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How much does a penetration test cost?

The cost of a pen test depends on the skill of the testers you engage and the size of the application.

Having said that, we have seen wide variation in pricing – from $5,000 to $50,000. And the higher prices don’t always mean higher quality.

At Plynt, we constantly strive to reduce our costs and pass on part of those benefits to you. Drop us a mail or contact me to get a quote for a security test.

AT&T turned in a decent fourth-quarter performance, despite being dogged by costs. Nonetheless, the weak economy will blunt the telecom firm's chances of any meaningful growth for the foreseeable future, and it still hasn't figured out how to counteract the loss in sales from those pesky landline defections.

All told, AT&T recorded a 22.6% earnings slide from the previous year's corresponding quarter, to $2.4 billion, or 41 cents per share, from $3.1 billion, or 51 cents per share. Excluding special items, earnings totaled 64 cents per share.

Between October and November 2008, AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) beat expectations by adding 2.1 million wireless subscribers, largely because of its being the exclusive official carrier of the popular Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) iPhone in the United States. So, yes, AT&T registered a strong quarter, but times are tough.

Though its wireless sales grew 13.2%, its landline sales 3.3%. Unlike Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ), AT&T still hasn't been able to quell sliding sales in the segment by selling broadband and TV services.

The San Antonio-based telecom operator expects sales to grow in the low single digit percentages. In a sign of the times, though, it also expects to cut capital spending by 10% to 15%, from the $19.7 billion it invested in 2008. That will hurt equipment vendors like Ciena (nasdaq: CIEN - news - people ) and Alcatel-Lucent (nyse: ALU - news - people ) since AT&T represents a third of spending on telecoms gear.

As in the case of Verizon, the upheaval in the financial markets is forcing AT&T to fill funding gaps. It announced Wednesday that its 2009 earnings will take a 19 cent per share hit owing to pension and retiree benefit costs. Excluding that cost, though, it expects margins to remain stable.

Sure, there are costs involved. But going the extra mile for unhappy customers can lead to serious growth.

We've all done some crazy things. Like when the "Happy Days" writers had Fonzie jump that shark tank; or when Tom Cruise flailed around on Oprah's couch; or when I recently grappled with the take-a-way sushi at Heathrow Airport.

For my money, though, the crazy crown has to go to the folks at Henderson, Nev.-based Zappos. Reason: This company sells shoes. To women. Online.

Ask any guy who's gone shoe-shopping with a female and you'll understand why I say this. This is not a matter of political correctness: Women simply have an unnatural relationship with shoes. My wife owns dozens and dozens of them. It's like she's on a never-ending search to find that perfect thing in her life to make up for her other disappointments (like her choice in men). And, like all other women, my wife has never purchased a pair of shoes without trying on 37 other pairs beforehand.

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Still more perplexing (to men, at least), these same women--after finally deciding on that one great pair--will head right back to the store 10 minutes after getting home to return them. Because that's what women do--they change their minds. It's their prerogative.

So why, a decade ago, did the Zappos guys decide to start an online female-shoe retailer? "We're actually not in the shoe business at all," says Sean Kim, vice president of business development. "We're in the service business. We just happen to sell shoes."

South Korea's central bank carried out its biggest interest rate cut ever Thursday, slashing borrowing costs by a full percentage point to a record low in a bid to stave off possible recession.

The Bank of Korea said it was slashing its benchmark seven-day repurchase rate to 3 percent from 4 percent during a regular policy meeting Thursday.

It was the fourth time for the bank to lower the rate in the past two months and exceeded the 0.75 percentage point emergency cut on Oct. 27, previously the largest one.

The rate has gone from 5.25 percent to 3 percent since the cycle of easing began on Oct. 9.

The previous record low for the bank's benchmark rate was 3.25 percent last seen in October 2005.

South Korea's economy slowed in the third quarter and economists are predicting it could falter further next year amid global economic weakness.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

As the miner cuts 14,000 jobs, its rivals will be preparing similar cost-cutting moves.

Wal-Mart will start selling iPhones by the end of the year, but it is unlikely that they will be available in time to take advantage of holiday sales.

Of more importance, perhaps, is that the phone may be sold for its lowest price yet—$99.

The rumors started circulating last week that a partnership between Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) and Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) may be in the works, but Bloomberg confirmed today that employees at five California stores said that Wal-Mart will offer iPhones by the end of December, likely after Christmas.

Two of the representatives said the store will carry two models.

Bloomberg said analysts are suspecting that Apple may use the partnership to sell a discontinued 4-gigabyte version, which will allow it to hit what is considered a low price point for a smartphone.

Wal-Mart will be the second outside chain to be allowed to sell the device, following Best Buy (nyse: BBY - news - people ).

Currently, two models are for sale—an 8-gigabyte and 16-gigabyte version for $199 and $299.

With the highly proficient National Security Guard commandos having killed the last of the terrorists holed up in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, the question on everyone’s mind is what effect the tragedy will have on the economy. Despite some clear differences between the Mumbai tragedy and the 9/11 New York calamity, the latter provides a good starting point for answering this question. The effects of the 9/11 events, now extensively studied and analyzed, may be considered at the local level on New York City and at the national level on the United States.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many analysts predicted significant permanent damage to the economy of the New York City. There is now virtual consensus, however, that the effects were smaller than initially predicted and were short-lived. A July 12, 2006, report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concluded that the economic effects of the terrorist attacks were sharp but short-lived and had largely disappeared by the end of 2002. According to the Federal Reserve report, New York City recovered from the 2001 recession--well under way at the time of the attacks--at least as fast as the rest of the country. Average incomes in the following four years rose faster for the city’s residents than the rest of the nation.

At the national level, the Sept. 11 tragedy had no measurable effect. A 2002 study authored by Gail Makinen and published by the Congressional Research Service, observed that the initial fears that the event would have serious adverse effects on aggregate demand proved wrong. At the time of the attacks, the economy was in the third consecutive quarter of contraction. By the fourth quarter, growth had resumed. This strongly suggests that any adverse effects of the attacks on aggregate demand were truly short-lived and small in magnitude.

Several factors suggest that the effects of the Mumbai attacks, though devastating for far too many families at the personal level, will be less significant than those of 9/11 attacks. To begin with, the 9/11 attacks were the first ever by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil. They were perhaps also far more dramatic and took many more lives. As such, they left a deep psychological impact on a vast number of Americans, especially in New York. The Mumbai attacks are also more heinous and dramatic--and wider in scope--than anything Mumbai has witnessed previously. Yet they are not entirely new to Mumbai. Psychologically, Mumbai and India are better prepared to deal with such tragedies than the U.S. was immediately following 9/11. This makes the prospects of Mumbai bouncing back rapidly substantially better.

Indeed, I was surprised to learn from my former Columbia student Catherine Delain, who has been on a visit to India for the last three weeks, that she could arrive at Mumbai at 5 a.m. by train from Vadodara immediately following the night of the massacre at Victoria Terminus station, and, within an hour, could also take the train from the Terminus to Aurangabad.

Catherine could observe the signs of the vast tragedy strewn all over in the station and yet found, to her astonishment, that the railway staff was out there going about their jobs as if it were a normal day! And of course, flights into and out of Mumbai never stopped during the 60-plus hours of the clean-up operation.

Equally reassuring was the effect on the stock market. Following 9/11, the stock market in New York had to be closed down for almost a week. When the market opened on Sept. 17, the Dow Jones index, which had closed at 9,605 on Sept. 10, fell to 8,920. In Mumbai, markets opened on Friday (Nov. 28, 2008), after just a one-day break--with the tragedy still in progress. A day earlier, markets in Singapore and elsewhere had reacted negatively, with the rupee declining in value. Yet, the Sensex on the Bombay Stock Exchange rose 0.7% on Friday, reaching a two-week peak.

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Thanks to some timely tailoring, shares of Gap (GPS) jumped 27% on Nov. 21 even as the retailer's sales fell 8%.

The reason for the favorable reaction was another round of successful cost-cutting at Gap, which boosted profits despite the reluctance of consumers to spend at Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy stores.

Across the economy, corporate executives are looking to follow a similar strategy. As a potentially nasty recession sets in and revenues drop, firms are forced to cut their way toward higher profits.

Some analysts predict the Gap can continue boosting profits next year even as revenues decline. But eventually, many analysts say, Gap must find a way to draw more shoppers' dollars—not just cut costs through inventory controls, shrinking real estate holdings, or other measures.

A Short-Term Strategy

"While expense management has been impressive, we continue to wonder how sustainable earnings growth is longer-term with deteriorating sales and given a bleaker economic outlook in '09," wrote Banc of America (BAC) analyst Dana Cohen. (BofA handles banking services for Gap.)

Many other firms are taking similar cost-cutting steps, which often involve large rounds of layoffs. Dell (DELL) was also able to increase profits last quarter despite falling sales. The computer maker said it has cut 11,000 jobs in the past year.

"It's a necessary strategy, but it's a short-term strategy," says Dan Genter, chief executive and chief investment officer at RNC Genter. After a certain point, you're no longer cutting fat from your budget, he says—you're cutting bone.

For some firms, cost-cutting can be a healthy process that repositions them for future growth. Greg Estes, portfolio manager at Intrepid Capital Management, cites Starbucks (SBUX), which is shutting down less profitable coffee shops after "growing too fast" for several years. "If and when a positive environment returns, they'll be in a better position [with] better margins and a better portfolio of stores," says Estes, whose funds own Starbucks stock.

However, Estes says that, with some exceptions, it's generally very difficult to cut costs significantly for more than four quarters. After a while, though you may be widening profit margins, you're shrinking the entire firm.

When Are Cuts Permanent?

The financial sector is the most glaring example of these sorts of permanent cost cuts. Faced with a financial crisis and a tough economy, financial firms are slashing costs, shrinking expenses and perks, and laying off hundreds of thousands of workers—sometime alongside mergers with weaker rivals, sometimes not.

For example, Citigroup (C), the recipient of a federal government bailout Nov. 24, "may end up being a shadow of what it was," Genter says. Citi, like other financial firms, faces the problem of leverage, he says. Because it built its business on borrowed money, its contraction is more striking and more permanent when that leverage goes away.

In corporate board rooms, there is a raging debate on how much and how quickly to cut as the economy slows down. If you believe the recession will be over by mid-2009, you may want to hold onto valuable employees and keep facilities open so you can profit from the recovery.

As the cost and convenience benefits of cloud computing become more compelling, more and more IT departments are taking a close look at moving large parts of their infrastructure out of their data centers.

While a year or two ago it was possible to dismiss many of the cloud offerings as too new and somewhat rickety, that objection no longer applies. For the industry-leading cloud vendors, the growing pains are essentially over and the services for storage, computing, load balancing and other functions are as good or better than what most IT departments are getting out of their data centers and are offered at extremely attractive prices.

The massive barrier that remains in front of a wholesale migration of IT to cloud computing is the problem of facing the worst case: How will an IT department deal with a major outage in the cloud or in the network that connects to the cloud? This is a different issue than everyday quality. No matter how substantial a cloud offering it is, as with all computing resources, massive failure is possible. This week, the JargonSpy takes a look at the different approaches that can be taken to managing disasters in the cloud.

The first and most important step that savvy IT managers take when deciding what can be moved to the cloud is to separate infrastructure into various groups according to its importance. In every company, there is a set of applications and infrastructure so important that nobody outside the company can be trusted to run them. But for most businesses, the bulk of their infrastructure could go into the cloud. The definition for what is safe for the cloud is different for every business, but if you can live without an application for two days, it is probably safe to put it into the cloud.

So, once you have decided what you can put into the cloud, how do you manage the risk of disaster? One approach that can offer some comfort in certain situations--service level agreements (SLA) that state a level of performance that must be met and remedies in case of failure--is a non-starter for the cloud. If you take a close look at the SLAs in the cloud, you'll see that they guarantee almost nothing--not even that the service will continuously operate. The remedies are similarly weak. You may be able to cancel a contract or get your money back or get credits to pay for future services, but that's about it.

To be fair, SLAs in other areas of computing and outsourcing aren't much better. Vendors are only comfortable offering strong SLAs if they are being paid a fortune or if they have a dedicated architecture to solve a well-understood problem.

Hydroponics -- a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil -- could bring farming into cities.

The program run by the California State Polytechnic University agriculture professor is part of a growing effort to use hydroponics -- a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil -- to bring farming into cities, where consumers are concentrated.

Because hydroponic farming requires less water and less land than traditional field farming, Fujimoto and researchers-turned-growers in other U.S. cities see it as ideal to bring agriculture to apartment buildings, rooftops and vacant lots.

"The goal here is to look at growing food crops in small spaces," he said.

Long a niche technology existing in the shadow of conventional growing methods, hydroponics is getting a second look from university researchers and public health advocates.

Supporters point to the environmental cost of trucking produce from farms to cities, the loss of wilderness for farmland to feed a growing world population, and the risk of bacteria along extensive, insecure food chains as reasons for establishing urban hydroponic farms.

However, the expense of setting up the high-tech farms on pricey city land and providing enough year-round heat and light could present some insurmountable obstacles.

"These are university theories," said Jim Prevor, editor of Produce Business magazine. "They're not mapped to things that actually exist."

The roots of hydroponically produced fruits and vegetables can dangle in direct contact with water or be set in growing media such as sponges or shredded coconut shells. Most commercial operations pump water through sophisticated sensors that automatically adjust nutrient and acidity levels in the water.

Hydroponics are generally used for fast-growing, high-value crops such as lettuces and tomatoes that can be produced year-round in heated, well-lit greenhouses. So far, production is not large enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to track.

The country's largest hydroponic greenhouse is Eurofresh Inc.'s 274-acre operation in southeastern Arizona, where more than 200 million pounds of tomatoes were produced in 2007. Most large-scale commercial operations are in the arid Southwest, where water-efficiency is prized, or the sometimes frigid Northeast, where the method can be used year-round in heated greenhouses.

The technology has benefited from nearly three decades of NASA research aimed at sustaining astronauts in places with even less green space than a typical U.S. city.

Hydroponics also bears the dubious distinction of being a growing method for marijuana.

Fujimoto said one of his research assistants got a call from the FBI after using a credit card to buy nutrients for the campus greenhouse at a hydroponic-supply store.

There's clearly nothing illicit going on at the greenhouse, where thin streams of water pass silently though dozens of long white plastic tubes arranged in rows across chest-high stands. Rose-shaded lettuce leaves, pale-green stalks of bok-choy and sprigs of basil poke from the holes in the tubes.

Fujimoto aims to prepare his students to operate the urban hydroponic businesses that he thinks will gain importance in the future. They sell their lettuces, peppers, tomatoes and other produce to an on-campus grocery store and at a farmers market.

In Ohio, the ProMedica Health System network of clinics used a Toledo hospital roof to grow more than 200 pounds of vegetables in stacked buckets filled with a ground coconut shell potting medium. The tomatoes, peppers, green beans and leafy greens were served to patients and donated to a nearby food shelter, hospital spokeswoman Stephanie Cihon said.

When the project resumes in the spring, the hospital plans to expand into at least two community centers in economically depressed central Toledo, where fresh produce is hard to come by.

"From the health-care perspective, the more we can increase people's lifestyle changes and encourage them to eat better, it's going to impact our services greatly," Cihon said.

In a New York City schools program run by Cornell University, students grow lettuce on a school roof and sell it for $1.50 a head to the Gristedes chain of supermarkets.

Cornell agriculturist Philson Warner, who designed the program's hydroponics system, said his students harvest hundreds of heads of lettuce a week from an area smaller than five standard parking spaces by using a special nutrient-rich solution instead of water.

The numbers have some researchers imagining a future when enough produce to feed entire cities is grown in multistory buildings sandwiched between office towers and other structures.

Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, who champions the concept under the banner of his Vertical Farm Project, said he has been consulting with officials in China and the Middle East who are considering multistory indoor farms.

He is also shopping his concept to engineering teams in hopes of having a prototype built as he seeks funding.

"Most of us live in cities," he said. "As long as you're going to live there, you might as well grow your food there."