The telephone is such a commonplace item that we forget the many ways that business processes can be enhanced or made more efficient through the proper application or service. The mobile phone in particular and its ability to access information or PBX-like capabilities from anywhere is changing the way even small businesses operate.

 

Cbeyond (News - Alert) is a voice and broadband Internet provider that exclusively serves small businesses with customized packages and enhanced customer support. Their local, long distance and Internet packages, anytime account management and advanced VoIP platform bestows upon small businesses the same kind of communication tools enjoyed by big businesses, but a reasonable price.

 

Cbeyond’s Paul Gies, senior director of products, says, “Our main goal from a product perspective is to introduce applications, such as treating voice as an application that helps small businesses run more efficiently. We focus exclusively on the small business space. We’ve recently introduced some new applications that, while not voice-centric, do help small businesses run more effectively, particular in light of the current economic climate. Small businesses are putting out some additional ‘spend’ for new things and they must get some payback for doing that. For example, take our hosted Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange product. What really separates us from the competition in this space is the integration of mobile synchronization with our plan. We let the small business owner be connected to the office no matter where he is: at the office, out on the road, at home – having full integration with his email and contact lists is a big deal for these small businesses. They typically haven’t had access to these things in the past.”

 

“The other key to what we do is that we tailor our offerings to meet the needs of a small business,” says Gies. “With our Microsoft product, we have a free service they can use and we have an upgrade product they can buy. We let the small business upgrade as many boxes as they want, so they don’t have to upgrade their entire account to enjoy the benefits of what we offer. If they only have two employees who need mobile access outside of the office, then they only have to buy two upgrades from us – they don’t have to upgrade everyone in the office. Their domain will still be shared and all the email services will still be shared. Small businesses can thus control their costs and maximize employee productivity.”

 

“For us at Cbeyond, it’s all about giving the small business owner ‘anywhere access’ to the information that they need,” says Geis. “Another recent application introduction by us is the Secure Desktop. It’s a product that has actually been around for a while, but the way that we’ve deployed it with our Cbeyond Online central management, we enable the small business owner see and manage all of his or her subscriptions in one place so that all of the computers are up-to-date and have the latest software revision, the latest virus definitions, all monitored and supervised from one central management package. So whether it’s the business owner or his ‘IT resource’ – which in the case of many small businesses is not a dedicated IT technician but the business owner’s brother, nephew or techie friend – with Cbeyond’s offering, the owner can see what’s going on and manage everything from one location. In this way we give the small business owner peace of mind. He knows his system is now protected, and now he can focus on his actual business.”

 

“We partner with a third party to bring out this solution, and it provides your typical anti-virus, anti-malware protection,” says Geis. “We do it on a monthly subscription basis. The customer can pick and choose how many computers they want to have protected. We also offer a root kit detector as part of that product.”

 

PhoneFactor is listed as one of the “Ten Technology Companies to Watch in 2008” by Bank Technology News. PhoneFactor is built on the national data center and infrastructure of Positive Networks (News - Alert), which was founded in 2001. Positive Networks provides enterprise VPN, remote access and security services over the web. Its flagship service, PositivePRO, provides thousands of enterprises with secure remote access and security.

 

As for PhoneFactor, it adds a second factor of authentication to any existing corporate or website login. It’s quite easy: Step 1: Enter your username & password. Step 2: Instantly, you receive a phone call. Just answer and press #.

 

Evan Conway, Chief Identity Officer at Positive Networks, “Our company was originally very much in the security space, with a VPN-like, Software-as-a-Service approach, really locking down endpoint security of all the computers that were connected into a network. If, say, a doctor at a remote location calls into his office or hospital, you obviously have to make sure that the computer doesn’t have any viruses, spyware or malware. The doctor might not be adept at handling that, so we had a really interesting system that would lock it down and check things. It had all of the ‘smarts’ in essentially a black-box form. The next logical progression was to ensure that the doctor or whoever is in fact the person they are claiming to be. It’s not good if someone gets connected and they don’t have any viruses, but it’s the wrong person who’s being allowed to connect to the network. So we became interested in combining the security foundation with a hardcore telephony background.”

 

“The phone today is ubiquitous, and is getting more powerful – primarily cell phones and mobiles, though not just them. We looked at the phone itself as an additional device for verification,” says Conway. “Once you’re connected via a phone, there are all sorts of powerful tools within it that can be used at will. That’s where our PhoneFactor comes in. Let’s say an end user working with a banking application touchtones his or her username and password, then presses the ‘Enter’ key. The phone instantly rings and they answer it, inputting a PIN number or the # key, depending on how the provider has set up the system. So, with PhoneFactor you now have a complete out-of-band, separate security authorization procedure. The key point is that any of the security authorizations sitting on your computer can be breached or hacked. It doesn’t do a lot of good to have something associated with your computer. The beauty of using the phone is that it’s a complete, freestanding, separate place where your identity can be verified. The trend is that you’ve got all of these people walking around with what’s becoming a more and more powerful device – the mobile phone, though in the case of our technology, it could be you home desk phone. In any case, we’re all looking for new ways of using the phone, and identity management happens to be the implementation where we fit in.”

 

“Initially, we didn’t just have an epiphany that ‘phones are it’. Quite the opposite,” says Conway. “We started using all of the standard technologies that were out there, such as RSA secure ID tokens, and things that you could carry around and you deal with items such as one-time passwords. But all these things are a nightmare from a business process standpoint. One could argue that the technology is pretty decent, but every successful implementation is a combination of the technology and the actions and behaviors of real-world people. I, for one, don’t feel like carrying around a keychain attached to tokens, dongles and what-not. You’d need one for your banking application, one for your stock brokerage account, one for eBay (News - Alert), one for PayPal, one to check your medical records, and so forth. Since the phone is such a ubiquitous device, however, and since it can receive a call, that simple capability can be leveraged by our system to provide superlative authentication, and the phone doesn’t even have to be a smart phone. There’s nothing to download. There’s no Java code or whatever. It’s literally a voice call. Once you’ve got the connection, there’s now tons of additional technology you can leverage, such as voice recognition and response systems.”

 

“Imagine this,” says Conway. “You’re driving down the street and your phone rings. You hear ‘This is PhoneFactor. Please authenticate your online banking account. You now realize that you didn’t want to access your account and somebody else is trying to. Instead of authenticating, you can press, say, 911, or you can call the bank and that will connect you to a person or it can automatically report fraud or automatically take down your online banking account so that nobody can get into it until it’s reset. There’s almost no other technology that has such an instant response and proactive notification as a telephone call. So I do believe that, in the security space, we will continue to take advantage of the real-time and ubiquitous aspects that telephony brings to the table.”

 

The humble telephone, revitalized with modern software and services, still has a lot of life in it yet, and continues to change the nature of business as it did when it first appeared more than a century ago.