Maria Korolov » Entries tagged with "Treasury & Risk"
Cyber Security Review
As threats proliferate, here are five areas where companies need to strengthen and update their policies and practices. It’s particularly galling when a company specializing in security issues gets monumentally hacked. That was the case for Stratfor, which suffered a massive data breach just before the holidays that exposed thousands of client names, e-mail addresses and credit card numbers. Adding insult to injury, hacktivist group Anonymous revealed on Twitter that it was able to get at … Read entire article »
The Little Shop for Apps
To cut costs and ensure security, companies adopt a retail model for distributing apps for mobile devices to their employees. Enterprise use of smart phones and tablets is exploding, but letting employees buy applications on their own from the iTunes or Android app stores can become a logistical and security nightmare. Instead, companies are setting up their own stores so they can centralize app procurement; automatically provision and de-provision software; and even distribute their own custom-made … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles
Fail-Safe for Clouds
Companies with backup systems in place kept their businesses running when a major outage at Amazon shut down websites. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) outage that brought down a number of major Websites in mid-April, including social network sites Foursquare, HootSuite and Reddit, underscores the value of backup for cloud users—on traditional servers, another cloud or even another zone of their provider’s cloud. Amazon took the blame for the disruption, which involved the cloud’s Elastic … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles
Putting IPads to Work
Spurred by enthusiastic senior executives and rank-and-file employees, companies are starting to roll out iPads in the enterprise, especially for board meetings and sales staff. New security features from Apple and additional security and management tools from third-party vendors are boosting that effort, but companies are wary of employees’ using their own iPads and putting sensitive customer data on the devices. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that “employee demand for iPad in the corporate environment remains … Read entire article »
Cloud Containment
As cloud vendors mature, Web-based delivery of applications, storage and infrastructure is getting more secure and trustworthy. That doesn’t mean that the risks are gone–they’ve just migrated to a more difficult-to-manage form. Today, big-name cloud providers like Salesforce.com offer top-notch security, auditability and compliance. Even Google provides a compliant e-mail hosting solution for regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Providers can now meet cor- porate needs, experts say, as long as companies do their security … Read entire article »
Filed under: Journalism
Driving Monitor
If an iPhone can make people healthier by tracking how many steps they take, why can’t something similar make cars and trucks safer by monitoring drivers’ behavior? Telematics equipment–black boxes–has been available for years, helping companies track the locations of their vehicles and the speeds at which they are traveling. Now the devices have become more affordable–and smart enough–to be used to identify unsafe driver behaviors. In January, global insurance giant Zurich announced a product … Read entire article »
Filed under: Articles
Watch Your Avatars
Enterprise software helps set rules for virtual worlds Consumer-friendly technologies like Web-based e-mail and instant messaging, Twitter and Facebook have all brought compliance challenges, with companies typically reacting after something has gone wrong. With virtual environments and meetings, however, companies can get ahead of the trend, setting guidelines and preferred platforms before employees start adopting their own. Enterprise-class platforms like Teleplace and ProtoSphere allow companies to control when new users … Read entire article »
Sorting Out Sales
Changes to revenue recognition rules may be beneficial but will lead to accounting headaches that new software can relieve. Last September, regulators issued new revenue recognition rules that allow companies to book product and service sales separately—a boost for the balance sheet, but a big accounting hassle. Prior to the new rules, effective 1Q of fiscal 2011, if a company sold a product bundled with a service contract, the revenue was allocated … Read entire article »
Six Steps to Better IT GRC
Securing corporate IT systems is crucial, but there are ways to make that effort more productive and less costly. Companies have spent years beefing up their information technology governance, risk and compliance systems. With cutting costs now top of mind in corporate America, here are six ways to make IT GRC systems more productive and less costly. 1. Automate access controls. Today, most companies use a manual process to add users to … Read entire article »
Taming Spreadsheets
New software products aim to help companies get the whip hand over ubiquitous but risky spreadsheets. Concur Technologies helps companies automate the processes by which they manage employee travel and entertainment spending, but some of its own processes aren’t fully automated. “We’re like everyone,” says Terry DePolo, Concur’s director of accounting. “We’re trying to minimize the number of spreadsheets we rely on. We’re currently on the Oracle 11i system, and it’s … Read entire article »