Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: Cloud Security

  • Atlantic BT Achieves SOC 2 Type 2 Certification

    Atlantic BT Achieves SOC 2 Type 2 Certification

    A Milestone in Our Commitment to Security and Trust

    We are thrilled to announce that Atlantic BT has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 certification, a significant milestone that underscores our unwavering commitment to the security, availability, and privacy of the solutions we provide to our clients.

    What is SOC 2 Type 2?

    SOC 2 Type 2 is a rigorous, industry-wide standard developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). It is designed to ensure that service providers like us manage your data with the highest standard of security and compliance. Unlike SOC 2 Type 1, which evaluates the suitability of design controls at a specific point in time, SOC 2 Type 2 involves a more detailed examination of operational effectiveness over a defined period.

    Why It Matters

    For Atlantic BT, achieving SOC 2 Type 2 certification is not just about security theater. It is about building trust with our clients and partners. At a time when data breaches are all too common, this certification is a testament to the robustness of our systems and processes and people that protect and secure your data.

    Our Journey to Certification

    Achieving this certification was a rigorous process that involved detailed audits of our data management practices and the controls we put around those practices. Our team worked diligently to meet and exceed the strict criteria set forth by the AICPA. This included enhancing our security measures, refining our data processing procedures, and strengthening our system controls. It was also amazing to partner with Vanta for automation in reporting and control objectives related to the SOC 2 Type 2 framework. 

    What This Means for Our Clients

    With this certification, our clients can feel even more confident in partnering with Atlantic BT. Whether you’re looking to design a new website, enhance your e-commerce platform, or secure your digital assets, you can trust that your projects and data are in safe hands. Our SOC 2 Type 2 certification assures you that we adhere to the highest standards for security and compliance, today and into the future.

    Thank You

    We want to take this opportunity to thank our dedicated team and our clients who have trusted us over the years. Achieving SOC 2 Type 2 certification is a collective achievement that reflects our shared commitment to excellence and security.

    For more information on how our SOC 2 Type 2 certification can benefit your projects, or to discuss your next digital initiative, please contact us at hello@atlanticbt.com or click the button below. 

    Get in Touch

    Thank you for trusting Atlantic BT with your digital solutions. We look forward to continuing to serve you with even higher standards of security and reliability.

  • Unleashing the Power of Cloud with Atlantic BT’s Select Tier AWS Partnership

    Unleashing the Power of Cloud with Atlantic BT’s Select Tier AWS Partnership

    Welcome to the future of cloud computing, where we, as a Select tier AWS partner, are ready to take your business to new heights. Our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is more than just a badge—it’s a testament to our commitment to delivering top-tier cloud solutions to our clients.

    The AWS Partner Network (APN) Advantage

    Being part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) is a significant achievement. The APN is a global community of partners who are committed to helping customers build, market, and sell their AWS offerings. This includes a wide range of services from storage and databases to analytics and machine learning.

    As a Select tier partner, we’ve proven our expertise in AWS services. We’ve passed rigorous certification processes and demonstrated our ability to deliver effective solutions. We’re not just experts—we’re trusted professionals with a track record of success.

    Take, for example, our work with Mutual Drug – a billion-dollar business that supplies more than 500 pharmacies with over 25,000 drugs and other items. With a business model completely dependent on online transactions, Mutual Drug recognizes the importance of superior network reliability and Amazon Web Services’ position as the leader in this space. Several years ago, we helped Mutual Drug to create a scalable and fault-tolerant hosting solution on Amazon Web Services. 

    Delivering Success with AWS Partner Led Business Support

    Our partnership with AWS extends beyond the Select tier. We’re also part of AWS’s Partner Led Business Support program. This program enables us to provide our customers with extensive technical support, ensuring their AWS solutions are optimized for their specific needs.

    We’re here to help you navigate the complexities of the cloud. Our team of certified professionals will guide you through every step of your cloud journey, from initial consultation, to ongoing support, and through your first production incident. We’re committed to delivering solutions that drive your business success and keep you secure.

    Why Choose a Select Tier AWS Partner?

    As a Select tier partner, we’ve met specific requirements set by AWS, including extensive training and a proven track record of customer success. But we’re not just a partner—we’re a proven, endorsed team of cloud professionals.

    It’s tempting to chalk up this success to simply choosing the right technology and capabilities to master, then implementing these solutions for our clients.  But the truth is, we got here because of the effectiveness and empathy of our team. How they creatively approach problems, while collaborating with clients, matters. 

    To really delight clients, you need more than intelligence and expertise. You need a spirit of cooperation that listens closely to a client’s unique situation. That is the inspiration to design an inclusive process to craft, test, and optimize technology. 

    The Future is in the Cloud

    The benefits of cloud computing are extensive. From increased efficiency to cost savings, the cloud is transforming the way businesses operate. As a Select tier AWS partner, we’re at the forefront of this transformation. We’re not just delivering cloud solutions—we’re building the future.

    Ready to Elevate Your Business?

    Are you ready to take your business to the next level with AWS? As a Select tier AWS partner, we’re here to help. Contact us today to learn more about our AWS services and how we can help you achieve your business goals.

  • How to balance technical risk and innovation.

    How to balance technical risk and innovation.

    While following strict corporate regulations makes sense from a risk management standpoint, it can be debilitating to innovation. 

    Issues like regulatory compliance, privacy protection, and data security result in a plethora of processes and policies to reduce risk. Unfortunately, this red tape also slows down the hiring, development, and technological advances needed to move business forward.

    Processes slowing change is especially dangerous if technology is part of your competitive advantage.

    So how can you combat a culture of limits and protect your core competency?

    Recognize the dangers of technology complacency.

    What happens when your technology is stagnant? Your organization’s growth is hindered due to these issues.

    Low employee morale.

    Outdated technology can make you feel stuck. Employees may no longer enjoy working within an application and feel frustrated leveraging it to perform needed tasks. They may not be able to find needed information with poorly connected systems, which weakens decision making.

    Feeling limited can lead to turnover, a lack of creativity and initiative in employees, and ultimately less innovation.

    Increased technical debt.

    Not only does outdated technology hurt morale, applications will incur expenses from technical debt. Past decisions that were meant to eliminate risk prove harmful over time. This may have been a quick security patch or the decision to delay a helpful feature.

    Missed market opportunities.

    What are the costs of going through your business strategy with slow technology, security gaps, or a poor user experience? You may opt to forgo some opportunities all together, giving your competitors an instant advantage.

    Find ways to foster innovation in a regulated environment.

    These two simple changes to a company’s culture can start remedying the harmful practices that slow you down. 

    Encourage people to take risks and allow for mistakes.

    While industry regulations will always be a requirement, there may be some other areas where risks are permissible. 

    Bizjournals.com states:

    Roger Perlmutter, the new research and development director at drug giant Merck, gives leaders and their teams the opportunity to take chances without punitive risk. Most wrong decisions at low- to middle-management levels won’t kill the company, and when people engage and take full ownership of their jobs, the result may yield something wonderful.

    Create a culture where partners assume some risk.

    You’re the expert in your industry and business model, but a partner can specialize in the necessary development piece. 

    Find a partner who can focus on the complex technical pieces of a project, assuming the risks of development time and budget. This partnership should empower you to focus on higher level strategy.

    For instance, in this example with Mutual Drug, Atlantic BT handled contracting an established 3rd party CSOS auditor to evaluate their application. We then performed multiple internal audits and tests to save our client the significant costs of multiple official audits. 

    Handling the nitty gritty back and forth and auditing gave our client some peace of mind. The partnership ultimately led to a stronger, streamlined, and compliant new application that launched their business forward.

    Feeling stuck with your technology?

    Many businesses come to Atlantic BT for help when they feel limited by their mission-critical applications. We can help by integrating systems, recommending the best way to spend budget, or building new features. 

    But most importantly, we understand the nuances of industries with strict policies. That’s why we create flexible processes that work for you – in terms of billing and accounting, development, deploying, and project management.

    Reach out to one of our experts to learn more about how we can help.

  • Failed RFPs are expensive. Here’s how to find better vendors.

    Failed RFPs are expensive. Here’s how to find better vendors.

    When you find yourself in a scenario where custom software is essential, you have three options:

    1. Develop the custom software in-house.
    2. Find a partner to handle the entire project.
    3. Partner with a vendor who integrates with your team.

    This middle ground of working closely with a vendor leads to writing an RFP and evaluating responses.

    Why do RFPs fail?

    Many RFP partnerships fail due to poor vendor selection or unclear project requirements and deliverables outlined. You may have even lost faith in the process of trusting partners altogether.

    Consider that it might not be the RFP process that’s failing, but rather using outdated methods for evaluating your partners. After all, they’ve probably responded to enough RFPs that they’ve learned what you want to hear at the surface level.

    Try these evaluation tactics to dig deeper and choose better partners.

    1. Stop using price as a measure of quality.

    We are trained to believe that price and quality is a linear relationship: the more you pay, the higher the quality and the less you pay, the lower the quality.

    However, price is not exclusively tied to a company’s output. It’s also closely tied to internal efficiency and how streamlined internal processes may be.

    A vendor who has found a highly efficient way to produce a quality product may have the same price as a company who cuts corners to produce a low quality product.

    According to CIO.com, “The highest priced technology partners often spent longer amounts of time on the project, with too many unnecessary staff members and account managers. On the other hand, the lower end of the market often lacked the skill and technical ability to produce consistent quality.

    Picking a technology partner is a completely different experience than shopping on Amazon. You cannot go to a vendor and simply pick the lowest price for the exact service you need. It can be a nuance-filled and complex process.”

    For this reason, your perfect partner is likely in the middle ground of high and low price.

    2. Rely on references over examples.

    Most organizations like to see vendors’ examples of past work and testimonials to help them evaluate expertise. This may come in the form of case studies or quick client quotes.

    The problem is, these are surface-level validators that can skim over some of the important nitty gritty. You’ll want to take a step further. Always ask for references to discover:

    • How the vendor handled issues that arose during the process
    • How the vendor performed in terms of budget and timeline
    • If the final product was satisfactory and truly provided business value

    3. Look for a warranty.

    Vendors who truly believe that their services will be satisfactory will offer some sort of guarantee. This may be in the form of month-to-month contracts, commitment to fixing bugs for free, or free work when a project exceeds budget.

    4. Seek vendors with flexible processes.

    Is your vendor the same? What happens when two rigid organizations work together? Look for a partner who can mold their development, deployment, project management, and billing processes to fit your organization’s standards.

    Need help with custom software development?

    Whether you need help defining business requirements, writing an RFP, or are in the stage of looking for vendors; we’d love to learn more and see how we can help! Get in touch for a free consultation.

  • Coping with COVID-19 and preparing for the future of digital.

    Coping with COVID-19 and preparing for the future of digital.

    Take a look at how COVID-19 has impacted our organization, what to expect in a post-pandemic world, and how we are embracing the future.

    A new normal: working fully remote.

    I personally am settling into week 9 of isolation and social distancing, it’s been fun to watch other people adjust to becoming remote workers.

    In 2019, Atlantic BT decided that we needed to open our minds to people working full-time remote. This would help us recruit top talent across the East Coast and give employees flexibility they needed. This change also aligned well with my move to Ottawa, Canada, as I took the plunge into working fully remote for the first time.

    We encouraged the remaining ABT-ers in Raleigh to explore working from home a few days a week to avoid traffic and maximize their flow.

    What this means during this time of “Business as Unusual” is that Atlantic BT is already prepared to be fully operational as a remote team. We are still managing web applications, writing quality code, and settling into video conversations. Some of the benefits we are seeing include:

    • Better written documentation
    • More chatter that’s searchable and archivable
    • Finding creative ways to socialize (We are still having our 2 4 7 mini game breaks for some virtual games at home.)

    How will reopening impact our digital future?

    While we understand that these unusual times are putting a strain on many of you in all facets of life, I think it’s important to focus on the post-pandemic world and look to our digital futures. 

    At ABT, we are taking this time to streamline our processes to provide more value at a lower cost, develop more useful and value driven baselines for our favorite platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Shopify, React), and tackle enterprise integration as we never have before. 

    If there is one thing we can count on, it’s that we as a collective humanity will emerge from this as changed for better and worse. While popular media wants to emphasize the worst, I want to think about the better for a bit.

    Industrial Automation

    We will emerge a truly digital society where curbside pickup and take out persist outside of the restaurant industry as a way to do business. This will force us to rethink industrial automation as it is related to B2C eCommerce.

    Hopefully we can move a bit past the Gig Economy into the Robot Economy (I for one welcome our robot overlords, just wanted to get that out there before the Singularity).

    IoT and Healthcare

    We will be socially distancing for a bit and need to come up with new ways to take care of each other. In the digital world, we will see an explosion of IoT healthcare monitoring that will change the way we travel and we convalesce.

    This explosion will put more pressure on privacy and security frameworks to encrypt and make portable this data that ultimately belongs to the individual. We will be better off for sharing this information globally in a secure way.

    eCommerce transactions and shipping

    Ecommerce will continue to grow at a covid-19 like pace (too soon?) – but we need to be prepared. Current credit card and shipping solutions won’t cut it.

    As merchants see profound impacts to their ability to earn revenue, the credit card industry is going to have to ease costs and provide more security around transactions using biometrics, cryptocurrency, and temporary transaction numbers.

    Shippers are going to have to figure out machine learning and how it applies to density and logistics in a new way.

    We all see multiple delivery trucks pass our houses/apartments each day. We need to see true improvements in payment technology and logistics/supply chain improvements past what Amazon Prime has already taught us. 

    Increased work-from-home opportunities

    It’s clear that working from home will become more common. We are already in the habit and have become comfortable with these setups. New tools and processes will continue to improve, and companies are beginning to realize to the benefits of remote work. Furthermore, we may use work from home as a solution to prevent the spread of future illness.

    Reduced commuting will also allow our earth to heal a bit from the over consumption of fossil fuels and maybe actually put a dent in global warming.

    While it’s hard to look to these long-term, more pressing issues, we will be able to make the case for more remote work and better integrated digital platforms to allow for connected remoteness while keeping our communication secure.

    Let’s have a conversation.

    As ABT prepares to thrive in the future and comes out of this “Business as Unusual” time hardened and ready to tackle these problems with creative agility, let us know if there is anything we can do to support you. We are truly a people-first company and no digital ask is too big or small. If you need help, let me know!

  • Atlantic BT Becomes SOC 2 Type I Certified. What’s Next?

    Services Organization Control 2 (SOC 2ÂŽ) is a thorough technical audit that requires companies to follow strict security procedures. Attaining a SOC 2ÂŽ report ensures that Atlantic BT is providing safe cloud environments for our clients, both protecting their private data and having a plan of action for detected threats.

    While Atlantic BT completed a SOC 2Ž Type I Audit examination on April 1st 2019, we are currently pursuing SOC 2Ž Type II. Our goal is to give clients peace of mind with our cloud solutions, educate on security measures, and continue to stay up-to-date with industry standards to prevent future threats.

    Type I vs. Type II: What’s the Difference?

    SOC 2® engagements are performed in accordance with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) AT-C 205, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization and based on the trust service principles outlined in the AICPA Guide. The SOC 2® Type I report is performed by an independent auditing firm and is intended to provide an understanding of the service organization’s suitability of the design of its internal controls.

    Type I and Type II both involve reporting controls and processes related to five principles: Privacy, Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, and Confidentiality. Atlantic BT is focusing on Security, Availability, and Confidentiality.

    The primary difference is that Type I confirms our security controls at a single point of time, assuring that all of the proper policies and procedures are in place. On the other hand, Type II spans over six months, assuring that these processes are effectively working.

    How Atlantic BT Became SOC 2ÂŽ Type I Certified

    SOC 2ÂŽ Type I is a starting point that paves the way for Type II. Some examples of the measures we took to achieve our Type I certification include:

    • Use of encryption protocols to protect customer data
    • Designing with tiered access for client accounts
    • Ongoing management of capacity demand
    • Required internal training courses to help employees spot suspicious activity

    Skoda Minotti, an international business advisory firm, was selected to conduct the final audit. Atlantic BT received its SOC 2ÂŽ Type I certification after thorough testing and review.

    [pull_quote]We were excited to work with Atlantic Business Technologies from the very start. They are an intriguing organization delivering high quality services and their business adds to our growing SOC reporting practice.[/pull_quote]

    – Ben Osbrach, CISSP, CISA, QSA, CICP, CCSFP, partner-in-charge of Skoda Minotti’s risk advisory group

    What This Means For Partners

    It is a requirement for many companies to work with SOC 2ÂŽ compliant software partners. Businesses handling sensitive data or working in highly regulated industries, for example being subjected to HIPAA compliance regulations, are required to work with SOC 2ÂŽ compliant providers.

    In general, any security-conscious business can count on the rigorous auditing process to hold companies to a high standard.

    What’s Next for ABT?

    Atlantic BT will undergo audits on an annual basis to maintain their SOC 2ÂŽ report and continue to apply best practices by maintaining logs of their application of these SOC 2ÂŽ controls, policies, and procedures to ultimately achieve SOC 2ÂŽ Type II. Committed to quality, we will continue this voluntary process to provide top-notch service and expand our capabilities.

    [pull_quote]The successful completion of our SOC 2ÂŽ Type I examination audit provides Atlantic BT’s clients with the assurance that the controls and safeguards we employ to protect and secure their data are in line industry standards and best practices.[/pull_quote]    – Matt Lemke, President of Atlantic BT

    We are happy to further discuss our SOC 2ÂŽ certification or help you plan for any of your security needs. If you are interested in learning more about our cloud and cybersecurity solutions, reach out to schedule a free consultation.