Is An OmniChannel Officer Inevitable?

The rapid advances in the technology landscape and proliferation of digital have taken customers beyond multi-channel to an Omnichannel retail experience. Global retailers that include the likes of Macy’s, Saks and Lowe’s have already moved in this direction enabling customers to shop anytime, anywhere and enjoy consistent and delightful experience.

Omnichannel retail aims at enabling sales initiatives through multiple channels – online, brick and mortar stores, social media, events, mobile, and the usual traditional sales efforts; at the same time creating consistent and uniform customer experience at each sales touch point. The channel operations are connected at the back end to provide the integrated, customer specific information whenever required. The availability of customer information across all channels through regular information sharing enables store representatives and online customers view the same data anytime, anywhere.

However, building an Omnichannel capability is easier said than done. It needs a totally integrated operation across all customer touch points - store operations, marketing, call center, and digital (which includes all forms of non-store-based commerce). This is made all the more difficult because the traditional organizational structure creates siloes.

To take an example, let’s look at product and customer data. Data is generated in-store through point-of-sale systems, e-commerce and m-commerce platforms, the contact center, and other systems.  This information is collected and stored across different systems because retailers have traditionally kept sales channels independent of one another. These systems generally don’t get the necessary attention to turn that data into real information assets. Rather than having a central repository that can syndicate product information out to the various channels, retailers create product assortments based on sales channels.

On the customer side, CRM systems are often struggling to get a single view of the customer. Customer information is among the most valuable assets in retail but it is rarely utilized properly. An order fulfillment system may be the lifeline of an Omnichannel experience but its deployment is usually deferred citing high investment costs, lack of integration with existing systems and lack of time and resources dedicated to deployment.

Technical problems apart, siloed skills create their own issues. Disconnects exist between retailer’s business and technical staff. Open conversations are rare between the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) around people, processes and technology. There are separate heads for all the functions - marketing, finance, merchandising, HR, stores, who report into the CEO or the President. Very few people who have the holistic understanding of the business requirements are available and all of them are among the topmost C-level executives. Unfortunately their hands are always too tied up to take up and drive an operation like the creation of Omnichannel retail capabilities.

Organization level ownership, commitment and accountability is needed to break these silos and to drive synchronization and alignment. Since such a capability cannot be built without active involvement, monitoring, facilitation and support from the leadership, the creation of a dedicated senior level position responsible for Omnichannel becomes an imperative for the success of this initiative. This will be the omni-channel   officer or Chief Omni Channel Officer, who has a good understanding of all the customer touch points, a holistic understanding of business needs and a direct reporting to the top leadership.

The Chief Omni Channel Officer will manage the development of strategies that will integrate the company’s stores, online and mobile activities; take on responsibility for systems and technology, logistics and related operating functions. It could also be a position different from the traditional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in the sense that it is becomes a P&L role where he/ she will also be looking after revenue generation activities along with a reasonable share of the profitability. Chief Omni Channel Officer will look after the store level/ digital level execution and will also be responsible for the ROI on marketing investment. Undoubtedly, the Chief Omni Channel Officer will have to play the prime role in accelerating digital growth while inseminating an organic acceptance of Omni-channel best practices across all departments of a company in such a way that it doesn’t affect the current high performing channels.

The ideal Chief Omni Channel Officer should be a candidate with an experience in store operations, call center operations, digital and marketing which is very hard to get. Someone with a strong digital/ marketing experience and exposure to the other business functions should be a good enough to handle the role properly.

Essentially, the operationalization of Omnichannel is an exercise in managing change and it should start at the very top with the leadership making it clear in no uncertain terms that this is one initiative that has been sponsored by them. All the stakeholders, right from the customer support executives in the stores to the senior C-level executives should brace up to whole heartedly support the initiative. Ultimately how effective an initiative has been depends as much on how it has been accepted as on how it has been implemented. This is critical to convert the Omni-channel investment into tangible long term returns and strategic advantage.

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Fascinating How To Get Traffic From Tumblr Tactics That Can Help Your Business Grow

Social media do take lots of time but if you are seeing a return on your investment there, you are most likely looking for more good social media sites to expand to. While there isn't a shortage of social media sites, some of them are just a waste of time and effort, so you'd better skip them and head to the ones that work.

It is not that hard to find good social media sites. For instance, Tumblr might not be as big as Facebook or Twitter, but it is a popular blogging and social networking site, so you might want to explore it as well. Most of the tips for getting traffic from social media sites in general apply to Tumblr as well but as you will see, there are some specific ones that are tied just to it.

1 Post All Types of Media You Can

Tumblr offers multiple types of media for you to post. These types include: text, photo, quote, link, audio, and video and the best you can do is use them all. Of course, if your content is not fit for a particular type of post, don't force yourself to post that particular media ‐ i.e. if your products are not visual, video and even photos might be an overkill. You can post things that are directly related to your business and niche but you can also post more fun stuff that will appeal to the general audience.

2 Post Memes

One of the specific things about Tumblr is that of all sorts of media, memes are especially popular. Memes aren't very hard to create, so if you can't find cool ready-made ones, take the time to create a couple of memes yourself, post them, and see if they get the response you are hoping for. If they do, invest more time and effort (or even consider hiring somebody else) to create more memes.

3 Add Many and Relevant Tags

Tags on Tumblr are very important because this is the main channel through which users will find you. This is why it makes sense to add as many (but relevant) tags as possible. Look for variations and synonyms of your target keywords, and include them all. It goes without saying, though, that you shouldn't become a tag spammer.

4 Create an Excellent Profile

As on all social media, your profile is your business card. Therefore, you can't afford to have a messy profile. You need to create an excellent profile so that other users like you ‐ this increases the chance of getting more followers.

5 Be Active and Regular

If you don't already know that social media do take time daily, now you will learn it. The key to getting and keeping an active and loyal following on Tumblr is to be active and loyal yourself. It's better to post a link a day than post 10 links at once after you have been gone for 10 days because in the first case your followers will have the habit of checking the daily stuff from you, while in the second case they will never know when you will post and might miss your multiple posts.

6 Interact with Other Users

Another trick to becoming popular on Tumblr is to interact with other users. Follow them, comment on their posts, reblog their stuff ‐ this all helps to become a Tumblr star whose posts are read by many users.

7 Reblog, Reblog, Reblog

When you find a good post from somebody else, don't hesitate to reblog it. This way you are feeding your audience with new stuff, while at the same time the original author will be thankful and might reblog some your original posts in return.

8 Quality Matters More than Quantity

When we say to be active in posting and interacting with other users, this doesn't mean you should spam and nag ‐ it's better to post less frequently, if you have nothing relevant to post than to post junk every day just for the sake of it. You might think of filler posts (i.e. funny stuff that supposedly appeals to everybody) and have some of these in stock, so you can post them when you have nothing better but don't post meaningless posts just to fill your daily quota.

9 Blog Around a Niche

While nobody limits your topics, for best results, you'd better narrow down your choices to topics from one niche. Tumblr is especially good, if you need niche traffic, so if you have multiple niches, you'd better create separate profiles for each of them than mix them all in one profile.

10 You Can Advertise Yourself but Do It with Measure

Tumblr allows to place ads in your posts, so you can advertise yourself, your site, or your products but do it once a week at most; otherwise, you will irritate your followers really soon and the effect you will achieve will be just the opposite to what you want. Resist the temptation to post ad, if the ad itself is not cool, or if the product/service you are promoting is far from excellent. You need to do this only once and many of your followers will drop you right away.

Tumblr doesn't have the huge number of users of Facebook but the good thing is that your competition isn't that huge either. If you have good stuff to post and you are persistent, sooner or later you will get noticed. And who knows, even if Tumblr isn't the first choice for many other webmasters, it might turn out that for you personally it works like a charm. In fact this is what matters most ‐ if it works for you, not for the whole world.

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Success and Happiness

Ashok Soota was invited by the Ananta Aspen Centre in August 2015 to speak at their CEO Series.He spoke on Success and Happiness in a session that was facilitated by Anuj Poddar, Viacom 18 Media.Watch him in “The CEO Series : Leading in the 21st Century with Ashok Soota”

In his words, some suggestions to be happy:

• Pursue your Passion
• Create a Mindset of creating a problem into an opportunity
•  A sense of Well-being
• Honest self-assessment and self-awareness 

“Truthfulness, Love, Forgiveness, Passion & Resilience are characteristics to develop &  emotions to nurture for Happiness. Similarly, Envy, Greed, Anger and Hatred are emotions to avoid.

Success without Happiness is not success. Therefore the two really converge in the context of saying that what really counts is a truly happy life.”

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Happiest Minds CEO & MD

Happiest Minds CEO & MD Sashi Kumar

Happiest Minds Technologies, a next generation IT company today announced the appointment of Sashi Kumar as the CEO & MD of the organization.

Sashi comes to Happiest Minds with a wealth of experience. During his career of 23 years, he has been profit centre head for 11 years and has achieved significant success and innovative breakthroughs in his previous roles. Prior to Happiest Minds, Sashi has led significant operations in Microsoft, SAP and CSC. He began his career in Wipro.

While welcoming Sashi Kumar to Happiest Minds, Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman, Happiest Minds said that "Sashi's experience in global products and services companies will provide a tremendous push towards bringing innovation to Happiest Minds in a world of productized services and solutions. This, coupled with his expertise in global business services and SMAC+ technologies, will further accelerate our success in implementing Digital Transformation solutions for our customers."

On his appointment, Sashi Kumar said, "Happiest Minds has shown tremendous growth under its current leadership and I am delighted to be the CEO & MD of this fast growing company. I have an opportunity to build a global organization and I truly believe in its Mission of "Happiest People. Happiest Customers".

Happiest Minds' strategy of focusing on disruptive technologies has resonated well with customers. It has achieved several records for an IT services company out of India in 3 years from its launch, with run rate of US$ 50mn, 94 customers and 1450 people. Happiest Minds is also on track for its goal of going public in maximum 7 years from its launch.

About Happiest Minds Technologies

Happiest Minds has a sharp focus on enabling Digital Transformation for customers by delivering a Smart, Secure and Connected experience through disruptive technologies: mobility, big data analytic, security, cloud computing, social computing, M2M/IoT, unified communications , etc. Enterprises are embracing these technologies to implement Omni-channel strategies, manage structured and unstructured data and make real time decisions based on actionable insights, while ensuring security for data and infrastructure. Happiest Minds also offers high degree of skills, IPs and domain expertise across a set of focused areas that include Digital Transformation & Enterprise Solutions, Product Engineering Services, Infrastructure Management, Security, Testing and Consulting.

Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Happiest Minds has operations in the US, UK, Singapore and Australia. It secured a $52.5 million Series-A funding led by Canaan Partners, Intel Capital and Ashok Soota.

Source : Happiest Minds CEO

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The Cheapest Way to Improve Productivity: Make Your Employees Happy

Some employers view their relationship with workers as purely transactional: The company pays employees for their services, and staff members are responsible for getting their work done. Happiness doesn’t even enter into the equation, but we now know this is a mistake.

A slew of research has found that employee happiness has a dramatic effect on performance. A study published in the University of Warwick’s Economic Research Institute Journal revealed, “human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity… Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect.”

So how can companies promote workplace happiness? Here are five best practices companies can use to promote employee happiness in the workplace:

1.Give people choices. People like to have a say in shaping their workday and controlling their own destiny. Daniel Pink, author of the New York Times bestselling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, drew on four decades of scientific research to discover that autonomy is one of the three pillars of the “motivation formula.”

Autonomy means giving employees control over when they work, where they work, and what they work on. It means allowing for self-determination and flexibility, and focusing on results, rather than face-time. Choice and autonomy are proven to be powerful drivers of employee motivation and performance.

“We found that knowledge workers whose companies allow them to help decide when, where, and how they work were more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, performed better, and viewed their company as more innovative than competitors that didn’t offer such choices,” wrote Diane Hoskins in the Harvard Business Review.

2.Help people achieve emotional wellness. The World Health Organization found that the cost of stress to American businesses is as much as $300 billion. And its estimated that two-thirds of visits to the doctor’s office are for stress-related conditions. These visits cause costs to soar in the form of decreased productivity and absenteeism.

Stressed employees do not perform at their peak level, and it doesn’t matter whether the stress is directly related to work. For example, money trouble is one of the most powerful sources of stress out there. The American Psychological Association reports five out of the eight top sources of stress in America are financial. If an employee is worried about their personal finances, that stress will be reflected in their work.

As an employer, it is your best interest to help your employees achieve emotional wellness. It’s important that employees don’t feel overburdened or overwhelmed by their work. They need time to unwind, at or away from the office. And since socialization and exercise are known stress reducers, you can promote emotional wellness by encouraging employees to engage in these activities. In addition, many successful organizations provide confidential counseling services through a third-party.

3.Cultivate purpose and meaning. One of the other pillars to employee satisfaction and happiness is purpose. Harvard Professor Rosabeth Kanter wrote that people want to work for companies where they feel that they’re making a meaningful difference in the world. People who believe in what they are doing are happier, more motivated, and more productive.

Employers can cultivate purpose in the workplace by writing a meaningful mission statement and placing it around the office. This will help remind employees on a regular basis why they are there and why they do what they do.

The next step is to ensure that employee goals align with the organizational goals, which is best done through one-on-one meetings where individuals can share their thoughts with their managers, and feel that their voice gets heard. Managers can also instill a sense of purpose by giving every employee the opportunity to use their strengths.

4.Spread happiness. Putting someone in charge of spreading happiness — appointing a “happiness evangelist” — can be an incredibly effective way to foster a cultural change. Most leaders have a hefty amount on their plate, and don’t have a lot of bandwidth to dedicate to “softer” issues like how people are feeling. Moreover, they are probably not trained to do so.

A happiness evangelist (or in Google’s case, the Jolly Good Fellow) is responsible for creating an environment where people feel valued and happy. They can spearhead initiatives to improve workplace satisfaction, like catered lunch, regular happy hours, or work-from-home Fridays, as well weed out sources of dissatisfaction. This person ensures that employee happiness remains a priority and prevents issues from festering to the point where performance is compromised.

5.Reward and recognize. It is human nature to respond positively to recognition and rewards. An analysis from Gallup that spanned 10,000 business units found that “the act of recognizing desired behavior increases the repetition of the desired behavior, and therefore productivity.” Employee recognition leads to greater employee satisfaction and enjoyment of work, better teamwork, higher retention, lower negative effects from absenteeism and stress, and even higher loyalty and satisfaction scores from customers.

Incentivizing employees and celebrating success makes employees feel valued and boosts confidence. It helps them feel a sense of accomplishment, which is a powerful motivator, and reinforces their sense of meaning and joy in their work. Rewards and recognition can take many forms, including from gift cards, time off, public recognition at a weekly company meeting, and of course, promotions. In any case, they inspire employees to do their best.

The impact of happy employees on an organization is dramatic. A Russell Investment Group study found that stocks for companies on the Fortune 100 “Best Companies to Work For” list significantly outperformed the average. Caring about employee happiness isn't just the “right” thing to do, it is the smart business thing to do.

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Happiest Minds declared “Startup of the Year” at The Smart CEO – Startup50 Awards

Happiest Minds Technologies, the next generation Digital Transformation, Infrastructure & Security and Product Engineering Services Company, won the "The Smart CEO Startup50 - Startup of the Year Award at the prestigious  "SmartCEO Startup50 Awards 2015: Recognizing the Leaders and Change-makers of tomorrow”. Happiest Minds was among the winners in the Rapid Growth Category.

The Startup50 Conference and Awards was conceptualized with a very specific goal in mind: to recognize and reward entrepreneurs who’ve scaled up their businesses in the most strategic way and at a dynamic pace.

The Conference revolved around understanding the art and science of building long-term businesses in various sectors - including technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer, retail etc. - through discussions with venture capital investors and entrepreneurs. The summit culminated with an Awards ceremony to recognize 50 of India’s most promising startups. The nominated companies were evaluated by a jury, which comprised a leading panel of experts from the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem, investors and top Indian business leaders.

"The Smart CEO Startup50 - Startup of the Year" Award highlighted Happiest Minds’ overall performance and track record among all the top 50 companies recognized as winners across different categories.

“The Startup of the Year” Award focused on scaling of critical parameters of Revenue and People, where Happiest Minds had already established its credentials with several international recognitions such as the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 awards etc.

“Winning two awards on the eve of our Foundation Day, is recognition of our cutting edge offerings in the sphere of Digital Transformation and allied services. As one of the fastest growing companies, we are proud to share this moment with our customers and gratefully acknowledge their steadfast support in this journey”, said Sashi Kumar – CEO & MD, Happiest Minds.

“Our philosophy is, “happiest people make happiest customers”. Our mission is a constant reminder of the fact that we are in the business of making our customers happy through happy people. Receiving such awards gives us the confidence that we are on the right track,” added Raja Shanmugam, Chief People Officer at Happiest Minds.

With a $ 50mn+ annualized revenue run rate, 100+ valued customers and a team size of more than 1500, Happiest Minds is also en route to becoming the fastest Indian IT services company aiming to achieve $100mn in revenue with a focus on going public within the next 4 years.

About Happiest Minds Technologies

Happiest Minds is a next generation digital transformation, infrastructure, security and product engineering Services Company with 100+ customers , 1500+ people and 16 locations. Happiest Minds enables Digital Transformation for enterprises and technology providers by delivering seamless customer experience, business efficiency and actionable insights through an integrated set of disruptive technologies: big data analytics, internet of things, mobility, cloud, security, unified communications, etc. Happiest Minds offers domain centric solutions applying skills, IPs and functional expertise in IT Services, Product Engineering, Infrastructure Management and Security. These services have applicability across industry sectors such as retail, consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, banking, insurance, hi-tech, engineering R&D, manufacturing, automotive and travel/transportation/hospitality. Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Happiest Minds has operations in the US, UK, Singapore, Australia and has secured $ 52.5 million Series-A funding. Its investors are JP Morgan Private Equity Group, Intel Capital and Ashok Soota.

Website : http://www.happiestminds.com/

Email : media@happiestminds.com

Source : Happiest Minds

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How to Protect Your Data from Third-Party Breaches

 How to Protect Your Data from Third-Party Breaches

The December 2013 Target data breach that compromised the credit card information of 40 million customers was the first of many wake-up calls to organizations, bringing home the damage a company can sustain when a partner’s systems are hacked. As the whole world now knows, the HVAC supplier had access to more of Target’s systems than was needed or intended, and hackers infiltrated Target’s network through the partner’s own vulnerable solution.

Sadly, Target is not the lone case. More recently, 15,000 Boston Medical Center patients’ personal information and the payment card details of 868,000 Good will customers were compromised through data breaches at vendor companies with access to the organizations’ systems. In fact, a recent PwC study found the biggest challenge to security today is from internal sources – employees and partners – not external threats.

Vendors often need remote access to maintain your internal systems, but they may not be as stringent about security processes as your chief security officer, CIO, or IT team. For example, partners’ systems may use software that a developer no longer supports, and is hence, vulnerable. Even worse, they may use the same administrative passwords across every customers’ systems.

All this translates into the need for a far more comprehensive information security risk management strategy — one that not only oversees your data, but also third-party access rights, the robustness of network defenses, and more.

Here are some best practices to help protect your network from third-party data breaches:

Be aware of what your vendors can remotely access. Understand what kind of data and which systems your vendors can access, and the levels of access they enjoy. Can they retrieve any critical data they do not need for their work? Or do they have access only to the resources necessary to perform their jobs? This is of particular importance when you work with infrastructure management partners, for instance, because these have privileged access that could pose a significant threat if not properly secured. Provide access to data and systems only on a need to know basis.

Standardize remote access methodologies. The proliferation of available remote access methodologies (WebEx, web conferencing tools, and virtual private networks, for example) makes it difficult to monitor and manage access controls. Simplify this and better manage connections made to your network by defining the specific methodologies you will allow.

Use stronger authentication. Insist that vendors who must access your environment use two-factor authentication and institute well-defined access control processes.

Segment your network behind firewalls. It is advisable to allow vendors access only to a specific segment of the network, with this segment being firewalled from others. Network segmentation can limit the damage from a third-party data breach. To make this even more effective, provide dedicated systems for vendors, so they do not use their systems to connect to your network.

Monitor network defenses frequently. Frequently audit access controls and security policies to identify potential security gaps that can be plugged before a breach occurs. Real-time analyses allow your IT department to see what is being accessed by whom and why, as your vendors connect to your network. This helps proactively identify any problematic activity.

Hold vendors to the same security standards you hold yourself. However stringent your organization’s security system, all is nullified if your vendors are not equally particular. Define your security requirements upfront when signing on a new vendor. Review their security processes and access control policies, and check if they conduct regular penetration testing on their systems and network. Insist they adhere to the same standards as your organization in the areas of data protection, identity management, authentication, and other security measures.

Proactively plan for third-party breaches. You will (or should) already have a robust incident response and disaster recovery plan for attacks on your own systems. Take this a step further by planning a defense against third-party attacks as well. Ask your vendors to demonstrate how they protect your data, their incident response plan, and how they will deal with breaches that can affect your data.  

Periodically verify your vendor’s security posture. Security assurance is not a one-time task but a continuous process. Conduct periodic audits of your vendors to make sure that they follow best practices and have the necessary technical controls in place. The aim should not be to review every vendor you engage, but to conduct a thorough audit with greater frequency for targeted, high-risk vendors.

In this, as in other aspects of your relationship with your vendors, work with partners to identify security gaps and protect against breaches before they occur. Industry standards are gradually evolving to this end as well. The latest version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS 3.0) mandates that organizations pay closer attention to partners’ security practices. This will probably provide the much-needed nudge to get businesses to think beyond only their own security posture.

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Five Parameters That Influence Customer Experience

Here are Happiest Minds thoughts on what are some of the factors and parameters which influence these perceptions.

1.Expectation Management: Customer perceptions about the product or service depend on whether it meets, exceeds or falls below their expectations. Incidentally, these expectations are originally set and/or influenced by the brand. “Don’t make promises you cannot keep” goes the old saying and it continues to be true even in the digital world today. Sadly, we still have scenarios where providers raise expectations during the sales and pre-sales cycles but fall woefully short during execution, resulting in a negative experience.

2. Cycle Times: The digital age is about speed and agility. You cannot really take weeks to on-board a customer or days to address a complaint. Response times have to be in seconds and minutes, for example in acknowledging a customer complaint. Resolution times can of course be a bit longer, however it’s critical to keep the customer informed about the resolution status on a proactive and periodic basis. There’s nothing like a lack of updates to get customers mad at you. This sounds obvious and perhaps trivial and yet it’s mind-boggling how few companies practice and execute to this approach.

3. Value for Money: Customer perceptions about your product or service are directly influenced by the value they derive for the money they’ve spent. Here it’s important to note that providing a good experience with a higher priced product or service is much better than a cheap product/service with a correspondingly cheap experience. ‘Never sell on price (e.g. my product/service is the cheapest) but always on value’ is something that all good sales specialists are well aware of. A focus on ensuring that customers get value for their money (before, during and after the sales transaction) goes a long way in creating positive perceptions about your product/service and your brand.

4. Integrated and consistent view: As multi-channel gives way to omni-channel, consistency and integration across channels becomes critical in influencing what customers feel about your product/service. There’s no better way to irritate customers than to give them a disjoint, inconsistent experience when they deal with you over multiple channels.

5. Transparency: Businesses often practice “Dark Patterns” – the art of hoodwinking customers with a multitude of fine print conditions, with the aim of trapping customers into products, features and services that they don’t want. I remember my father receiving a credit card that he had not asked for, being charged for it, and the hassle it took to return it and make the issuer refund the charges. Another example is the proliferation of companies being set up, with the sole aim of ‘building up the customer database’ – which means enrolling and on-boarding customers through dubious means. For those companies who want to make Customer Experience a core part of their business strategy, among my first recommendations would be to be totally transparent with customers. Junk the fine print and dark patterns, avoid hidden charges and surprises, and focus only on how you can make your customers happy.

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Identity and Access Management

With organizations increasingly focusing on access governance (as they should!), it would be foolish to underestimate the importance of Identity Management. Data on the what, why and when of information access must be complemented by the knowledge of who accesses data—in other words, the identity of the person accessing data. Identity management refers to the process of creating and implementing policies that define roles for every member of the organization (employees and vendors), and their associated privileges and access rights. The level of access that a user enjoys to applications, data, and different parts of the network,are defined by his role and responsibilities, and what he needs to perform his job.

 

An identity management system helps to automate provisioning, re-provisioning and de-provisioning of users as well, reducing time and effort spent, as well as human error.

Identity management is more than simply governing user access rights. It includes: a) defining enterprise-wide access policies; b) designing reporting mechanisms; c) defining rules-based alerts for when there is an unusual request or when a user tries to access information outside the scope of his role; and d)the regular monitoring of role assignments and changes (when employees move out of the organization, a particular role, or to a different function, and their identity within the organization changes accordingly).

Best practices in implementing an identity management system that can enhance security and compliance

• Establish a single virtual directory of identities that consolidates the multiple directories spread across the enterprise. This is essential to facilitate both the standardization of authentication systems as well as access management and governance.
• Assign access permissions to job roles rather than to the people in those roles.Linking permissions to people who may change their job roles (and thus, responsibilities) or quit the organization could result in privilege creep or orphan accounts if access governance is tardy. Linking permissions to job roles allows for easier long-term identity management.
• Establish a workflow that automates the processes of requesting for and approving access rights. This can make the identity management more efficient. Such a workflow should be complemented by a self-service user interface that offers employees, data owners and business decision-makers a detailed view of identities and associated access rights.
• Since identity management is so closely linked to compliance initiatives, it is imperative to consider the impact of regulatory compliance requirements on identity management systems during the planning stage. Essentially, these requirements will inform the scope of the system.
• It is not advisable for IT to be overly involved in identity management; instead limit their role to developing and implementing the appropriate tools and infrastructure. Essentially, when IT is enabled to grant access based on requests, without the benefit of business context, it will be unable to take an informed call on whether that level of access is appropriate for that particular role.
• Have a strong review process in place. Identities are dynamic, and it is imperative that the organization engage in frequent recertification to ensure that the right people have access to the right data. Continual reviews of identities and their assigned permissions reduce the enterprise’s exposure to risk.

Finally, remember that just like any other aspect of security, identity management too is an on-going, iterative process that does not end with the implementation of a solution.

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Free Guest Blogging - Guest Bloggers Wanted

Free Guest Blogging - Guest Bloggers Wanted

When I guest post for someone else, I do the following:

•     Link to the post from my blog
•     Promote it on Twitter (several times)
•     Share it on Facebook
•     Thank the person
•     Stick around and respond to comments on the post

For Free Guest Blogging  
  
Send Your Content to ssivaseo@gmail.com

While not everyone does this, it’s not a bad idea. However, this is important: If you have to choose between getting people to guest post on your site or guest posting elsewhere, do the latter. It’s always better to get your name out into new communities.

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Cloaking: What It Is and Why You Shouldn't Do It

Cloaking: What It Is and Why You Shouldn't Do It

 Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

As of 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement are available, so cloaking is not considered necessary by proponents of that method. Cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique, to try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking; it can also be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine description which site turns out to have substantially different, or even pornographic content. For this reason, major search engines consider cloaking for deception to be a violation of their guidelines, and therefore, they delist sites when deceptive cloaking is reported.

Cloaking is a form of the doorway page technique.

A similar technique is also used on the Open Directory Project web directory. It differs in several ways from search engine cloaking:

* It is intended to fool human editors, rather than computer search engine spiders.
* The decision to cloak or not is often based upon the HTTP referrer, the user agent or the visitor's IP; but more advanced techniques can be also based upon the client's behaviour analysis after a few page requests: the raw quantity, the sorting of, and latency between subsequent HTTP requests sent to a website's pages, plus the presence of a check for robots.txt file, are some of the parameters in which search engines spiders differ heavily from a natural user behaviour. The referrer tells the URL of the page on which a user clicked a link to get to the page. Some cloakers will give the fake page to anyone who comes from a web directory website, since directory editors will usually examine sites by clicking on links that appear on a directory web page. Other cloakers give the fake page to everyone except those coming from a major search engine; this makes it harder to detect cloaking, while not costing them many visitors, since most people find websites by using a search engine.

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SEO Link Building Service Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages of Link Building:

Increases link popularity – Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your website. So, total number of inbound links for your website will increase. The inbound links are the links from other websites to your website.

Increases page rank – Your website page rank will increase. If you get low PR inbound links, there is a possibility that your website PR gets reduced. So, getting high PR and relevant inbound links are very important here. Also, these inbound links are the very important factor that the search engines take into account for ranking the websites. So, be careful while getting inbound links.

Easy to get links in the future – As your page rank increases, it is very easy to get links in the future. Even it is very easy to get one-way links. As mentioned above PR is the very important factor and all the webmasters will check the PR before linking to the websites. So, they will get satisfy because of our high website PR and they will come and ask us to give link to their website from our website.

Increases search engine ranking – Your website rank in the search engines will increase. So, your website gets the top position in the search engines search results page. This depends on the link popularity and page rank. This depends on many other factors including other than link building process.

Increases website traffic – Traffic to your website will increase. So, you will get more number of relevant visitors to your website.

Increases sales – As more relevant visitors visit your website, there is a possibility that they will buy your products or services. So, your sales will increase.

Popularizes business – As many of the websites/authority websites link to your website, you can get into the users mind very easily as a branded website/company.

Cost effective Advertising – This is the very cost effective advertising for your business as you are going to advertise in the other websites for free.

Disadvantages of Link Building:

Chances of reduced sales – With reciprocal links method, you are encouraging your visitors to visit the other relevant websites/companies. This will lead to reduce your sales or services as they are navigating to other websites.

Time-Consuming – This is the time-consuming process because getting the sufficient number of inbound links to increase your website PR takes many months/years.

Webmaster is necessary – Webmaster is necessary to manage the link building process because it needs more follow-ups and of busy schedule of website owners.

Low inbound links PR reduces website PR – If you get the low PR inbound links unknowingly, then it will decrease your website PR. So, we should be very careful while getting inbound links.

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Guidelines for Best SEO practices for E-Commerce Websites

Guidelines for Best SEO practices for E-Commerce Websites

If you have an eCommerce website, there are many things you will need to pay attention to in order to have better SEO. You might know of the current Panda update, which has come up after a long wait of ten months. You don't want to lose out on the ranking for some silly mistakes, and then wait for months together to make it back when the next update is in. We provide you some guidelines that will help you while looking for Ecommerce SEO.

Categorization

Every eCommerce website has a number of products to offer in different categories. Dividing products into different categories makes it easier for the users to search for their product. For example, users might be looking for "school bags". Now, you might be providing this product under several categories like school items, kids’ items or backpacks. Using keyword search, you need to see how the users are searching for that item and accordingly, categorize your products.

Pagination

Pagination is the process of dividing the list of products in a specific category into different pages if you have a long list that you don't want to put up on a single page. You must have the "previous" and "next" options on your page if you have products of the same category on more than one page. If you do not have these options, Google will not be able to see the depth of your product offerings. If you have 100 products with 10 products on each page, and you do not have the prev/next options, Google will consider that you have only 10 products.

Canonical tags

A canonical tag is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a webpage for SEO. This tag is important for those products that are available in various colours, sizes and attributes. So, you will want to keep the link directed to one preferred page version.

Duplicate content

If you are duplicating content across multiple categories and pages on your own website or you are using other domains for a product with the same content, then you will be having duplicate content issues, which will badly affect your website's ranking in SEO. There are many tools that can help you check for duplicate content. There are also other tools available to check how many other websites are using the same product descriptions.

Shifting to HTTPS

Many eCommerce website owners are shifting to HTTPS. If you are one of them, you should not forget to update your canonical tags from HTTP to HTTPS. You will also have to create a new Google Webmaster Tools profile under HTTPS and submit your new HTTPS sitemap(s).

If you are looking for professionals who can deliver the perfect Ecommerce Website Design, you can contact Jain Technosoft. They can provide the best e-commerce website that is attractive, user-friendly, SEO friendly, fast and responsive so that you have increased sales and hence, greater profits. They will take care of all aspects of ecommerce including payment gateway integration, shopping cart, secure transactions, shipping options, order tracking and more.

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Search Engines Market Shares

Country Search Engines Market Shares  

For the search marketer, Google is still the 800-pound gorilla of the industry. You cannot ignore Google in your search strategy for organic or paid campaigns. But Google is not the only search engine in town. Google is the most popular search engine in the world, but you must include other search engines in your plan to maximize the benefits of search marketing.

Remembering that Google does not dominate in other countries, a marketer must understand market share on a per country basis. As a marketer, you need to know which are the top search engines in your targeted country, and plan for a mix.

Market Share by Country

In local markets your campaigns should be conducted in a specific language and will drive people to web pages in that language. You need to know which search engines are being used by people speaking those languages so that you know which search engines to check for organic search rankings and traffic, and which paid search engines to place ads with.

Not every country is represented on the list below. We selected countries with search engines other than Google or with some other unique attributes. If you are interested in a specific market’s data you can view Net Market Share or Statista, both of which have aggregated data in multiple country markets.

Brazil

Brazil has a rapidly growing Internet population that primarily uses Google as their search engine:

1. Google: 96.7%
2. Yahoo: 1.2%
3. Bing: 1.1%
4. Ask: 0.44%
5. My Search Dial: 0.1%

China

About one fourth of all Internet users worldwide are in China. Baidu has the top market share in China, with Google landing fourth on the list with a market share of less than 2%:

1. Baidu: 58.14%
2. 360 Search: 25.26%
3. Sogou: 13.31%
4. Google: 1.55%
5. Bing: 0.81%
6. Yahoo: 0.55%
7. Youdao: 0.17%
8. Others: 0.21%

France

France is dominated by Google but also is one of the larger Bing markets outside of the US, with a few smaller local search engines.

1. Google 91%
2. Bing 2.6%
3. Yahoo! 1.5%
   
4. Delta-Search 1.1%
5. Babylon .6%

Korea

Korea is an interesting market, in that Google only has a fraction of the search market that is dominated by Naver, with a decent share from Daum.

1. Naver 73.62%
2. Daum 18%
3. Google 2.5%
4. Nate 2.14%
5. Zum 0.37%

Russia

Yandex is used throughout the Russian-speaking markets of the world. It is also being used in other markets, such as Turkey.

1. Yandex 54%
2. Google 34.7%
3. Search Mail.ru 8.6%
4. Rambler 0.9%
5. Bing 0.6%
6. Others 0.6%

United Kingdom

Bing has a very strong showing in the UK, but Google still takes two out of three searches:

1. Google: 67.3%
2. Microsoft/Bing: 19.3%
3. Yahoo!: 10.0%
4. Ask: 2.0%
5. AOL: 1.3%

United States

The US is one of the largest markets and has a fair bit of diversity with the engines. Google is still a dominant player but a key consideration is the browsers and their search engine preferences for search. Internet Explorer defaults to Bing and now Firefox defaults to Yahoo!, which might change its share until users learn how to change to another search engine:

1. Google: 67.3%
2. Microsoft: 19.3%
3. Yahoo!: 10.0%
4. Ask: 2.0%
5. AOL: 1.3%

Global Market Share

Net Market Share’s November 2014 aggregated data shows Google being the dominant search engine globally:

Search Engine	Market Share
Google	53.74%
Baidu	31.32%
Bing	10.81%
Yahoo!	3.52%
AOL	0.15%
Ask	0.07%
Other	0.39%

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Instant Approval Article Sharing Sites List

Instant Approval Article Sharing Sites List

Website	TYPE	DA	PA	PR
sites.google.com	Instant Approval	100	95	9
livejournal.com	Instant Approval	96	92	8
tumblr.com	Instant Approval	99	94	8
storify.com	Instant Approval	91	91	8
github.com	Instant Approval	96	94	8
merchantcircle.com	Instant Approval	89	63	8
newsvine.com	Instant Approval	95	79	7
evernote.com	Instant Approval	93	91	7
quora.com	Instant Approval	90	78	7
https://www.behance.net	Instant Approval	0	0	7
https://www.diigo.com	Instant Approval	0	0	7
squidoo.com	Instant Approval	94	75	6
buzznet.com	Instant Approval	81	58	6
wikia.com	Instant Approval	0	0	6
matadornetwork.com	Instant Approval	75	78	6
skyrock.com	Instant Approval	83	64	6
houzz.com	Instant Approval	92	69	6
inspiration.entrepreneur.com	Instant Approval	93	70	6
wattpad.com	Instant Approval	85	69	6
articlesbase.com	Instant Approval	87	57	5
goarticles.com	Instant Approval	83	85	5
celsias.com	Instant Approval	60	47	5
smore.com	Instant Approval	63	56	5
wistia.com	Instant Approval	77	80	5
1x.com	Instant Approval	73	77	5
justpaste.it	Instant Approval	76	73	5
yookos.com	Instant Approval	53	51	4
sett.com	Instant Approval	60	65	4
artipot.com	Instant Approval	49	44	3
articles.abilogic.com	Instant Approval	59	48	3
inube.com	Instant Approval	58	52	3
purevolume.com	Instant Approval	88	71	3
theproarticles.net	Instant Approval	32	42	2
look-4it.com	Instant Approval	0	0	1

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