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Marketing Your Business

Marketing your business means letting people know that you are around and that what you do and how you do it is amazing. Whether you are working as a DJ or growing your carpet cleaning company, marketing is a key to growth and success. Here are four things you can do to market your business.

1. Have a financial plan. You will have to invest money in your company between business cards, a website, and equipment. One way you can start out slow is by opening a prepaid reach visa card. This acts as a credit card, but spends only the money you put on it.

2. Create a website. Many web hosts will have pre-created sites that you can drop your information into with minimal effort, but you may want to consider hiring someone to give you something more unique to your field or company.

3. Start a Facebook page for your company. Once you have a clientele, you need to continue to connect with them, letting them know what you are up to, as well as staying in tune with what they are saying. The client-company relationship is the most important thing to remember in business.

4. Send out postcards and email promotions. If you are trying to decide between postcards and email, note the pros and cons of both. Email is free, but is more likely to be discarded by readers. Postcards cost more, but they can have more presence and may be read more often.

By taking these steps to give your company presence and to connect to your clients, you will be on the right path to a strong company.

Filed Under: Business, Computers Tagged With: , ,

Social Networking for Non-Profit

Twitter can be an excellent resource for non-profit organizations to use. Although Facebook is more popular, Twitter can be just as effective if utilized correctly.

Social networks like Twitter are a good way to reach out to other non-profit organizations to let them know the latest news about what is going on within your organization. This is a great way to inform them about events such as:

  • Fundraisers
  • Special holiday donations
  • Networking events
  • New Hires and organization changes

Twitter can also assist in keeping people up to the minute with news instead of writing traditional newsletters or an email blast. If you have to include more information than just a blurb, you can include a link to your Twitter message with the details. This will save you time as well. Millions of organizations do this, like Kars 4 Kids, to keep the public notified in a timely fashion.

One thing to remember is that it’s all about outreach to let others know who you are. In order to get a good following, tweet as much as possible about your organization. Soon you will be featured as, “a tweet to follow” and your tweets will be visible to others to connect to you. Also, you want to include your Twitter address in your emails and any other advertisement you use to promote yourself. This will attract people to join your page so they can follow you. Of course, word of mouth is always a selling point that never goes out of style!

Filed Under: Computers, Technology Tagged With: , ,

Types of Firewalls

All businesses that have computers connected to the Internet need to have a robust firewall system in place. Selecting a firewall is not that easy at it looks, and can become a thorn in the flesh. Given the variety and plenitude of products in the market, there is an embarrassment of choices. This article attempts to explain the types of firewall technologies prevalent now.

Application Gateways

Application Gateway or proxy gateways, comprise of bastion computer hosts that primarily function in a second-fiddle way. In other words they function as proxy servers. The firewall software on the bastion host computer works closely with the application layer of the OSI model. Client applications using the bastion hosts as a shield will have to configure themselves to route all requests through this bastion host.

Packet-filtering Gateway

Application gateways are more expensive than packet-filtering systems. This is because packet-filtering happens at the transport layer, more than the application layer. Routers are engaged to do packet-filtering tasks mostly.
Packet-filtering gateways are much faster due to the fact that they work at the transport layer. This means a host computer can use as many applications, and not worry of any obstruction to application performance.

But packet-filtering has its problems. Giving access to packets based on the IP addresses enclosed in the data packets is not foolproof. Packet-filtering gateways might not be intelligible enough to understand what is a genuine IP address and what is a fake IP address.

Hybrid Gateways

Hybrid gateway computers or systems combine application gateway with packet-filtering gateways. So it is like creating a new system that has security and speed. Because application gateways are more secure, and packet-filtering gateways are more faster.

Hybrid gateways make sure if a new data packet is a genuine one at the application layer. Then the session layer takes over. Packet-filtering mechanisms watch the whole session and ascertain if the packets are coming from the original source. If not they block it.

Filed Under: Computers Tagged With: , ,

Comparing kinds of Firewalls

Host, Network, and Enterprise Firewalls

Host firewalls are also called personal firewalls, as they are intended for personal use, and protect one computer. Network firewalls on the other hand give anti-virus protection to several computers. Not all network firewalls are similar in function, some may do better than the others.

Host firewalls are inexpensive when compared to network firewalls. Many direct subscriber line connections from the Internet service provider to the customer have network firewalls installed at the starting point.

Then there is another extension, or you could say, contextually different network firewall called enterprise firewall. Enterprise firewalls are designed to handle criss crossing and complex network infrastructure. They are expensive and need specialized knowledge to manage them.

Enterprise firewalls can handle more network users than network firewalls. They also have a centralized managerial capability of being able to handle many firewalls under their jurisdiction. The reporting and monitoring formats and methodologies of these firewalls are comprehensive and more detailed.

Enterprise firewalls can set multi-user policies which is a limitation with network firewalls. In organizations with many employees doing various types of jobs, this kind of access hierarchy or privilege is required. Unlike network firewalls, enterprise firewalls have high availability, and have fail-over mechanisms by using server-clustering technology.

Hardware and Software Firewalls

Hardware firewalls are quite confusing. That’s because firewalls work on firewall software that is stored on the hardware of the system. Actually, such a term is used for pre-installed firewall software. It also refers to certain firewalls that can only be installed on specific operating systems.

Software firewalls can be enterprise firewalls and personal firewalls. Hardware firewalls are understood to be ready to use upon delivery. Those that come with proprietary operating systems have more robustness in terms of security and reliability.

Hardware firewalls leave customers with no flexibility of adding network interfaces to the list, and the number of network interfaces that the firewall can take are pre-decided by the vendor.

Filed Under: Computers, Internet Tagged With: , ,

Why do we need firewalls?

There is plenty of reason to value the importance of firewalls. If any business operates without a robust firewall technology, then that business should operate without using computers or without using computers connected by way of a network.

Firewalls prevent and cure. But more importantly prevent something from happening, since prevention is the best form of cure. Firewalls protect confidential data of a company, which may be otherwise easily monitored from another computer. Without firewalls, there could be loss of data, data corruption, and data thievery.

Viruses are being invented on a daily basis by hackers. Some virus attacks have ways to not pass through the firewall. The firewall can’t do much on that. Firewalls also have multiple points of failure. If one point fails, it can trigger a chain or reactions to open up the whole network to intruders.

A business will store so many types of data. It could be project blue-prints, employee bank details, client information, competitor information, and so on. All these data are very critical and private. A firewall will protect such data by stopping unauthorized access. To use an analogy, just imagine your house was your computer. If you don’t employ a security guard at the gate, plenty of people might come to your house, and eventually one day, find a way to get into your house. So just like you employ the guard at the gate, so too you use a firewall on your computer.

A network can get hijacked and be held captive by hackers. Using all your network resources network hijackers will manipulate all data, and eventually bring the whole network down to its knees. Its almost like a cyber terrorist attack. Loss of networks, hijacked networks, and sabotaged networks all give away millions of dollars of money as losses. Such Denial-of-service attacks will freeze all network resources, and the amount of money required to bring back to speed is high.

Filed Under: Computers, Internet Tagged With: , ,