Efar launches 1.3.5 Deal

28/04/2011

Efar drives down cost of 100mb MIA with no install fee
Companies looking to increase your bandwidth and lower your cost read more...




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Assystem UK sign £1.1 million network deal with Efar

01/10/2010

Assystem have chosen Efar to provide the communications backbone for the network enabled operations that support their growth strategy. A strategy which has seen them increase in size despite the global down turn.

Who Are Assystem?

Assystem are an international provider of engineering design and innovation to industry, with over 8,500 people world wide and revenues in excess of €613 million. Despite the global down turn Assystem have continued to grow exponentially over the last 2 years, using their significant expertise in Aeronautical and Nuclear design to drive innovation. It’s strange to think that, although you may not have heard of them, it is likely that every day you use something they designed.

What was the issue?

Assystem have a large UK base with strategic offices throughout the British Isles. The key to their successful growth is being able to harness engineering expertise where ever it can be found and at the core of that strategy is robust communications. Without network enabled operations they cannot take the data to the man and would incur significant cost in the business to ship employees and contractors to central sites.

Assystem are also well aware that a significant cost to the business is moving people from site to site for meetings and is investing heavily in IP based solutions to decrease the requirement for their personnel to travel between countries and sites. The crunch for this came earlier in the year when, despite the high level of ICT deployment, the business was significantly disrupted by the volcanic ash cloud.

Why they chose Efar.

Efar, using its in depth experience in business process and complex network design, have developed a mixture of deployed MPLS and Ethernet Leased Lines to provide a fully redundant network of 10 and 100 megabyte links. Efar’s Technical Director, Matthew Wring said. “key to the success here is flexibility and resilience. Assystem is a dynamic organsiation who set up and remove offices on a regular basis. Any network we deliver to them has to be flexible enough for us to change both line types and speed within the contract without creating a major management burden”.

Matthew goes on to say, “Equally that solution has to deliver resilience and capacity so that they are able to operate regardless of peaks and troughs in demand”. Assystem have worked with Efar for a number of years and appreciate Efar’s solution development approach. The core of this is to listen to a customer requirement, undertake the research and development of solutions, and then offer the tested working solution to the customer with no obligation to buy. This may be a high risk strategy but it means that companies like Assystem do not get bogged down in costly R&D and still have the option not to buy into the technology. For Efar’s part, the take up on solutions design is 90% so, as Matthew says, “we don’t win them all but we do get most of them so we cant be that far off the mark”.

Assystem have been so impressed with this approach they have requested 3 other solutions be investigated so have no doubt that this will not be the last time they make it onto the Efar Talking Point.







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Efar work with South West Police forces to protect children from abuse and engage with companies to do the same

01/09/2010

There can be no worse crime than that committed against a child and the lowest is committed by an adult in a position of trust. It is a sad fact that, in today’s society, the tools that offer everyday people the opportunity to document their lives, to keep and share their memories with friends and loved ones through the mediums of digital photography and the internet, have been usurped by those who would use these tools for evil..

We do not have to accept this; nor should we sit by and let it happen. Efar has joined forces with NetClean from Sweden to bring a powerful compliance package to the UK and use it to assist in the identification and prosecution of those who would seek to groom and harm our children.

Efar has provided NetClean Analyzer, free of charge, to the South West Police forces. This software package has cut investigation time by 70% in the forces that use it, ensuring swift prosecution of offenders. Matthew Wring, Product manager for Efar’s Security and Compliance product range said, “In these times of austerity, anything we can do to ensure that the high tech crime units investigating these crimes are not disadvantaged, we will. The NetClean developers in Sweden are passionate about dealing with this problem and fully support Efar’s initiatives to build a coalition against this crime.”

With the Police forces working hard to catch and prosecute offenders it is now time for the corporate community to step up to the plate. The statistics do not make pretty reading:

· 1 in 1000 persons will view or download images of children being abused.
· 95% of these will use their company computer systems or remote devices such as laptops and PDAs as they feel they are less likely to be caught by family members
· These abusers are most likely family men or women with children of their own.
· Those working within organisations requiring CRB checks will not be found, as until they are identified and prosecuted they do not have a criminal record.

Why should a corporate entity care?

Apart from the moral issues surrounding this subject, the viewing, taking or passing of images of children being abused is illegal under UK law. The use of corporate networks for illegal activity criminalises the user and make the network owner liable to prosecution. Worse still, abusers have typically hidden images on the corporate network, leaving their discovery by other employees as a real danger. Under UK law, a company must seek to protect its employees in the workplace from criminal activity.

The viewing of child abuse images becomes a drug for these people and they will start a spiral of abuse, initially viewing images, then swapping them, moving on to grooming a child for abuse and finally undertaking an act of abuse. Stopping future abuse by identifying these people and breaking their cycle at an early stage is of paramount importance.




Why filtering products don’t work

Often I am told that an organisation has a web or email filtering product which prevents people inside their network from viewing inappropriate content. Although this is a step in the right direction, it will not stop the transfer of images downloaded to a company computer and nor does it stop the abuser visiting a website that is not in a filters blacklist. Abuse rings will often setup temporary web sites at free web hosting locations, that may only last for a couple of hours, in order to transfer images and these temporary sites will not make it onto filter blacklists. None of this takes into account removable media such as data sticks or CD / DVD’s.

NetClean works in a similar way to an anti virus product. A management server sits in your network downloading updated reference information from the “Internet Watch Foundation” who are tasked in the UK to identify and classify content as abusive. They take their information both from individuals reporting abuse and from Interpol, who manage a reference database of known images collected from police forces around the world.

Installed on each network computer, a scanning application runs hidden in the back ground, continuously talking to the management server, updating its database if required and informing the management server if a known image has been scanned. The server then alerts the agreed personnel in your organisation and stores relevant information for creating a court admissible file. Your HR department will have been supplied with a step by step guide detailing what to do next.

Should the abuser disconnect the device from the network, the application continues to collect information until it can reconnect to the server and upload its report.

There are no false positives

The key to this system is that it will identify when someone looks at a known image of abuse, so there are no false positives and you can act immediately to remove the abuser from the company, engage with law enforcement and ensure the abuser is dealt with in an appropriate manner.

If any of us think that abuse doesn’t affect us at a financial level, then I suggest we think again. For example, in the case of Vanessa George, the Plymouth Nursery Nurse who fell into a cycle of abuse and ultimately grooming children in her care, had a huge impact on those around her. The Nursery closed and the staff, who were completely innocent, lost their jobs and the owners livelihood was removed. Her crime left not only the parents of the children to pay but also the company she worked for and its employees.

So what price for a corporate conscience and protection

Matthew says “This is not about cost” as the NetClean product can be supplied under a number of pricing models including, free to install with a charge per instance found, a per site license agreement or a price per seat. Even on a straight buy, pricing is based on volume and starts at £10 per computer per year and can go down to as little as £2 per computer per year.

Of greater import is how this software can change lives. The larger the distribution of this application, the higher the likelihood that abusers will be identified, their victims helped and those who are starting down the spiral of abuse can be stopped before they themselves, abuse another.





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Efar enjoy success at the GWE Business West show

01/09/2010

Once again Leigh Court was the venue for the 2010 GWE Business West show and despite the blustery weather a large part of the wider Bristol business community came out to view the exhibits.

Efar’s stand was well attended throughout the day and we would like to thank all those who took the opportunity to visit us. A large number of questions centered on hosting and digital security and a number of opportunities were identified for us to work with companies going forward.

Particular interest was formed around the NetClean product range and the capacity for Efar to host data services in the Bristol area whilst the ability for stand members to walk around the show using our Splicecom phone system to communicate, demonstrated the capacity of this true VoIP solution and impressed many.

It was also good to see some old friends and business partners both exhibiting and visiting the show. Despite the tough economic times it just proves that there is both opportunity and demand for business services. Matthew Wring also got a change to talk to the editor of the BBC Politics Show discussing the impending cuts and how the business community will be able to weather the storm.

Efar will continue to exhibit as we seek to get the message out that the right use of technology is a business enabler that can give you a significant advantage over your competitors.



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INDEX is dead and Efar delivers an heir apparent

01/05/2010

Now that Avaya have consigned its popular INDEX PBX to history and you are a company that uses one, the question is: where do I go from here. The obvious immediate answer is to buy its replacement and you would have thought Avaya would have made that easy.

Sadly not, the Avaya range has expanded has focused into specific market areas. This would be ok but the companies who bought the INDEX did so for is functionality. The new range requires you to purchase additional modules to support those functions, which means you end up buying a system designed by Avaya for a much larger company and at a much greater cost.

The majority of PBX providers come from a telephony background and as such understand voice and the features of the phone systems they are supplying. We believe companies buy a system for is functions not its features and that a system should come with all the functionality out of the box. In this way we can stay true to the Efar philosophy of supplying big company functionality to smaller companies that would not normally be able to afford it but, never the less, have the same requirements.

The Splicecom Maximiser is an IP based solution that has all the features of a modern system supporting ISDN, ISDN2e and SIP out of the box. Analogue and VoIP handsets are supported as standard with no requirement for additional cards or licences. More importantly is has all the functionality of a full blown corporate system supporting:

- call centre function including call tracking, wall boards and integration with a contact database,
- distributed workers (road warriors) offering one number calling and home working with all the call information and call diverting as if you were in the office,
- business continuity through the clever use of multiple Maximisers linked to become one seamless entity.

Add to all this the scalability of a system that supports up to 500 users as standard and the ability to link multiple boxes together, offering all the capability of an enterprise class PBX. The Maximiser grows with your company and saves you money by offering the functions your company requires and not forcing you to purchase a load of features you will never use.

Efar are in a unique position because SpliceCom are the only British company to design, develop and manufacturer "Pure IP" next-generation communication systems that deliver tangible businesses benefits for all types of company, irrespective of size. Our relationship allows us to have direct access to the manufacturer that means as an end user customers gain value from understanding and influencing the development of the Maximiser product family unifies voice, video, IP TV and web enabled IT applications at the desktop within a single, scalable system.

If you are working with an INDEX system then give us a call at Efar and we will be happy to discuss the functions you require, and the replacement cost using the Splicecom Maximiser; I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Checkout the Splicecom website for full details on what he system can offer. They also have some excellent video on functions of the system. www.splicecom.com




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