ASPs today offer nearly any service a company might need. Many of these services (like e-mail, Web hosting, ad serving, invoicing and bill delivery, payroll, etc.) are mission critical. It is therefore important to make sure that the ASPs handle customer information and relationship in a mission critical way. The core to ASP success is a robust and reliable application infrastructure and processes.
Proteans has experience and expertise in creating applications which address the key ASP challenges:
- User experience: What kind of user experience you want to provide to your customers? How to build a great user interface without compromising on usability and user experience?
- Data Security: How secure is the customers’ data? What are the best policies and practices to secure sensitive data like password, credit card numbers, SSN etc.?
- Communication security: How secure is the connection between the ASP and the user? Data flows between the ASP and the user whenever the user accesses it. Is it secured by encryption, a VPN, proprietary techniques or some other system?
- Shared vs. Dedicated Service: How to design the application so that it can be served in both ways. ?
- Redundancy: How does the ASP handle redundancy? If a machine fails or an Internet pipe goes down, what levels or redundancy should be in place to keep your servers online?
- Error handling: How to handle hardware/software problems? If a hard disk fails or the application hangs, what are the policies in place around recovery?
- Disaster Recovery: How does the ASP handle a disaster? How would the ASP handle the complete loss of the facility? How long would it be before service is restored?
- Interoperability: How can a customer get the data out if he chooses to select a new ASP two years from now?
- Integration: How can customers move data between existing applications and the ASP?
- Customer Service: How to resolve customer service issues?
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