Business Feeds

According to a new report from data security company Impreva, web applications experience on average twenty seven attacks per hour, or approximately one attack every two minutes. The Imperva 2011 Web Application Attack Report offers insight into malicious web app attack traffic in the period between December 2010 and May 2011.

The data security company monitored and categorized more than 10 million individual attacks across the internet, including attacks targeting thirty different enterprise and government web apps. The report outlines the frequency, type and geography of origin of each attack to help security professionals better prioritize vulnerability remediation.

“Most security research focuses on vulnerabilities, and while this insight is extremely valuable, it doesn’t always help businesses prioritize their security efforts,” Amichai Shulman, lead researcher and Imperva CTO said in a statement. “Take a Read more…

PRINCETON, Ind. — Alliance Resource Partners, which operates the Gibson County Coal mine, announced Thursday that it intends to develop a second Gibson County mine.

The new operation, which should be up and running in 2014, will employ about 310 miners and produce up to 3.3 million tons of coal a year, the company said.

The new mine, Gibson South, will be located due south of the Gibson County Coal mine, which employs about 320 workers.

Based in Tulsa, Okla., Alliance operates mining complexes in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland and West Virginia. The company also has a coal-loading terminal on the Ohio River in Mount Vernon, Ind. As of Feb. 1 the company had 3,558 full-time employees.

While the news for small businesses hasnt been too good as of late, owners arent taking things too badly, as the Wells Fargo and Gallup Small Business Index shows that business owners are holding steady and not being optimistic or pessimistic.

The score of zero for July of 2011 is much better than July of 2010, when business owners had an overall index score of negative-28.

The Index shows that optimism is currently at zero, as the poll said the current financial situation was not enough to offset lowered expectations for future revenue.

Doug Case, a small business segment manager for Wells Fargo, said that business owners are demonstrating a reluctance to invest and are holding onto their money.

“In recent months, weve seen strong growth in deposit balances as business owners prepare for potential business challenges and save for future opportunities,” Case said.

According to a recent survey from the Alternative Board, 68 percent of business owners in the United States and 61 percent of Canadian business owners are optimistic that the economy will improve this year.

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Creating a small business website or blog and publishing a few articles is only the beginning of the job. While the completion of a great-looking website is worthy of a celebration, there is plenty more to do in order to ensure your website or blog attracts and keeps your desired online audience.

To help website owners make more sense of the visits they get, a list of statistical information is available. But the collected statistics and data are meaningless if you don’t know what they mean. These statistics can easily be presented using web analytics tools found either from your web host or from a third-party web analytics company. T

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In these days of economic recession and budget cuts, every company must make an effort to reduce overheads as much as possible. CCOMM Video Conferencing can be very useful for these purposes. With travel being too costly for many companies, replacing physical meetings with video conferencing is a clear and efficient way to save money. In addition, new businesses starting out in tough times need to ensure they keep startup costs to an absolute minimum, to reduce the amount of money they need to convince banks to lend. Read more…

A supermarket has been given permission to sell alcohol every day of the week, despite opposition from residents.

Brighton and Hove City Council has granted an alcohol licence for the Southern Co-operative store in Western Road, Hove.

The licence is for the sale of alcohol from 8am until 11pm daily.

Retailers in the area collected almost 1,000 signatures from members of the public who opposed the opening of the store on the site of the Providence pub.

Ranjan Limbachia, the owner of Western Newsagents opposite the site, said the move was very bad news for independent retailers.

She said: “I opened the first convenience store in the area 25 years ago and now all these big supermarkets have moved in. I

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EVANSVILLE — The current debate over the nation’s debt ceiling has sparked some questions and concerns about how the issue may affect individual investors, local professionals say.

“The concerns started coming in about a week ago, and they are coming from people who are either retired or very near retired,” said Mark Pettinga, president of Evansville firm Pettinga Financial Advisors.

“They just don’t want to revisit a situation like 2008/2009 again.”

The situation is uncertain and unprecedented, the advisers say, but their advice is a familiar investment refrain: Stay the course and don’t panic.

“Don’t be knee-jerking and trying to do some timing maneuvers,” advised Ken Sendelweck, president of private banking and wealth management at Jasper, Ind.-based German American Bank.

Most of German American’s customers, Sendelweck said, have confidence the situation will be resolved before the Aug. 2

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IBM has launched new cloud services that enable clients to protect, store and retrieve their most critical data in minutes versus days in the event of a disaster.

Disasters can cause significant damage to businesses in the loss of crucial data and revenue. Analyst estimates state that the loss of revenue during downtime is tens of thousands of dollars for every hour. Businesses need to assess threat risks and create a resilience strategy that helps ensure uninterrupted business operations and enables speed and agility when an unforeseen event strikes.

The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services allow customers to protect their data and applications faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner than they could before within a traditional data center environment. IBM SmartCloud offers companies of various sizes a virtual and physical server recovery service that continuously replicates their applications and all associated data on a secure cloud infrastructure. Th Read more…

InformationWeek Analytics, the service for peer-based IT research and analysis, announced the release of its latest research report; Promises, Promises: A Not-So-New SLA Model encompasses analysis of our latest SLA survey results and guides readers in determining how to make the most of external service-level agreements as many IT functions move to the cloud. More than 560 IT service consumers and providers responded to this poll. The report author, Frederick Rose, is the service assurance practice director at Fusion PPT.

46% of service consumers agree it’s difficult to monitor SLAs for public cloud.

SLAs have long been tough to negotiate and tougher to enforce, especially for small companies that lack the resources to push for the best terms and monitor for compliance. But Read more…