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.
AXLR8 has been working on many integrations for the ATS (applicant tracking system). Now our clients can spread the net even wider in their search for new talent. We are all competing for the best candidates.
Integrations include Indeed, Monster and Rest Less as well as many others. We have several links with other HR tools you can plug into the candidate journey such as one way interviewing platforms like Willo. There is much more information about the AXLR8 ATS on our specialist AXLR8 Staffing site. Also, there are several explainer animations about our clients using the AXLR8 ATS like this, and this
Your talent management team can ensure compliance with hiring standards like BS7858, rights to work and automate the process using the AXLR8 Application Form Builder (AXLR8 AFB) and AXLR8 Vetting. For placing the adverts and job details pages on your website job boards, AXLR8 provides a plug in for well known CMS providers such as WordPress.
More information About the AXLR8 ATS is available in this article.
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:
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.
It is an old adage that more companies go bust coming out of recessions and depressions than during them. So now there are very competent managers who are starting out with their new businesses and using AXLR8 from the very beginning.
We have responded with a start up pricing package. It is summarised as: “Start at a low cost whilst you need to keep costs and risks down. Pay us more when you get richer”. So we are effectively investing in start ups. Obviously, some make it and some do not – for all sorts of reasons.
Many are staffing companies where their previous employers went bust. Most are successful. See this article. There are no surprises why some succeed and some fail – hard work and keeping lots of plates spinning.
We are just exploring and testing different offers customised for startups. It really started when we had to lend money to clients during the recessionary period in order to keep their systems going. The reason for this was that their services have not been required for two years! Thankfully, most of those have recovered and are paying us back as their shift numbers increase.
Others have come across from competitors who have been left with balance sheets tens of thousands underwater and in two cases a quarter of a million under. So make sure you check out the financials of any prospective supplier before gambling your business future on them!
With the arrival of the new football season and other stadium management challenges, we have a short window of dev time for major enhancements.
We will be using the new Paxton development and test kit we have purchased. This will speed the programming and testing cycles up enormously.
This is a mature integration. It has run at live high traffic staff check in locations for several years now. However, it needs to evolve with changing business and systems requirements. We have identified many areas for improvement.
We will be focussed on robustness, reliability, auto restart to heal problems caused by onsite systems maintenance, power failures, etc. Also, we are improving the alerts system telling us when something has gone wrong at a client site.
We have many new ideas including utilities to match up card data which is sometimes not the same in AXLR8 as in Paxton – a common problem we know happens in other stadium systems. So that will be a great step forward. A recent site visit identified 12 ideas that would make the system better for the end user both during the high pressure match day and also in pre- and post-match administration.
Thanks to our clients for their patience and diligent feedback and understanding.
Thanks also to our great partners like Computer Care, FSL and Paxton. Without your help and specialist expertise, this would have been tough. We really appreciate the open discussions and constant attention to detail and cooperative, problem solving approach.
Please read more on our specialist staffing website.
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.
As a supplier of lone worker applications we were thinking about our own commuting to and from AXLR8 and business travel in general which is growing now in the UK as people in commerce are mostly back in the office. The employer has to take due care of workers. The law also stipulates1 that the staff must carry some responsibility for their own safety.
Every Monday morning we have our regular sales and management meetings. Yesterday, we added in a tyre check.
Don’t forget oil, windscreen awash liquid, radiator, etc., as well!
Stay safe. Prepare for all trips and build in time to pause and allow others out of turnings and not have to speed. Planning is everything. Distractions are dangerous. If you get in a car tired and cause a crash, nobody will congratulate you on your work ethic.
1 If you are an employer or employee Health and Safety law needs professional advice. However, if you want to read up and acquire general knowledge, google The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Health and Safety at Work regulations 1999.
Software as a Service (SaaS) has revolutionised our lives and freed most of us from large up-front development costs, expensive on-premise hardware and associated software and networks.
You just sign up and everything magically appears with your business data, pictures, documents. It is all backed up and safe. However, have you checked the provider is actually doing what they promised? AXLR8 have been in the SaaS business for over 2 decades and trust many suppliers but check everyone.
Here are a few questions we suggest that you ask your SaaS supplier.
Business Stability
My business critical data
Before developing your own system with a software developer or an in-house developer, you should also be able answer the above questions.
You will be aware of the well known economics of software development:
If it costs 1 pound to develop a system,
it costs 10 pounds to implement and another 10 pounds to document it
15 pounds a year to maintain it and
150 pounds a year to support it.
Outside developers bidding for your business conveniently forget that in their pitch!
On top of that, complying with basic security and GDPR is very costly and you would be paying for it on your own. A SaaS supplier can share those costs around hundreds or even thousands of users.
A reputable SaaS supplier can also bring specialist expertise and new modules from the accumulated experience of thousands of users to your business. They can concentrate on updating their platform, performance, bug fixes, encryption, security. Do not underestimate these expenses. Their helpdesk is always there. Your inhouse developer could be off sick or go on holiday – or leave the company just when you have a critical repair.
Thirty five client websites, including our own Staffing specialist website, have been affected by a DDOS attack this morning.
No business critical business applications are affected.
Email is not affected.
It should be resolved by the engineers at the datacentre soon. These problems are rare and this is the first in perhaps ten or more years.
Thanks for your patience. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need more information.