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Data Exchange

Information technology is about processing data. Within an organization, the “processing of data” seamlessly extends to sharing and exchange of data, being able to ubiquitously access and work with them.

Consequently, our data exchange competency focusses on the following subjects:

Repeating our vision statement here seems to be appropriate, since the proper data exchange is one of the major supporting pillars to achieve a competitive advantage for any business:

Thus, in our judgment, the successful operation of a modern enterprise is best driven by an organizational structure whose primary responsibility focusses on optimization and control of information flow.

Unified Communications

In our technology-driven world, there are many methods of communicating with colleagues and other correspondents, inside and outside of your organization.
Depending

  • on the content of information exchange (voice, video, short messages, (longer) text), or
  • the need of sharing of information like documents,

various solutions are available to support this exchange. This extends as well to features like presence indication, web conferencing, desktop content sharing, and others.

These solutions are usually delivered in a mixture of multiple products, which are highly integrated and allow to a large extent a superior user experience due to consistent user interfaces, even across various devices and media types.
For example: 

  • A voice message left on the office phone can be listened to while on the road from an email box or converted into text to be read;
  • Users can initiate a chat session or conference call with all addressees of an email with a click directly from the email program;
  • Presence information allows users to see if their colleagues are online and available, no matter where they are physically located, and get in touch with them by the most appropriate means of communication;
  • Communication received on one device can be easily attended to on another;
  • Documents shared can be edited and worked on by multiple people using different devices.

With our customers, we planned, designed, implemented, and supported multiple solutions to deliver true unified communication for the enterprise, regionally and globally. This usually covered both, operation of unified communication within the organization and between the organization and external partners, again on a regional and global scale, leveraging federation technologies.

Mobility

Modern organizations like to be understood and perceived as being agile. While “agile” can be applied to various facets of an enterprise, one major one certainly is the mobility of its work force. This could be the sales staff or as it is becoming more and more common people working from home office.

In both cases, and there are certainly other groups which are heavily relying on mobility for their work, like executive management, the ability of the information technology department to support them whilst not in the office is paramount to the success of the business. They rightfully expect to work without restrictions, identical to working in the office. On average, more than one third of the work force of an enterprise is affected, tendency steeply growing.

Besides the typical and more or less generic challenges to be solved, like

  • Mobile device security,
  • Device encryption management,
  • Remote support access,
  • Transmission technologies and others.

The choice and management of the mobile devices themselves creates constraints in terms of IT security in companies.

    From the philosophy of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to the use of standardized devices (be they phablets, tablets, laptops, or smartphones), there hides a lot of effort to accomplish a reliable and secure operation of mobile devices. 

    To summarize, mobility is about the 

    • Information we need,
    • When we need it,
    • Where we need it, and
    • If this is safe.

    For all of these four dimensions, we created efficient and effective solutions for our customers. This includes

    • Analysis and categorization of enterprise users and their demands for mobile work, deriving role models from it;
    • Establishment of Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems;
    • Support for mobile device selection and rollout;
    • Security review of MDM and mobile device management processes;
    • Integration of mobile devices into secured data access procedures;
    • Extending of business decision workflows to mobile devices.

    Cloud Computing

    Cloud computing, representing a – albeit sometimes only partial – relocation of the IT infrastructure, is characterized by its flexibility. But extending computing resources to the Cloud creates multiple challenges to the operation and management of information for the information technology department. This is mainly independent if it is a public cloud or a private cloud.

    In addition, all three basic options of 

    • Software as a Service (SaaS),
    • Platform as a Service (PaaS),
    • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),

    provide unique requirements for implementation.

    Besides the sourcing process executed to select, initiate and integrate (transition to the cloud) a particular resource from the cloud with the on-premises landscape, the operational tasks are usually getting more complex.

    To cope with this important paradigm shift in IT systems management and operation we covered the following areas with our customers during cloud project phases:

    • Establish audit framework and practice for
      • Data privacy,
      • Pharmaceutical or medical Device regulatory competency (if required),
      • GxP process practice,
      • Quality management,
      • Security management.
    • Align service management
      • Service levels,
      • Integration in customer service desk,
      • Incident and problem response times,
      • Escalations,
      • Change management,
      • Monitoring and alerting.
    • General security practice
      • Standards,
      • Certifications of provider staff,
      • Governance,
      • Processes and reporting.
    • Account management
      • Segregation of duties,
      • Integration into corporate (e.g. on-premises) identity management solution (if any),
      • On- and offboarding of provider staff,
      • Handling of authentication and management for multiple tenants.
    • Separation of tenants
      • Network level,
      • Application data,
      • Backup data, 
      • Customer or tenant specific interfaces,
      • Handling of classified data.
    • Backup/Restore/Archiving
    • Disaster recovery and business continuity