Keeping Your Rivals From Minding Your Business

I found an article in the New York Times called "Keeping Your Rivals From Minding Your Business." This artilce was published on November 12, 2008 and the author is David Strom.

This article is related to small businesses who rely on e-mail and instant messaging for their communications. Businesses would do well to use a number of inexpensive methods to preserve privacy and ensure that messages are read only by the intended recipient.

An obvious remedy for business people to preserve privacy is to keep their computers with them, rather than leaving them in a hotel room or locked car. When it is not possible to keep physical possession of the computer, people can take a number of protective measures to ensure that only its owner has access. According to the article, one of the simplest ways is to use the "built-in fingerprint reader" on your laptop, if it has one. Another option is to secure a laptop's files with an encryption program like "TrueCrypt," which is free. These programs render all the files "indecipherable" if the laptop falls into the wrong hands. Moreover, some USB flash drives also come with encryption software.

In addition, businesses no longer need to run their own e-mail networks because many inexpensive alternatives will rent them as many mailboxes as needed. These providers will also manage the entire e-mail process and offer a full collection of features, including the ability to block messages that contain spam and viruses.

One of the functions of the management department is to preserve the privacy of the most important documents of the company. Nowadays, technology offers a variety of products and/or services to companies to protect "top secret" files. Most companies use laptops to save their most important documents, so they need to advantage of today's technology.