Ensuring Data Security and Continuity of Operations with Aptean Food & Beverage ERP

In today’s business world, the word “security” has less to do with installing video cameras and making sure doors are securely locked—instead, it’s about protecting your business from digital threats that could originate from anywhere around the globe. For a food and beverage company like yours, your data and the continuity of your operations absolutely must be safeguarded against the cybersecurity hazards of the world.

When organizations as large as LinkedIn and Facebook are shown to be susceptible to digital attacks, it demonstrates the need for every company to put measures in place to ensure that they are not the next to fall victim. Aptean Food & Beverage ERP is known as a powerful platform for managing all aspects of a food and beverage business, and knowing the needs of our clients, we’ve packed it with resilient security features that will give you peace of mind.

Here, we’ll discuss the ways that our solution protects your most valuable assets—namely, your proprietary business information and ability to carry out critical processes—as well as the ways in which a cloud ERP implementation can offer even more assurance against the security risks of the digital world.

How Do We Know Our Data is Protected?

Unauthorized access of a food and beverage company’s data can be a major liability should that information fall into the wrong hands. Knowing this, we’ve built several security measures into our food ERP solution and placed certain restrictions on accessing the system to ward off cyberattacks and ensure that your platform is open only to those who should be allowed entry.

Perhaps the most basic way in which we ensure that only qualified staff interact with your database is through IP address whitelisting. Because this designation will be constant at your facilities, your users will always be able to log in, but no one with a different IP address will be granted access without additional security functions being triggered.

One such additional function is two-factor authentication (2FA), which will require those trying to log in from unknown IP addresses to further verify their identity through another means such as a code sent to a related email account or text to mobile device. With that in place, authorized employees will be able to use the system when working remotely, but those who can’t confirm their legitimacy will remain locked out.

There is also a concern among some clients that their data could be vulnerable due to it being hosted on the same server as other Aptean users’ information. We eliminate this risk by giving each client their own dedicated database within the server and restricting access to the information therein to only the accounts associated with the particular business in question.

Finally, we recognize that it is also vital to ensure that only actual Aptean staff can log in to the system as Aptean users, so we have limited entry from our side to only those with accounts from a specific internal domain. This assures that no one can pose as a member of our organization in order to retrieve data that isn’t theirs.

How Can the Continuity of Our Operations Be Assured?

Knowing that your system is safeguarded against outages and will reliably be available when you need it is another crucial component of security. That’s why we’ve built a number of features into Aptean Food & Beverage ERP to make it as dependable as possible.

Every one of our servers is paired with an identical redundant server, and they function in tandem via a load balancer. If one goes out temporarily, the load is shifted to the other, and clients whose databases are hosted via that pair of servers experience no downtime as a result of the shift.

We also maintain a 31-day data retention policy that allows us to reset a client’s database to a specific date and time if the system is compromised at any point. In this way, we’re able to restore the conditions that existed before the adverse event, mitigating the risk of permanent damage to important information.

Furthermore, knowing the prevalence of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and the damage they can cause, we’ve enabled our servers with Cloudflare. The application can automatically identify these tactics and block repeated fraudulent requests for access that could otherwise overload the system.

Lastly, we have dedicated information technology teams that are focused solely on improving and maintaining the continuity of our servers. We recognize that not all food and beverage companies have their own IT teams and sometimes choose to work with outside contractors for these services, but we offer both the solution and the support all from one trusted source.

The Clear Advantages of the Cloud

When it comes to comparing on-premise and cloud ERP deployment options, there are many misconceptions and barriers that need addressing. Let's take a look at a few of those.

Some food and beverage companies—especially those that are smaller or not as far along in their digital transformation—see the cloud as unreliable or too vague in concept to be trusted for hosting their critical systems. When they don’t have physical hardware and on-site servers, the leaders of these businesses may feel like they lack ownership and control over their information.

As a partner to your business, we want to let you concentrate on what you do best—making great food and beverage products—while we take care of technical matters. We know that with any new technology come security concerns, but with our solutions’ purpose-built features, a cloud implementation of Aptean’s food ERP is among the safest bets you can make.

An unreliable internet connection can also be seen as a barrier to moving to the cloud, as an interruption on the part of the service provider could result in loss of access in crucial production periods. At Aptean, we’re happy to work with clients to establish more dependable setups and redundancies that can prevent these issues from occurring, and we encourage customers to strongly consider a cloud deployment.

There are several reasons we make this recommendation, the most relevant to your business having been revealed by our recent commissioned whitepaper from IDC, Food and Beverage Global Trends and Strategic Insights 2021. The report indicated that cloud implementations saw an average 3.3% increase in revenue and 3.9% increase in profit last year, compared to respective 1.7% and 2.7% increases for on-premise installations.

There is also the additional advantage of our dedicated cloud teams—that’s in addition to our regular IT teams—who focus solely on our cloud solutions and help to ensure uptime of 99.9% or more. Implementing Aptean Food & Beverage ERP via the cloud also vastly improves connectivity with our other solutions, including Aptean Business Intelligence, Aptean EDI and Aptean Advanced Workflow, all of which complement our ERP.

Streamlined system updates and upgrades are another reason to prefer the cloud, as we can conduct these processes automatically in the background without inconveniencing your personnel or disrupting operations. Deploying via the cloud also makes remote access and working from home possible for food and beverage companies’ staff, which is more important than ever in a fast-paced world that is still adjusting to the “new normal” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’re proud to offer platforms that are developed on a strong Microsoft Dynamics 365 foundation, which facilitates integration with all of the latest tools and developments. We firmly believe that the best way to future-proof your operations is to choose a flexible cloud deployment of our industry-specific system.

Want to learn more about Aptean Food & Beverage ERP and what it can do for your organization? Contact us or request a personalized demo today.