B2BGateway.Net develops TASC - EDI Testing Portal

Global EDI Specialist, B2BGateway.Net have expanded their offering in the Cloud with a new SaaS EDI Testing Portal - TASC (Testing And Supplier Compliance) Portal. The TASC portal offers On-Demand 24/7 EDI Testing & Validation Services for Large Format Retailers, Manufacturers and Third Party Logistics Providers (3PL’s). As more and more firms become EDI compliant the pressure on trading partners to implement successful EDI testing, mapping and validation procedures can put a huge strain on any firms resources. With B2BGateway.Net’s new TASC portal, however, firms can now access on-demand 24/7 EDI Testing and Validation services thus freeing up personnel to focus on their production environment. The advantages of using B2BGateway.Net’s TASC portal include cost and time savings, consistency, ease of use and the portal is fully customizable to meet the individual needs of any particular client.

B2BGateway CEO to be featured speaker at Right Networks Accounting C4 Conference

B2BGateway.Net CEO, Kevin Hoyle, will be a featured speaker at Right Networks Accounting C4 conference. This year’s conference will take place at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel from September 18th to 20th, 2011.
Accounting C4 is an event focused on bringing the practice and clients of all size accounting firms to the cloud to allow for integration with the hosted or SaaS business applications that best fit their needs. Attendees will gain a better understanding, through networking, training and presentations, of how to bring their own practice online and of the available technology platforms to allow their business to excel in addition to providing guidance to their clients on how to do the same.
Kevin’s topic will be B2BGateway.Net- The keys to streamlining the supply chain and increasing sales. Everyone talks about streamlining the supply chain process, tightening lead times and process flow automation…but most people have no idea what any of that means. To most, it sounds like a load of the latest buzz words with a really high price tag attached. Do you really need to be part of the cloud to make your business better? Kevin will use this session to demystify some of the newer technologies and show how you can use them to your advantage in a cost effective manner.

On being different..................

Over the past month or so, I have had some extended business travel and some free time in the European Union (EU). Having spent time in the UK, Ireland, Denmark, France and Italy, you see a few things that are different. No, not just the obvious things like different languages, or driving on the other side of the road, but the more subtle things. For example, in Europe the grocery shopping carts (trolleys) have 4 wheels that swivel. This doesn’t sound like much, but if you come from the United States and you are used to the carts traveling in two dimensions and suddenly you are faced with three dimensions, it can be a big change.
In Paris, I noticed that a lot of people seem to litter. I’ve seen Parisians eat a sandwich and throw the wrapper on the ground. I watched a lot of Parisians open a pack of cigarettes (from my limited point of view, I’m pretty sure that all Parisians smoke, although there may be one older gentleman in South Paris who does not…) and the wrapper ends up on the sidewalk. In Ireland and the UK, a large percentage of the people smoke as well, but they are not allowed to do it indoors. So the sidewalks are filled with smokers. I spend most of my time walking down the sidewalks coughing; so much that I’ve found that you have to ‘step inside for a breath of fresh air’.
In the United States, when we go to the beach, there are teams of people watching us and blowing their whistles to make sure we don’t swim out too far. If we do, they are ready to swim out and rescue you (remember the TV show Baywatch…). But in Europe, if you want to do something stupid and you end up hurt or dead, it is your own fault. “Oh, he swam out to far and drowned. Bummer, he should have known better” (It is best if you read this quote with a French accént).
But, being different is interesting. After cataloging some of the differences between the US and EU (which would fill a whole book), I started thinking about differences in organizations and in particular, B2BGateway.Net (yep, here is the tie in). At B2BGateway.Net, we are different; not just in what we do, but in how we do it. People at B2BGateway.Net enjoy what they do and take pride in their work, but they also have personalities that are different and unique. This newsletter and some of our future video clips will show some of the different personalities that make our company great. I hope you enjoy.
Thanks , Kevin

Next Generation Firewalls

The Internet can be a scary place. It is an ever-evolving landscape that empowers the enterprise and is now a critical component to success for most companies. Some organizations have their entire business model based on the Internet and online retail. However, the downside to the exponential growth in customers and wonders of the Internet are now made more obvious with each passing news day. The extended reach offered by the Internet not only lets us reach out to our customers; it also opens the door for malicious entities and provides new attack vectors that target the Enterprise.

But this is old news; everyone knows that hackers, spammers and virus writers are out there trying to get in. That is why we have firewalls, spam filters, Intrusion Detection Systems, Intrusion Prevention Systems, Windows updates and everything else. Yet, given all that we have to secure the enterprise, why are there so many data breaches and public exploits? Because things change, applications mutate and what used to be a wonderful utility is now a data-stealing virus running over port 80. The funny email someone just sent has now infected the entire office and is clogging the network with spam. In other words, Outlook will no longer work and Excel has become frozen and you can’t get any work done.

Enter Next Generation Firewalls. We all know the firewall is a company’s first line of defense against the perils of the Internet. Savvy firewall administrators open only those ports that are necessary to support mission critical applications and services. Bandwidth monitoring and Content Filtering provide an essential layer of security as well. We all know this and employ this technology, so what defines a Next Generation Firewall?

Gartner defines them well in their report, available on the Palo Alto Networks website at http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/literature/research/Gartner-NGFW-Report.html or on the Gartner website at: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=171540

To view the reports you will need to enter in some information, but essentially Next Generation Firewalls can do everything that a first generation firewall does and more. To fit the Gartner definition they must have Application Awareness and full stack visibility, allowing security policies that enable or disable features at the application layer. The example cited is allowing Skype but blocking the file-sharing feature within Skype. They must have Extrafirewall Intelligence, which allows the firewall to make better blocking decisions using data from an outside rule base such as a black list or white list. Other examples of this would be directory integration, and allowing access to resources based upon the user accounts within the directory.

In today’s rapidly changing climate, what seems like innocuous behavior in an application can be much more. It is easy for applications or malware to exploit open ports in the traditional firewall and go unnoticed because of device limitations. If you would like more information on Next Generation firewalls and everything they have to offer, you might want to check out a company leading the way named Palo Alto Networks. For more information please their website at http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/products/index.html


Steve Kohler