Rowland's Blog

Is your phone system secure from being hacked....?

2011-03-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

This week I attended the Telecomms Convergence event in Manchester. It is a relatively small event, but interesting to see the various Voice Over IP (VOIP) systems being offered. CISCO have recently launched the UC300 system which is a fully feature phone system on a box no bigger than a small cereal box, which supports up to 24 users, for sub £1,000. Also the amount of interest shown in hosted system offerings. However there is a area that needs your attending.

One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a company call Sipera (www.sipera.com), who specialise in telephony security. Now a few years ago, if you had been asked how secure is you phone system you would have probably looked to see it was bolted to the wall, or the room it was in was locked. Now days the question is more about securing your system against being hacked.

I have read a few articles in the past couple of months talking about systems being hacked and just last month I was talking to a company who had their system hacked and had £10,000 of calls to Africa put through their system. So this threat is very real. I was interested talk to Darren Newman of Sipera to understand how prevalent this was and how it can happen.

Their are a number of threats, the example above is known as toll forwarding. This is where you system is hacked to allow poeple to route calls to you system, then forward on the call normally to a premium rate number in another country. By all accounts any non secured system can be accessed for this hack very quickly and easily. I understand that certain systems have well known standard admin passwords which often do not get changed on installation that make life even easier for the hackers. Remember the early days in IT when the server Administrator password was "Password" - you have changed that, right?

Older non VIOP systems are apparently not immune from certain types of attack either.

So my word of warning is that hacking of pretty much any type of phone system is a possibility, it is costing businesses money. You can also suffer from identity theft from phone hacking; consider what you provide via you phone when you are asked to enter your credit card details by keying the numbers on your phone for example. You need to think firewall around your phone system in the same way you think of it around your IT systems.

Speak to your phone supplier today.

Build or Buy - considering the choice

2011-03-01T12:15:00.001-08:00

A question that crops up every now and then when talking to prospects is should we buy or build? If you were looking for a software solution say CRM, should you go to the market with your set of requirements and look for an off the shelf solution, thinking that your requirements are so general that any system will do, or do you take the same set of requirements to a set of developers and considering your requirements are so special that youI need a custom application.

Or are you somewhere in between.

Building from scratch - first rule of thumb:- building from scratch will ALWAYS take longer than you expect it will, and longer than your developer(s) say it will. Suggest multiplying by a factor of at x2 but more likely x5 or more, so budgeting is tricky. Which means you are likely to be paying out a long time before you get any return. The plus side of a “built it” approach is that you should not pay any additional licence to use fees, unless you set up your agreement with your developers poorly. Note to self, double check IPR agreement!!

With an off the shelf approach consider the 80/20 rule. i.e. your are likely to get 80% of your requirements for 20% of the cost of building yourself. Admitting here that I might be slightly biased, but I believe there are many advantages to buying an off the shelf solution, although the recommendation would be to buy one that offers flexibility in terms of being able to customised/extended by you.

When buying of the shelf, there are two options, a vertical solution and a general one. Again, with CRM there are vertical solutions that service markets from the legal practice management solutions to finance, retail etc. Some may try to cover more than just CRM, i.e. be a complete practice management solution covering every aspect of running say a legal practice. In my experience there are very few such solutions that do a great job at everything, but you have to access the fit of the solution against your business requirements.

If you go for a horizontal solution that does a great job of CRM, you may need to add the consideration of working with (integrate with) other solutions that manage the other aspects, such as time recording, billing etc. This Best of Bread approach can be very successful, with the advances in technology making integration less painful than might previously have been.

I have listed below some of the considerations when making your choice. You may wish to score your preferred options against these. If you are looking to buy, but from a very niche supplier they may score low in some areas, but their specific knowledge and experience might make up for that. However, there are partners that take a horizontal platform or technology and then add their own vertically focused customisations to it. You could see this as the best of both worlds, it is certainly proving effective for our customers in the world of Telecomms service providers. You get the cost effectiveness and flexibility of a horizontal platform or application, but with specific features/functions appropriate to your industry, but without being limited by a niche supplier.

Buy or build considerations.

Flexible solution – able to be shaped to your requirements
Administration/customisation tools included – enabling you to do at least some of the admin/configuration/customisation, ideally without the need for a degree in rocket science
Common use technologies – finding that a solutions works on a proprietary database, will probably add to cost one way or another
Solid vendor – consider what the key markets a vendor is in, is your just a side line
Solid Partner – a lot of vendors work indirect, so what is the choice of partners, is there only one in the country, what would you do if you wanted to change partners
International support - if required how would you get it via vendor/Partner
Out of the box integrations – particularly with you chosen email/calendar system such as Outlook, Office etc
Out of the box reporting capability – ideally with the ability for you to modify/add new reports etc

Have a sense of community

These days, any reasonable product will have is user and possibly partner communities. Researching this aspect will give you a very good insight into the experiences good and bad others are having. It will also give you an idea of how much informal support you might get. Forums, newsgroups, blogs, twitter feeds, etc all add up to you NOT being on your own. Knowing you will have a choice of partner/supplier if you current relationship doesn’t work out is a good thing. It will also help finding a good source of off the shelf add-ons that reduce the cost of a feature or function the chosen product is missing. Certainly this is one area that a in-house solution will never have, but one that could prove invaluable.

What does your email address say about you?

2011-02-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

I have thought for a long while that people spend a ton of time and money on web sites and the like, but how much focus if put on the simple details of your email address. I have no idea if I am unique or weird but I do look at email addresses and they do create an impression on me. Equally they can infruirate if not appropriately complete, consistant or respesentive of the organisation the person belongs to.

Obviously I am in the main talking about emails from a company/business perspective, but there are images/perceptions created by whatever may appear prior to the @hotmail.com or @googlemail.com etc. lusciouslinda@..... or onenightstan@...... does give an impression!.

However, from a business perspective there are considerations of both the name element and the domian element of an email address.

We have a customer who has a domain of www.theaccountants.co.uk, yes they are accountants, but that is not the company name. I first thought it was neat idea, but then, if for some reason you wanted to contact them and called 118118, having just seen and remembered the domain, you would never find them.

Although slightly off the thread, my view is the domain name should reflect your brand or product. A case in point is company called Qliktech who produce one product, a great BI product called Qlikview. They had a web domain of www.qlikview.com, but the email domain was @qliktech.com. They are now @qlikview.com, which to me makes much more sense because it re-enforces the product brand. It is less important to know who the company is from a marketing and communication view point.

Getting to the numb of the question though; what does your email address say about you. If you are in business then it can say a lot, some examples and possible interpretations:

johnit545@hotmail.com - possibly a consultant, but if it were, and you were tyring to sell yourself, it does not take much to move to a domain to give a more professional perception, as well as sort out the name element of the address.

john@domain.co.uk - a one man band? a very small company? a very friendly personable company?

jh@domain.co.uk - male or female? what do they have to hide? large ego? Is his/her name is actually JH?

johnh@domain.co.uk - again a smallish company? can't be bothered to type in a longer name

johnhayes@domain.co.uk - is there a standard? should it be john.hayes, I think so, easier to type and remember, getting towards a more corporate format, giving the impression of a larger organisation.

john.hayes@domain.co.uk - this looks like a well managed organisation, perception is of a larger/professional organisation, but not as friendly as some formats above.

john.hayes22@domian.co.uk - unless this is a wind up, this is probably the preserve of the IBMs of this world, where they may have lots of John Hayes, which is unfortunate for John, and anyone trying to guess Johns email address.

Based on the above it might give some thought of how you might want to be presenting yourself with your email addresses. I am not saying any of the above is wrong, just that your email address can assist in presenting an image, so why not make it present the one you would prefer to represent you.

My final point on this would be one of consistency. With respect to all the comments above, whichever format you choose for you organisation, ensure consistency, i.e. everyone should adhere to the same format. Knowing your domain, knowing your name and understanding the format of emails of your colleagues should make it easy for other to build your email address and make contact with you. If you are in a business where you are trying to speak to more people, then make it easy for people to speak to you. I am not oblivious to the concerns of spam, but I am keen that if anyone wants to contact me, then it should be easy for them to do so. I even have multiple emails set up, allowing for people to misspell Rowland (Roland, Rolland etc) forwarded to my main email address.

So this is blogging....

2011-01-13T10:37:00.001-08:00

Hi, so yesterday, I finally got the chance to look at some of the "social media" stuff beyond Linkedin including Blogging. It has been one of those things I have been meaning to get to for ages in order to be able to dump some of the thoughts I have had kicking around my head for ages in need of an outlet.

The key trigger to actually get started was a Vistage session I attended run by the guys from mediasnackers http://mediasnackers.com. DK and Mark set about transforming a room full of sceptics (of a generation) into social media activists, to their credit they pretty much succeeded. Not so much a sceptic personally, mine has been more of a case of setting aside the time to do it. The guys from mediasnackers were able to show that it doesn't take a lot of time and technology such as it is provides a number of methods of contributing.

Anyway, I have started, so excuse the first faulting steps, I hope the mind dump of opinions, questions and experiences made public through this are of interest to some.