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Tag: continual compliance

  • Innovation With Software Architectural Excellence

    Innovation With Software Architectural Excellence

    Software architecture plays an irreplaceable role in enabling businesses to deliver value efficiently. This is evident in how digital natives have been challenging incumbents and forcing them to rapidly digitize and transform how they operate and innovate. Accordingly, achieving architectural excellence is a continuous process of efficient implementation, advanced planning, and executive leadership engagement. Furthermore, it’s essential to recognize that software architectural strategies and planning shouldn’t be limited to IT. Enabling collaboration between IT and business leaders is necessary as software architecture plays a key role in delivering value, making processes robust, and tackling the next wave of changes in value creation and delivery.

    The Goal of a Good Software Architecture

    A good software architecture facilitates the ongoing business processes function robustly and ensures business capabilities are competitive against threatening challenges. Beyond this, the software architecture should also become the fundamental aspect of driving the next waves of business changes—whether they are processes, models, or innovative products and features. These changes result from competitive forces increasing digitization, transformation, and ecosystem-based consolidation, making change the overarching constant in various business aspects. Accordingly, conventionally viewing a software architecture at a limited software or product level doesn’t work as well as it used to. The practice of viewing software architecture at the business and ecosystem-level gains even more emphasis as digitization and innovation make businesses and ecosystems digitally intertwined in how they interact.

    The following fundamental aspects describe how to innovate with architectural excellence:

    Security and Privacy

    Customers are increasingly becoming wary of how their data is handled and protected—and are even reluctant to do business if an organization doesn’t have clear policies on how it protects and handles customer data. On the other hand, regulators are constantly improving their compliance requirements to protect customers. This landscape is changing at different rates across multiple countries, posing challenges and equally creating opportunities for fast adapters. All of this implies that businesses need to ethically manage customer data along with protecting against the constantly evolving threat landscape. To satisfy this need, it is necessary to revise the existing software architecture and involve senior executives in making critical decisions in this respect. Moreover, architectural planning cycles should come down to a few months—instead of years. This is key to building and implementing innovative solutions rapidly to tackle changing regulatory landscape and customer expectations.

    Satisfy User Needs

    Since 2008, the smartphone has been changing customers’ experiences and expectations. Digital disruptors are continually challenging incumbents and threatening their survival. In this paradigm shift, businesses should understand their customers more deeply, quickly adapt their business models and introduce new products to fulfill customer needs. It requires architectural agility that offers the flexibility to innovate business models in shorter cycles and improve them faster with customer feedback. This also means keeping a long-term view towards software architecture planning and strategy development that enables seamless innovation and eliminates process and performance bottlenecks. In this view, software architecture improvements and decisions should align with business objectives and strengthen business capabilities, not just the number of implementations or technical solutions the IT has delivered.

    Empower Developers

    Today, more and more businesses need developers to help them digitize and transform. Accordingly, empowering developers is essential, and software architecture is the fundamental way to help them drive innovation and build critical business capabilities. Developer empowerment is usually measured in terms of developer velocity — it defines how enabled developers are to be agile and how well their talent is utilized. To improve developer velocity, provide them with a well-defined software architecture to focus on quality and consistent development. Also, the software architecture must have scope for customization so that developers can utilize it to its full potential.

    While the above describes the overarching approach, the following sections detail the fundamental aspects of achieving innovation with architectural excellence.

    Scalability

    The software architecture should support scaling applications seamlessly on-demand to accommodate spikes in user growth and scale back to save operational costs. Accordingly, this approach requires deploying your application in the cloud while ensuring not just the underlying infrastructure but also the multiple components in your entire system scale without friction or intervention. High performance should accompany this to ensure customer satisfaction and deliver a superior experience. This means that your system should perform ideally at any scale at any time.

    Portability

    Can the system itself or components of it be deployed in any cloud platform—public, private or hybrid cloud? How much does it cost to move in terms of time, effort, and cost? In a world of hyperscale cloud providers and cutting-edge cloud services, a company’s IT ecosystem shouldn’t be locked into one platform or vendor but should utilize the best available services and technologies currently—that are also future-ready to improve performance and optimize overall costs.

    Compliance

    Businesses should develop a compliance framework that aligns people, processes and strategies with regulatory requirements to ensure compliance and avoid non-compliance risks. Also, the framework should be work-in-progress to accommodate upcoming changes from regulators across the board.

    Maintainability

    Similar to the source code of software components, software architecture should be easily maintainable—meaning that the software architecture shouldn’t introduce bottlenecks when modifying and improving it.

    Maintainability issues could take many forms: is the software architecture outdated for the current technical and business landscape? Is it using legacy versions that are incompatible when other components and dependencies are updated? Ensuring the software architecture’s maintainability helps facilitate innovation and move at a competitive pace. If at all unsure where to start improving or redefining a software architecture, start with maintainability.

    Cost

    IT is often under constant scrutiny to justify its expenditure, and it is complicated to measure IT’s meaningful contribution to the business outcomes. As a result, IT constantly faces the risk of budget cuts and challenges in optimizing costs. Typically, the software architecture is let to grow organically, leading to duplication of system and efforts and inconsistent data across systems. To overcome this, control the software architecture on an ongoing basis, which, in turn, allows for more predictable cost-control.

    In this fast-changing landscape of digital, businesses should maintain flexible architectures that facilitate innovation and continually improve the software architecture using agile methodologies to gain a competitive advantage in the business capabilities. This practice is much needed, especially when digital disruptors are increasingly threatening to take it all—leaving laggards behind.

  • 8 Ways to Focus on Cloud Software Security

    8 Ways to Focus on Cloud Software Security

    Cloud Software Security Examined

    Cloud software security is critically important. Take, for example, health care: Doctors and other healthcare professionals are one of the biggest users of cloud software, yet recent studies demonstrate that more than 15 percent are considered to be operating at a high risk of security breaches, and more than half are operating at a medium risk.

    Security breaches can be devastating to almost any large industry. Companies must take accurate measures to ensure the safety of cloud computing software, as hackers are all too eager to break into a computer system and do what they seem to do best.

    Fortunately, there are a number of ways to increase security of data and apps in the cloud. Increasing cloud software security is almost like an insurance policy that affords valuable protection.

    Taking Steps to Increase Cloud Security

    The first step in building an effective cloud security plan is to conduct a complete internal audit that includes all current cloud providers. All internal security personnel should participate in the auditing process.

    Once the auditing process is complete, companies should take the following measures:

    1. Security personnel must take steps to ensure all company data is correctly encrypted. Having a secure encryption process in place will increase cloud security significantly.
    1. IT and/or security department should create an authentication process, which will help ensure all cloud software, as well as highly confidential internal information and related files, are secure.
    1. All new internal applications should undergo in-house developmental testing. Well-organized developmental testing procedures will guarantee that new applications are secure at the time they are released. This procedure is highly effective and also should increase cloud software security, when done correctly.
    1. Security solutions must be created that accurately scan and store various binary codes. What’s more, security solutions must be created internally. Runtime makes it extremely difficult to detect any security breach or potential vulnerability. Failure to detect or recognize a potential security flaw can prove disastrous for any organization.
    1. Use a web application scanning program for better security and safety. Use a provider that secures and monitors all web applications on a continual basis, as well as multiple scanning on a single platform. Multiple scanning will produce increased accuracy as well as unified results.
    1. Use one platform for all multiple assessment tasks to heighten cloud security. Using one platform will enable security personnel to identify and address an open-source risk quickly.
    1. Utilize streamline compliance centralization tools, which permit access to direct access to applications for compliance. Applications for compliance should include access to PCI controls and CWE. Both PCI and CWE can be used to make sure corporate compliance requirements are being met.
    1. Develop a system of continual compliance., which will monitor the system for any existing vulnerability or security concern. In addition, this unique system will fully access and examine any and all applications before they are released or deployed. Finally, the system of continual compliance will automatically conduct regular searches to identify all web applications that are related to a specific company domain. Any temporary sites also will be searched and properly identified. A continual compliance system is highly effective when properly utilized.

    There are many ways in which cloud software security can be enhanced. It may be a wise decision to consult with a security and compliance specialist. Many large and small organizations are now utilizing the services that security and compliance companies can offer.

    The Importance of Cloud Security Enhancement for Businesses

    In this of age of advanced computer technology it is becoming easier for hackers to access highly sensitive information from just about any organization. It is sad to say, but there are people who have made careers out of computer hacking. Many computer hackers are never brought to justice. Therefore, it is critical that organizations take the necessary steps to protect all computer software as well as sensitive company information that should never be released to the public.

    Having efficient software testing tools is the first step when looking to increase or improve cloud software security. Efficient testing tools will help an organization to better identify any security problem or vulnerability that may be present. If vulnerability is identified, the next step is to fix the problem and prevent additional security breaches in the future.

    Keeping company software and critical files safe must be a No. 1 priority. If critical internal information is compromised, it can cause severe damage that may be irreparable.

    About the Author / Reed Gusmus

    gusmusReed Gusmus the director of Marketing at QASymphony. Gusmus is an award-winning, passionate and innovative B2B marketing leader who excels at prescribing winning strategies for new customer acquisition and revenue-driving solutions for SaaS companies looking to get more from their marketing investment. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.