Riverbank It management

The US parent company of retailer TK Maxx has agreed to pay out $9.75m as the settlement for its data security breach. The security breach enabled an international gang to connect to its wireless network and access credit card details being transmitted from its tills.

It's a lot of money to pay for an unsecured wireless network, and the moral is clear. Make sure your wireless network is secure, because the damage to your bank balance and your company reputation could be severe.

If you need help or advice about your wireless network, just ask Riverbank.

Riverbank will be exhibiting at Venturefest, the business event that links investors, entrepreneurs and innovators, on 29 June at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford. It’s a great opportunity to network with an interesting group of people from businesses across the south-east region.

We look forward to seeing you there.

If you use an Outlook calendar here are some suggestions that might make life just a tiny bit better. Note that some of these ideas assume you are connected to a network with Microsoft Exchange.

1. Create a shared calendar.
If you work with others, create a shared calendar so you can see what everyone is doing, make appointments, set meetings etc.

If your business is to succeed in these challenging times you know that it needs to run as efficiently as it can. Your company’s internal web site, an intranet, is a key component in building business efficiency.

You can create whatever you need to help your business. Using Microsoft SharePoint your intranet can be your company noticeboard, your staff handbook, your document library, or your knowledge base. One Riverbank client uses SharePoint for their vital quality control procedures, and another uses it to share selected documents with their clients.

We recently completed another round of PC health checks for Riverbank clients. They know that the occasional check-up does their computers a power of good.

People often complain that their PC is getting slower, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Your computer gradually accumulates temporary files that have been left behind, more programs are automatically loaded during startup, and the files on the disk become more fragmented. Outlook also becomes slower as e-mails accumulate and the underlying data store becomes more bloated. All this makes your PC slower, and you spend longer waiting while the disk rattles away and the computer takes time to catch up with you.

What you can do and how well you can do it depends on the quality of your Internet connection. You need to be ready to cope with a great connection, limited connectivity, or none at all. It also depends on what equipment you have with you – your laptop computer, a mobile phone, or nothing at all.

Here are some ideas that work well and will help you to extract value from every moment of your working day.

If you would like to spread the cost of your IT project, ask about our financing options. Riverbank can help with financing from Microsoft.

Microsoft financing is particularly appealing because it provides a single source of finance not just for Microsoft software but hardware and services too. You also protect your bank credit and other lines of credit to your business.

No deposit is required and repayments can be spread over a period of two to five years, with a very competitive fixed interest rate. Simple documentation also makes administration very straightforward.

The Palm Pre, due to be launched this summer, could become the next must-have gadget and a rival to the iPhone. It's a very attractive touch-screen phone, but unlike the iPhone it also features a Qwerty keyboard.

It's much better to see it than talk about it, so take a look the PC Pro video, then decide it's something you simply must have. 

You need to work from home, yet still be productive. You need to be able to work as effectively when you are away from the office as you can when you are in the office.

What technologies work well, are easy to use and reliable? The answer is that you have a range of options, starting with the simple and inexpensive, and moving up to highly secure remote access systems.

But working from home is about more than just technology. You also need to think about protecting your data, and managing and involving your team.

Where are you leaving your data? Could sensitive or confidential information be leaking out of your business through use of insecure USB data sticks? Your potential losses might not be as dramatic as MI6 or the British Council (see the news items below), but they could still have serious implications for your business.

In a blunder that has cost taxpayers millions of pounds and put scores of lives at risk, the drugs liaison officer lost a [unencrypted] computer memory stick said to contain a list of undercover agents' names and details of more than five years of intelligence work.