They are QR (Quick Response) codes, also known as 2D bar codes, and may appear in magazines, on signs, on buses, on business cards, or on almost any object about which users might need information. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone’s browser.

Many Android, Nokia, and Blackberry handsets come with QR code readers installed. QR reader software is available for most mobile platforms. Moreover, there are a number of online QR code generators which enable users to create QR codes for their own needs.

However, there have been warnings from mobile security firms, who are urging caution over the use of QR Codes on smartphones, claiming that they could become a likely target for hackers and malicious users. So watch out, because while QR codes make things run faster and easier, they can also pose a threat to your mobile security as you don’t know what you are downloading until it’s on your phone already. Nobody would use a laptop without some sort of specific anti-virus and internet security, but how secure is your smartphone?

Here is an example of someone searching for “DVLA Phone”:  http://contactnumber.org.uk/DVLA/Dv1.html

which gives 09040 490449 to call for a fixed cost of £1.53

Whilst 09 numbers are regulated to prevent people being misled, this site complies with the regulations by explaining how much it would cost to call the 09 number on the website.  Obviously many people don’t read that and incur a cost when they could find the number for free elsewhere.

Information on some internet forums states people believe they did not call the numbers and that some technical mechanism has been used to scam them.  If someone truly believes this to be the case, they can contact their phone company.  Also if a company has its own phone system which logs numbers dialled, this would show the exact digits dialled and which extension did it.

Googling “DVLA Phone” today brings the site at the top of the list.

It is not unusual to hear entire departments within an organisation extolling the virtues of cloud computing which is the general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet.

A cloud based service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand; a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access).

While there can be benefits in adopting services offered by a cloud service provider, the applicability of these services will depend on the business needs and profile of the enterprise. Not all services will be applicable for all organisations.

For example, an organisation with multiple sites, employees working from home and/or a sales team who are on the road may get greater benefit than an organisation without these facets within it.

It is therefore imperative that before deciding on the technology that will deliver a comprehensive IT solution a detailed requirements specification of business needs is first put together. Decide what the organisation requires to meet its aims and objectives before deciding how it will be delivered.

Expense Reduction Analysts IT Solutions and Services can help you specify new IT solution requirements; engage with potential suppliers; objectively evaluate products and service offerings and negotiate sound supply and service contracts. In this way you get the solution that meets your current and future needs, not what the salesman is trying to sell you.

If you do decide to go down the cloud computing route here are some key considerations:

• What are the total costs for the solution.
• Are you looking for a bespoke system, or could you use a system ‘out of the box’? Cloud based services are typically expensive to customise.
• Where is your data being held? Does the supplier give you any guarantees about its safety?
• What would happen if the system went down because of technical issues experienced by the supplier? Could you survive without it?
• How long would you use the system for? Vendor lock-in is one of the major issues in cloud based services. Changing suppliers within a cloud environment may be more challenging than migrating with on-premise software
• What due diligence have you undertaken on the cloud supplier? Will they still be there tomorrow? What would happen to your data and service if your supplier disappears?
• How is your demand for using the cloud services provided by the vendor? Is it mostly constant or widely varying? Cloud services can be most cost effective for varying demands than for constant demand.
• What is the frequency of usage? Very frequent usage may make less economic sense in a cloud based ‘Pay as you Go’ model.

The above list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, and is only an extract of the type of questions Expense Reduction Analysts IT Services & Solutions would consider when recommending a suitable solution.

In early October 2011, many Blackberry customers experienced service interruptions and delays for up to 3 days in some areas. The affected regions included Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, Canada, and the United States. As of Thursday, October 13, service levels returned to normal.

This highlighted the need to consider risk management within communications, and what would an organisation be able to survive, should anything go wrong. However, there is a very clear cost element when implementing comprehensive backup provisions and as Blackberry experienced, do you need a back up for your back up system?

Whilst mobile communications are one area of the risk management programme, increased use of the internet within organisations may be of more concern. What would happen if you couldn’t pay your staff’s wages online? What if you were unable to pay an invoice in time? Would your credit rating be affected or would the supplier stop working with you entirely?

The Communication’s Team at Expense Reduction Analysts have experience in managing risk management issues, and are happy to discuss any concerns you may have.

What to look out for in 2012:

• Within the communications’ sector, there is still scope for reducing the costs that are being charged to organisations as the amount of providers has increased, all offering different tariffs and service levels. How much are you spending on communications? How much would a 19% saving represent to your organisation?
• One area of concern for organisations is the volume of calls being made when compared between mobile phones and landlines. Historically, there used to be a 50/50 split between landlines and mobile calls, but more recently there has been a significant rise in mobile usage, with a ratio of 80/20 being more common. Is your organisation on the right tariffs? Are your employees using their mobile phones out of work hours?

Phonepayplus, the regulator, has just found against two Service Providers who misled people into faxing a premium rate service.

In both cases people had been requested to send faxes to Premium rate numbers without being informed of the cost or that it was a premium rate number, in breach of the Code of Practice. Fines were imposed and also a ban was put in place on the Service Providers being involved in, or contracting for, the provision of any premium rate services for 12 months.

Claims for refunds are also to be paid. The costs to any individual company are likely to be insignificant but incidents such as these show why regular reviews of detailed call charges are important to identify abnormal items and trends.

We need to get back to allowing conversation to occur without texting, e-mailing, browsing, Tweeting, Facebooking, or doing whatever else we do these days on smart phones, iPads, notebooks, etc. As 2012 fast approaches, this needs to go on top of our New Year’s resolution list: focus on the live conversations at hand, rather than conversations on the screen.

But the bigger need is just for more live conversations to occur, period. This is especially true when people are trying to resolve a conflict or communicate an important business decision. There is a rising and unproductive trend towards people trying to do digital conflict resolution. The de facto path for issue resolution seems to be increasingly via email. More accurately, e-mail has become a convenient mechanism for issue-avoidance. It is easier, quicker, less stressful, and less confrontational to have critical or challenging issues sent over e-mail, versus a live one-on-one with a counterpart.

Like many, I have experienced too many unproductive strings of back-and-forth emails. The problems with trying to resolve sensitive matters over email or text are quite obvious:

1. It is hard to get the EQ (emotional intelligence) right in e-mail. The biggest drawback and danger with e-mail is that the tone and context are easy to misread. In a live conversation, how one says something, with modulations and intonations, is as important as what is said. With e-mail it is hard to get the feelings behind the words.

2. E-mail and text often promote reactive responses, as opposed to progress and action to move forward. One suggestion is not to react to any incendiary message until you have at least had a night to sleep on it. While by definition reactive responses occur in live discourse, they are usually more productive. The irony is that while e-mail has the potential to be more thoughtful, it often promotes the opposite tendency. Why? Because the bark is almost always bigger than the bite behind remote digital shields.

3. E-mail prolongs debate. Because of the two reasons above, I have seen too many debates continue well beyond the point of usefulness. Worse, I have experienced situations which start relatively benignly over e-mail, only to escalate because intentions and interests are easily misunderstood online. When I ask people if they have called or asked to meet the counterpart to try and reach a resolution, there is usually a pause, then a sad answer of “no.”

E-mail is one of the greatest productivity contributors of the past two decades, and social communication platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have fundamentally changed and positively enriched the means and reach with which we are able to interact. Yet we have to recognise when such digital channels cannot substitute for a live conversation. E-mail and social networking modes of communications have created a generation of casually convenient new connections, and even helped us deepen existing relationships, but they can rarely replace the real world. As digital communication accelerates the pace at which people form and broaden relationships, it is also decreasing the rate at which people are willing to resolve issues professionally and directly in-person.

The next time you experience an issue over e-mail, ask yourself if it is something that would be better served by a real conversation. Then have the courage to stop e-mailing and pick up the phone.

Or even better: have a meeting.

(Courtesy: Anthony K Tjan)

In a recent survey of IT professionals by Lieberman Software some startling insights were revealed into security practices particularly in the area of password management. Portions of the survey focused on the numbers of passwords in use, sharing of privileged passwords, organizational security and other areas. The respondents to the survey worked in organizations ranging from fewer than 100 to more than 10,000 employees.

The data reveals a fundamental lack of IT security awareness particularly in the area of password control and privileged logins. For example, 42% of the 300 plus IT professionals surveyed said that in their company two or more IT staff shared password access systems or applications. Whenever passwords are shared in this way there is no way to attribute loss of data or other damaging changes to any one individual.

Moreover, almost 50% of the administrator passwords for a system, network device or application were going unchanged for more than 90 days. There is a risk that within these organisations they may be non-compliant with common standards such as PCI DSS the information security standard for organisations that handle cardholder information for the major debit and credit cards.

Possibly more worrying was the finding that 25% of respondents said that privileged account passwords used to grant “super-user” access to systems and applications are sometimes less complex than normal user network logins. These organisations core systems may be less well protected against malicious intruders and malware than are the organizations’ normal users!

Nearly half of the respondents commented that they had worked for a company whose network had been breached by a hacker.

It would seem that unless the board of directors of a company pay far more attention to IT security policies and procedures they are running the risk of major data losses and reputational damage and may be in breach of their responsibilities as a Director.

If you would like help in forming or reviewing your IT policies and procedures our auditing your compliance Expense Reduction Analysts IT Solutions and Services offers this as part of our portfolio of Strategic IT Advisory services.

From April 2011, OFCOM has enforced a reduction in Mobile Termination Rate (MTR).

The MTR is the amount that the Mobile Network can charge the originating network (e.g. BT) for inbound calls to their network, this has been reduced from 4.18p/ min to 2.66p/min.

For example, this means that it now costs BT less to route your call to a Vodafone mobile and O2 less to route your call to an Orange mobile. Essentially, it is now cheaper to route all cross network calls to mobiles.

But there is evidence that these savings are not being passed on to all end-users, so companies should scrutinise their bills carefully to see if they are actually benefiting from this reduction.

The MTR was originally introduced to allow the Mobile Network Service Providers to recoup their investment in building the network infrastructures but OFCOM, under sustained pressure from BT, has decided that the Service Providers have had sufficient time to cover those investments and over the next few years MTR will drop to close to 1p/min.

However, this is not all good news; The reduction in MTR will impact the revenues of the Mobile Network Service Providers and whilst the strong levels of competition will prevent them from increasing their headline business rates they will be looking for areas where they can up their prices and it is likely that the hardest hit will be payas- you-go customers.

The Expense Reduction Analysts Communications Team have tools to quickly and easily analyse your communications costs and advise you on how to get the best value from your suppliers.

Ofcom have confirmed (13th September 2011) that rollover contracts, which tie landline and broadband customers into repeated minimum contract periods unless they opt out, will be banned from December this year.

The contracts, also known as Automatically Renewable Contracts (ARC’s), roll forward to a new minimum contract period – with penalties for leaving – unless the customer actively opts out of the renewal. The ban will apply to ARC’s for landline and broadband services sold to residential and small business customers.

This will not benefit larger business customers, though it is possible for them to exit some current contracts without penalty prior to their anniversary by undertaking the correct process.

A 2010 report from The Communication Fraud Control Association ranked the UK as a top five global hot spot for communication fraud, including telephone hacking, which was estimated to be running at up to $80bn worldwide. According to research, the UK joined Cuba, the Philippines, Lichtenstein and India where the biggest outbreaks are concentrated, with problems continuing to escalate.

The Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation says Irish firms could be paying out up to €75 million a year for PBX fraud, although the true figure is predicted to be much higher.

Within the communication industry, it is thought that fraud is increasing, probably as a result of new opportunities and changing technology.

Telephone fraud can take place in a number of guises and has been around for years. Generally, such fraud involves either making phone calls at your company’s expense, directly from your offices, such as employees’ or third parties with access to your handsets making personal calls directly from your offices;, or through unauthorised access such as hacking into your PBX and/or telephone system.

Inevitably, technology develops on and the risks and opportunities continue to change which means companies need to be on their guard and ensure they are protected from significant loss. As telephone systems become more integrated into company systems and networks, and with as the convergence of voice and data proceeds, they need to be protected with firewalls, etc.. Modern phone systems using internet technology can be hacked into like any other computer system and unauthorised calls made at your expense including calls to premium rate numbers. Whilst technology changes, security principles sometimes don’t keep pace, and often there is a gap in security which can be exploited until people understand the implications, change practices to cope or wait for technical solutions to appear.

To mitigate the risks you need a combination of PREVENTION and DETECTION measures in place, such as:

• Institute Policies for personal calls by staff
• Ensure you apply your security policies for access, passwords, etc. equally to phone systems
• Know who is able to gain access to your phone systems (including suppliers) and how
• Ensuring suppliers comply with your security policies or tell you what theirs are
• Reviewing the call records from your phone bills to identify any misuse
• Set up alerts if your supplier provides them, e.g., to warn you if daily spend exceeds a fixed amount or to warn if call costs to specific call types exceed a fixed amount
• Implement or turn on call logging on your system and enable reports to detect misuse before your bill arrives
• Control any modems which allow dial-up access to phone systems

It is a major challenge for many companies to keep on top of the highly complex and constantly evolving communications market, as well as ensuring they have the right technology, procurement and cost management practices in place.

Our in-depth knowledge of the communications market and the technologies involved, and our relationships with suppliers, put the Expense Reduction Analysts Communications Team in an ideal position to provide offer companies with the best possible value in this area, as well as being able to provide valued advice through our consultancy services.

This article was featured in the July 2011 Edition of the Profit News. Click here to download a copy of the July 2011 Profit News