[See Migration Director 6.1 Features and Benefits]

“Across all segments, we see companies reinventing themselves via automation.” Said Dale D. Royal, Unitask Chairman and CEO. “The continual rolling need for a competitive advantage demands that companies compress the time from concept to customer. Unitask Migration Director supports this exact initiative.”

New features in Migration Director 6.1 expands change management, automates package management, adds support for additional legacy Version Control Systems and includes additional security measures. With its newest feature set Migration Director 6.1 extends Unitask’s leadership for Enterprise Change and Migration solutions in the Oracle E-Business Suite marketplace. Delivering an ROI most often achieved in less than six months, Migration Director 6.1 is an Oracle E-Business Suite module add-in that allows burdened technical resources to respond quickly to demands for change by business users, as well as changes between systems.

The Migration Director 6.1 module is designed for optimizing required operational processes that must be performed and synchronized before a system can be put online. This automated approach provides for increased system uptime and shortened maintenance windows, while alleviating operational strain on staff. Oracle E-Business Suite resources are empowered to effectively apply routine changes in a completely controlled and managed way with automated procedures that would otherwise have to be employed manually. The elimination of migration related errors and the ability to reapply environment configuration once tasks are completed helps organizations ensure accuracy and efficiency with a lean staff, while still supporting native Oracle E-Business Suite operations.

“What our leading customers have shown us is that change is inevitable. Those that have embraced it, used it to their advantage are now seeing the ROI for that acceptance. The most notable return is showing in more efficient operations as well as in the achievement of better bottom line financial results presented to shareholders alike,” continued Royal.

About Unitask

Unitask Software is a recognized global leader in automation software solutions that seamlessly extend the enterprise architecture of the Oracle E-Business Suite. Unitask creates, sells and supports software products based on experience gained from over a decade of Oracle E-Business Suite implementation projects. Customers of the Oracle E-Business Suite around the world rely on Unitask products to automate printer configurations, code migrations and non-production data scrambling saving both time and money with an ROI in months – not years. For more information, please visit www.unitask.com.

Unitask’s solution for Oracle E-Business Suite users who clone data is to scramble clones automatically each time a new clone is created. Unitask Security Director was built around the premise that data is most vulnerable when in non-production environments – often accessed by numerous developers and testers both internally and externally. And more often than not this data is the same data as production environments meaning actual personally identifiable information and other sensitive data is accessible and at risk.

For more information on Unitask Security Director watch this video:

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“I consider it an honor to share the Unitask success story, but I’m most excited to share some of our secrets with leaders of other Southeast Michigan start-up companies” said Mr. Royal. “The goal of this event, and the goal of these outstanding organizations sponsoring it, is to assist in the growth of these emerging companies, which in turn creates job opportunities leading to a more prosperous Michigan.”

Mr. Royal will be part of the “Million Dollar Club Panel” featuring a select group of CEO’s of start-up companies that have been able to surpass the $1million annual sales milestone. The “Growing to Stage 2″ event is held exclusively for the portfolio companies of Ann Arbor Spark, The Detroit First Step Fund, Automation Alley and TechTown and will highlight some of the top business leaders in the State of Michigan.

"Hacktivists" Put Government Agencies Under Cyber-Attack

For government agencies using Oracle EBS, securing both production and non-production databases, is now more important than ever. The New York Times recently reported that the so called “hacktivists” group “Lulz Security” is waging a virtual war on  government agencies. Additionally, a recent report by antivirus vendor McAfee described a 5 year hacker operation that targeted more than 70 U.S and foreign government agencies, defense contractors, and international organizations.

Like their private sector counterparts, government agencies tend to spend time and money on ensuring their live, production databases remain safe and secure, but typically less emphasis is put on securing non-production databases. In essence, there is a guard at the front door, but the back door is being left wide open.

According to a 2009 Ponemon Institute study, “Cost of Data Breach“,80% of companies surveyed reported using real production data in testing environments while 75% share live data with third-party vendors and offshore teams. The study also reports that 42% of all data breaches were the result of third-party mistakes or flubs.

Those organizations that do spend some effort on securing non-production databases often choose to manually write scripts to mask data – field by field. Many of the governmental groups Unitask has spoken to and worked with indicate their primary non-production data security measures amount to manually writing scripts to mask data before they are shipped off to third-party vendors for testing. The current issue they are faced with is the risk of exposing sensitive data both internally and externally. Unfortunately, manually securing data is often an error-prone process. Miss just one of the hundreds of sensitive data fields and you’re still at risk of hackers accessing live sensitive data.

To respond to both the challenges of keeping data secure in Oracle EBS and the difficulty and inherent errors associated with manually writing scripts to mask data, Unitask Security Director has been developed to provide an automated, error-free approach to securing non-production databases in Oracle EBS. Unitask Security Director automatically scrambles all the numerous sensitive data fields in Oracle EBS non-production databases – in just 5 steps – all without impacting production database uptime or functionality. And in the event a hacker did gain access, the scrambled data would be useless to them, but still useful to developers and testers.

So is output management really important? After all isn’t really just about printing stuff?

If you are a vendor who sells printers, it’s probably fairly important.

If you are a software company who provides printing and faxing solutions it’s critical.

But what about Joe Oracleappuser? (any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental but absolutely intentional)

In a study reported in the OAUG Insight Magazine (Winter 2010), Mr. Oracleappuser and 249 of his Oracle App User buddies were asked that very question – “How does information impact the decision making that runs the company”. The answer will surprise you.

In the survey, respondents said that:

• “Decisions were affected 27% of the time by delays in the availability of the required information”.
• This was a growth from the 25% the year before who saw this as a growing problem, as well as the 18% who expressed the concern two years prior.

But wait, it gets better.

Respondents were further asked “ How LONG is decision making at your business impacted by IT Reporting Backlogs?”

The answer;

• 35% of Respondents said 1 to 5 days
• 17% of Respondents said 7 to 14 days
• 16% of Respondents said 14 to 28 days

Ouch! That’s painful

So is output management and getting information important?

Only if you want to make great timely decisions!