As the economic climate continues its hold managers and business owners are continuing to seek tangible opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. On initial consideration the feasibility of this appears to be an enigma however complacency and time pressures in organisations of all sizes reveal intensive manual processes, repeat data entry, disconnected systems and burdensome administrative tasks which can easily be streamlined with a low investment in custom software.

• Streamline Operations
• Increase Workforce Efficiencies
• Connect your Mobile Workforce
• Increase Operational Efficiencies
• Slash Duplication of Effort
• Reduce Operating Costs
• Remove burdensome Administration

Successful departmental and core line of business applications can quickly outgrow their original purpose leaving slow performing spreadsheets and database applications which are prone to corruptions and support only a few simultaneous users.
Typically many organically emerged in-house application do not perform well over mobile and wide area network connections and as business acquisitions, new offices setup and home working grows in trend supporting mobile field staff and a disparate workforce needs smart and secure connectivity solution along with specialist and custom software solutions.
Return on investment can be easily calculated to support investment justification by calculating the amount of man hours saved versus the cost of development.
For example an estate agents inputting new rental property has spend the past five years inputting the property information to internal spreadsheets then check with the accounts team then re-enter the information onto the company web site and place the property with several advertising media taking 3 hours each. The custom software removes duplication in this pipeline, provides integration with accounting systems, third-parties and internal departments to reduce the operation to 30 minutes freeing up the salesperson to generate more leads and develop new opportunities. In this real world scenario the business gained over 83% efficiency saving in a workforce of 12 staff for processing sales of rental properties.
The business case writes itself and as a department manager or business owner you can decide to run the operation with a smaller team or increase volume.
Custom Software is not for every requirement but does allow you to define the way you want to work without confirming to an off-the-shelf package that is designed for the mass market.
SymTex are specialists in custom database and software development building robust solutions for SME public and private sector clients including big banking corporations, insurance giants and national utility companies working nationwide.

Tell us about your database and software challenges.
Visit us at symtex.co.uk or call 0800 58 70 949 today.

Security of data is a primary concern for many businesses and securing the network identities that have access to this critical business information is a key success factor for business operations. This increased concern is greatly due to the change in the way applications are developed and accessed giving users the ability to perform their business tasks from outside the security and confines of a business’s private network. Allowing this additional flexibility of working beyond the confines of the private network brings with it an increased level of risk from unwanted attacks.

Strong authentication solutions such as one time passwords (OTP) with tokens and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) based logon with smart cards, which have the ability to withstand many common attacks, help to protect an organisations valuable data. The implementation of this strong authentication is very flexible and can be integrated into a business infrastructure at various key points dependent upon the business requirements.

Strong authentication methods can be applied to user logon at:-

•A domain
•Internal Websites
•Intranet applications
•Outlook Web Access (OWA)
•Virtual Private Networks (VPN)

Which in turn gives a user the ability to securely perform their daily work tasks from anywhere with an internet connection. Two factor authentication (2FA) and three factor authentication (3FA) can drastically reduce the frequency of online identity theft and other online fraud due to the victim's password no longer being sufficient to give an attacker access to their information.

Both Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) and one time passwords (OTP) introduce a second factor in to the authentication process. It is the introduction of this second factor that increases the security of the authentication process. When referring to authentication, a factor is a piece of information used to verify a person's identity for security purposes.

The three most commonly recognized factors are:-

•'Something you know', such as a password or PIN
•'Something you have', such as a credit card or hardware token
•'Something you are', such as a fingerprint, a retinal pattern or other biometric

A one time password (OTP) is an effective method of implementing a strong authentication solution. The OTP is commonly generated on a physical device such as a token and is entered by the user at the time of authentication, once used it cannot be reused which renders it useless to anyone that may have intercepted it during the authentication process.

By replacing your businesses weak user name and static password security with this one time password strong authentication solution, you are guaranteed to increase the security of your network infrastructure by eliminating the possibility of a users logon credentials being stolen while using an unsecure network location. Even if a hacker can obtain the user’s name and password, they will be unable to copy the content of the token which generates the OTP, and therefore will be unable to access corporate network resources.

For further information regarding strong authentication please visit the strong authentication section of the Symtex website