Assuring business continuity and faster resilience in unprecedented times

“CIOs should apply an agile approach in executing the initiatives, … enabling the alignment between business and IT and ensuring delivery speed and quality. In crises such as the COVID-19 outbreak, agility, speed and quality are crucial for enabling the continuity of operations.” – Daniel Sun, Research Vice President at Gartner 

The world is fighting an unanticipated enemy in an unprecedented war. An enemy that is only a few microns in size, but humongous in the impact that it is causing. This war may leave a lasting impression, and even introduce and reinforce a new normal. These are testing times, when the healthcare institutions are holding up the front while the global economy is plummeting and every industry is facing disruption. These are times when we must stand together in solidarity to face the pandemic and the global crisis brought upon us due to the COVID-19 outbreak. 

We, as a company, abide to and support the measures being taken by the governments across the world to contain the contagion. While we realize the utmost importance of health and safety at this critical juncture, we also understand that your business must continue in these tough times. As a majority of our workforce as well as our clients start working from their homes, we are enforcing measures to ensure that our service delivery capabilities do not get affected. We are constantly working to develop the infrastructure and strategies required in the present situation and will continue to evolve and adapt our strategies as per the changing needs and environment of the uncertain future. 

We are supporting organizations across the industries to serve their customers with utmost efficiency, even in the present situation. We are listing some of the measures that Cigniti is taking to help your efforts for your organization.  

Enabling zero-touch technology

Social distancing has become the key strategy in preventing the spread of the Corona Virus. People are becoming conscious of what they are touching and coming in contact with. As COVID-19 transmits from human-to-human, it is logical to eliminate as much human interaction as possible. Zero-touch technologies such as contactless payments and RFID scanning can be significant in controlling the ‘touch-required’ activities across Retail and Supply Chain & Logistics sectors. 

Embedding retail products with RFID will allow their automatic scanning at the Pont-of-Sale (POS) counters without needing the billing clerk to touch any of them. Contactless payment technology can facilitate faster checkouts without the card changing hands between the customer and the cashier. In the Supply Chain & Logistics industry, RFID-embedded trucks can be tracked in real-time when they come in close proximity to the sensors. This eliminates the need of mandatory, but possibly-contagious, paperwork that is required whenever a truck or goods carrier passes a terminal. The possibility of contracting the virus by touching is one of the major reasons for panic among the global community. Zero-touch/No-touch technology can help avoid this.  

At Cigniti, we are testing software and applications that are built on the premise of ‘no-touch’, thereby, assuring quality of zero-touch technology and applications for a wide range of industries such as Retail, Supply Chain, Logistics, & others. We engineer the quality of these applications so that they are reliable, robust, and secure. If this is of interest to you, we urge you to reach out to us.  

Healthcare & Life Sciences – supporting the frontline

Coronavirus has affected over 700,000 people directly, and most of the global population indirectly.  Due to the pandemic, there has been a sudden surge in the demands for healthcare equipment, medicines, and such other supplies. Hospitals and telemedicine companies are getting overwhelmed with the growing demand for medical devices, diagnostic equipment, and more while struggling to serve the increased numbers of patients and volumes of calls. There also have been reports of several telehealth platforms crashing under the weight of huge volumes of patient influx. 

With Healthcare, Pharma, and Medical devices being few of the top industries that we have been working with since last 8 years, we have focused on how we can augment our team’s capabilities to serve these industry domains in such times. We have modified our operational strategy in response to the COVID-19 outbreak for keeping our employees safe while ensuring minimal disruption to the workflow. As onshore/offshore remote work culture is the base of our software testing & quality assurance solutions, hundreds of our staff testers are prepared to continue delivering on both new and existing projects with the greatest levels of quality even while working from home amidst the national lockdowns imposed currently. 

In support of the global fight against COVID-19, we will provide our services round the clock to qualified programs supporting the diagnosis, protection, and recovery of the people impacted by the pandemic. 

Security and compliance – containing cyber risks

As we are fighting a highly contagious virus, lockdowns are imperative. During the lockdown, the number of nodes which access any enterprise application is increasing, making them increasingly vulnerable to cyber–attacks. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Health & Human Services Department were targeted by hackers in recent incidents. With most of the global population working remotely, security is of paramount concern as cyber-risks exponentially amplify outside the secure firewalls of an organization’s high-end infrastructure. 

To make sure that we do not expose ourselves or our clients to such vulnerabilities, we have enabled our employees to Work from Home, without deviating or compromising on our security-related as well as other compliance and standards. We are a CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013, & AICPA/SOC certified organization, and our workforce – currently working from home – strictly adheres to them. 

Security and the impact on performance

With global workforces going remote, the number of access points which are now accessing the enterprise applications has multiplied multi-fold from an internal standpoint (the employees, vendors, partners, and so on). These geographically-distributed access points are creating high concurrent load on the systems, which need to function optimally even under heavy usage. These access points will not just be the company provided systems, but also less secure personal systems, laptops, and temporarily-allocated systems. It will become the top priority for organizations to assure the security of the systems while also reducing the vulnerabilities that may crop up.  

To uphold the security protocols from our side while connecting to our client infrastructure, we have enforced multiple security features such as stipulated connection via web-based URLs, customer supplied VPN Client tool and infra on user system, & robust, Site-to-Site tunnel systems which are helpful in drastically reducing the risk of a security breach. 

In addition, we have also strengthened our Security Testing CoE and teams as the requests for our security testing service continue to increase. Your applications need to be accessed securely, and more so in the times of crisis, for you to gain the confidence of your customers. We at Cigniti stand in solidarity in the midst of this global crisis to work together with greater productivity & efficiency. 

Enforcing these measures will allow our teams to continue their unwavering support to our clients with greater productivity & efficiency. 

A final word

At this stage, we are committed towards ensuring that your applications are secure, reliable, and robust, and to #SayingNoToBadSoftware. We are making active efforts to ensure business continuity and stability for our customers and employees alike. If you are looking for assistance related to Quality Assurance for your applications, please reach out to us here.