Online communities are an excellent way for people to interact with other individuals who they can help or who can help them. For business and technology professionals, they also represent a way keep an eye on trends and thought leadership within ones industry that can help solve a company’s issues.
They also provide one element of career growth, in that they expose a professional to tips, tricks, issues and concerns of peers in other organizations in a reasonably safe environment. And, lastly, they provide for professional networking.
One of the most vibrant communities that brings together all aspects of business, is Focus at www.focus.com. This community bring together Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Technology and more, to solve business problems for businesses small and large.
To aid in your professional growth, it is highly recommended that you set aside at least 15-20 minutes each day, or 3-4 hours each week, to participate in communities such as these. (LinkedIn also provides various interactive groups, but I am starting to prefer the arrangement offered by Focus.) You will start to see that these are good places to learn and grow.
So, set some time aside to contribute and collaborate with your peers, and you will see your value increase, whether it is to your employer, your peers, your clients or your partners.
Google is in the news quite a bit, lately, but not all of that publicity is good…
Contrary to popular opinion, Google is not made of Teflon®, and not everything they touch turns to gold. The fact is that no matter how many super geniuses you have developing products, code and ideas, a considerable amount of coordination and integration is necessary to successfully bring products to market, especially when you’re competing with other heavyweights who have been doing it longer, such as Apple with the iPhone and Microsoft in Operating Systems & Office Productivity Apps, just to name a few.
Some folks seem to be of the opinion that they can do no wrong, and that whatsoever they decide to put their hands to will prosper, just because they are Google and hire some very smart people. Newsflash: Success in business is more than just having access to smart, talented people. There are many other considerations to be made when attempting to build and maintain a powerful business that dominates in many different industries.
Google can ill afford to hit a rough patch now, as the tech industry seeks a major rebound. Businesses are looking to see which players to work with for the long haul, and any perceived weakness by a big partner will result in many more executives taking a pass on the potential risk.
Instead of trying to be all things to all people, Google should focus on what it does best (web services, search, advertising and automation) and choose a few other markets to enter into in a measured and controlled fashion. This will enable it to get a better handle on the various nuances of different industries. It should be especially careful not to enter so many consumer markets at one time. The folks at Google need to decide whether their focus is consumer or enterprise and stick to that focus until they have actually mastered it. Otherwise, the 2010-2019 decade may not be nearly as favorable to them as the 2000-2009 decade was.
The ball is still in their court – for now.
For the first time in over a decade, my home network saw no major improvements for almost 2 years.
Let’s just say that the past few years have been interesting…
From March 2008 until December 2009, several major undertakings that I had planned for my networking environment were put on hold. Additionally, I suffered a few hardware failures (one of my domain controllers, also doubling as the source of my redirected folders) that were not easily (or cheaply) resolved. So, I’ve been running on just a single domain controller for the better part of a year. And it was my intention to have my entire environment fully virtualized by now, as indicated in the following post made oh so long ago.
Time passes…
Well, here we are at the beginning of a new decade, and I’ve resuscitated my projects. My virtual host server is finally up, running on Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, but it is now accompanied by a few Windows 7 clients. I’ve just introduced a virtualized domain controller running 2008 R2, and installed the new version of Certificate Services, since my dead DC was running the old version.
I just have a few more steps before I finally update that old network diagram, including a system running 2008 Server Core, so I can practice with that, and also an upgrade of all the client systems from Vista to Windows 7, and replacing my dead domain controller with a virtualized file server for the off-line folders. I also have to remove that old DC from the domain – properly – now that I’ve moved away from trying to repair it at all.
(I originally thought the problem was a power supply, but even after changing it out, the system powers on and right back off. Seems like a short somewhere, but now I can just replace the motherboard and build something different with that.)
So far, I’m loving the performance of Hyper-V, which is really improved over the original release. The management tools are a lot better as well. Given how well the 4-core system continues to perform, I might upgrade the RAM (16GB vs 8GB) so that I can run more than the five (5) virtual machines I had planned to run.
On a side note: Now that I have all the physical servers labeled, it is much easier when I need to ask my wife to reboot any of them. I’m not even going to get into a discussion concerning the significantly different way that men and women (particularly those not in technology) describe computer equipment. Seriously.
Thankfully, 2010 has started with a bang, and my network is finally getting tended to as it has been accustomed. I should have another update by month’s end, once I finish the server portion of this project, and then another update towards the end of February, when the client upgrades have been completed.
Please stay tuned…
Yes, you heard me correctly…
We still think about personal and corporate security only as an afterthought.
Despite all the regulatory and industry compliance that has been created and updated in the past 15 years, as we close out this decade, we are hardly any closer to proactively applying security guidelines in our personal or professional lives. Certainly, we don’t apply them ahead of convenience or functionality, in any event.
- We still leave our keys under our welcome mats, or inside our flower pots, or inside our garden gnomes.
- We still hate using passwords, still use feeble ones, and still write them down on sticky pads pasted to our monitor or the bottom of our keyboards.
- We still share the same password(s) across all our corporate accounts and our internet accounts.
- We still don’t lock our workstations when we leave our desks, or password protect our sensitive PDAs and smart phones.
- We still disclose sensitive information on websites that are not using SSL and are only “protected” by feeble passwords.
- We don’t pay for preventative information security solutions or apply best practices unless we think we *may* have been compromised.
- We prioritize new functionality over operational security, even though new features are a common source of security issues in the first place.
As consumers, we are willing to pay for products if they have the right features, but rarely will we inquire about how safe or secure they are – and even less commonly are we will willing to pay extra for safety or security. This gives the vendors no incentive to prioritize security until something bad has happened™. We’ve got to get past the acknowledgement that vulnerabilities are a given, and get to the place where we hold people accountable for issues that could have been foreseen and mitigated in advance.
We cannot expect to hold vendors accountable for security failures if we continue to value non-security features ourselves – not in a free market society, anyway. They’re only going to produce what we’re willing to pay for, and so far security is not what people clamor for.
What the Future Holds…
Having said all that, however, I predict that the next 15-24 months will bring more penalties for organizations small and large that fail to be proactive in their management of information security and privacy concerns. There will be embarrassing disclosures of personal data, and many more small-to-midsize firms will find themselves having to deal with the aftermath of data security breaches, given that 45 states currently have breach notification laws on the books, and a Federal breach notification law is on the horizon.
Expect the 2010 list of data breaches to be even larger than the 2009 list. It’s definitely going to get worse, before it gets better, and the consumer response to such negligence will be debilitating for the offending companies. There are lots of vulnerabilities floating around in the wild, in addition to targeted attacks by an increasingly sophisticated malware underground.
Now is the time for prudent business owners to make true information security a priority, recognizing that a secure enterprise is actually a business driver, and lowers the costs associated with attaining regulatory and industry compliance. Those who continue to approach security in a reactive way will spend more money, and use more resources, and generate less revenue than those who make information security an underlying part of their business operations. Security is a way of life, not a periodic event, and it’s about time we started behaving this way.
No matter how expensive we think security is, the costs are always less when paid upfront rather than after an incident. The question we should be asking ourselves isn’t “can I afford this security?” but rather “can I afford not to have this security?”
Collectively, we can hold organizations accountable for inadequate security and privacy practices and functionality – but we have to start with our own personal security. Don’t just pay lip service to security issues, or you could find yourself paying real dollars to rectify a huge mess in your personal or professional life.
Let’s start this new decade on the right foot, and not perpetuate the information security sins of the past.
It’s about time – at least, that’s what my wife will say when she learns that I have finally ditched the last remnants of a stockpile of old computer parts that I was hanging onto.
These are parts which were actually dead at the beginning of this decade, but I was loathe to part with them for reasons which continue to escape me.
Here is a short list of the relics that will finally meet their demise by tomorrow:
- One Diamond Multimedia Monster 3D video card
- One PCI 33.6K modem
- A couple PS/2 Keyboards
- Several Mice with serial connectors (yes, serial!)
- Several ISA and VL-Bus I/O cards
- One ISA Joystick controller card
- One broken Canon BubbleJet printer
- Several manual port-switchers for with female 9-pin serial connectors
Getting rid of this stuff will give me more space to collect this decade’s soon-to-be-obsolete cables, cards and connectors. I have a couple of sound cards that I might hang on to for a bit. (Makes for good spousal conflicts).
Wife: What’s this?
Me: That? It’s a PCI-based sound card for a mini-tower system.
Wife: Do you even buy machines with PCI slots anymore?!?
Me: That’s not the point! You never know when someone with an 8-year old machine might have a broken sound card!
Wife: Whatever!
Me: Just remember that time that you made me throw out those old non-functional laptops and not a week later, someone needed a component that I could have salvaged from them.
Wife: That was ONE time.
Me: Hey, you never know…
…
I wonder what next year’s battle will sound like… :)