Overview    Why Choose Us?     Getting Started     Building e-Businesses
 

Ascent carefully considers all the complex factors it takes to produce a successful e-business solution. The critical first steps are an understanding of your organization and design of a realistic affordable customized solution. Following are the key factors that will be considered and incorporated in every solution.

Scalability: An architecture that can accommodate unexpectedly large traffic volumes, and provide a solid base for future growth and expansion, is essential to critical to a successful e-business operation.

Web Site Design: It is critically important that a web site be enticing and intuitive to use and navigate. The site must have logically organized content that is easy to update. 

HW/SW Selection: The hardware and supporting software (servers and network, operating system and middle-ware) need to be chosen and configured to provide rapid response time, future expansion and growth, and easy ongoing maintenance and administration.

Security: Two types of security are important – the security of your systems and databases from viruses and unauthorized access, and the security of your customer’s transactions and information. Customers need to know that their information is kept private and used only for authorized purposes.

Statistics and Reporting: To keep your system running well and to plan for the future you need periodic reports on system capacity and performance, customer transaction types and volumes, web site usage, traffic volumes and network performance. The design must ensure that this critical data is collected. 

Reliability/Availability and Backup/Restore: Critical to a successful e-business is a system that is available and reliable. This means down time must be minimized and backup/restore procedures need to be in place so your operations can be restarted rapidly in case of an unexpected outage. 

Training: In order for any solution to run properly all personnel involved – technicians as well as end users must be well trained. 

Ongoing Maintenance: A solution must be easy to maintain and have well defined procedures and processes for ongoing maintenance and administration. 

Process Review and Revision: Both business and technical support processes need to be carefully reviewed and revised to work seamlessly with the new e-business solution.

Web-site marketing and Branding: Customers need to know about and be able to find your web site. Technical factors such as search engine placement need to be considered as well as branding and overall integrated marketing plans.