Financial Services: Meeting the Corporate Connectivity Challenge

Today it takes more than profits and stock prices to keep banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies at the top of their game. In an online world where time is money, delays or unsecured access to financial services applications can cost not only in millions, but also in loss of customers and at worst, the business itself. The IT solution needed to provide staff, brokers, partners, and insurance agents with access to corporate, retail and mortgage banking, as well as insurance applications must be secure, reliable and drive overall business efficiencies.

Ericom realizes that escalating globalization, deregulation, and competition, place tremendous performance challenges on today’s financial service providers and IT organizations.
They must meet not only the challenges of rigid accountability standards for privacy and security, but also of globally dispersed offices and mobile workforces, within ever-increasing cost and time constraints.

Ericom Software enables IT departments across the financial services industry to address a wide range of complex IT issues:

High availability (up-time) of applications and services -anywhere, anytime.
Business continuity – supporting continuous operations, with no single point of failure.
Mobility and BYOD scenarios.
Extended banking, securities and other financial services to branch offices, mobile agents and staff.
Supporting a wide range of new and legacy applications and data.
Ensuring privacy of corporate and customer records and information
Enabling information sharing among geographically distributed agencies and branch offices.

Secure and On-demand Access for the Financial Services Industry

Ericom’s enterprise-wide application access solution is flexible and scalable enough to accommodate gradual or rapid growth of any business. It enables you to:

Leverage existing IT assets to provide faster and better services, while increasing overall business efficiency.
Centralize application access management to reduce IT overhead and complexity
Accelerate software updates – installing applications on servers instead of individual desktops, optimizes your IT resources and lowers overhead.
Centrally monitor access to applications to prevent fraud and lower security threats.
Publish Windows and web applications to any device, anywhere including Windows, Mac and Linux desktops, laptops, mobile devices and thin clients without having to install any client-side software – ideal for BYOD policies.
Secure applications and data with built-in encryption.

Download Ericom Connect documentation

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Do you like football? Beware of APPs!

As football fever sweeps across Europe due to the 2016 UEFA European Championship, the SmartWire Labs Team at Wandera has been analyzing the mobile data traffic patterns across our network of enterprise customers in the European countries that make up this year’s tournament. By investigating the billions of daily data inputs that are scanned by our Secure Mobile Gateway, we’ve made some startling discoveries about data security and mobile phone usage in the lead up to and during the tournament (Research period 25 May to 24 June 2016).

MALICIOUS WEBSITES AND DATA LEAKS

With the tournament in full swing, users are becoming more active on their mobile devices, by exploring new content and being exposed to an increasing number of online ads. As a result of this spike in activity, SmartWire Labs discovered an increase in the number of malicious websites being accessed by smartphones. Worryingly, it seems that the host country has been actively targeted by hackers with 72% of malicious websites and 41% of exposed passwords being detected on smartphones in France.

During our research period, the number of data leaks observed by our research team increased. We predict this number will continue to rise as the tournament goes on as a result of more people travelling across Europe and using unfamiliar apps and websites to access match information. Our research suggests that data leaks will peak in late June towards the end of Euro 2016 before going back to normal levels in late July.

UEFA APP FOR FANS IS LEAKING DATA

One of the most startling discoveries by our researchers relates to the ‘UEFA EURO 2016 Fan Guide’ App. It’s one of the official UEFA mobile applications for Euro 2016, designed to provide practical tourist information for fans that are travelling to France for the tournament.

We have discovered that user credentials (including username, password, address and phone number) submitted to the online UEFA store website, are being transferred by both the iOS and Android versions of the app, over an insecure connection. The app itself has over 100,000 downloads on the google play store alone, and a very high rating. The implications of this are huge with potentially thousands of people having their personally identifiable information exposed and possibly stolen.

CONCLUSION

Overall, the increased data usage during the beginning of Euro 2016 will come as no surprise to anyone. The risks associated with this increase in traffic however have huge implications. With more people traveling across Europe, using unfamiliar websites and apps, as well as the shocking discovery that the official UEFA app is leaking data could all lead to serious security breaches with thousands of fans’ data being put at risk.

UEFA’S RESPONSE

Since SmartWire Labs exposed the treat UEFA have acknowledged the problem and fixed the issue. A UEFA spokesperson confirmed:

It is correct that there is an issue with the fan app, concerning a third party component in the myfanzone section, where the contact details of around 4,000 users (name, email and phone number) were not fully protected.

Within a few days UEFA made the following statement:

All security vulnerabilities have been solved. Data exchange between the mobile App and the server are now encrypted.

Download report

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FootPrints Service Core

IT service management for mid-size organizations

This tour (from BMC web site) shows how FootPrints Service Core can effectively deliver IT and business services using popular self-help capabilities, an extensive knowledge base, powerful analytics, and more. (1:30)

BMC FootPrints 12 is easy to own, use and extend. Create personalized working experiences for your employees and IT that increase their productivity. Administrators can quickly configure end-to-end business services for IT and beyond. BMC FootPrints integrates easily with other systems such as BMC Client Management, Active Directory, any SQL Database, and more. With configurable capabilities that streamline the automation of service delivery, FootPrints improves employee satisfaction and IT’s reputation with your business users.

Incident and problem management
Easily initiate, route, track, and manage incidents—no programming required.

Knowledge management
Create a searchable inventory of common issues and their resolutions.

Executive dashboards and business analytics
Increase uptime and compliance by instantly monitoring key metrics, including adherence to service level agreements (SLAs).

Visualization and reporting
Easily and quickly automate processes, solve issues, and communicate with the business by using tools like the drag-and-drop visual workflow builder, impact analysis, and real-time report building..

Mobile access
Conveniently access a full range of functions from any device.

Strong user community
Enjoy a strong, collaborative user community who can provide expertise online and face-to-face.

Download Footprints Service Core documentation

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Application Webification – Not Just Another Remote Desktop Access Solution

They may be old or new; they may run only on certain Windows operating system versions. However, for most businesses, critical Windows applications must remain available for employees working outside their primary office and from a myriad of devices. Yet, not all Windows applications have been converted into a web-based format for easy ubiquitous access. And reprogramming Windows applications for web, from scratch is not always the best option. It is usually a long and expensive process, that can spread over months and even years.

Remote desktop for Windows applications based on HTML5

With a computing device and any reasonable-speed connection, the daily work can travel with your employees. If you want your employees to access Windows applications securely from their mobile devices, implementing non-premise / cloud-hosted solution is often the choice; yet either method generally requires IT staff to support the corresponding software client for each of the devices from which users want to access the application. Using instead an HTML5 remote desktop access client can eliminate the need for IT / Helpdesks to support a plethora of clients. This approach supports access to Windows applications via remote desktop protocols directly via the browser, without the need for client-side plugins or installations of any kind.

A clientless HTML5 remote desktop client can rapidly facilitate the transformation of legacy Windows applications into Web-based & cloud-hosted services. The HTML5 RDP client offers the fastest route, immediately enabling browser-based connectivity to access Windows applications – without having to reprogram the application for Web access.

HTML5 in-browser RDP access

Ericom’s AccessNow is the market’s first high performance HTML5 RDP client, providing browser access to Windows applications and desktops – virtual & physical- running on Windows Terminal Services / RDS / VDI platforms, including Microsoft Hyper-V and other hypervisors. It provides a simple, remotely accessible operating environment that runs in a browser that also delivers the desktop-like experience.

Daniel Miller

Remote Access to CAD, But Without the Latency

Global expansion and sustainable industrialization trends require innovative thinking in design. These trends also drive the need for engineers and architects to collaborate more than ever across offices and remote locations as well as in the field. Designing buildings, transportation hubs, bridges, cars, homes, appliances, mobile devices, and other conveniences – What do all of these important tasks have in common? You guessed it – they all require CAD applications.

So what can be done to ensure productivity across offices and remote locations without sacrificing user experience and efficiency?

CAD, or computer-aided design, applications such as AutoDesk’s AutoCAD allow businesses in a wide variety of industries, including engineering and architecture firms, to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional drawings and models. In other words, CAD applications make it possible for engineers and architects to develop accurate visualizations and simulations of their projects in order to detect and resolve issues without having to produce the actual product first.

CAD is cool but heavy …

On the one hand, CAD is cool; it saves cycle times, development costs, and improves the end product. But here’s the problem. While CAD applications and models are extremely useful, they can be difficult to manage, especially within groups, and when the design team is scattered or in multiple locations.

The proliferation of mobile technology has made it possible for engineers and architects to work outside of the office, both at home and on job sites. However, because many CAD files are massive, in most cases, CAD applications and files are available in local offices only. These files can be in the gigabytes, making them almost impossible for workers outside of the office to download and edit without spending an exorbitant amount of time draining the wide area network (WAN). Additionally, as files are checked in and out, uploaded and downloaded, there can be version control issues that create confusion among the teams using the files.

The short answer: implement a remote access solution

A remote access solution can provide seamless access to CAD applications and files from any location, on any device, while eliminating the need to download the applications and files on physical devices. That kind of freedom allows engineers, architects, and others working with CAD on a regular basis to work on job sites around the world without sacrificing the ease and performance of working in the office.

One of our clients, a major engineering firm in the United States, experienced difficulty accessing, editing, and sharing CAD files across its six office locations and on job sites scattered across the globe. Searching for a solution, the firm chose Ericom Connect, our robust managed access solution, to give flexible, zero-latency access to the engineers and architects working remotely. Our HTML5 technology has made it possible for designers to access Autodesk Revit and large CAD files via a single centralized access system, allowing architects and engineers to collaborate on projects regardless of physical location. Through the browser, there was no latency and all the updates remained on the system in the respective office, eliminating version control issues.

Another client, the Sahara Force India Formula One Team, has also benefitted by integrating our remote access technology. The engineers that design the racing cars need to access and edit three-dimensional CAD models away from their factory and from tracks all over the world. Before Ericom Connect, the engineers were compelled to bring their bulky workstations with them from location to location in order to open and edit CAD files in the field. Now, through our browser-based technology, Sahara’s engineers can view CAD models in fine detail and make edits on the fly, speeding up part fitment and modification at the track.

Remote access capability has the power to transform how engineers, architects, and other designers interact with CAD applications and files. By providing remote, centralized access to CAD from a variety of devices and locations, Ericom is enabling the next wave of innovation in engineering, architecture, and design – without the limitations.

Mendy Newman