eNabling Your Business

It is safe to say that consumers have been adopting voice over IP (VOIP) in a big way. Vonage and similar services are continuing to increase their market share. This evolution is caused by the wide availability of high-speed Internet connections in homes, the high cost of copper wires from the local phone carrier, and general frustration with “The Phone Company”. The savings potential itself is big. I am in the process of switching from an $80/month phone line to a remote extension of my office phone system, which will be virtually free.

Mention VOIP to a small business owner however, and you are liable to invoke a look of horror. VOIP has gotten a bad reputation in the business community, largely due to poor quality Internet connections, unsupportive vendors, and the complexities of supporting VOIP on a business network. Many small businesses are choosing to sacrifice potentially big monthly savings just to hang onto their copper phone lines.

The bad reputation of VOIP in business is largely deserved, but fortunately, this is changing. Positive developments include:

Improved speed of Internet connections available to small businesses, and at a lower cost
VOIP carriers focused on the needs of business
Affordable phone systems that are equipped to support high-qualify VOIP connections
Plug and play network hardware that supports prioritization of VOIP network traffic (known as QoS) out of the box.
Excellent call quality (between 95% and 105% of the quality of a copper line phone call) on a properly implemented VOIP system.

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Adobe Security Vulnerability

In case you thought that a PDF file was safe from security threats, think again! Adobe announced on 4/27/09 that all current versions of Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have a flaw which can allow malicious Java Script programs to run. The recommend doing the following as an interim fix:

Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader
Select Edit>Preferences
Select the JavaScript Category
Uncheck the 'Enable Acrobat JavaScript' option
Click OK

We will monitor this situation and advise when a fix is released. In the interim, we advise all Adobe users to make the above change.

Read full security advisory

Lowering the Cost of Online Backups

We at eNable have been long-time advocates of Internet-based backup services. Tape, DVD and external drive backup systems all depend on human intervention to work. It is all too easy to forgot to change the tape, or to start the manual backup process. Thus, you discover that the backup you critically need was never made.

With an Internet backup however, the process happens automatically. The backup application wakes up in the middle of the night, and uses your Internet connection to make a backup to a remote data center. Your data is encrypted with a key known only to you, so your data is safe.

The cost of Internet backup services has continued to drop in recent months due to the greatly reduced cost of disk drives. We have recently reviewed the available services, and we think that iDrive currently offers the best value for business.

If you are not doing backups, or are using tape or DVD, consider switching to an Internet-based service like iDrive.

More about iDrive