WHEN RISK TURNS TO REALITY
The Irony of a Steel Producer
Imagine being one of the industry leaders of a multi-million-dollar global business in this predicament. While the product you proudly create is durable, corrosive resistant, and yields tremendous strength, a key software program managing the manufacturing process inversely stands vulnerable to attack. Meanwhile, your workers’ mindsets of ‘it isn’t broken, leave it alone’ are constantly defending its unchanged existence.
For this steel piping manufacturer (SPM), the nightmare was all too real but unrecognized at first. The company relied on a software application developed by an employee in the early 2000s that provided key calculations and instructions for shop-floor operations. While the application performed well for its users, the underpinning software technology had not been updated in years. This risk was not thoroughly considered until that employee decided to retire. It was then SPM’s management team began to realize how precarious the situation was.
Held Ransom
It was not until SPM was hacked did they fully realize the risks they ignored.
Reacting to the threat of the ransomware, their IT staff triaged the emergency, salvaging bits of the application by moving it to a server at another plant. While they were able to mitigate the damage, the shop-floor application was still outdated, unsecure, and vulnerable to further attacks. Immediate action was needed to avoid future damage.
It’s Your App and You Need it Now
So, ASI to the rescue.
Developers worked with SPM to modernize the original application using the ASI Core within weeks. With the Core, ASI regenerated the functionality workers demanded on a modern, web-based platform hosted in Azure. Now the application is stable, accessible by multiple users, and has the additional benefit of having its data backed up daily. The users are happy, and the app is now secure.
We pride ourselves in understanding your needs first, followed by building solutions for the long term. In that way, when risk threatens, call us, we can help turn it into productivity instead.
