Thursday, March 21, 2013

We're back!

Hi! We haven't blogged for quite a while, but we have an excuse. We've been hard at work producing the Data Resource Manager. DRM is a state-of-the-art data transport and polling system.

"Why would you build DRM when there are already polling systems out there?".

Pretty simple, really. Changing technology, new government and private mandates, new security threats and the constantly evolving business environment demand that software systems change as well. We didn't see that happening in the industry so we did something about it.

DRM is the product of marathon design sessions, cutting edge development environments and best practices coding methodology. It's scalable, extendible, intuitive and easy to maintain. It allows your staff to have the ability to do their jobs without permitting access to functionality they don't need. It gives management the ability to monitor staff activity and thus affords training opportunities when mistakes are made. And speaking of end user errors, DRM is designed to limit the ability for employees to enter the wrong stuff. Choices are selected from drop-down menus and text fields are checked for length, unpermitted characters and proper content.

There are a number of reasons why these features are important to you.

As our motto says, "Information is Business Critical." These days you can't run your business without the information generated every day. Broken, problematic software means no data or incomplete data. Reliability in a data transport system is job number one.

Insecure data communications is an open door to hackers. This is well known. Legacy systems transmit plain text files, clear text IDs and passwords. A hack just waiting to happen. But an insecure system at headquarters can also be a time bomb. Insider data breaches account for about 35% of all breaches. And hacked data costs money. A lot of money. In 2011 the average cost of a data breach per organization was $5.5 million. Securing communications is a no-brainer. It is also interesting to note that 39% of those insider breaches were due to negligence! Is your data transport system an open book? Or does it implement role based access as DRM does? An employee who only runs reports doesn't need to have the ability to change login credentials. Fine-tuning employee access is peace of mind.

Many software developers ignore database security, focusing on the application itself. But the data, the stuff that hackers value, is in the database. The DRM database and application are designed to deny rogue access, SQL Injection attacks, etc. We monitor current events in the hacker world and review published breaches to ensure that our software is as robust as it can be.

We'll be blogging more about DRM because we're very excited about it. It's good software! And we'll also be talking about data security, good software design and maybe even the endless snow in New Hampshire.

Stay tuned!

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