Dave Bennett, CTO, Axway
“I think there’s also another way to think of governance, and we see that in different segments. At Axway…governance, we look at it in these three ways. It’s the policy management piece. It’s the whole enforcement of the policy. And it’s the monitoring of the visibility. And those three elements…you can just about put everything into it, other than your strategies that would feed that policy management. But, essentially, that, to us, is governance.”
Axway CSO Taher Elgamal posted a blog post today on DarkReading.com, a news and information portal that focuses on IT security. Please take a look and share your thoughts!
“Biometrics is the obvious choice, since virtually all users have fingerprints. But how can we integrate fingerprints in a *standard* way so that Web and enterprise applications can take advantage of them? How can we build middleware in a standard way so that anybody could log into any system with a fingerprint, so that applications could attach access control to different resources based on the identity associated with the fingerprint?”
A commentary by Antoine Rizk, VP, B2B Program, Product and Solutions Marketing, Axway, on the InformationWeek.com article “Consolidation, Virtualization Top State Government CIO Priorities”
“Consolidation is an important measure for IT savings. Not only for IT savings and cost-cutting but also it brings value and adds security, which the survey doesn’t say. It adds security because consolidation makes data flows centralized and governments more efficient. What they need to do when they look at consolidation is make sure that, at least for middleware, make sure that the consolidated platform can cater to all the flows which they see in government administration.”
Paul Lavery, Director, Solutions Enablement – Supply Chain Axway
“How do you not have to go through a large restructuring or large integration project with your B2B traffic and your B2B transaction flow? Part of the challenge there is making sure that you’re getting the most of what you’ve already invested in, whether it be a communications gateway or it’s a translation software that you have on-premise, while at the same time looking at the total cost of ownership when you combine your maintenance fees alongside with value-added networks service charges.”
A commentary by Dave Bennett, CTO, Axway on the internet.com article “IT Survey Spotlights Cloud Computing’s Potential, Misconceptions.”
“If you think about where they sit, and the job that they do, any time there is a major platform change or a major new platform introduced, it creates some uncertainty. So I can sympathize with the fact that they would play both sides of this, because you have to make sure you’re protecting your organization the best way possible. So they have to play both sides a little bit with these new platforms, because they’re assuming that they are more reliable and more secure and all those things, but they don’t know yet.”
Ulf Persson, Director, Product and Solutions Marketing, Axway
“Let’s say that we have the scenario where a bank wants to offer a new service, maybe a new payment service to its corporate clients or customers or maybe needs to do settlements with other banks to satisfy a customer. Today, there are a few problems. There is a challenge due to the use of many applications and systems to really have an automated process where the bank, so to say, can run this as a new payment service campaign, maybe send me — responsible for the corporate client — send me an email (and) introduce me to this. But the challenge today is that all of the applications, both on the customer side and the bank side, are not integrated. They’re not automated. The process is not automated across these applications.”
Mathias Bonnard, Product and Solution Marketing, Axway
“New business processes will have to be put in place. To that end, an integration broker and a process manager allow companies to redesign their process and execute them so that they can comply with new regulated business processes on top of the existing business application without affecting them and having to change them to deploy new versions of those business applications.”
by Ruby Raley, Director, Healthcare Solutions, Axway
You may have been following some of the recent articles on pharmaceutical distribution, and, in particular, the conversation on anti-counterfeiting that appeared in USA Today. Another article, this one in The Wall Street Journal, appeared around the same time and took a very different point of view: that counterfeits are not a serious problem.
So, if you’re an executive, a leader, or someone who cares about the safety of our pharmaceutical distribution supply chain, what are you supposed to glean from all these messages from respected voices?
Consider the recent injury of a diabetic man, an injury that had nothing to do with counterfeit pharmaceuticals yet illustrates why anti-counterfeiting measures can yield effects that go beyond the scope of pharmaceuticals.
A shipment of diabetes management devices was stolen from a major manufacturer’s truck, and the lot the devices belonged to didn’t appear in the marketplace at all for a year.
Then, all of a sudden, it did. A patient purchased one of the devices, the device was no longer effective, the test did not work correctly, and the patient’s blood sugar went sky high.
This episode succinctly illustrates why we should be concerned about anti-counterfeit measures, regardless of contrarian pragmatists with narrowly focused points of view. Whether the root cause is the bad guys making fake product and putting it in the supply chain, or the bad guys stealing product and mishandling the product and putting it back in the supply chain, or non-pedigreed product coming over the border and into our pharmacies, there is a problem.
And fortunately, we actually know how to solve that problem.
Tighter lot control.
The lots are so large now that when there’s a recall, it can clear the shelves, as you’ve probably seen at your local pharmacy with some of the recent recalls from trusted manufacturers.
We need smaller lots, and we need to assign a serialized number to the product below the overall lot level so that we can track batches and sub-shipments. With the right software, tracking those batches and sub-shipments is not difficult, yet the savings compared to entire lot recalls is profound.
And with track and trace legislation enforcement just five years away, product manufacturers should seriously consider labeling at the case level or at the shipment level, using tamper-evident markings, and investing in the right solutions so that they can determine that all products have shipped safely from a secure manufacturing site to a secure distributor, or from a secure distributor to a secure location at a local pharmacy.
After all, there’s a lot more than profit margins and reputations at stake. And the sooner everyone—journalists, enterprises, and industry leaders alike—recognize that even one injury injures us all, the sooner profit margins, reputations, and a lot more can be secured.
Axway 