SMARTER STRATEGIES

Five on Agility

John Jainschigg | Date: 12-01-10 | Comments

Recently at Smarter Technology, we told you about numerous new agility solutions for your business. Here are our top five picks.

Table of Contents:

Five on Agility
Smarter Technology has been covering new agility solutions for your business. Our top five picks follow:

1. Emergency Identity and Access Management

Granting secure access to business premises and networks is more complex and fraught with peril during emergencies than at any other time. To make such access work, you need to create an ad hoc federation between participating entities, where notions of identification and authentication are aligned, and policies enable protection of critical assets, while enhancing productivity.

Standardized ID is potentially part of a solution, but security researchers have yet to understand all the nuances of how such systems function in real emergency conditions. A recent Northrop Grumman exercise, conducted with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was held to shed light on hidden gotchas and evaluate the functionality of global ID solutions in tandem with legacy ID, under emergency conditions. Northrop Grumman personnel tested a range of processes and techniques and were able to successfully and quickly coordinate access for large numbers of personnel using the Department of Defense's Common Access Card system, IDs employing Northrop's own smartcard-based Personal Identity Verification (PIV) system and other government IDs. Find out more here.

2. AI vs. Finance Fraud

Louisiana's Neighbors Federal Credit Union (FCU) was growing fast in a state hard-hit by Katrina and the BP spill. But they were also spending big-time on human monitoring and the evaluation of paper records to stem a rising tide of fraud stimulated by the perfect storm of economic crisis, a large volume of cash transactions, and presumably the lure of easy money from aid, redevelopment and other programs. But an artificial intelligence-based fraud-monitoring solution from Verafin is reducing the problem by calculating per-account scores for a range of suspicious, out-of-pattern behaviors, and notifying appropriate personnel. You can read more about the program by clicking here.

3. 3D Fabrication for Any Budget

Three-dimensional printing used to be an esoteric, expensive technology. Today, though, low-cost open-source-based solutions can output objects on your desktop for under $1,000. Online hosted services may be even less expensive, while letting you work with a wider range of materials and technologies. Those with an interest in rapid prototyping or custom, user-driven and personalized "long tail" manufacturing now have numerous options, and all are compatible with standard 3D design software. Read more here.

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