SES Blog

The vast majority of businesses are heavily reliant on third party software owners to develop and maintain their business critical applications.

SES are delighted to announce that we have partnered with insurance provider Markel to provide as standard, what continues to be the highest liability indemnity insurance available to any UK based Software Escrow vendor.

SES has achieved continued certification during its annual surveillance audit for ISO: 9001 and ISO: 27001. The scope of the certifications covers the provision of Software Escrow Agreements, Cyber Security and Data services, inclusive of Data Storage and Validation across all business sectors.

Barely a week goes by without news of another cyber incident making the headlines and the stakes have never been greater for businesses. Data theft has become commonplace, the scale of ransomware demands has risen steeply and the environment businesses are operating in has become more hostile than ever.

Software Escrow is essential to protect your business applications, especially those which are bespoke, highly customised, business critical or revenue generating as the time and financial cost of sourcing suitable alternatives in the event your supplier is unable to support them can be astronomical. 

Standardised, off the shelf applications no longer fulfill the requirements of today's highly dynamic organisations. Although these applications are good as a starting point, a foundation to build on, they often don’t fulfil the true needs of their users.

Recently we published an article summarising some of the findings from Proofpoint’s 2020 “State of the Phish” report. That article focused on the rise in phishing threats over the last 12 months. However, this week we will be focusing on another concerning finding from the report – a lack of understanding when it comes to common phishing and ransomware threats.

When setting up an Escrow agreement to protect hosted applications, ensuring you can retain access to the most current version of your application data should be your number one priority. 

Security threats are increasing year on year and 2019 was no different. Organisations across the world were constantly targeted by scams and vast quantities of data was breached by malicious actors. 

Validation is an important step in the Software Escrow process. It provides an audit of the application development process to determine whether all the pieces required to build the application are present and accurate.

We are now almost two years on from the introduction of GDPR. During the first year of enforcement, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) were quite lenient in their enforcement of the regulation, giving businesses the extra time they needed to adapt to the tightening regulations.

A recent report by cyber security company Proofpoint highlighted that 55% of all organisations were successfully breached by phishing scams in 2019.