3.4 Digital Security Certificates 12
4. Internet Access Policy 13
Internet Connectivity
In today’s tough economy, companies are working even harder than ever to grow their business and control their costs in various items such as telecommunications which includes telephone, internet and similar other such costs in order to manage and grow their customers efficiently and effictevely.
In order to establish a business properly communication needs are the most important factor. This is internal using the existing computer network. There are different types of connection methods. Some of them are as follows:
Cable Broad band: is the broad band delivered via cable rather than a BT phone line. Examples of cable broad band provider in the UK are virgin media and Wright cable.
Dial up/Modem: is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original data. It can be used over any means of transmitting analog signals.
ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network lines are high-speed dial-up connections to the Internet. The speed is the positive, however, the cost and availability is determined by local telephone companies. This means in some locations they are available and in others they are not; sometimes they are cheap, sometimes they are not.
ADSL broad band: is a form of DSL, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines than a conventional voice band modem can provide. It does this by utilizing frequencies that are not used by a voice telephone call.
T1/T3: A dedicated phone connection supporting data rates of 1.544Mbits per second. A T-1 line actually consists of 24 individual channels each of which supports 64Kbits per second. Each 64Kbit/second channel can be configured to carry voice or data traffic. Most telephone companies allow you to buy just some of these individual channels, known as fractional T-1 access.
Recommendation
This is a pipex product which costs £49.00 a month. It allows a download speed of 16 Mb/sec downloadable services. It also gives an upstream speed up to 1Mb. Other features include:
- unlimited usage allowance, prioritised traffic,
- business grade with low contention ratio,
- free enhanced care for 12 months, assured 500kbps bandwidth,
- dedicated 24/7 UK Based technical support,
- 1 static IP address, 20 E-mail mailboxes,
- 100Mb E-mail storage per box,
- 3 months FREE AVG security,
- free engineering assisted installation.
Email
Is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications system. Email can perform both internal and external communications. Internally, email communication can replace the paper based memo communication between management and employees. Email is a very useful and valuable way of communicating as well as advertising.
Spam: Email spam is also known as junk email, is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients sent by email.
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Recommendations: For the security of SME business, I recommend them to check their emails regularly if possible each day to make sure that it doesn’t gets affected by any kinds of spam otherwise you may not be able to differentiate between the spam and emails, as a result your computers gets affected by spam completely. Therefore its very important to check the emails regularly.
Email filters: email filter is the process of email to organize it according to specified criteria. Most often this refers to the automatic process of incoming messages, but the term also applies to the intervention of human intelligence in addition to anti-spam techniques, and to out going email as well as those being received.
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Automatic features such as out of office response and flags: here you can see the print screen of “out of office assistant”.
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You can use the flags to prioritise the emails. For example you can use red flags for important messages.
Recommendations: I recommend the SME business to make use of flags because by this one can easily be able to direct their attentions at important emails by the exclamation marks, this shows that the emails is really important to be read by the business. By using the other automatic features one will be able to save the time because by using this feature the original sender will know that the person is not therefore, therefore he doesn’t need the send an email to each and every person saying that “he is not currently available in the office”.
Email address book distribution lists: whenever you need to send mass emails, you need to grab all your contacts and export them into a single list file. In order to use this file with Microsoft outlook, outlook express or any other thunderbird or any specialized mass emailing programs, you need to format the file so that it can easily be imported as an email distribution list.
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Virus checking: it’s a process of checking virus to see if there’s any known virus there. Virus cleaning is the process of removing the detected virus from the file so that the files can be used safely.
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Allow/disable Html emails: Html also known as hyper text mark up language allows you to add colours, design the text in whatever way you want and publish outlook folders on the internet. Whereas an email that do not have Html format does not allows you to format anything.
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Size and type of attachments: Your message security service includes Attachment Manager, which you can use to create filters to enhance security or enforce your company's policies for email attachments (size or type). You can set up attachment filters for both inbound and outbound email. Filters always apply to all users in a user organization. Here are some examples: Block inbound or outbound messages with large attachments. Block inbound messages with executable attachments for security. Block outbound messages with specific types of attachments that your company's policies prohibit, such as music or video files.
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Web-based email: web based email is an email service intended to be primarily accessed via a web browser, as opposed through an e-mail client such as an outlook, Mozilla’s thunderbird, or apples Inc’s mail. Very popular web mail providers include Gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail and AOL.
A major advantage of web based email over application based email is that a user has the ability to access their inbox from any internet connected area around the world. However, the need for internet access is also a draw back, in that one cannot access old messages when not connected to the internet.
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INTERNET SECURITY AND LEGAL ISSUES
Virus protection software: Anti virus software mainly prevent and remove computer viruses, including worms and Trojan horses. Such programs may only detect and remove adware, spyware and others forms of malware.
Recommendation: I recommend my client to use Norton anti-virus as it’s the most popular and cheaper software these days.
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Hackers and firewalls: Hacker is someone who gets unauthorized access to a computer system. Many hackers just like the challenge of breaking through a computer security system but not all hackers are harmless. It must also be said that not all hackers are bad. Government and huge companies use hackers to maintain their security systems. People normally confuse hackers with crackers.
Recommendation: I recommend you that for a business like SME you need to install firewall so that to ensure that the business doesn’t get affected by virus, and also as recommended above Norton should be installed on the computer, to prevent from virus entering the computer system.
Spyware: is software that is installed unreasonably on a personal computer to collect information about a user, their computer or browsing habits without informing the user. Spyware program can collect various types of personal information such as internet surfing habits, such as installing additional software, apart form that Spyware steals information from the user by using computer memory resources. It works is several ways.
Recommendation: I recommend that an SME business use offer firewalls and software that can easily protect your system that I have already suggested such a McAfee Security Suite, this software has all the essential software required in order to protect your system from spyware viruses and hackers.
Digital security certificates: these are the digital ID within SME that is an attachment to an electronic message used for security purposes. The most common use of digital certificate is to verify that a user sending a message is the one who claims to be and provides the receiver with the means to encode a reply.
Recommendation:
