The Copper Wire

Scenario: You receive an invite to visit a webpage and are prompted to sign up for their monthly sweepstakes promotion. All you need to do to win your fabulous prize is enter your name, address, birth date and a few other questions and you’re on your way to being a winner. But before you click submit, you could be on the losing side the identity theft game.

Personal information is constantly being sent and received through the internet. Users may not realize that this information can jeopardize their identity, making it easy to become a victim of identity theft.

At one time, running a credit report was the hallmark of ensuring a valid credit history; however, the ease of online identity theft has required that consumers ensure proper handling of their personal information.

Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner, recently quoted in PC Magazine that identity scoring will “overtake credit report monitoring” by 2009.

The best protection, above and beyond any identity monitoring services, is to use common sense. Before sending any information through a website, look for the Verisign symbol, this ensures that there can not be third-party interception. It is easy to protect your identity if you are prudent but it is excruciatingly, difficult to recover your identity once it’s been stolen.

Posted by andrew at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is an understatement to say that the process of validating invoices on a monthly basis for a large enterprise is a daunting challenge. However, increasingly the ability to validate invoices on a monthly basis is becoming more of a priority based on increased consumption of telecom services. In the past it was extremely difficult for large enterprises to have a true picture of its assets. With invoicing that was largely rooted in paper and did not provide much detail, enterprises were more or less left in the dark.

Electronic billing data is changing that and allowing companies to literally step into the light. By using electronic billing feeds companies can build a billed inventory to create a complete view of their telecom assets and resources across the entire enterprise. By extracting this data from the billing feeds, companies then have a starting point for creating a complete inventory of assets.

Posted by andrew at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Much of the focus around the Web (or Web 2.0) has been around the growth and functionality of “on-demand” applications. As we have been writing about, it can be argued that the success of on-demand applications (or Web 2.0 for that matter) has been fueled by increased bandwidth and enhanced networking technologies that allow for the development of better applications. And it appears there are even more cutting edge technologies that are on the way that will accelerate the corporate WAN. These types of new technologies will be able to increase data rates, optimize bandwidth, and enhance operating systems.

And behind these new technologies that improve the corporate WAN, comes the increased importance on the overall management of the network. Much of these new initiatives aimed at supporting an ever increasing remote workforce, that utilize these on-demand applications, will place more emphasis on knowing which employee has what, is accessing which applications, and the types of connections being utilized.

Posted by andrew at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)