the many applications that can use GPS to determine where you are and share the information with your friends. The problem with these applications however, seems to be that they have limited lasting appeal which could be a problem when one looks at their market penetration. So, if you’re thinking about investing in one of these firms; it’s worth waiting to see if someone can develop a way to keep the market engaged. In the meantime, it would be better to put your money in psoriatic arthritis treatment or exotic investments, you may get more joy from there.

There’s an interesting article on Business Week about Smartphone Software and the way new developments are making inroads into gaining more and more adoption amongst users. The reality is that this is still an emerging market, but one that is expecting to grow enormously in the future. There are a couple of really interesting examples of the technology on the article; one centring about a shopping experience. It talks about a smartphone being used to track a person’s shopping – scanning her items as she picks them off the shelf. This information is used at checkout to bill the customer, but it also provides valuable information about shopping patterns and location in the store. The customer is rewarded with coupons that match her shopping patterns, whether it’s for cheese or weight loss pills, it all depends on her purchases. It’s an interesting model with both parties gaining from it, a synergy that produces some interesting result.

The technology that makes this possible is the inclusion of devices in phones that makes them context aware. My phone for example, has GPS, a compass, motion sensors and other sensors that tell the phone where it is and what it’s doing. However, the applications that can use this platform are still in their infancy. Every month, new applications are produced that take advantage of this technology and over the next few years, we’ll see some amazing innovations in this sphere.

I personally, just can’t wait to see what’s around the corner

What’s the worst thing that can happen to your business? Well, for some organisations, the loss of data can be critical. If strategic information gets into the hands of your competitors, it could spell a fatal blow for your business. And if you have consultants in the field, you can be particularly exposed to this risk.

So, how do you mitigate against this? Well, there are a number of companies that deal in computer protection like Alertsec who produce a full disk encryption package that locks a computer’s hard disk and prevents access to it unless the correct password is supplied. What this means is that if a laptop gets lost or stolen, your data will remain protected, away from prying eyes.

It’s one way to deal with unavoidable risk; if you can mitigate it, you can reduce the potential damage that can occur.

Twitter is ablaze at the moment with people trying to figure out what’s up (or down) with Gmail, what work and what doesn’t and how long it’s going to remain the way. Outages happen, but when you store your entire email history somewhere out on the Internet and suddenly you can’t get access to them; well, people start talking.

The whole problem with this is people start to doubt the effectiveness of Cloud Services. it gets even worse in the corporate space where people need to run their businesses off these systems. And I’m not talking a small outfit trying to perfect the newest diet supplement coming to market; I’m talking about large multinationals who depend on the technology to keep their organisation ticking. Moving towards Cloud Services increases risk and if those risks are managed all can be fine. But an incident like this brings home the impact of a risk you cannot manage.

Interesting article today about how iPhones sales have beat expectations. Here’s what the BBC had to say about it:

Net profits hit $1.23bn (£953m), or $1.35 a share, in the fiscal third quarter to 27 June, from $1.07bn, or $1.19 a share, a year earlier.

Apple sold more than 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, seven times greater than the same period a year, before, boosted by a new iPhone model.

Analyst reacted positively to the news and shares rose in after-hours trade.

Shares of Apple ended at $151.60 before rising to $157.02 after the results.

I must say the iPhone is a wonderful device, epitomising the development of mobile technologies into this new century. The device is capable of a totally new experience, one that other devices are starting to catch up with, but when it first came out, it was a huge step forward for phone innovation. Whether you use it to play with an application that calculates how your exercise will burn fat, or play games on it, or browse the web; it’s a device with a million uses. It has introduced a large segment of the population to new technology and turned around Apple’s fortunes.

What a great device!