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Today's PrintShop typically does a lot more than simply printing and distributing
customer reports. It's common for some sort of print data
manipulation to take place, such as the addition of barcodes, usage
graphs, marketing info and graphics. Documents are sorted into
postal regions for mailing discounts and come out the 'other end' of
the PrintShop, with true value added, looking very different from the
customer source data.
Many of these enhancements are currently performed by custom written
in-house processes which are subject to normal programming 'bugs'.
How then does the customer have confidence in their data making it out
the 'other end' with integrity and security?
Emtex VIP software can perform transformations from one PDL to another
and Emtex VDE can manipulate the data in any of the ways mentioned
above (and more). This article describes some of the techniques
for ensuring data integrity and security when using Emtex.
First off, here are a few worldwide Emtex customers who have no issues
with security:
UK
Inland Revenue
Hermes Precisa Australia
Goldman Sachs (large investment bank)
UBS
Warburgs (large investment bank)
Schroeders (large investment bank)
UK
Armed Forces Payroll & Pensions
Lloyds TSB (largest UK bank)
ANZ
Bank
Norwich Union (Aviva Insurance Group)
Prudential
Windows itself has plenty of sophisticated internal security.
Windows can be set so that only authorised people can read, write or
update certain directories so resource libraries can be protected.
Every customer has their own 'Change Control' system which manages the
update of resources on the mainframe or the Emtex Server or both.
Emtex VIP also has security levels which can be applied. For
example, the VIP Server can sit in the secure server room and can only
be logged into by a Systems Administrator. A VIP GUI acting as a
print room console for print operators can be restricted so that only
the required functions are available and viewable. This is
called a Secure Desktop.
Data can only be changed by using VDE and VDE can only be used by
authorised users. (Data cannot be changed via the VIP system
itself, which can only perform transformations.)
Emtex maintains log records of everything which is happening on the
system. Additionally, the Windows file system can provide audit
trail tracking when appropriately enabled.
Finally, VDE itself can be used for a special audit trail. As
one example from a large telecom customer, data was extracted from the
value of the bills from the print run documents on Input processing.
This data was then used to create an audit report which was printed or
viewed before the print run was started. The report compared
figures from a SQL database and if the value of the print run was not
equal to this process value, the print run was put on hold by the
operators. A similar process on Output compares values with
Input values as well as an external source of information.
The
expression 'fully commercial, auditable, change controlled process' is
true of Emtex transformation and manipulation.
How
secure is your data, and what home-grown processes are currently
applied to it as it navigates the PrintShop internal maze?
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