MYOB and the Cloud

In business you can’t stand still. Your world keeps changing, which presents new challenges and opportunities. One of the greatest opportunities available to businesses today is to take advantage of the power of the cloud. What’s the cloud? It’s a fashionable term for the internet.

The cloud fundamentally changes your world and how you connect with all the people you do business with. Business is no longer bound by time or geography. Your business can be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your office can now be where and when you want it to be – on the road, at home or overseas.

What is MYOB’s cloud strategy?

MYOB started out over 21 years ago with a clear vision … to make business life easier. We’ve continued to invest over $20M each year in enhancing and extending our business solutions as well as investing in new products and services that use the power of the cloud.

Innovation that makes business life easier. Since 2010 MYOB has delivered a number of significant online innovations that use the power of the cloud to make it easier to do more business, more easily. MYOB Live Accounts – MYOB’s simplest accounting solution ever, offering easy online accounting for less than $1 a day.

MYOB Account Right Live – a fully-featured accounting solution that gives you the choice of how you do the accounts: on your desktop, in the cloud or both. Account Right Live delivers a wide range of functionality including accounting, inventory, payroll, job-costing, time-billing and more.

MYOB Atlas – The easiest way for every business to create a website and sell online. Our website builder puts your business online in as little as 15 minutes.

Benefits of MYOB’s cloud accounting solutions

• Flexible – stay on top of your business when and where you want.
• Access – anyone, anywhere – if you have teams in multiple locations or a remote bookkeeper they can (with your permission) work on your accounting data, saving time and increasing efficiency.
• Bank feeds save time – Live Accounts and Account Right Live automatically link to over 100 banks and building societies in Australia and New Zealand. They will automatically bring your bank transactions in and allocate them to the right account, reducing data entry and saving you time.
• Easier and safer – you can use MYOB’s cloud solutions with the confidence that your vital business information is automatically backed up in a secure offsite location.

IP THEFT: How safe are you?

In recent months there has been a growing trend of Scammers pretending to be from Telstra/Bigpond. The scammers convince the people that they call up that there is an issue with their account’s security. They use this ruse to ask them to allow remote access to their system and gain access to their private information and exploit it for financial gains. The following is an example of one such occasion, “Telstra phoned and said someone in USA, Europe and Afghanistan has stolen my Bigpond and for the past 3 weeks has been using it 22 hours a day”.

Malicious Internet users stepped up data attacks on small businesses last year, states a report from the security company.

Do not think your small business won’t fall victim to some sort of Internet scam or malware attack.

Evidence is growing that small businesses are increasingly tempting targets of malicious Internet users.

Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report 2013 highlights the issues facing the small business sector, noting that small business attacks are a growth sector.

The report states that “the largest growth area for targeted attacks in 2012 was businesses with fewer than 250 employees; 31 percent of all attacks targeted them.”

That’s a threefold growth from the year before, indicating that small businesses may offer small rewards, but if they’re easy pickings, then malicious types targets them.

Symantec’s research tallies with what we’ve heard before: the retail sector is particularly at risk according to some experts. Others say the viewpoint that businesses may be “too small” to target is a particularly naive one.

Bottom line: if you have a small business, get professional data security advice.

How Vulnerable Are You to IP Theft?

If your intellectual property is digital, you’re at risk for online IP theft. But there are varying degrees of exposure. “It has to do with how valuable a target you present and how well-defended you are,” explains O. Sami Saydjari, president of security consultancy Cyber Defense Agency.

The types of organizations that currently face the highest risk include:

• Large, globally distributed organizations
• Small to midsize businesses in niche markets
• Companies with foreign partners or that sell directly in foreign markets
• Organizations with decentralized IT
• Military or government organizations that rely heavily on contractors and suppliers
• Industries like telecommunications that supply critical national infrastructure

Organizations lacking executive sponsorship of security issues, technical enforcement of security policies, adequate security monitoring or process/preparedness for dealing with security breaches

External partners, locally and globally, are a major source of risk. “You can spend millions on your own defenses,” says John Bumgarner, research director for security technology at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit. But attackers may find a way in through weak spots in the systems of customers or suppliers. As intruders’ sophistication increases, however, all organizations may face similar vulnerabilities. “With new hacking methods, if the information is not encrypted and it is very valuable, it’s at high risk,” says Alan Paller, research director for the SANS Institute.

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