June 24, 2010
In today’s world of heightened security with both foreign and domestic threats on the rise, eternal vigilance now more than ever should be the mantra of all Americans including Small Business owners.
What? What does National Security have to do with me? Well the short and simple answer is that “Security, being a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. Small Business owners are responsible for not only economic growth, but also contribute to the growth of online computing resources on the Internet.
Small Business owners have been feeling the pinch in the economy and as a result may have not spent the funds necessary to ensure that their networking environments have been secured. We all have heard it before, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”.
Communications is a key component in subversive activities both in the United States and abroad. Small businesses and individual citizens have unknowingly assisted in the facilitation of these communications, through poorly secured communications systems including VoIP, Network and Email systems.
A poorly secured communications system deployed on the Internet, not only gives the ability to bounce or even originate communications to anywhere in the world, but it may in fact have legal consequences as well. Minimally Small Businesses or individuals that have been breached may be impacted as a result of governmental computer systems flagging them as a person or an entity of interest for monitoring.
For those of you reading this that have already made capital investments in communications systems, take the time verify that they are secure. Some industry best practices include:
1. The implementation of a hardware firewall that has been well configured
(remember the minimalists approach in access is always the best).
2. Disable unused services on both workstations and servers.
3. Leverage anti-virus and anti-malware whenever possible.
4. As a part of your audit policy, enable logging of all access, and authentication to secured resources.
5. Implement a ridged password policy across all systems.
6. Educate your users, (business related browsing only, deleting unwanted emails
and never opening un-trusted downloads from the Internet).
No one can ever guarantee that a system is 100% secured as long as it has a network cable attached to the world, but taking some simple precautions can go a real long way.
For those of you that are currently ODS Managed Services customers rest assured that ongoing maintenance and monitoring of network resources is an integral part of our service. For those of you who are not an ODS Managed Services clients we are able to provide an audit service to test and report how secure your network is. Any remediation actions may then be performed under a professional service engagement.
By Taras Rudko CIO
February 17, 2010
“Hello and welcome to AMRCON’s “Small Business Executive Review”. I am Taras Rudko and as many of you know I have been on board with AMRCON for just about a year now as their Chief Information Officer. During this time period I have had the ability to experience and gather valuable information that I now plan on sharing with the AMRCON Community.
We live and conduct business in a rapidly changing and complex landscape that does not only revolve around a successful P&L. Making decisions that successfully guide you through that landscape require intelligence in the form of internal and external influences. I hope to examine Technological, Political, Social and Governmental influences. Blend them with a mix of life and career experiences to provide insight in the form of blog articles.
Topics that I hope to cover in the blog installments will include, leveraging technology investments, security both physical and digital, operational awareness, political and regulatory impacts on small business and the like.
I hope that you find the material insightful, educational and from time to time humorous.”
January 26, 2010
Even with the economic warnings of 2010 being similar to 2009, AMRCON has completed their 2010 kick off after another growth year. We rallied the troops at the start of the month to announce our end of year reviews, 2010 business plan and strategic overview of the year’s goals. We’re going to post some of those highlights here.
After review of last year we made the determination that our social media and networking groups provided the highest value in business development. Learning from that experience we plan to continue the current groups as well as take on 2 more seats in various meetings across Monmouth county NJ. I welcome anyone looking to grow their business to ask me about my findings and or to learn more about getting involved in the best group for you. I’m more than happy to assist you. AMRCON allocates nearly 10%-15% of its weekly man hours devoted to networking and business development groups. This does not include my time which is nearly 50% in business development. I strive to increase that even further, but I still play a major role in administration as well as financial management of the company.
We successfully completed our brochure project which has left the end result of a 12 page brochure that tells the AMRCON story better than ever. Feel free to download the PDF link to the latest version and be sure to distribute as you might see fit. We’re very proud of the outcome and the work that our graphics and publicist professionals have done. Craig Gunter with INCA Graphic, and Tricia Krietzberg with Krietzberg Creative are 2 of the best people in the business. Anyone requiring their services please feel free to reach out to them and reference this blog. The primary purpose and overview for the brochure was to further “Telling the story” without having to schedule an appointment or conference call. We now have the ability to making sure our story is told more than my personal business goal of 10 times per week. Anyone looking to expand their virtual sales force needs to have a solid marketing collateral campaign. We feel very confident that we have done so. Comments are welcomed. The brochure will also be permanently be posted as a link within this blog.
OK, so it’s true AMRCON will be expanding it’s offices again this year to include new administrative offices and eventually the move of our NOC to seat double the employees currently employed. This also provides the ability to start building out AMRCON to be more of a demonstration site for prospects looking to kick the tires on build-out projects, security and more.
The last bit I’ll share that is going to be a big deal to watch is coming from our new products development group. Just to touch on it, we will be launching an innovate new solution for the small business market looking to have a single solution that provides support, infrastructure and hardware required to implement and maintain a small growing business without the cost traditionally involved in doing so. This packaged solution will be something to watch in the marketplace and is scheduled to launch prior to the summer. It will be covered further in our blog site, local media as well as other publications.
Since we have a variety of clients, prospects, and vendors who watch this blog. I welcome anyone to contact me directly to ask about anything that may have sparked your interest about AMRCON, business development or any other bit of information I can share to help you in your business.
November 18, 2009
I wanted to take a minute and provide our members with a few updates here at AMRCON. I am pleased to say we’re still growing and carefully continuing to provide better products and service to our clients. We understand that in order to retain and earn the business of new clients, we need to continue with the vision of making our clients the most important part of our business. Given that we need to make changes from time-to-time. Here are a few of the changes that we have successfully implemented.
- In October we completed a small expansion project in our main office to allow for additional employee seating. Most of all it provided a better configuration to provide fast response to our walk-in clients in our store front.
- A few months ago AMRCON realized the need for a Dispatch Manager to better serve our clients. We tested and changed internal protocol to allow a single point of contact for our help desk. The purpose was to provide better efficiency to the tickets already in progress with our technicians instead of pausing to talk to new incoming calls. It also provides a layer of quality control for accuracy and making sure the flow of tickets are meeting our guarantees.
- AMRCON has hired our new Dispatch Manager Richard Wong. If you have not had the opportunity to speak with him, I’m sure you will the next time you have the need for support. Richard is a seasoned service coordinator from Dow Jones and Company. In addition he has experience with level 1 support, so he is an excellent resource for point of contact at AMRCON. We’re very pleased to have him on board. His direct extension is 2309 and his email is rwong@amrcon.com.
- Our Keyport dataroom went through an upgrade to provide even better up-time and availability through a power outage. Additional battery runtime was added as well as an upgrade to a larger generator backup. This will ensure our availability for smooth management and support quality in the event of an extended local outage. Additional cooling has been added to the dataroom as well, to handle additional future expansion.
- Internal policies has also been updated to include help desk protocol as well as others. These are dynamic changes that take place once an issue is recognized in our plan. Be assured that our help desk team and policies are adaptive. All of our valued clients benefit from our diligent eye on our own efficiency.
As a business partner and trusted advisor to our clients I think it’s important to keep you posted. You provide us with a great trust in providing support service to you. Partners need to know what’s going on. Please feel free to ask questions in this blog and or post ideas. We welcome them all.
October 13, 2009
Independent traders require smart technology to obtain the bleeding edge over the markets how ever that may be defined. Even the independent trader in a trading boutique or from home can not afford to make common mistakes. Some of these mistakes can include:
- Trading over a cable modem or other non-business class Internet service. This can create latency or an unknown amount of hops between you, your public network and your exchange. I’ve just seen it too many times. When you’re using a non-dedicated ISP, you have no control over how many networks you need to pass through before reaching your destination and back.
- All hardware is not created equal. A standard desktop with 1-2 video cards will not do. Depending on your trading platform you could be creating latency just by miss use of your screens. Even a slight overlap of a window can crunch a video processor to the extend that you’re looking at 3-4 second lag-time.
- Wireless trading is never a good idea. A good old ethernet connection into a business class router is always more stable. If you have to make sure you’re using business class equipment and someone who knows what they’re doing. It could cost you!
Larger environments need even more careful planning. Many complexities can arise as soon as you add multiple markets and or execution platforms. They all work on very different technology. Each has its benefits as well as concerns. Knowing these applications and understanding the demand on properly engineered and implemented technology is key. This brings me to my next point. Not all consulting firms, professional services companies or other IT support vendors are created equal.
I wanted to touch on the independent trader since we have so many as valued clients. Next month I’m going to talk a little more about the larger environments that we support. In the meantime I wanted to share a story depicting yet another different between AMRCON on other support vendors.
For close to 2 years a trading floor in lower Manhattan struggled with problems with a software trading platform. Each time the firm would experience the issue it cost them money. Each time they had the issue they would report the problem to their IT support company who we will call ACME for the purposes of this article. They were a professional services company as apposed to AMRCON’s Manged services model of real-time preventative support. Thus the trading firm had to waite for them to respond on site to troubleshoot the issue. Both ACME and the trading firm played a serious game of cat and mouse. The client being upset that ACME could not pin-point the issue and fix it and the software vendor pointing fingers at the client network as the problem. Finally ACME stated that it was an outside issue that they did not support and the issue continued. Eventually ACME lost the firm as a client to AMRCON due to various support related and other issues. AMRCON was pleased to take charge.
AMRCON deployed its managed services model of support through its start up process which corrected many outstanding issues. Later the firm began to experience the issue with the software and AMRCON was able to capture real-time data about the problem. Now it was the first time the issue had happened while under our support model and in fact the first time we heard of the issue. Needless to say we were shocked to hear it was going on for years and was an accepted reoccurring issue. AMRCON quickly compiled the data and began aggressively monitoring all aspects of the internal network all the way through the connection to the host provider. Come to find out there was an issue with the configuration of the 3rd party software vendor. AMRCON was able to prove the issue through hard documentation, statistics, and reports. This made the vendor step up and fix the issue. Our client is no longer being represented by a support vendor who even thinks about not owning each and every issue as their own.
I’m pleased to say the that we have repaired many other fixes to their network. We’ve reduced their IT budget and AMRCON has received calls from their executives personally thanking us for the diligent work we have provided.
September 2, 2009
Welcome to AMRCON’s new Newsletter and content website. We’ve been working pretty hard to get this out and convert our monthly newsletter from paper, to email, to this. We have 1000′s of followers that we need to make sure sign up at the top right to subscribe to the monthly newsletter. We will be sending the courtesy email as usual for the next few months just as a reminder, but after that you will need to be signed up here to receive it. We would love for you to continue receiving our news. Soon we will also be introducing the RSS feed for those of you looking to receive your news in that method, along with integration into FaceBook and other media sites. Be sure to search for Dee Rudko and the group AMRCON on FB to follow us closer. Thank you for your continued support.
So here is a little tidbit I’d like to share with you, that you might be able to use in your own business. This will tell you a bit about where our newsletter started and why we’re here now. I think you’ll find it informative and you might just start thinking about how you want to use digital media, content and social networking to promote your business.
We started our monthly newsletter in January of 2007 in printed form. We began by just sending to our existing clients and current prospects. All of the same categories have survived since the beginning, including the Personal note. Believe it or not 30% of our feedback comes from sharing a little about myself and my family. Each month it became quite a task and expense to produce and deliver the newsletter, but we kept on going. The responses as well as comments from prospect clients was tremendous. Over the last few years we’ve gone through various changes as a company and it’s been reflective in the newsletter. Most of the same content writers are still in place, Adam and myself included.
In the meantime we developed several versions of our corporate website. It seemed each year we made such changes that we were redeveloping the entire site for a feature here and there. I realized through my endeavors of working with SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimizations & Search Engine Marketing) efforts that we need a living breathing website to really stay in touch and be successful with our campaigns. So the idea to implement a blog based site began but where do we start. Well the next natural thought was we needed content to stay fresh in order to place better in the search engines. But where were we going to get content and who was going to update it? Of course the job inevitably would fall in my lap by default, but the thought crossed my mind. Why don’t we really hit the ball out of the park and maintain the content through our already popular newsletter? We can integrate all of the product aspects of the old site but bring new life through changing content and interaction with our clients at the same time. It just seemed like a win win. So we hit the paper with our development staff and sales group to start discussing this project.
It all fell together quite well. In fact the new site helped our process become more automated and easier to publish. Our sales staff could edit content prior to publishing or making publicly available. Now get this, even after our time and project expenses, the site will pay for itself in 4 months in savings. Some of the other added benefits include searchable content for historical information as well as search engines, which will help us rank better. So here we are in the infancy stages again of something that started back in 2007. I know we’re all very excited to see the growth not only in our business but also this newsletter. Soon we will have the rest of the pieces from our old corporate website integrated, but the nice thing is it will be interactive and constantly changing. Bringing you the updated content you need about products and services.
So don’t forget to join us by subscribing at the top right of this page, look for our RSS feed coming soon and be sure to search for Dee Rudko on FaceBook as well as the AMRCON group. We look forward to serving our valuable followers. Thank you!
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