23 Apr 2015

Thoughts on Email & First Things First

First Things First is a self-help book written by Stephen Covey.  If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.

In the book, Covey describes a framework for prioritizing work that is aimed at long-term goals, at the expense of tasks that appear to be urgent, but are in fact less important.  He uses a time management formulation attributed to Eisenhower (see: The Eisenhower Method), categorizing tasks into whether they are urgent and whether they are important, recognizing that important tasks may not be urgent, and urgent tasks are not necessarily important.  This is his 2×2 matrix: classifying tasks as urgent and non-urgent on one axis, and important or non-important on the other axis.

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This got me to thinking about how our anti-spam solution is able to map my email messages to this matrix.  Sendio only delivers Urgent & Important messages to my mobile device; this means that I am able to enjoy life (without interruption) while still being alerted when appropriate (like a question from a customer, a notification about a down server, security-related messsages, etc.).  When I have time, I am able to review my Sendio Hold queue to see if there are any new partnership opportunities (or the like) that I would like to take advantage of; these messages are Important to me, but Not Urgent.  Finally, I am able to have all Not Important messages Dropped by the Sendio.  (Of course, Bulk messages can be dropped automatically.)

I bring this up, because early last year Gartner published its, likely, last Magic Quadrant report on email security vendors. The maturity of the market, lack of competition, and commoditization of the products available, all pointed to a market where innovation was dead and so too the need for analyst reports.

However, Gartner researchers made a parting dig at the vendors who had failed to improve:
“Dissatisfaction with current bulk email capabilities is a significant pain point of existing solutions. End users don’t care about the clinical definition of spam and are frustrated with the level of “unwanted” email in their inboxes…None of the vendors offer personal controls to enable end users to better manage their inboxes.”

Sendio Opt-Inbox™, introduced in May of 2014, provides these exact features that offer end users complete control of their email inbox.  If you are interested in removing the “noise” from your email inbox, please call (804) 798-4444 Option 2 or email sales@computer-business.com.

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19 Feb 2015

disconnecting from the “noise” of email

Toward the end of last year, our organization moved to using Sendio’s email security solution.  This is one of the best moves that we have made in a long time.

As many of you know, I have had the same email address for 15+ years. And, I have made mistakes with it over those years, such as giving out business cards at trade shows, etc.  Having an email address for this long and having made mistakes with it over time, my inbox was inundated with countless messages from spam, BACN, or bulk sources.  This makes it hard to separate the junk from the mail you really need.  This can become particularly troublesome for small business people who can’t afford to overlook an important email.

Sendio’s marketing team talks about the fact that “the average employee receives 200 emails per day.  And that of those 200 emails, typically only 10% are important.”  I became very aware of this after we installed the Sendio solution.  Below is a screen shot of stuff that would normally come to my inbox.  I would consider all of this to be “noise”.

Opt-Inbox

Impact on Unified Communications

As many of you know, we use our IP PBX to deliver our Voicemail to Email.  Prior to Sendio, an important voicemail could easily be lost in a sea of 200 emails.  Now, since Sendio only delivers the important (think 10%!) emails, things tend to get lost a lot less often.

Impact on Mobility

Like most small business people, my email is delivered to my iPhone. I don’t care about ITEXPO booth updates at 9 PM on Friday night or Spectralink marketing at 10 AM on a Sunday.  These are times that I want to avoid “noise”.  I want to spend time with my family.  The only time that I want to be interrupted is if a customer requires service.  This is exactly what Sendio does for me.

As Sendio says, “Your time is important, and it’s time you got an email solution that makes sure time is spent on the projects that matter, not on junk mail.”

Here is a quick video of what makes Sendio work so well:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5oVRcpm5G8

If you are interested in removing the “noise” from your email inbox, please call (804) 798-4444 Option 2 or email sales@computer-business.com.

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30 Jul 2013

Adding IP Reputation to increase efficiency and effectiveness of your IPS

If you have read our previous blog post, you know that we are big fans of using IP reputation.  But, you might still be asking yourself, “Why?”  The answer is simple, increased efficiency and effectiveness.  Today, many (probably most) organizations use a Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliance to protect their organizations; however, the same increases apply even if you are using standalone components (i.e. firewall, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), etc.).

All of these security components (UTM, firewall, IPS, etc.) are sold based on throughput; costs increase as device throughput increases.  Complaints about the cost per throughput are quite common; see these comments on Fortinet and Palo Alto.  Adding IP Reputation can help keep costs down as packets to/from known hostile IP addresses are dropped before they tie up precious CPU resources on UTM, firewall, IPS, etc.

In addition, since packets to/from known hostile IP addresses are dropped before they tie up precious CPU resources of the UTM, firewall, IPS, etc., your security administrators can be more effective, because they are not wasting time sorting through UTM, firewall, IPS, etc. logs cluttered with packets to/from known hostile IP addresses.

If you are interested in adding IP reputation to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your security initiative, please call (804) 798-4444 Option 2 or email sales@computer-business.com.

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26 Mar 2013

disconnecting networks from the “bad parts” of the Internet

For years, CBSi has been connecting enterprise networks to the Internet.  As you likely realize, Internet connectivity is a requirement for almost every business to function today.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of “bad guys” on the Internet trying to do a lot of bad things to enterprise networks.  Just read up on botnetshackers, keyloggers, spyware, Trojansviruses, zombies, etc.

A long time ago, we decided that it was best to start disconnecting enterprise networks from the “bad parts” of the Internet.  Our original approach was to block the most problematic countries.  Our internal list was known as the “dirty dozen” country list.  Maintaining this list became a full-time job.  Often times, we had to call in a geopolitical specialist to determine if a country should be considered hostile.  This approach was not scalable so we started looking for new solutions.

After much research, CBSi decided that partnering with ThreatSTOP was the best approach.  This partnership provides a number of benefits to our joint customers:

  1. We can block “bad” countries with a single mouse click.  For example, if your business doesn’t need to do business with China, we can simply drop all packets from and to China.
  2. We can keep track of the geopolitical posture of all countries.  For example, we can drop all packets from and to all ITAR countries with a single mouse click.  Of course, we can also do this for all OFAC countries, etc.
  3. We maintain a reputation database down to the IP level.  So, our customers can block all traffic from and to hostile sources, such as botnet command-and-control (C&C) servers, as well.
  4. We maintain application-specific reputation databases.  Our customers can block all IP addresses that are seen initiating SIP attacks, etc.
  5. Because our customers are dropping these packets, they can get more performance from their other security devices (firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, etc.) as the devices are not busy processing known hostile traffic.

If you are interested in disconnecting your enterprise networks from the “bad parts” of the Internet, please call (804) 798-4444 Option 2 or email sales@computer-business.com.

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