Business Consulting

Business Process Re-engineering

NSG BPR services assist customers in rethinking and redesigning the way work is done to better support an organization's mission, streamline processes, automate functions, improve productivity and reduce costs. Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions are asked, such as "Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned with our mission? Who are our customers?" An organization may find that it is operating on questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its customers. Only after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, does it go on to decide how best to do it.
Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering focuses on the organization's business processes—the steps and procedures that govern how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved. It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
Re-engineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into sub-processes and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process. Reengineering maintains that optimizing the performance of sub-processes can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive for realizing dramatic improvements by fundamentally re-thinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes the re-engineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement.

Solution Strategy

Solution Strategy is the overall plan to meet business objectives and primarily focus on the solutions/technologies themselves to improve productivity and efficiency of business processes and user acceptance of change. Some of the steps taken by NSG team under this practice as part of solution strategy are (1) Business Analysis to identify critical and nice to have features/functionalities. (2) Market research to identify potential solutions to meet business and technology requirements including demonstration of readily available solution by Vendor meet specific criteria established (3) Auditing of Proof of Concept with critical functionalities and integration requirements (4) Solution Architecture and Design review to meet short-term and long-term business objectives and application security (5) System Integration and User Acceptance Testing, (6) Application Security Documentation review and auditing, (7) Implementation and Deployment Plan review and Service Level Agreements/MOU establishments for user training, User Support as well as Operation and Maintenance organization and Plan

NSG team has been involved in deploying many solutions for customers and can assist customer to ensure that solution selected is meeting customer business needs and have clarity on the capabilities of solution and short-term and long-term operational requirements to support users, operational and application security requirements.

Application Security

Application security encompasses measures taken to improve the security of an application often by finding, fixing and preventing security vulnerabilities. Different techniques are used to surface such security vulnerabilities at different stages of an applications lifecycle such design, development, deployment, upgrade, maintenance. An always evolving but largely consistent set of common security flaws are seen across different applications

Different techniques will find different subsets of the security vulnerabilities lurking in an application and are most effective at different times in the software lifecycle. They each represent different tradeoffs of time, effort, cost and vulnerabilities found.
• Whitebox security review, or code review. This is a security engineer deeply understanding the application through manually reviewing the source code and noticing security flaws. Through comprehension of the application vulnerabilities unique to the application can be found.
• Blackbox security audit. This is only through use of an application testing it for security vulnerabilities, no source code required.
• Design review. Before code is written working through a threat model of the application. Sometimes alongside a spec or design document.
• Tooling. There exist many automated tools that test for security flaws, often with a higher false positive rate than having a human involved.
• Coordinated vulnerability platforms. These are hacker-powered application security solutions offered by many websites and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs.
Utilizing these techniques appropriately throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) to maximize security is the role of an application security team.