Darren Bridges, President
2010 has been an exciting period for Safe Systems as we’ve seen continued growth, a big step forward in the expansion of our network infrastructure, additions to the team, and a long held company goal realized.
From a financial perspective, we have experienced an 18% revenue growth over the same period last year. The expansion of our existing support services and the addition of new services have been key contributors to this growth. Our hosted email service (SafeSysMail), hosted disaster recovery solution (Continuum), and hosted data backup/vaulting service (CVault) have been extremely well received by our clients. The overall goal in the development of these new services was to address client needs from the perspective of cost, maintenance and ease of use. The initial deployments and ongoing tests of the Continuum service have gone extremely well for our clients, coordinating and simplifying a required annual process that was consuming from a time and resource standpoint into an organized and efficient exercise. Likewise, CVault has provided a more reliable and redundant alternative to tape backup and SafeSysMail has proven an overall lower cost of ownership to in-house mail servers.
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Curt Frierson, Chief Technology Officer
Utility Computing
In the latter half of the 19th century, one of the key differentiators for any major business was its effectiveness in producing electric power. Companies within industries as diverse as printing, manufacturing, agriculture, and food processing had to create their own electric power in order to produce the goods and services that drove their businesses. This meant that they had to employ experts who were educated in the latest advancements in electrification if they wanted to gain an edge over their competitors. Additionally, they had to employ maintenance workers to keep their complicated electric generators running. Any unplanned downtime in the flow of power to their machines meant hundreds of hours of lost productivity. Over time, companies had to deal with issues such as ensuring old equipment could work with newer machines and how to integrate new electric power technology with their existing systems. Looking back on this era, it is easy to see the inefficiencies in this model. It is also simple to observe the astonishing similarities with the state of information technology today.
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Niki Neese, VP Account Management
As I have discussed in previous newsletters, we have incorporated a compliance topic to the Quarterly System Review that we perform with your financial institution; the main objective being to present you with information on the latest compliance trends that we see throughout our customer base. Our goal this year is to incorporate topics that address the latest IT trends, goals and challenges for financial institutions and give you the tools and suggested solutions to help meet these common challenges.
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Jay Butler, Senior Technical Consultant
In last quarter’s installment, we looked at ten ways computer users can help prevent malware as a human supplement to the electronic security layers deployed at your financial institution. Those guidelines are also helpful in thwarting email born phishing attacks that slip past security, but they are essentially useless against vishing or smishing. Phishing attacks are known as vishing when a criminal attempts to trick their victim into revealing private information over the phone; the smishing method uses text messages.
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Jamie Davis, Education and Product Manager
There are thirty-three reported breaches in 2010 for financial institutions as of the first of June. These thirty-three breaches have led to 1,817,328 known records being compromised and many more unknown at this time. Here is a breakdown of where these breaches originated:[1]
Employee intentional
- Former employee access
- Current employee access
|
6 |
Employee accidental
- Stolen laptops (from office)
- Virus/Malware
- Stolen backups
- Incorrect procedure
|
14 |
| Vendor |
1 |
| Hack |
4 |
| Software vulnerability |
2 |
| Social engineered/ATM skimming |
5 |
| Unknown |
1 |
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Marshall Jones, Director of Managed Services
Telecommute has proven to be a vital role in a successful disaster recovery plan. During the floods in Nashville a few months ago, we had numerous customers utilize their telecommute licenses to allow their employees to work remotely, while their institution was largely unreachable. Telecommute allows users at the institution to connect remotely to their office machines via an encrypted connection from anywhere, provided that they have an Internet connection. As long as the institution’s Internet connection is still running, the user will be able to work effectively from wherever they may be, be it at a conference across the country, or stuck at home due to flooding.
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Tom Hinkel, Director of Compliance
Up until just shortly before it failed, Washington Mutual had received either average or above average CAMELS ratings from their primary federal regulator (PFR). According to the post-mortem report by the Department of the Treasury, “WaMu failed primarily because of management’s pursuit of a high-risk lending strategy that included liberal underwriting standards and inadequate risk controls.”[1] Certainly the declining economy and real estate market contributed, as did a sudden flood of customer withdrawals as the crisis began to unfold, but it’s instructive to note that the Treasury’s report primarily faulted Bank management.
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To register for any of the workshops please visit our online registration form.
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FFIEC Guru is here!
Safe Systems is now on Twitter!
Safe Systems’ National Users Conference – Save the date
Job Openings
Recent Awards and Accolades
New Employees and Appointments
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August 12, 2010 1:23 pm | 
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