On Rad's Radar? - Web 2.0 Archives

3 Lessons From Radio Shack

2012-09-04T14:42:49Z

Before a plane ride, if I am out of books to read, I run to B&N. The last two trips have been a waste of time. One trip the sales clerk asked me what I was looking for, but they were out of stock on two of the books, but offered to order it online for me. Lately sales is about "Is it in stock, because I want it now."

This weekend I decided to buy a Roku. I should have just either ordered it at Roku.com or Amazon. But No. I like to buy from brick-and-mortar of I can. I try to buy from Sears when I can because they support the military so much. Sears doesn't make it easy to give them money. Their website is horrible. The only Roku I found was from some third party supplier. I wanted to buy it and pick it up at the store. Not possible.

I remembered that Radio Shack had them in stock, so I surfed over to RadioShack.com. The local store had inventory. I clicked on ship to store, which I thought meant store pick-up. Wrong! I paid for it online, printed out the receipt and went to the store. The clerk said and the FB CSR wrote, "Peter- We are sorry to hear this. Since our .com is separate from an actual RadioShack store, if you made a purchase from our RadioShack.com website, and decide to later purchase the item at the store, you would have to either wait until the item is shipped to the store, or cancel the order and purchase the item from the store."

Well, you can't cancel orders online according to the website (when you check order status): "After you have clicked "Send My Order," your order begins to process and you cannot cancel or change your order.*" Apparently, I didn't know that nor did the Facebook CSR nor the store clerk.

ON FB, "Unfortunately, our inventory systems are not fully integrated at this time, which makes it a bit difficult. It's actually something that we're actively working on, to avoid giving customers frustrating experiences like the one you described. -Ricky" Not solving my issue or anything, just explaining that I ordered wrong.

This is why Amazon is beating everyone - Best Buy, B&N, Radio Shack, everyone. One click. BOOM! it's done. Great communication. You know when it shipped, when it is likely to arrive. If you buy from Amazon as a Prime member you can get it in 2 days for free.

Lesson 1: Communication is key to everything in sales. The web allows for great explanation via pages, videos, email, tweets, etc. Use that limitless, free space to explain clearly what is being bought and how. Customer Expectations is integral to customer satisfaction.

Lesson 2: Don't explain policy! Solve the customer issue! You cannot retain a customer by quoting policy.

I want to buy from you. You are parroting policy to me over and over -- and twice the action suggested (cancel it) was wrong. Help me give you money so I can have my Roku.

Lesson 3: Make It Easy to Buy from you. It should be as easy as Amazon, but I understand why it might not be that easy.

By setting up proper customer expectations with clear communications, you won't have to explain policy to a customer. Instead you will have let the customer know exactly how the sales and delivery will proceed, so that both of you get what you want.

Churn Predicted by Social Influence

2012-03-02T13:54:45Z

Found this preso this morning on twitter: Social Network Analysis for Telecoms. "A major North American telecom sought to identify factors driving customer churn. We applied social network analysis over several billion call records. We found that customers with a cancellation in their frequent calling network churned at twice the monthly rate."

Social Network Analysis for Telecoms

Most people have 3-5 frequent callers. That explains the Circles and Friends&Family plans.

When one of their frequent callers cancels, they are 7x more likely to leave. Now that's Influence.

What are you doing to retain customers (or re-acquire them)?

Zero Moment of Truth

2011-10-31T20:41:34Z

I hit up the newest gastro pub last night. It's been open about 4 days. There were zero search results on Google about them. Just a flash-based website. It was slow in the pub. The staff was very attentive. The owner and I got to talking. He agrees that a website that is viewable on all mobile devices (including tablets) is important. We talked about all the sites today that you have to watch - GetSatisfaction, Yelp, Chowhoud, Urbanspoon, Metromix, MerchantCircle, Around Me (an iPhone app), OpenTable, Facebook, and the local search sites (Google, Yahoo and Bing). It seems just a bit overwhelming.

Then I read about Google's Zero Moment of Truth by Gary Kim and started reading the book.

From the Google book, "A Zero Moment of Truth is:"

A BUSY MOM IN A MINIVAN, looking up decongestants on her mobile phone as she waits to pick up her son at school.
AN OFFICE MANAGER AT HER DESK, comparing laser printer prices and ink cartridge costs before heading to the office supply store.
A STUDENT IN A CAFE, scanning user ratings and reviews while looking for a cheap hotel in Barcelona.
A WINTER SPORTS FAN IN A SKI STORE, pulling out a mobile phone to look at video reviews of the latest snowboards.
A YOUNG WOMAN IN HER CONDO, searching the web for juicy details about a new guy before a blind date."

Craig's Lifetime of Customer Service

2011-06-15T13:43:47Z

Craig Newmark of craigslist spoke at the CoolTech event in Tampa last Friday. It was a good speech from a nerd with a dry sense of geeky humor. (Not everyone got it.) He was doing his best to "simulate social behavior", he said. He had 3 themes that he repeated throughout the talk (that's kind of my style of speaking, too): Customer Service, Doing what's Right, and the Common Good. Craig was introduced by his former attorney, Brett Britton, as a Bad ass. He kind of lives up to it.

Craig offered up a history of social media. It's been around a long time - just the technology has changed (from town cryer to newspapers to books to twitter). Social media has had the same effect throughout the ages though: social change. Martin Luther learned a valuable lesson about social media: You lose control of the message. Today, the Internet is everyone's printing press. Tough to fact check all the stuff that gets added to the WWW every day!

Craig is worth about $400M accoridng to Forbes with Craigslist generating about $40M per year. Craig considers himself a Customer Service representative. He has started something called Craig Connects, which "helps connect people of good will for the common good by highlighting nonprofits that are making an impact in Community Building, Journalism Integrity, Middle East, Open & Accountable Government, Service & Volunteering, Technology for Social Good and Veterans issues." These are the issues that he actively helps on: the VA, Mideast, journalistic integrity, democracy. Why? He wants to be part of something bigger. He believes in doing Social Good because It's the Right Thing to do. Is it easy? No. And he encouraged the audience to operate outside their comfort zone too. (Growth only happens when you are uncomfortable.)

Fact checking is important, according to Newmark. I agree and he gave the names of many sites that do that. Web 2.0 has certainly had an effect on shining the light in some areas. These sites grade non-profits: Charity Navigator, GreatNonProfits.org, and Guidestar. Also, Donors Choose. These check political facts or money: Politifact and Influence Explorer, [I would add Open Congress here and mention that Politifact is a project of the St. Pete Times newspaper, which is owned by the Poynter Foundation. Local pride for Tampa Bay!]

He is working with some crime fighting nerds to check grant apps and vet veterans groups. Craig worries about journalism (especially since media empires are crumbling), since the Fourth Estate is supposed to keep our Democracy in check. For our democracy to survive, the press has to have integrity and be diligent in fact checking. I'm not surprised that The Daily Show wih Jon Stewart does the best job of fact checking, according to Newmark.

Craig has his hand in many pies that all revolve around social good, customer service and doing what's right. I'll leave you with 3 quotes from his speech.

"Listen to people and then do something about it. That's customer service. Try to listen to everyone because even a disgruntled customer can be right."

"Working together for the common good - whatever your version of that is."

"Sunlight is the best disinfective for government."

Mobile Coupons With Haneke Design

2011-05-06T21:36:12Z

Jody Haneke runs an interactive agency that specializes in user design for the mobile/tablet/desktop app space. Haneke Design has worked with HP and the St. Pete Times (on an iPhone app for things to do). I got to speak to him about AT&T's attempt to take on Groupon, the "Shop Alerts by AT&T," an opt-in geo-fenxing service that would text you deals at retailers near where you happened to be at the moment. (Basically, mobile coupons and social coupons). Haneke believes that mobile coupons will have to be developed from the customer experience, not the corporate view point. Listen in for the insight.

The Inexpensive Cloud

2011-04-21T14:20:11Z

Image via Wikipedia

Amazon Web Services including EC2 is down today. When Gmail has any failure my twitter stream goes nuts. Facebook collapses often.

There is one thing people should keep in mind: Building Resiliency and Survivability into a Cloud Platform is not cheap.

For Agents, used to selling TDM with five nines reliability, moving to VoIP with less than that will be a shock, especially when they find out after the first outage.

For VAR's, who have been running their own servers, and like visitors to Vegas who tell me they are up money, will tell you about never having any down time, moving customers to the Cloud, where you lack control and transparency, will be unsettling.

Everything breaks or burns out - that's the nature of commodities (and servers, power supplies, hard drives and NIC's ARE commodities). Outages will occur. The Cloud Provider has to provide updates (honest updates) - and the Channel will need to communicate with the customer. It will just be a shock the first time.

Let's just say that a cloud provider doing less than $8M in revenue is not going to have the finance or propensity to design in high-tech security, survivability, and resiliency, because it will be just too expensive. (This might explain why the finance industry is taking slow steps toward cloud use).

Let me explain. Security is a full-time job. Administering password management is just one aspect. The network gear is expensive - IDS, firewall, router, switch, etc. And in redundancy?! Twice or four times as expensive. (Two per data center as a back up and two data centers equals 4.) Add monitoring all those parts. Then securing the data, encrypting it, backing it up, off-site storage, etc. Not only expensive, but a challenge to manage.

And for Cloud Communications providers, dual data centers is more expensive when you consider that the softswitch is $250K and rides on a blade server (x2 for redundancy at each data center). Plus other gear like SBC's which aren't cheap either.

Even Google and Amazon can't keep everything up and running. Even these two don't have enough survivability and failover built-in to takeover after an outage.

This will be a problem for Agents selling Cloud. Agents and Customers will have to come to grips with the fact that the Era of Five-9's is ending. Luckily, consumers are so used to dropped calls and other glitches on the Internet, that perhaps this will lighten the blow. (Much like how inferior cellphone call quality allowed VoIP to take hold).

IBM's New(er) Strategies

2011-03-29T04:17:56Z

Image via Wikipedia

At IBM's Lotusphere this year (Feb. 1), IBM rolled out strategies for Cloud and Social Media.

IBM identified 5 ways that partners could benefit from the Cloud. They are as follows:

Cloud Application Providers - deliver business apps via a subscription model through the cloud such as SAAS
Cloud Builders - design, build and manage clients’ cloud needs, typically integrating with existing infrastructure.
Cloud Infrastructure Providers - provide a public cloud infrastructure or Platform as a Service (PaaS) on which app can be hosted.
Cloud Services Solution Providers - resell multiple public cloud services and offer complementary services such as training and integration.
Cloud Technology Providers - provide the tools, services, and technologies, such as cloud management, billing metering and monitoring — that help clients use the cloud more effectively.

These are ways for VAR's to stay in the business of providing applications and associated services.

According to some PR sent my way, " IBM is the largest consumer of social technologies. As a company, IBM takes social networking seriously - to develop products and services, to enable sellers to find and stay connected with clients, to train the next generation of leaders, and to build awareness of Smarter Planet among clients, influencers and other communities. IBM will showcase how it is poised to help clients exploit this transformation of a social business delivering new software, services and skills resources to help organizations adopt best practices, policies and software to transform their businesses, including: (1) New Cloud software and services that delivers a cloud-based office productivity suite; (2) New software to help companies and governments socially enable their business processes using the most successful mobile devices, including tablets, such as the iPad, iPhone, Google Android, RIM's Blackberry and Nokia devices."

See how they worked Cloud and social networking into that press release? Google Juice!

"IBM intends to offer a cloud-based version of LotusLive Symphony, an office productivity suite that will give organizations a social platform that enables them to simultaneously collaborate on documents in the cloud. LotusLive Symphony in the cloud complements IBM's on-premise, free of charge, office productivity suite, IBM Lotus Symphony." I didn't know IBM offered free office software.

In its collab suite, IBM will turn the inbox into the Activity Stream that feeds in twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and SAP through the Social Business toolkit. (Yeah, it says SAP in the release.)

Meetrix is an IBM Partner that offers IBM's enterprise-class Sametime Server in the Cloud. "Combining Meetrix with Broadworks Connector provides unique capability for Broadworks operators to deliver a full featured, over the top Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC 2) offering to business-class customers." Simple Signal is using this service. Meetrix is the only partner for Hosted Lotus Sametime presently, which allows Meetrix to offer "businesses access to enterprise-class UCC features such as instant messaging, chat, presence, awareness, document and presentation storage and sharing, audio and video, web conferencing and e-signature capabilities through SAAS." Note: digital e-Signature. [pr]

I'm guessing that this will compete against Microsoft Linc. I'm also guessing that the marketing and branding of this will take some time, which they don't have. The key may be the Activity Box and the digital e-Signature capabilities. At least, that's what I would be featuring in my marketing. It should be interesting to see, especially if other Broadsoft CLEC's jump on that wagon.

Thoughts from Social Fresh

2011-02-24T23:31:00Z

Social Fresh Tampa was this week but I only attended the final panel on Day 2. Justin Levy (now at Citrix) resonates with me. Zena Weist of H&R Block did not. Paula Berg formerly at Southwest Airlines, now with Linhart PR shoots straight. (See some of her SF keynote here). The other panelist spent too much time trying to prove that social media marketing wasn't snake oil.

They talked about the future being about checking in with TV shows and websites for points programs. I think all that checking in will burn people out. I have credit card rewards, coke rewards, and airline programs -- all basically worthless. I see that checking in (to me) would be basically worthless. It was mentioned becuase with the new FTC rules about cookies and tracking may change some online analytics. This may be the way to get real analytics - of loyal customers, which is the kind you want (not the 5000 people who just click Like and then shut off your feed to their feed. A panelist suggested that we need a "smarter use for Like".

Google Real Time search will become more important. (I think it already is especially for news).

Group texting from companies like Groupme or Beluga. A panelist called this "spin up communities" and another said it was "like a chat room".

Facebook is going to be using iFrames because they don't want you to leave and most users of FB don't like to leave FB to go out there. It's 1998 again people. iFrames and AOL-like behavior. Amazing how everything old is new again. A point here: building your business on FB instead of your own website/domain means you are at the whims of FB - and don't own anything. Just saying. You can't have it be about some platform or application. You have to find a way to get those prospects into your sales system.

A couple of college administrators asked questions. One asked what the business world needs from students. Paula Berg asked that students have a realistic expectation of what it means to work! (I blame Tim Ferriss and his 4-Hour Work Week on some of that entitlement expectation). Justin Levy said that they have to be realistic about experience. Being on twitter for a month is not experience. Students need to know how to tactically run a campaign. Know how to drive traffic with content - and more importantly know what kind of traffic they are driving. In addition, students need to know how to write. IM/text writing is not for email or any form of business communications. Expressing thoughts, ideas, benefits, ROI and TCO takes more than 140 characters.

Don't be afraid of negative comments. It's a chance to talk to your community (or marketplace).

Have a content strategy.

Finally, don't face-tweet. And don't face-tweet to LinkedIn!! I know not everyone follows your every waking thought on every platform - and there is a reason for that. And if they do, they don't want to see the same tweet three times. (Trust me, it wasn't that great.) You have to understand that people are on these platforms for very different reasons. Messaging on the platforms has to coincide with your strategy and how people interact and listen on the platform. On twitter, you can post 8 times a day. On FB, the stats are more like once every other day. On LinkedIn, people are there for business. I know you think it's all relative but it is not. All you are doing is adding to the social noise. And people are not listening -- even to you!! Imagine that.

So those are the take aways from the Social Fresh conference. Can't wait for next week because VoiceCon is having a twitter wall :)

8 Questions for Cloud Providers

2010-11-22T23:13:38Z

I've done a couple of webinars lately for VAR's and Agents about the Cloud. I think that between SAAS and Cloud, vendors are forgetting that they are selling applications.

I think the disconnect right now is that Agents aren't comfortable selling apps. They aren't comfortable with many of the SAAS Providers.

Here's the scenario: Agents sell telecom services for licensed companies, most of whom are public. And all agents have heard or know someone who was burned on commissions from companies they know. So now imagine we go into this nebulous thing called Cloud or SAAS, where some company says, "Hey, Go sell my Apps to your base!" The company is unknown, unlicensed and private. You have no idea what to look for; what to ask; what to expect; and in some cases how you are going to sell it.

At least the Conferencing companies (Conferencing is Software-as-a-Service and Voice-as-a-Service) like Intercall and RollCall have been around a long time. SalesForce too for that matter. But others? Not so much. Unknown entitiy.

So how do you choose a Cloud Provider to be a vendor?

Carefully.

Really the questions are the same for a Hosted UC company as it is for Cloud provider or SAAS company.

You want to know something about the financials. How many paying customers do they have? Can any be used as reference accounts?
Do they test their software regularly? Do they use an outside audit firm?
What does their redundancy look like? What does the data backup system look like? What does the Disaster Recovery scenario look like?
Are they using SAS 70 data centers or are they seeking or ISO 27001 certification?
How do they fix problems? If they say there are none, that's a red flag.
What does the SLA cover? What's the procedure for SLA's?
See if you can talk with any customers that require compliance such as HIPAA or PCI.
Use your best judgement.

Basically The Cloud is

2010-11-02T15:45:59Z

Basically, the Cloud is here. But then it has been for a while. The Cloud has been around a while. We used to use it to describe the Internet. Then we used it to describe the Frame Relay system when explaining how PVC's worked. Now there is reference to MPLS as a private cloud, which it kind of is. The MPLS network is virtually separate from all other networks. BellSouth Metro Ethernet works in a virtual cloud. Each circuit is a VLAN mapped to a host circuit. The Metro E architecture is a private cloud.

Email is in the cloud. Doesn't matter if it is Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail or Hosted Exchange, it's in the Cloud. It is attached to the Internet for you to access your email from any Internet enabled device.

Shared hosting is where most of your websites sit. GoDaddy's 43M customers host mainly on shared web servers. These shared web servers make up some of the Cloud.

It's interesting because I saw an ad for a company today with the tag line: "Hosting, Reinvented™ - change how you think about web application setup and hosting." "Shared hosting was a great advance in application development. In 1999." Standing Cloud talks about root control, reliability, simplicity, efficiency. Key items to discuss. (But I would have added Redundancy and Security).

Standing Cloud also talks open source web applications - a lot of them. The Cloud is all about web apps and high availability of the data through those apps. Users want to be able to access email, contacts, pricing, status, voicemail any where they are connected to the interwebs. That is basically what the cloud is all about.

How Do They Avoid Being Just the Dumb Pipe

2010-02-11T14:20:43Z

On LinkedIn there was a question in the Telecom Executives Business Network group: "How can a Telco Service Provider value chain defend itself from the attack by the emerging "Cloud" services? My understanding is that the emerging "cloud" services remove value-add and differentiation from the Telco service providers which are cornered to act just as the bit-stream providers (especially for the retail market)."

My answer to that was as follows:

Most telco carriers worry about becoming a Dumb Pipe. Isenberg told them this would happen. They fired him instead of listening. All the value is in Layer 1 or Layer 7.

Layer 1 in owning the network and delivering fast Internet bandwidth. The value there is if you can also deliver it with Quality. The value for the Telco is to deliver it via as many ways as possible to maximize ARPU - wireline, wireless, Wi-Fi, WiMax, cellular.

The value at Layer 7 is the apps - Web 2.0, social networks, SAAS, ASP, virtualization, The Cloud. People have to get to their data. However, Telcos are horrible at implementing and selling managed services. Why?

When you are a cost-cutting organization you will not hire the right people, train your sales staff, provide the necessary customer care, and design a suitable user interface.

The RBOC's can barely keep their copper up and running. If you have a lousy experience with them in wireline or cellular, why would you move to them as your App Provider?

Remember that RBOC's couldn't even sell Centrex, which essentially the first hosted phone system type of service. Their E-Commerce initiatives have been failures. RBOC's partnered with Yahoo on their ISP DSL service.

This also falls under my rant that Telcos don't innovate. There was a time when AT&T Labs was the promised land for PhD's. It is a shadow of what it was in the 80's. Some of that is due to the fact it was spun-off with Lucent. Some of it is that the US doesn't graduate nearly enough PhD students. Some of it is that the R&D budget is shrinking fast. (We even cut the NASA budget). We need pure research. It leads to innovation. If the US is going to be the knowledge center in the future we need to continue to be the leader in research, innovation and patents. I see that shrinking. And it scares me.

When I think about the CEO's of Ma and Pa Bell, my take-away is that the customer is a number, an ARPU figure to be manipulated. Erik says it's the regulatory environment, but I think it is the Bell-head mindset. When you can't get billing right - either because the BSS is too clunky or it is a revenue source - why would someone trust you with their DATA? Fortune 5000 companies probably will because they play it safe and buy by the Brand, but the rest of the 8 million companies in the SMB space don't buy that way. They buy from who they like and trust.

SayHired at Startup Telephony Camp

2010-01-29T15:03:32Z

Screening candidates that send in resumes is a tedious task. I get to do that when my clients are hiring new salespeople. It's a time-consuming task. Really, resumes don't mean anything because how many aren't embellished?

Anyway, at the 1st Startup Telephony Camp which Larry Lisser ran, we had a chance to hear from 4 start-ups - SayHired, Close Haul Communications, Fonolo, and Pebb.ly.

So I know of a few companies looking for marketing, sales and channel people. One was inundated with over 300 resumes in 2 days. Ouch! What do you do with that as a time-strapped manager? Well, you can outsource it to SayHired who will help with the screening process.

Hiring is a multi-step process: place the ad, receive resumes, screen resumes, set up interviews, evaluate, interview again, re-evaluate, choose, hire, and on-board. No wonder it can cost a company as much as a year's salary to hire wrong.

Screening is important in sales. You can automate some of it through SayHired. For example, if your comapny does a lot of tele-sales, the screening through SayHired will help you eliminate candidates that sound horrible on the phone. You can ask tougher - or more specific questions - to screen even further.

I don't know if SayHired will help you design the questions (probably will), but I can see for retail and sales positions will be their niche.

Developing Profitable Web 2.0 Solutions

2009-08-20T19:58:03Z

I will be moderating a developer panel at IT EXPO WEST on Developing Profitable Web 2.0 Solutions. The panleists are from Ifbyphone, Voxeo and Intelepeer.

This is a Dev panel so we will be talking about The Styles or Ways to go about Developing Apps, including How To Create an App using the API. We will basically keep to the core of the description: "Attendees will learn how Web 2.0 allows organizations to gracefully migrate expensive legacy telephony to a lower cost software model without disrupting existing operations."

Join us on Thursday, 09/03/09at 9:30 AM

What About AOL?

2009-04-30T03:29:47Z

Tonight, Steve Case was on twitter tweeting, "Sad AOL went from being Internet pioneer/leader to also-ran. But still more there then most understand; hopeful can return to greatness." My replies were as follows: what they need are some young, hungry start-up execs, but what they will get is a stodgy exec that wants to cost cut and ride it out.

Why do I say that? Look at Embarq. Hesse had a couple months to pick a team and formulate a plan for the soon-to-be spun off Embarq. What did he do? Let's go with DSL and cost cutting. Blah! They needed that at Sprint not at Embarq. The next guy, Gerke, who took over last March, has been trying to be innovative with the eGo home phone. But EMBQ was already up for sale just trying to find a match.

Then you have EarthLink. Under Barry, it was trying everything: Muni Wi-Fi, BPL, MVNO, etc. He dies. The balls drop to the ground. The Board hires Rolla Hoff to come in, cost cut and try to find a buyer. No go. Just ride it out.

AOL has a wealth of brand recognition and content. It has active email accounts and IM users. My thoughts: go mobile with mobile IM app, definitely make the website and its content WAP based. Create MyAOL for the smartphone for $9.95 per month.

Also, I would have a premium email service that has extra value like saved address book, calendar and mobile access.

AOL has an advertising platform that I am not certain would spin-off, but if it did, there's cash and potential there, just like with the dial-up silo. And ADN, which it the AOL backbone is also something that could be leveraged.

I would even partner with ISP's to be the portal and content partner. Maybe the cable guys would like a deal like Yahoo has with AT&T.

Anyway, there's plenty there to be worked (a social network too I think), but it wouldn't be that hard to find someone creative and passionate enough to run it. (Hey, Steve, my CV is on LinkedIn!)

Why Security Will Be Priority 1

2009-04-16T05:47:49Z

As I skim the Verizon Business 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report (PDF) to find that "295 million records were compromised and there were 90 confirmed breaches last year", I think where is the security? The Intrusion Detection Systems, the firewalls, the vigilant admins. Oh, wait, most companies don't have that. What else is missing? A Password Policy and a skilled technician who doesn't use the default settings for gear.

I'm generalizing of course, but there wouldn't be so many breaches if systems, policies, and security was intact. Mind you, this is reported breaches; some known breaches do not get reported and probably a good many breaches are undetected.

As we move to cloud computing, virtualization, SAAS, Web 2.0 and other examples of applications and corresponding data located on an Internet connected server, security will become paramount. It will be too costly to lose data.

Mind you, it's not 16 year old hackers who are the issue. It's organized crime cartels internationally who make billions off stolen data. Yes, Billions.

Managed security services are available. Almost every telco and ISP sell some - from managed firewall to IDS to managed router. My recent experience with a managed AT&T router tells me that perhaps that's not the way to go, but certainly there are MSP's who specialize in network monitoring.

Another idea would be to sell MPLS in place of IP-VPN or Internet based VPN. Yes it costs more, but isn't the peace of mind worth it?

Businesses that accept credit cards also have to worry about security due to liability and punishment. The credit card companies have established guidelines for PCI Data Security.

As a business, if there is a breach, you will be fined, your reputation tarnished and you will be left holding the bag for damages as well. Ask TJX.