BANK tech-trends News
 

January 3, 2011 - January 7, 2011

• Hardware News
• Software Updates
• ATMs/Kiosks
• Wireless World
• Security Section
• Leaders Roundtable
• Technology and Marketing
• Online Banking/E-Commerce/
  Website Design
• Internet Access
• Call Centers

Complimentary Webinar

Maintaining Telecommunications & Meeting Auditor Requirements

It can be extremely difficult to maintain telecommunications with your staff and customers after a disaster. This point is evidenced by the fact that the Post-Katrina reports from all of the governmental agencies regulating financial institutions placed restoring communications quickly at the top of their lists. The FFIEC reports said that banks must:

"Anticipate disruptions in communications services, possibly for extended periods of time." 

The report also noted that "communications outages made it difficult to locate missing personnel." 

Therefore banks must develop affordable ways to quickly restore their telecommunications infrastructure. This complimentary Webinar will demonstrate how your bank can be prepared for telecom disasters without having a telecom person on staff or spending thousands of dollars on redundant phone systems.
 

What You Will Learn:

- How to inexpensively satisfy telecom disaster requirements
- How to show auditors that you can provide a backup telecom system with just 1 phone call
- How you can successfully answer every telecom disaster preparedness questionnaire on the auditor's forms.

BONUS: Every attendee will receive a sample Telecommunications Disaster Recovery Plan.

Who Should Attend:

IT staff, telecom staff, Audit and Compliance personnel, Managers, and anyone interested in maintaining telecommunications.


Date: Schedule a 30-minute live demonstration at your convenience that could one day save your business. If this isn't the easiest to use, most affordable, and most powerful inbound telecom disaster recovery system that you have ever seen, we will send you a free gift - seeing is believing!

To Register: http://www.banktt.com/webinars.htm  

Costs: Free

~ This Week's News is Sponsored by MARQUIS Software Solutions ~

Please contact John Kassing @ johnk@gomarquis.com, or call 800-365-4274 to learn more about MCIF, referral tracking or CRM solutions that you can and will actually use!

Hardware News

Synology announced the addition of a new model to its DiskStation network attached storage (NAS) solution line designed to cater to budget-conscious organizations. The DS211+ model includes two hot-swappable drive bays, which, in the event of a failure, allow hard drives to be replaced without an interruption in service. With support for 3TB hard drives, this makes the DS211+ capable of providing up to 6TB of storage over a network; the drives can also be arranged in a RAID configuration that, while reducing the actual storage space, provides added redundancy to help protect against data loss in the event of a disk failure. The DS211+ model is priced around $400 and comes with a two-year warranty that includes in-house technical support.

In its first new product launch since acquiring Adaptec last spring, PMC-Sierra announced its new Series 6 line of 6Gbps RAID controllers. Supporting both Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces, the Series 6 adapters take advantage of PMC-Sierra's advanced multi-core raid-on-chip silicon. The Series 6 controllers use the optional Zero Maintenance Cache Protection (ZMCP) feature introduced by Adaptec last year. ZMCP uses a super capacitor and NAND FLASH instead of a battery to protect the cache during a power failure. The controllers support hardware RAID levels 0,1,1E,5,5EE,6,10,50,60 and Hybrid RAID 1,10 support for arrays of Solid State Drives (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for maximum performance.

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ATMs/Kiosks

NCR, the world's largest ATM manufacturer based on annual shipments, moved its headquarters from Dayton to Duluth, Georgia in 2009. Looking to take advantage of the expertise of former NCR employees who stayed behind, Nautilus Hyosung has opened a Global Software Center near Dayton. The Global Software Center will develop software for ATMs and financial services applications. In addition, center employees will develop and demonstrate professional services capabilities to Nautilus Hyosung's client base.

While Jitter technology is not effective in fighting skimming on ATMs in which cardholders simply swipe their cards, the ATMcommunity is still endorsing jitter technology in the fight against ATM fraud. The ATMcommunity, a group that represents more than 780 professionals in 54 countries, notes that "jitter technology works via a stop start or jitter motion inside the card drive specifically designed to distort the magnetic stripe details should they be copied onto a foreign card reader inserted into the ATM." While the ATMcommunity promotes jitter technology, they are even bigger proponents of end-to-end encryption which renders skimmed data useless.

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Research and analysis firm Ovum has released a survey that shows about half of employees in corporate enterprises use their own mobile devices to connect to corporate systems which raises significant security concerns. The survey found that while the majority of IT Departments believe smartphones at work increase a business’ vulnerability to cyber fraud and other attacks, only about 50% require corporate devices to be authenticated. Ovum says that “organizations must establish a holistic security strategy that addresses the consumerization of this fast-growing channel into corporate networks and data.”

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Rapid7 announced NeXpose 4.10, the latest version of its vulnerability management solution. New features include dynamic asset groups, advanced asset reporting filters, expansion of supported authentication methods and more than 61,000 vulnerability checks. The company says that with NeXpose 4.10, organizations can streamline their scanning operations and automatically identify and classify new assets as they are added to a network.

PacketMotion, a leading provider of User Activity Management (UAM) solutions, announced that its PacketSentry solution aligns with the requirements for combating internal user threats highlighted in the new "Zero Trust Model of Information Security," as defined by Forrester Research. In the Zero Trust Model, all internal network traffic is untrusted and security professionals must verify and secure all resources, limit and strictly enforce access control, and inspect all network traffic. PacketSentry monitors, controls and logs all network activity, and uses no agents or in-line appliances.

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Security:

Securing the Bank from the Inside to the Outside

BrandProtect - http://www.BrandProtect.com Read Michael Kiefer's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/BrandProtect.pdf

Diebold - http://www.Diebold.com Read Scott Harroff's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Diebold.pdf

FaceTime - http://www.FaceTime.com Read Sarah Carter's comments: http://www.cunews.com/FaceTime.pdf

Harland Financial Solutions - http://www.harlandfinancialsolutions.com Read Jeff Marshall's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/HFS.pdf

HEIT - http://www.goheit.com   Read Jeff Simpler's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Heit.pdf

Indigo Identityware - http://www.indigoidentityware.com Read Thomas J. Rheineck's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Indigo.pdf

mFoundry - http://www.mFoundry.com Read Carlo Cardilli's comments:     http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/mFoundry.pdf

Millennial Vision - http://www.mviusa.com Read Scott Cowan's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/MVi.pdf

Network Box - http://www.networkboxusa.com   Read Pierluigi Stella's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/NetworkBox.pdf

Ongoing Operations - http://www.ongoingoperations.com   Read Hugh Smallwood's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/OGO.pdf

S1 Defense - http://www.S1defense.com Read Bruce C. Smalley's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/S1Defense.pdf

Savant Protection - http://www.savantprotection.com Read Paul Paget's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Savant.pdf

TriGeo Network Security - http://www.trigeo.com   Read Michelle Dickman's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/TriGeo.pdf

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While a November report by Aite Group indicates that few financial institutions have invested in social media, a few have carved out a clear path for themselves. For example, SunTrust Banks started its own social media program a year ago and has since had conversations with 1,500 customers on Twitter and 15,000 customers on Facebook.

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According to an Auriemma Consulting Group, PayPal remains the dominant player in alternative payments and the company is still growing. The survey found that 90 percent of U.S. adults were familiar with or had used PayPal, up from 78 percent in a June 2008 survey. In contrast, just 32 percent of respondents were aware of Western Union's online payment method, down from 33 percent in 2008, and 29 percent were familiar with eBay's Bill Me Later instant credit system, up from 20 percent two years earlier. Just 21 percent of respondents knew about Google Checkout, up from 10 percent in 2008.

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Silver Peak recently announced the latest version of its WAN optimization software that includes a high-speed virtual appliance for large data centers and enables a significant reduction in the amount of traffic that has to cross WAN links by removing repetitive bytes. Silver Peak 4.0 software includes VRX-8, a virtual appliance designed for data centers and capable of supporting up to 1Gbps throughput. The company says the appliance will help speed data center backup and disaster recovery by reducing the number of bytes needed to transfer the data. The software is the same as that on Silver Peak NX physical appliances and its VX virtual appliances. VRX-8 runs as a Virtual Machine (VM) on VMware ESX hypervisors. The software also supports Microsoft Hyper-V environments, which Silver Peak recommends for use in branch offices that have WAN links up to 4Mbps. For larger links, such as those to data centers, the company recommends using VMware ESX as the virtual environment.

Mixed vendor VoIP/IP Telephony systems, e.g., Avaya and Cisco, present significant interoperability issues. That is where VoIP peering comes into play - that is where two VoIP/IPT islands interconnect/interoperate without using either the PSTN or T1 and PRI trunks with legacy signaling. A Session Border Controller is a device/appliance used in VoIP networks to enable VoIP peering connections to the PSTN and between VoIP carriers. The SBC also provides:

- Security between the two VoIP islands

- Voice codec conversion

- Converting Fax from the T.38 to T.30 standard and reverse

- SIP INFO/NOTIFY signaling and DTMF conversion to RFC 2833

- SIP to SIP-TLS over TCP or UDP

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Many contact centers are looking to add social media to their existing range of support channels. However some industry experts caution that social media needs a different type of agent which may entail either a long re-training period or a totally fresh agent pool. Certainly, candidate profiling should focus on their writing skills, as long as social media communication remains largely text based over the next few years. Since canned answers and a dry communication style do not play well with the nature and spirit of social media, some experts are recommending that you hire younger agents from the online generation who really ‘get’ the spirit of social media, but at the same time provide lots of training on how to use various social media channels in a way that keeps your bank secure and compliant.

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