If your business handles credit card payments, you need to be concerned about the rules and regulations of safeguarding the sensitive cardholder data. I was reminded of this the other day when a charge for $9.95 showed up on my debit card from a website I've never visited. Since 2007 any business that accepts credit card payment--this probably means you--has been subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). If you're a huge business that processes a million or more credit card transactions per year, you have to hire an outside professional to audit your processes. If you're smaller than that, you can do it yourself by means of the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, or SAQ. The SAQ comes in four flavors, depending upon...

We've all done it: bought something that's of absolutely no use just because it caught our eye. The problem is when we make business purchasing decisions based on glitter or glitz. Is it just me or are more people falling victim to this lately? A couple of examples.....

We've run across several projects lately that hit a bump. Somebody calls us and says something like "Hey, I've committed to xyz, got the contract right here. Can you make it work?". In one case it was somebody who'd bought PC-based software that supposedly has a 'web interface'. The issues there were that the 'web interface' was untried and their network wasn't set up for web hosting.