Layered security for your systems

Security is a key aspect of managing IT systems. Hackers and state-sponsored groups are breaking into whatever systems they can, with the assumption that one day that it will be useful at some point in the future. One of the keys to preventing breaches like Yahoo and the DNC is to layer your security systems.

There are several layers, and you can insert them at different points of your network. The firewall usually sites at the top and blocks both incoming and outgoing connections that do not conform to the rule set. The firewall also separates the various segments of your network. When you colocate to a facility like Rack Alley, the firewall component is available as a service.

Segmenting your network is another important part of layering your security. For example, place your applications servers, database servers, clients, and backup systems on different network segments. You can now use your firewall to allow only select communication between the different segments. For example, only the application server can connect to the database servers and the clients can only connect to the application servers.

Another layer consists of systems like IDS and IPS to deal with potential intrusions. You can place this later above the firewall or after the firewall. IDS use signatures that recognize potential attacks and block such connections.

Firewall, network segmentation, IDS, and IPS are just a few methods of layering the security in your network. There are also other systems like Honeypots, Anti-virus, Anti-malware, desktop firewalls, etc. that you can add as other layers. When you layer your security like this, even when a hacker breaks into one system, he cannot easily access another. All of this is possible whether you have all these systems in-house or have everything at an LA data center.

 

The challenges with scaling your EDI system

There are several challenges organizations face when implementing or managing their EDI systems. EDI enables the kind of supply chain efficiency that organizations could only dream of before. You can now deliver a product from a manufacturer that you never physically handle, to someone else’s customer automatically. The biggest challenge that most organizations come across is scaling their EDI applications. There are three things you need to do:

Multiple sets of trading partners

The first thing is to ensure that your EDI software can or will support multiple sets of trading partners and types of documents. There is a lot of data and structure that unique to every trading partner and your software should be able to handle all that variation. A single trading partner can have as many as a 100 business rules.

ERP integration

When you have a handful of trading partners, you can handle the manual transfer of data from your EDI system to your ERP. It is very difficult to scale data transfer from one system to another manually once you exceed that threshold. The only way is to look at native integration, which might require an upgrade of your ERP.

EDI outsource

An in-house EDI implementation can be expensive and time-consuming. Also, communicating with all the trading partners and testing out the business rules for each those partners are both time consuming and expensive. When you outsource your EDI system to a third-party, you save a lot of time and only need to direct the project.