Financial Services: Meeting the Corporate Connectivity Challenge

Today it takes more than profits and stock prices to keep banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies at the top of their game. In an online world where time is money, delays or unsecured access to financial services applications can cost not only in millions, but also in loss of customers and at worst, the business itself. The IT solution needed to provide staff, brokers, partners, and insurance agents with access to corporate, retail and mortgage banking, as well as insurance applications must be secure, reliable and drive overall business efficiencies.

Ericom realizes that escalating globalization, deregulation, and competition, place tremendous performance challenges on today’s financial service providers and IT organizations.
They must meet not only the challenges of rigid accountability standards for privacy and security, but also of globally dispersed offices and mobile workforces, within ever-increasing cost and time constraints.

Ericom Software enables IT departments across the financial services industry to address a wide range of complex IT issues:

High availability (up-time) of applications and services -anywhere, anytime.
Business continuity – supporting continuous operations, with no single point of failure.
Mobility and BYOD scenarios.
Extended banking, securities and other financial services to branch offices, mobile agents and staff.
Supporting a wide range of new and legacy applications and data.
Ensuring privacy of corporate and customer records and information
Enabling information sharing among geographically distributed agencies and branch offices.

Secure and On-demand Access for the Financial Services Industry

Ericom’s enterprise-wide application access solution is flexible and scalable enough to accommodate gradual or rapid growth of any business. It enables you to:

Leverage existing IT assets to provide faster and better services, while increasing overall business efficiency.
Centralize application access management to reduce IT overhead and complexity
Accelerate software updates – installing applications on servers instead of individual desktops, optimizes your IT resources and lowers overhead.
Centrally monitor access to applications to prevent fraud and lower security threats.
Publish Windows and web applications to any device, anywhere including Windows, Mac and Linux desktops, laptops, mobile devices and thin clients without having to install any client-side software – ideal for BYOD policies.
Secure applications and data with built-in encryption.

Download Ericom Connect documentation

Download “EricomConnect.pdf” EricomConnect.pdf – Downloaded 911 times – 1,006 KB

Remote Access to CAD, But Without the Latency

Global expansion and sustainable industrialization trends require innovative thinking in design. These trends also drive the need for engineers and architects to collaborate more than ever across offices and remote locations as well as in the field. Designing buildings, transportation hubs, bridges, cars, homes, appliances, mobile devices, and other conveniences – What do all of these important tasks have in common? You guessed it – they all require CAD applications.

So what can be done to ensure productivity across offices and remote locations without sacrificing user experience and efficiency?

CAD, or computer-aided design, applications such as AutoDesk’s AutoCAD allow businesses in a wide variety of industries, including engineering and architecture firms, to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional drawings and models. In other words, CAD applications make it possible for engineers and architects to develop accurate visualizations and simulations of their projects in order to detect and resolve issues without having to produce the actual product first.

CAD is cool but heavy …

On the one hand, CAD is cool; it saves cycle times, development costs, and improves the end product. But here’s the problem. While CAD applications and models are extremely useful, they can be difficult to manage, especially within groups, and when the design team is scattered or in multiple locations.

The proliferation of mobile technology has made it possible for engineers and architects to work outside of the office, both at home and on job sites. However, because many CAD files are massive, in most cases, CAD applications and files are available in local offices only. These files can be in the gigabytes, making them almost impossible for workers outside of the office to download and edit without spending an exorbitant amount of time draining the wide area network (WAN). Additionally, as files are checked in and out, uploaded and downloaded, there can be version control issues that create confusion among the teams using the files.

The short answer: implement a remote access solution

A remote access solution can provide seamless access to CAD applications and files from any location, on any device, while eliminating the need to download the applications and files on physical devices. That kind of freedom allows engineers, architects, and others working with CAD on a regular basis to work on job sites around the world without sacrificing the ease and performance of working in the office.

One of our clients, a major engineering firm in the United States, experienced difficulty accessing, editing, and sharing CAD files across its six office locations and on job sites scattered across the globe. Searching for a solution, the firm chose Ericom Connect, our robust managed access solution, to give flexible, zero-latency access to the engineers and architects working remotely. Our HTML5 technology has made it possible for designers to access Autodesk Revit and large CAD files via a single centralized access system, allowing architects and engineers to collaborate on projects regardless of physical location. Through the browser, there was no latency and all the updates remained on the system in the respective office, eliminating version control issues.

Another client, the Sahara Force India Formula One Team, has also benefitted by integrating our remote access technology. The engineers that design the racing cars need to access and edit three-dimensional CAD models away from their factory and from tracks all over the world. Before Ericom Connect, the engineers were compelled to bring their bulky workstations with them from location to location in order to open and edit CAD files in the field. Now, through our browser-based technology, Sahara’s engineers can view CAD models in fine detail and make edits on the fly, speeding up part fitment and modification at the track.

Remote access capability has the power to transform how engineers, architects, and other designers interact with CAD applications and files. By providing remote, centralized access to CAD from a variety of devices and locations, Ericom is enabling the next wave of innovation in engineering, architecture, and design – without the limitations.

Mendy Newman