In continuing with our security series, the following is part one of a case study for a small business client of Aquafruit Media.
Small business
Technology in small business is big business. With small business in Australia accounting for 96% of all businesses and with technology playing a vital part within the day to day operations of almost any business (particularly within creative industries), it’s not only imperative that technology works well; it’s imperative that it work’s consistency.
Enter Aquafruit Media.
Aquafruit was approached for a web design makeover for an interior design company …

For any professional, mobile communications are an absolute must. Not only for the those of us who are often on the road, but also for those of us who are “too busy” to be in any place at any point in time. Enter the PDA, Blackberry, iPhone or what ever other mobile device you use. In my case, the iPhone.

For those of you who are running windows (or windows on Parallels/Vmware) – and who are looking for a good antivirus, check out Clamwin. It’s open source, free, very good and is based on the Clam Antivirus Engine.
Very cool, and better than most common commercial (paid for) antivirus programs.
So, that you are aware, clamwin does not have a real time monitoring engine (like most commercial applications) – with the exception of real time email scanning (for outlook, thunderbird etc).
No background process running – scanning each and every file that you …

Every now and then you come across experts in their field who provide you with some invaluable basics. Basics that you know, but need to be reminded of from time to time.
This book, The Business Brickyard, is a small PDF that details some of the basics of why – as a director or company owner – that we are in business. Or, at the least the original reason’s we got into business.
I highly recommend it to all of our clients. A great read.
Warm Regards, 
Scott Malpass
Aquafruit Media.

Digging a little deeper into the security site of Mac OS X, let’s focus on a few of the smarts within – the security side of the Mac.

The Disk Utility tool included in Mac OS X enables you to create encrypted disk images—using 128-bit or even stronger 256-bit AES encryption—so you can safely email valuable documents, files, and folders to friends and colleagues; save the encrypted disk image to CD or DVD; or store it on the local system or a network file server.

It’s easy for the every day person to work within a single sign on environment – such as Active Directory (Microsoft) or Open Directory (Mac and UNIX). But what about the mobile worker?
For people at the corporate executive level or who work in hot seat environments, remembering a password that changes on a 30, 60 or 90 day rotation cycle can be difficult and time consuming. (Assuming of course that your network admin employs rotational password security.)
Enter the Smart Card.
Smart cards enable you to carry your digital certificates with …

In continuing with our Mac OS X security series, we will start looking into the standard Business and Corporate environments.

For those people who primarily work within Windows based corporate networks, you may have – from time to time – seen a Mac floating around. Up until about 24 months ago, Mac’s were rarely seen within these environments.

Mac OS X is designed to provide defence in depth against outside security threats with a series of protective measures and systems. These include authentication and access control systems, protection from network-borne threats, and runtime mechanisms such as library randomization and sandboxing.

Mac OS X has a number of features designed to protect the confidentiality of your data, whether it is stored in your home directory, travelling across the Internet, or shared locally on your network. The eighth part of this ongoing series will begin with the Mac OS X FileVault.