AXLR8 are delighted to have achieved Cyber Essential Plus again this year. The standard has risen due to an increased international growth in cyber threats. So AXLR8 have also had to work even harder to meet the challenge.

Thanks once again to our team at Right Cue who have advised us and helped us raise our game and improve internal processes and systems to be better prepared.

We have just passed our Cyber Essentials audit for this year. This year’s assessment was much tougher than last year but we were given notice about that by our assessor 12 months ago and have upgraded many of our resources to overtake the evolving threats.

Thanks as ever to the clear guidance and explanations from RightCue.

Next we have Pen Testing and following that in Late December, we start our Cyber Essentials Plus preparatory scans and physical audit. If you have not been through this process with your company, please think about it. The cyber threats are real and we highly recommend Cyber Essentials for cyber peace of mind and now use it for the more stringent Cyber Essentials Plus exercise each year.

If you need to know who did what and when on the AXLR8 system, you can refer to the comprehensive audit data that is recorded as your users work.

This article from our public sector website demonstrates an example from workflow in a business area with very strict compliance compliance requirements. There are examples from our finance and staffing clients, as you can imagine.

However, the monitoring is mostly used not for compliance or establishing who was responsible for a change or for “Big Brother” staff monitoring. It is mostly used on a day-to-day basis for training and occasionally for diagnostics.

Audit trail data is also used for KPIs examples we have put into AXLR8 Reports (also spreadsheets, pivot tables and Power BI models) recently, include:

• recruitment applicant tracking progress (time in different job application stages from application to interview, to hiring, etc.
• sales KPIs – client contact activity rates, follow ups, etc.

Please let us know if there are audit data you need and your AXLR8 consultant will assist you to find an existing report or create a new report using AXLR8 RB.

In recent article, we looked at what checklist items you should look for in a SaaS supplier for your business critical applications. We included security accreditations and a solid reliable support team and a long track record of client retention.

One of the most important factors now is financial stability of your critical suppliers. If your supplier goes bust, the outcome for your business is unpredictable. A key part of many crashes over the last two hundred years is the domino effect of good businesses being taken down by bad businesses.

Due to the pandemic, we have lived through challenging times. Like many historical downturns, it will be followed by more economic turbulence. This time it looks like the war in Ukraine will have many side effects. In previous crashes and recessions and macro economic financial upheavals, more businesses failed after the recession than on entry or during the down times. So now is the key time to check out your SaaS supplier.

At AXLR8, we did this market analysis recently. AXLR8 have a strong balance sheet and have never borrowed money. This careful financial approach has meant personal sacrifice but has left us financially much stronger than our competitors. Losses in the down times are covered by hard earned reserves. This is important because our clients rely upon us for their operational systems – now and in the future.

We recently benchmarked our balance sheet against competitors. Like us they must pay wages and keep servers running in the cloud. Both are expensive with unpredictable costs – especially for security enhancements to counter ever increasing threats. One way they may be saving money that is invisible in customer service, is to skimp on expensive security upgrades. This is the equivalent for your business, of an airline not bothering with maintenance and pre flight safety checks on their aircraft.

With a simple Companies House check, we discovered that we have been competing in most of our core markets with our own positive balance sheet but this is not the rule. There are companies with one employee who have been steadily drifting more and more negative for years. What will his clients do if his wife tells him to go and get a proper job? Worse, there are two companies with fantastic websites and a few good references who are £250k underwater and one has not published their accounts for two years! They should swallow their pride and merge or sell out because they are risking huge damage for their clients.

So, take five minutes to check out your SaaS supplier and assess the consequences of their failure. If you are about to buy a system, again, check their finances not just how nice their website and screens look.