Security Management in Detail

read this wikipedia article about security management:

Security management is the identification of an organization's assets (including information assets), followed by the development, documentation, and implementation of policies and procedures for protecting these assets.

An organisation uses such security management procedures as information classification, risk assessment, and risk analysis to identify threats, categorise assets, and rate system vulnerabilities so that they can implement effective controls.

to read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_management

Fixed Fees Verses Hourly Rates

When your business is looking to hire and IT support Company, you should consider whether you are looking to pay a fixed fee or an hourly rate along with doing online research for companies in your area. This is important in order to hire the best candidate to assist your business with information technology. There is a big difference between paying an hourly rate and paying a fixed fee.  Learn the difference while reading this blog. 

http://www.tvgconsulting.com/why-is-a-fixed-fee-better-than-an-hourly-fee-for-it-services-in-los-angeles/

Reducing Your IT Capital Expenses

Among business organizations there is a concern about how they will run their business at low IT capital expenses. During tough economic times, the cost of running a business increases and leaves the business owner thinking about how they can save money.  In small to medium sized businesses cost cutting is a huge priority.  After all, you can't make money if you spend it all.  

http://www.tvgconsulting.com/computer-support-company-in-los-angeles-explains-will-an-it-consulting-company-reduce-my-it-capital-expenses/

Los Angeles Businesses and IT Consultants

IT technical difficulties from faulty equipment can happen at any moment.  Many businesses in LA rely heavily on IT technology.  When this technology malfunctions it can waste a lot of time and money.  In order to avoid losing your business's money you should hire and IT consulting company.  These consultants can prevent any issues from occurring, and if they do happen they can fix them at any time.  Most consulting companies are available 24/7/

http://www.tvgconsulting.com/the-importance-of-it-consultants-for-any-los-angeles-business/

Amazon website goes down for 40 minutes, costing the company $5 million

Read about how Amazon.com had an outage earlier this week:

Amazon.com’s website went down around 1 p.m. Pacific time today for as much as 45 minutes due to unknown causes.

The outage appears to have affected Amazon’s main website for all U.S. and Canadian visitors. VentureBeat was able to confirm that it was offline for at least 20 minutes, and the website Down For Everyone or Just Me also confirmed the outage for that time period.

Estimates differ on exactly how long Amazon was offline: Some reports have it at 15 minutes,  25 minutes, 40 minutes, and 45 minutes. At 40 minutes, the outage could have cost the company as much as $4.72 million in lost sales, the Puget Sound Business Journal estimated, based on the company’s average sales of $117,882 per minute. Of course, that’s an average rate, and sales at the online retailer might be expected to be much brisker on a Monday afternoon in the summer, when people are shirking work by ordering barbecue tools, Hawaiian shirts, boxes of cheap outdoor drink tumblers, or trashy novels to read on their Kindles.

Gigaom reports that Amazon’s country-specific websites were still online during the outage as were the websites of Amazon-owned companies like Zappos and Diapers.com.

It’s very rare for Amazon’s homepage to go down, although the company’s cloud service, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) went offline at least twice last year, once in June and once in October, taking out partner sites such as Netflix, Instagram, and Reddit.

Curiously, Google’s home page was offline for about five minutes August 16, potentially costing that company about $545,000 in ad revenue.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/19/amazon-website-down/#kTYcyo0xekj84WiK.99 

How Much Will IT Downtime Cost Your Business?

Information technology and information systems is essential for most businesses now a days.  As an IT support company we get questions about downtime frequently.  People want to know how a system crashing would affect their company.  The answer to this question can be shocking:

• The median cost of information technology downtime for most companies across industries in the US was estimated at $5,600 per minute.

http://www.tvgconsulting.com/it-downtimes-and-support-what-will-an-it-malfunction-cost-your-business/

Businesses Beefing Up on IT Security Specialists

Read this interesting article we found about IT Security Specialists:

In the wake of increased high-profile cybersecurity breaches, new research shows businesses are beefing up on theirIT security specialists.

The 2012 Career Impact study by (ISC)², a nonprofit organization representingsecurity specialists worldwide, found that 72 percent of businesses hired new employees last year specifically for their information security skills.

Sixty-two percent of businesses reported they are looking to hire additional information security employees in 2012.

"This data reflects the increase in security breaches we saw throughout 2011 and the fact that organizations, both in the public and private sector, are finally realizing the importance of implementing sound security programs that should be run by experienced and qualified professionals," said W. Hord Tipton, executive director of (ISC)². "Even in tough economic times, information security professionals are in high demand by hiring managers and organizations who understand that their skill sets are not only paramount to their organization's ability to conduct business, but also give them a competitive advantage." As demand for IT security specialists increases, the research shows many organizations are doing more to reward the qualified employees they already have on staff. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed received a salary increase in 2011, with 55 percent expecting another raise in 2012.

"While it’s a very positive sign that this field continues to grow and is somewhat 'recession-proof,' one of the biggest challenges that remains is finding enough of the right people with the appropriate security skills to fill the huge void that exists right now," Tipton said.  "We must continue to build this workforce at an aggressive pace."

The study shows the top skills hiring managers are looking for include operations security,security management practices, access control systems/methodology, security architecture/models, risk management, telecom/network security, applications/system development security and cloud/virtualization.

The research was based on surveys of more than 2,200 security specialists from around the world.

http://www.ittechnewsdaily.com/258-security-specialists.html

Should You Outsource an IT Service?

Outsourcing is a term that we often hear, but what does it really mean?  It usually refers to a company hiring an outside service, rather than hiring a full time employee.  Outsourcing definitely has its benefits.  It allows a company to use a service on an as-needed basis.  This way the company only has to pay for this service when necessary   Hiring a full time employee for a job that might not require full time hours, would be an unnecessary cost.

http://www.tvgconsulting.com/is-it-better-to-outsource-an-it-support-service-or-hire-some-people-in-house/