Month: April 2018

Data Security is in the news…again

~ dan

Mark Zuckerberg has recently fronted a senate comitee in the US to explain the use of personalised data by a third party organisation. While probably this is more of a direct concern to personal users than businesses, it certainly highlights the important of data security and who your sharing it with. Users of dropbox, google drive and iCloud should be aware their data is subject to an EULA licence agreements. There are often differences between the free and paid plans too.

Dial forward to a week or two and state sponsored cyber terrosism of Australian sites is reported. If your business depends on the cloud (and probably it does) then this is realy big news.

Some simple steps are to :
1. Backups everywhere. Ensure your have local off line backups and make sure its a bit more sophisticated than to thumb drives when you remember
2. The weakest link.You data security is only as strong as your weakest password. Get all your staff to review their passwords.
3. Contain the breach. Ensure that you are not using the same password across multiple sites.

 

Turing your hobby into a business

~ dan

doing what you don't like1.jpgIt’s an attractive idea isn’t it?, take something you really enjoy doing and turn it into your career. The trouble is a dream turned into reality can sometime become a nightmare. Somewhere in the process it could also takes away the very thing you love,  by taking al the fun out of it…but this need not be the case.

Your hobby and probably your passion is probably your key competitive advantage, perhaps you are already making some income out of it already. The challenge to making it viable is finding the key things people willing to pay for.  For many just thinking about turning a dollar somehow cheapens their endeavour, but it the secret of making a successful go of it.

Finding customers and developing channels (ways of reaching them) are then the vital key ingredient for sustainable. This involves doing and developing a whole new range of activities that will work hand in hand with your passion to bring it to realisation. 

The trouble for the newly converted hobbyist is that where passion fuels the business activity itself, but finding customers and reaching them through channels is well not nearly as exciting. Some of it you won’t mind, but some of it you really won’t want to do This is where discipline comes it, doing the need to do the activities that aren’t very exciting. For the activities that you don’t want to do, you cannot fuel these will passion…they need something else.. a discipline and a will to succeed!