News

Small business owners may wish to monitor the downloading habits of their employees in a bid to mitigate data and network security risks, it has been claimed.

A UK study has revealed that employers working remotely are more likely to access adult, gambling, social networking and dating sites than when they are in the workplace, potentially exposing company equipment to malware.

IT devices need to be "appropriately managed" by business managers, according to Vodafone's head of enterprise mobility solutions Curt Hopkins.

He suggests that with mobility helping small firms to stay ahead of the competition, workers should be responsible with their use of IT outside of the office.

Mr Hopkins adds: "Employees are not always aware of the risks associated with accessing certain content whether it is for legitimate reasons or not."

He suggests that centralised security management is "the safest approach" for firms to adopt where their IT systems are concerned.

According to Scansafe's latest global threat report, internet malware increased by 337 per cent during the third quarter of 2008.

Many entrepreneurs are continuing to work without a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, despite the risk involved with ignoring business continuity considerations.

This is the claim of small business commentator Jennifer Walzer, who says many people see the idea of developing plan as being overly tedious and time-consuming.

he most common business disaster is data loss, Ms Walzer stated, which can result from a number of causes including human error, hardware failure, natural disaster and theft.

"Fortunately, data loss is easy to recover from if you have a backup solution in place," she added.

She urged business owners to familiarise themselves with the information stored on their systems, consider backup options including outsourcing, attribute responsibility to employees where applicable, test the disaster recovery plan and review it regularly.

Bharat Thakrar, head of business continuity at BT Global Services, recently claimed that "unpredictable and highly selective acts of God and man" such as floods, fires and terrorist attacks have the potential to destroy businesses where continuity plans are not in place.

Many companies, often without knowing, install programs across more computers than they are licensed to, it has been claimed.

According to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the largest users of illegal software are companies, rather than individual consumers.

Julian Swan, Europe, Middle-East and Asia director of compliance marketing for the BSA, said: "On one hand there's counterfeit, and that can be getting downloads off the internet or buying dodgy discs from car boot sales, that's one aspect of the problem, but by far the biggest area is companies using more than they have licenses for."

He explained that, while there are people who do knowingly use pirated programs, for many companies software management is simply poorly run.

Mr Swan added: "There is lots of evidence that companies, often because they're negligent and sometimes are just not terribly well run, just don't know what is there and don't have policies in place that stop their employees downloading software, bringing in software from home, they don't have purchasing policies and all those things."

He added that during mergers and takeovers, firms are often unaware of exactly what software they have taken over.

The International Data Corporation recently reported that the amount of pirated software on PCs in the UK rose to 27 per cent in the last year.

Scott joins Adlite to assist us and head up the SQL and database division of the company.

We had a major gap in our services to key clients where we needed an expert in SQL report writing. Our larger clients needed information to make key business decisions based on the information pulled of their system by SQL queries. We approached Scott and were delighted when he joined the team in August.

A Bury based IT development company, Adlite uk ltd, have created an exciting link with Edinburgh, Scotland.

Directors Andy Faulkner and Darren Burgess who are time served IT professionals, have been developing the project over the last 12 months with a successful Scottish company LawWare Ltd, headed by Managing Director Warren Wander. LawWare have successfully implemented their software in over 150 law firms in Scotland and are delighted to welcome Adlite on board as their newest business partner in the North West of England.

The link with Bury based Adlite, will help facilitate LawWare’s growth in England. As a strategic partner, Adlite will be offering hardware and infrastructure expertise to support the law profession with the newly developed English release of the legal software. LawWare is an innovative product that helps law firms and individual lawyers do more with IT from a Productivity, Risk & Matter Management perspective, in a very stylish and easy to use software package. For further details visit www.lawware.co.uk

Adlite have already successfully installed and now maintains several international law firms in Manchester city centre and are meeting with LawWare to discuss introducing another three law firms to their portfolio this week. Darren Burgess explains that the link up with LawWare is a key gateway for achieving large successes within this field, in addition to delivering other specialised IT support services as a key solutions provider within the northwest. Recent discussions with a Law firm in Belgium are opening the door to our European arm for this specialist proposition and we are all very excited by this prospect.

Adlite and LawWare are in discussion about hosting a series of events and roadshows which will support our aim to be one of the UK’s leading providers of IT support for the law industry in the next 5 years.

Rachael Novak is the most recent member to the Adlite team – She is assisting Adlite with the introduction of the LawWare software. As part of its introduction to the UK market LawWare will be offered to a limited number of law Firms at highly discounted prices in return for some feedback to tailor the package to the English market. This is a pre-launch to the English market. Rachael has recently relocated to Manchester and is looking forward to the many opportunities that will arise.

Adlite are attending the Business Northwest Show at the Manchester 18th and 19th October. We are going to be promoting lawware and adlite and also talking to G-Force communications, who we have been working with Andrew for the previous 5 years and there are several new ventures that we will be discussing.