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SMB Community Podcast by James Kernan


Focused 100% on IT Service Providers and SMB IT Consultants. The SMB Community Podcast is produced by Karl W. Palachuk and the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community. Dedicated to the success of every IT professional. Episodes drop every Thursday. Hosts include Karl W. Palachuk, Amy Babinchak, and James Kernan.

Sep 18, 2015

While in DC for the MAX 2015 conference, I wandered down to the vendor hall. Of course I took my trusty recorder along for the stroll. Here are three quick interviews with vendors I met.

 

Carl Banzhof from iScanOnline talked about “data breach intelligence.” Basically, they use a host-based agent to search for sensitive data. In addition to the places where you know you have data (e.g., the database), iScanOnline looks at PDF and Excel reports that were generated from a database, but now those reports are stored on local PCs and in Dropbox accounts.

In addition to cataloging data that might be where it doesn’t belong, the tool also checks to see whether a breach has occurred and calculates the estimated cost of that breach. You can request a 14 day free trial on their web site at www.iscanonline.com.

 

Jim Lippie from Clarity Intelligence Platform talks about “turn-key automated analytics as a service” platform. Basically, that’s a tool that looks at how their data is moving around inside their business (both on premise and cloud-based). General topic areas include finances, sales and marketing, and I.T. operations.

I love the line he uses: “Small businesses are pack rats.” One of the ways to use this tool is to find the data that’s rarely used and recommend that it get moved off to long-term (less expensive) storage. The reports will certainly make monthly business reviews or quarterly business reviews a lot easier. And now you can bring juicy good data and not just how many viruses you stopped last month. Check out the free 90 trial at www.clarityintelplatform.com.

 

Josh Peterson

Josh Peterson

Josh Peterson from Bering McKinley joins us to talk about Peer Groups. In addition to group calls and in-person meetings, Bering McKinley provides a partner portal for members to communicate and help each other between meetings. They also partner with Corelytics to provide meaningful financial analysis so that members can benchmark themselves against others in the industry.

While some peer groups are “pure peer,” Bering McKinley provides a facilitator to help members get the most out of their meetings and overall experience. While a peer group might see the insides of 10-12 businesses, the facilitator has seen hundreds or thousands of businesses. The facilitator will also know a lot about how to tweak things in the business to meet the “best in class” benchmarks in Corelytics. For more info, visit www.beringmckinley.com.

 


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