Tag Archive for Business

RB | June 15, 2011
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More Firms Investigating Internet Liability Insurance

Enterprises now face the question of determining the right kinds of cyber insurance to buy in addition to the other traditional insurance that covers the risk of doing business. Internet Evolution asks, “What would you pay to be insured against data loss or theft”? While cyber insurance of all kinds has been around for a while, more firms than ever are seriously considering it, as data breaches, Web fraud, and security breaches continue to make headlines.

Tracey Vispoli, global financial fidelity manager for Chubb, told Internet Evolution, “Although I would still characterize business interest in cyber insurance as emerging, we saw a 40 percent growth in firms securing some form of Internet liability insurance in 2009.” Chubb provides Internet liability and other insurance coverage for businesses worldwide.  “I’ve been talking with several insurance companies now about entering the cyber-insurance area,” says Paul Sop, CTO for computer security and consulting firm Prolexic Technologies Inc.

For insurers like Chubb, the Internet provides an opportunity to develop new products to meet emerging business needs. For potential business clients, Internet insurance plugs gaps in Chubbcoverage that current business insurance policies don’t address. The article says the gaps include:

  • Website-related losses,
  • Website copyright infringements,
  • Cyber-attacks and
  • Unauthorized online access to customer information.

“We encourage companies to think not only about their Web-based assets, but also about their entire technology base when they consider insurance,” Ms. Vispoli told Internet Evolution. This includes not only cyber-attacks that directly target the Website from the Internet, but also breaches of confidential corporate data such as customer and employee records. Ms. Vispoli explained  that at least 45 states require a company whose data is compromised to send out official notifications to all those affected.

Someone from the outside can hack into your employee or customer information, and then there’s the financial pressure of not only fixing the breach and taking action, but also of notifying potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals whose information has been compromised.

The article says that the cost of notification alone can be worth insuring, but there are other costs as well. As recently as five years ago, companies were not required to send out notices nor did they spend the amount of money that it takes today to bring in a forensics team to analyze a cyber breach and find the hack.

The cost of Internet liability and other e-commerce-related insurance varies, depending on the risk factors a given organization presents. Internet Evolution says  one  of the variables is the amount of online sales it books each year. Common types of cyber-insurance that are available today include:

  • Technology professional liability,
  • Media errors and omissions,
  • Telecommunications professional liability and
  • Computer information and data security liability.

“We are seeing an aggressive trend in businesses subscribing to cyber-insurance, especially in industry sectors like healthcare, financial services, retail, services companies like hotel chains and media,” Ms. Vispoli said in the article. “Depending on the size of the organization, we might be contacted for coverage information by a Chief Security Officer, or possibly by a CFO or CIO.” All of them see growing exposures from e-theft, e-fraud, compromise of critical data, loss of goodwill, e-threats and vandalism, denial of service, copyright infringement, and regulatory compliance issues.

What do you think?

Does your organization have cyber insurance?

has any ever really gotten  full pay out from an insurance company?

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Category: Business | Tags: , , ,
RB | August 23, 2010
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80% of US Job Seekers Wont Get Jobs Soon

The U.S. Labor Department recently reported that the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5%.   The analysts at Chart of the Day crunched some numbers and it looks like the U.S. is not out of the economic woods yet.  According to Chart of the Day, assuming that the depression, economic uncertainty, recession ended in June 2009, the current unemployment rate is exactly where it was at the end of the recession (9.5%). They offer some perspective on the current state of the labor market, their chart illustrates the amount of time it took for the unemployment rate to ultimately dip below (and stay below) its recession-end level for each recession since the late 1940s.

For example, at the end of the recession that ended in November 1982, the unemployment rate stood at 10.8%. As the chart illustrates, it took two months for the unemployment rate to drop below (and stay below) the recession-end level of 10.8%.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) pointed out last March that to absorb the nearly 15 million officially unemployed workers in this country, plus the roughly 2.6 million “marginally attached” workers (jobless workers who want a job but have given up actively seeking work and are not counted as officially unemployed), job openings and hiring must rebound dramatically.

The latest EPI numbers say that for every job filled, there are still 5 people who cannot find a job. In this environment of constant right-sizing, resource actions, mass-hiring, firms are stock-piling cash and not making things. The cash stock-piles are huge. The BusinessInsider has this graphic which says it all in my opinion.

Bloomberg reported in February that a  majority of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index increased cash to a combined $1.18 trillion while simultaneously reducing spending, keeping a jobs recovery on hold. Bloomberg reports that firms such as:

  • Caterpillar Inc.
  • Eaton Corp.
  • Walgreen Co.
  • General Electric Co.

are among 256 companies that ended last quarter with billions more cash than a year earlier after cutting capital spending by 43 percent. Bloomberg economists say the dearth of investment is keeping the jobless rate at about 10 percent.

According to a Washington Post article,  non-financial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession. The Post sites a survey of more than 1,000 chief financial officers by Duke University and CFO magazine showed that nearly 60 percent of those executives don’t expect to bring their employment back to pre-recession levels until 2012 or later — even though they’re projecting a 12 percent rise in earnings and a 9 percent boost in capital spending over the next year.

It is noteworthy that, over the past two decades, it has taken much longer (on average) for the unemployment rate to drop below its recession-end level. The reasons for this increased time for the unemployment rate to turn around varies. One explanation that Chart of the Day offers is that following World War II, the US found itself in a strong/dominant economic position. It took time, but eventually many of the remaining world economies began to recover and we are now witnessing increased competition as a result of the rise of the rest.

If it globalization or corporate greed, the lack of jobs in the U.S. means 80% of job seeks are out of luck. “The 5-to-1 ratio means that there is literally only one job opening for every five unemployed workers. That is, for every four out of five unemployed workers there simply are no jobs.” explains EPI economist Heidi Shierholz.

Category: Recession | Tags: ,
RB | July 13, 2010
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Free AV Rules Market

OPSWAT, Inc. a provider of integration technologies to software developers and vendors recently released a report on the use of antivirus applications. According to the report, free products control 42% of the product market and vendors that primarily offer a free product have a 48% market share.

The top 10 Windows antivirus applications for January to May 2010 according to OPSWAT were:

  • avast! Free Antivirus 11.45%
  • Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus 9.19%
  • AVG AntiVirus Free 8.6%
  • Microsoft Security Essentials 7.48%
  • avast! Antivirus 5.4%
  • Kaspersky Internet Security 4.48%
  • Norton AntiVirus 4.24%
  • ESET NOD32 Antivirus 3.84%
  • avast! Antivirus Professional 3.5%
  • McAfee VirusScan 3.26%

This data indicates that free products account for 42% of the market.

From a vendor perspective,  European vendors, which include: AVAST, Avira, AVG, ESET, Panda, BitDefender, G Data and Sophos total just over 50% of the market. Whereas US-based vendors, which include: Symantec, Microsoft, McAfee, PC Tools and Sunbelt make up just over 30%.vendors that primarily offer a free product have a 48% market share.

The top 10 Windows antivirus vendors by market share for January to May 2010 according to OPSWAT were:

  • AVAST Software 19.14%
  • Avira GmbH 11.39%
  • Symantec Corp. 10.06%
  • Microsoft Corp. 9.29%
  • AVG Technologies 9%
  • McAfee, Inc. 7.3%
  • Kaspersky Labs 5.96%
  • ESET Software 5.66%
  • Panda Software 3.44%
  • Trend Micro, Inc. 2.8%

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According to the firm’s web site, OPSWAT collected information from tens of thousands of volunteers out of the 50 million endpoints that use the OESIS Framework and the free Am I OESIS OK? online utility which with which end users can check the interoperability and quality level of their applications.  I have said this before, with other fun factoids like this, the adoption rate of the vendors tools may skew the results. None-the-less it is notable that

  • Microsoft, not usually seen as a security vendor has captured a significant share with their recent anti-virus solutions and could be a legitimate challenger to pure-play security players Symantec and McAfee.
  • Symantec and McAfee who are often seen as the top choices in the U.S. do not do well in this list. This data seems to show that AV competition is alive and well in the highly fragmented consumer sector.
  • The fragmented market-place may help keep innovation active in the AV market, which is a good thing in the face of the increasing variety of threats from malware.

So despite the claims of this or that vendor to dominate a market based on sales numbers, the OPSWAT data seems to show that end users have developed a degree of trust  in the ability of free antivirus applications to keep them secure as they do paid antivirus.

Category: Malware, Security | Tags: ,
RB | October 30, 2009
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2010 Not Any Better – Maybe

recessionGartner says that IT spending experienced its worst year ever in 2009. The Stamford Connecticut research firm says the enterprise space saw a spending decline of 6.9 percent. ChannelInsider reports that the industry won’t reach 2008′s spending levels again until 2012 according to Gartner. In the mean time there will be some growth in 2010. Gartner projects a 3.3 percent increase over 2009 levels to $3.3 trillion.

“2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth,” says Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, in a prepared statement. “For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.” On the other hand Forrester has a rosier picture. In their report released 10-08-09 “US and Global IT Outlook: Q3 2009“, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels, says the global IT market will see an upturn, starting Q3 2009 in an article on Campus Technology.

According to Gartner things have been toughest on the hardware side of the computer market. Gartner says that worldwide computer hardware spending will total just $317 billion this year, a 16.5 percent decline, and in 2010 hardware spending will remain flat. Forrester says computer equipment sales will increase by 8.3 percent in 2010. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent this year and is forecast to grow by 3.2 percent in 2010 according to Gartner. Forrester claims communications equipment sales will show a bump at 3.6 percent

Additionally, Gartner forecasts IT services spending to total $781 billion in 2009 and to grow 4.5 percent in 2010.  In their report Forrester predicts IT consulting services will increase by 11.7 percent in 2010 Software spending will decline 2.1 percent in 2009, but is expected to grow by 4.8 percent in 2010. Forrester says software purchases will be up by 9.3 percent in 2010.

Three big trends will shape the IT spending and operational infrastructure in 2010, according to Gartner—a shift in IT budgets to more opex from capex, the ramifications of an older infrastructure made up of older IT hardware, and the need for IT to create business cases for spending.

Gartner says the shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure in IT budgets will be accelerated by emerging cloud services and will make IT costs more scalable and elastic. The second trend comes from delays in computer hardware upgrades. As business has delayed buying servers, PCs and printers, and is expected to continue to keep wallets closed in 2010, they need to look at the impact of increased equipment failure rates. “Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010 it will be at least 2 million,” Gartner says.

“If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement by 2011,” Sondergaard says. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”

Third, Gartner says that IT needs to build compelling business cases, “2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.”

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From where I stand, the Gartner predictions seem more rational than Forrester’s. Forrester seems to basing their optimism on two fleeting factors, Obama-money and Microsoft. The only real beneficiaries of Obama-money has been Wall Street, not the rest of America, so stimulus spending is irrelevant to most American business. Forrester seems to believe that Windows 7 will save IT spending, another large leap of faith that businesses are going to jump on the bandwagon, but none of my clients seem ready to leap yet.

Category: Business, Recession | Tags: , , , ,
RB | October 15, 2009
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Brocade Selling Itself

network ChannelInsider citing the Wall Street Journal is  reporting that network equipment maker Brocade Communications Systems Inc. put itself up for sale on 10-05-09. The paper, citing people familiar with the matter, said Oracle Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co were potential bidders for the company, but a deal was not imminent and Brocade may not even go ahead with a sale. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told investors at Oracle’s annual shareholder conference Wednesday. “We have no interest in buying Brocade,”  in response to a question from an investor according to Fortune.

brocadeTo compete with much bigger rival Cisco Systems Inc, the company has been bolstering sales partnerships with large technology vendors such as IBM and Dell Inc to expand their customer reach. In an interview with Reuters last month, Brocade Chief Executive Michael Klayko had said he did not see a need for Brocade to merge with or acquire another company, citing the company’s expertise and partnerships. However, “Interest in Brocade is picking up, and it is unlikely the company put itself up for sale in the absence of third-party interest,” according to Goldman Sachs analyst Min Park. “Brocade is a likely strategic fit for a number of potential acquirers.” At Fortune, Park includes Hewlett Packard, Juniper, Dell, IBM  and Oracle among those.

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It is unlikely that Dell will purchase Brocade since Dell has Perot Systems to digest and a sales partnership with Brocade. Iuniper is not in the financial postion, but is the most need of the product. IBM is financailly cpable but the hardware business seems to be losing focus at Big Blue. That leaves HP  for three reasons, first it is financially capable, second it is looking to grow its ProCurve business and its EDS acquisition is well underway. The wild card could be Huawei, if they can get government approval. Of course, Brocade CEO Mike Klayko, just may have needed some extra pocket money as the Wall Street Journal article triggering a 14 percent jump in the company’s shares. Mr. Klayko’s $5 million in options increased by $700,000 in one day.

Category: Business, Networking | Tags: , ,
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