For those of us using email ten to fifteen years ago when the concept was still relatively new, no one envisioned that Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) or Spam as it is more commonly referred to would be something most Internet users would grow to hate. In the early days of email, it was fun to forward around stuff that had questionable value and we didn’t think anything of doing this. Almost anything that we received which we thought was neat/fun/cool, we would forward to all our friends for the laugh value. Read more...

Information Security Management is a broad category, yet it is a very important area to a practicing accounting firm. The term Information Security relates to activities surrounding the protection of information and information infrastructure assets against the risks of loss, misuse, damage, disclosure,or theft. Information Security Management is the term to describe the collections of controls which an organization uses to ensure it is managing these risks.

Read more...

This time of year is one of introspection for many accountants as we evaluate what went right and what went wrong during the season.  For many firms, the focus quickly narrows to the firm’s technology.  For many firms, the performance of the technology is troublesome for the firm and we endeavor to make improvements to enhance our productivity.  For our firm, this tax season has been the most trouble free and technologically productive tax season in a long time.  Some of this stability was due to solving or finding workarounds for several issues which affected individual applications, but a large part of it, in my opinion, was due to a 2008 year end server upgrade which implemented Windows Server 2008 on most of our servers.

At this point, your thoughts might be wandering about whether this article is actually going to be about remote computer security in Windows Server 2008.  It is, but in order to understand the benefits of the security improvements, it is important to have an understanding of the overall benefits of Windows Server 2008.

Read more...