Transporting controlled goods in the modern economic environment has a major IT footprint. If you're in the market for IT support for controlled goods, it's critical to know what the key issues are. You'll want to pay attention to these five issues when discussing your needs with an IT support provider.
Redundancy
Anyone who needs controlled goods IT support will want to have a highly redundant system. The industry hinges on records keeping, and you can't afford to lose transactions and records due to equipment failures, connection problems, or human error.
Your IT system needs to utilize RAID arrays for physical storage and cloud-based technologies for remote services. Likewise, you want to have a system that provides precise timestamps for all transactions. This will ensure you don't accidentally end up with duplicates when taking advantage of your data backups.
Authorization and Privileges
While a good IT administrator should always have a strong system of privileges in place, this also applies when you're dealing with controlled goods. Every user should have the least privileges necessary to perform their job. Similarly, administrative privileges should only be available to admins and only when they need to do maintenance, installations, or upgrades.
Staying Up-to-Date
IT systems that monitor and handle controlled goods make for attractive targets. One of the most important jobs in IT support for controlled goods is keeping systems up-to-date. This means regularly following corporate notices about software issues, downloading updates, and rolling them out quickly across your infrastructure. Ideally, the support team will use automation tools to send updates across the network to patch systems as rapidly as possible.
Interoperability
You'll likely need to share information with authorized parties. The easiest way to do this is to provide access to your systems.
However, not everybody uses the same software stack. Consequently, you'll need an interoperable setup. For example, you should be able to permit a buyer to access your system to see their account, check shipments, make purchases, and obtain customer support. They should be able to do this with their hardware and software, rather than adopting new systems.
Compliance
By its very nature, the world of controlled goods is about compliance. This means relentlessly document who bought what and what products went where. Also, you and your customers may need to comply with several national control regimes. Every bit of data that goes into or out of the system must follow the required formats so you can easily look things up and print forms.
