User Workspace Management

Now is the time for financial institutions to take stock of their information technology and use the crisis as an opportunity to optimize their core systems. (Mike Barba, Manager, Information Risk Management Business, SMART Business Advisory & Consulting)

While the financial crisis creates a challenging time for many financial institutions, it also offers great opportunity to make improvements to the information technology infrastructure. Organizations willing to use the economic slowdown to upgrade and standardize their systems, especially the ones that have long been deemed too risky to replace, will have the ability to respond to both new regulations and changing customer demands, positioning themselves for a fast recovery when the economy turns around.

In general, the slowdown presents an excellent opening to make long-overdue changes and prepare for compliance with new regulations and increase capabilities to respond to ever-increasing customer demands.

Based on years of experience and close relations with financial organizations, Scense developed a workspace management platform that is an excellent foundation for innovation, optimization and effective management of IT. Our software can relieve IT departments from the mundane, time consuming, day-to-day support activities and allow them to focus on new system development or implementation.

We can break our product into four major functional areas that have the highest influence on the ROI of the IT investment:

Despite the name this key feature covers the whole range of activities related to software applications: from application configuration, re-/packaging and distribution to deployment and maintenance. For an organization with Scense environment this process is highly automated but allows for great flexibility and optimization.

This unique property allows for ultimate control over the user session. On the bases of a predefined set of events (user log in/off, application launch/install, machine inactiveness, etc.) IT administration can influence the machine behavior at any one moment though out the device operation.

A clear and transparent communication channel between IT administration and end- users allows for a reduced number of help-desk calls and stimulates users to optimize and maintain their working environment themselves.

Scense provides the means to achieve absolute control over the IT infrastructure without the commonly deemed as necessary machine complete lock-down. Desktop management becomes a simple task and new implementations or changes to the system as a whole can be performed quickly and reliably. Accountability and responsibility can be easily delegated and fragmented based on user knowledge and skills.

All of the above comes together and brings significant advantages when financial institutions have to manage their infrastructure security and system compliance to state and international regulations.

• Security as one of the most important issues for monetary organizations has always been a complex problem to solve, at best. With Scense, software availability can be defined to an extreme detail. Starting from the general user identity, group or location, administrators can go further and establish restrictions based on type of device or even timeframe. Another aspect of information security are the portable devices that have become more and more common (laptops and PDAs for example) in the daily life of the financial business. When such an item is lost, it poses a major security risk for the organization (the cost per such device can reach up to 50 000 USD) and can lead to catastrophic results. Scense provides the opportunity all sensitive information, together with application settings and other company data, to be stored centrally and, for example, to be removed from the local device after user log off, application shutdown or other similar event in the user session. Such level of security allows for high user mobility and conflict free device sharing.

• Compliance have become recently a major issue as new regulations, drafted to address the reasons for the financial crisis, pose drastic changes on the way monetary institutions do business. Scense is a platform that can accommodate any drastic changes in the business processes or promote transformation of user behavior. Having set their foundation level in order, organizations enjoy a greater freedom in their decisions how to implement any modifications to their systems. A simple example: companies with Scense can migrate their systems to a VDI environment in less than a workday. The ability to keep up with the constantly changing world of technology has proved to be a success factor not only for financial organizations.

In a conclusion, we can say that an implementation of Scense will lead to reduced costs of IT maintenance and support, innovation opportunities, technological capability to cease them and last but not least high level of end-user satisfaction.