White papers related to "Information Finance and Insurance"

With 10 remote office locations spread across nine states, Amerisure was in need of a communications platform that would enable the company to enhance the distribution of information to employees. Employees located in satellite offices, with no direct access to the home office, can feel disconnected from corporate headquarters? operations and activities. Amerisure needed to communicate to employees in a timely manner that would allow the flow of accurate, important information, whether that data be employee-specific, such as salary, job, or benefit information, or company news and updates. In addition to a centralized communication platform, the company wanted heightened management of its workforce through the use of business intelligence tools that would allow it to track trends and have improved monitoring capabilities for each location.

Client relationship management (CRM) technology can help capital-markets firms streamline investment banking activities, increase brokerage trade volume, and meet compliance challenges. As a nerve center for information about clients, prospects, institutions, syndicate partners, and other contacts, the right CRM system enables capital-markets firms to share intelligence, coordinate activities, and derive advantage from an integrated body of corporate knowledge and relationships.

To understand the power of cache poisoning and pharming, imagine that you?re logging on to your Internet banking service. The page looks a little odd, but the address is correct, and it has the same fields as usual. You might enter your credentials without thinking twice. Unfortunately, you?ve just provided a criminal syndicate with the contents of your bank account.

Small to medium businesses have typically built their own domain name system (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services, used Windows DNS/DHCP, or turned to a hosted service provider for these services. This approach may appear to offer tremendous savings, but contains many hidden costs and risks that are not always apparent until a catastrophic loss of service occurs.

Domain name system (DNS) best practices are becoming more standardized. However, DNS services are often overlooked simply because they are so commonplace. The result is poorly configured services that are either not fully functional, or easily compromised. To ensure that the Internet remains a reliable medium for information and commerce, further implementation of secure and efficient DNS will be required.

Predictions of the death of software are overstated. In reality, businesses are becoming more reliant on technology, not less. What?s changing, however, is the number of options available for managing, delivering, and paying for software applications. Many independent software vendors recognize the benefits of offering software as a service--a delivery alternative that can present long-term benefits for all parties.

Information management, which includes both data and content management, is an essential element of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Taking a service-oriented approach to information data can thus help you achieve greater value from your information assets. Implementing master data management (MDM) services can provide a multiplier effect, by delivering high-value business services over and above information integration services.

There is a considerable need to understand how technical performance and the problems within the technical infrastructure impact the capabilities of the business itself. The majority of companies can only measure specific asset and application performance, whereas many issues within the infrastructure lie at the transport level, where packet switching can present both great opportunities and major issues.

Effective communication uses many senses, but visual communication provides huge amounts of information, and can convey all sorts of meanings. Face to face, we can rely on visual cues; however, the amount of information transmitted via distant communication is limited by cost and complexity. And when the costs of transportation rise, broader use of remote visual communications becomes increasingly practical.

The road to implementing customer relationship management (CRM) systems is fraught with risk and littered with failure. Paradoxically, reams have been written by industry practitioners explaining why CRM projects fail, yet the same patterns and mistakes are repeated?over and over again. While there is no magic bullet, following some simple guidelines can help assure CRM success for your organization.

Small to medium businesses (SMBs) need technology to survive in a competitive business environment. However, regardless of the business type, size, or industry, incorporating technology into existing frameworks involves risk?to productivity, customer service, operations, and the bottom line! The key to reducing risk and increasing productivity is thus the selection of technologies that will accommodate change in your business.

The process of implementing a new enterprise solution is incredibly complex. This process can send your organization down a long road of beneficial?and sometimes painful?change. The good news, though, is that if the implementation is done right the first time, you won?t have to travel that road again. The key question: how do you do it right?

Just as back-office automation became critical for competitive success in the last half of the twentieth century, customer relationship management (CRM) is today?s imperative for success. However, the key to creating business value with CRM is remembering that business strategy and technology strategy are linked. Companies that believe they can implement CRM capabilities based on technology alone will fail.

SANs, NAS devices, corporate servers, and high-end workstations all suffer the effects of fragmentation because of their multiple physical disk drives. This is attributed to the impact of fragmentation on the logical allocation of files and their physical distribution. The solution to this problem: implementing an automatic defragmentation software solution, together with intricate modern hardware technologies.

Corporate leaders know that revenues are made from ?better data.? And when your data is at risk, so is the survival of your organization. That?s why it?s essential to protect your revenues with ?safer data??and it?s also why the common business language is now one of risk management. IT departments are now learning this in many of the same ways that business people have always had to?including the hard way.