Many UK companies are now considering outsourcing IT services within the UK. Some of them are doing it in addition to their offshore outsourcing developments, while others are simply supporting the economy by involving themselves with local suppliers. In the previous blog I was discussing about advantages & disadvantages of offshore IT Outsourcing. A few days back we interviewed some of our clients regarding their experience with offshore and onshore outsourcing providers. This blog will include some of those interview responses.

One of our clients Steve said “Driving from Surrey to Maldon is much cheaper than taking a flight to India. Sometimes we need to bring the developers onsite to show them what our other applications are like and what quality and style we prefer. We need to give them proper training before handing over the responsibilities. Companies which are relatively smaller like mine could never afford to do it with someone from overseas.”

According to another client Erick, it is very important to have feedback from the outsource providers. ...

Following our recent white paper on Outsourcing, this blog series will discuss more about outsourcing of Information Technology.  Previously the conflict was between doing the job in house or outsourcing. Nowadays, outsourcing has become such a hot trend that the conflict is between choosing onshore or offshore outsourcing.

Offshoring is simply the exporting of business functions to another country. Currently the major players in offshoring are India followed by Philippines and China etc. Offshoring has been very popular mainly because of reduced cost and tax. Some of the advantages of offshoring are-

 Lately Offshoring has been criticized due to jobs moving out of the UK resulting in job losses. ...

Asset Allocation by its nature is a risky business attempting to make money through investments such as shares, equities and funds. With this in mind it makes sense to ensure every other aspect of the company is as safe as possible to prevent further risks and dangers.With this in mind let me set the following scene:

'Imagine you arrive at work in morning and are just about to enter the building when you see a delivery person struggling with the door'

It’s human nature to try and be helpful (at least for most of us); in this situation it would mean holding the door open so they can get through easier. Of course in a perfect world this is fine but what if that delivery guy you let into the building was in fact a ‘Hacker’, you would have just given them access to the building and potentially the network of your business.

This type of attack is known as ‘Social Engineering’ and it preys on people’s good will. These ...

Fund Administration is defined as “the set of activities that are carried out in support of the actual process of running a collective investment scheme”. If you strip this down to its most basic elements it basically leaves you managing someone else’s money for them. As soon as you start looking after someone else’s money priorities drastically change.

When you consider security with regards to development for Fund Admin applications it is difficult to not consider the ‘Security Triangle’ (shown below):

In an ideal world your project would sit dead in the middle of this triangle representing a perfect harmony of the 3 aspects; however this is rare because the sections do not always complement each other that well. When considering fund admin theme this becomes clear; obviously you want to protect the data as best you can from unauthorised access by malicious users and the best way of doing this would be to implement a strict multifactor login process. However by increasing security it means you are decreasing ...

Having recently attended a course in Ethical Hacking it has made me dangerously aware of just how flawed some security systems can be. More specifically if you have ever found yourself working on a  project developing financial software it is guaranteed that you will have to deal with (and in turn protect) delicate personal information. This said I thought I would try to compile a top 5 security checks you should keep in mind while developing such projects:

1. SQL Injection / Cross Site Scripting – this is the biggest problem that catches most people out. In all places where a user can input data it’s important to sanitise the inputs to ensure SQL strings cannot be generated due to a rouge quotation mark.
2. Passwords – one of the easiest parts to not enforce in the security process is that of a strong password. Dictionary words should really be avoided seeing as they can be brute forced in a matter of minutes (this includes words with letters replaced with similar ...