About Net Reaction
Net Reaction is a forensics firm specializing in cybercrime. We work with clients in many different industry verticals to investigate information crimes that happen to them and mitigate the risks associated with them. With many of our clients, part of the mitigation strategy is putting appropriate policies and procedures in place to affect their operations in a way that the vulnerabilities that caused the previous breach are mitigated. This scenario requires a lot of documentation, and with many companies requires starting from scratch, as they have no existing Information Security Policies
Requirements Scenario
In selecting a product, Net Reaction needed a solution that would help us automate policy creation to get started in helping our proactive clients. We needed several things:
- To be able to work from either an existing template document or to start from scratch
- To be able to create and insert charts within our documents
- To be able to modify existing documents as needed in the future
- For security and stability reasons we needed to keep Microsoft Office off of our server
- To be able to perform merge tasks within tables and other nested fields
- Implementation within a standards-based solution
- To be able to save documents seamlessly in several formats as required by our clients
Solution Implementation
While our implementation is still a work in progress, we have already used Aspose.Total for .NET within proof-of-concept projects to successfully automate many of our routine tasks. The first major project we have undertaken with Aspose’s product is the creation of a Needs Assessment Report from an Information Security Survey that we make available to our clients.
Net Reaction’s internationally recognized Needs Assessment applications have historically been very user intensive in terms of our staff walking a client through the different surveys needed to make a determination on the Information Security Readiness of the client.
Recently, we took a lot of our knowledge gleaned from legacy and automated these surveys. This, coupled along with the development of algorithms to decipher client’s answers greatly cut our time spent on an assessment, and thus also cut client cost considerably. While this automation was great, we lacked a way to efficiently present those findings in a report that we would want to provide a client. We tried several solutions, but were unhappy with each, as they all had tradeoffs that we were not willing to make.
When we found Aspose.Total for .NET, we immediately decided to try it out as a proof of concept with our assessment application and were very pleased with the result. We were able to create robust reports from data gleaned from the assessment surveys in real-time. This cuts both our implementation time and our costs to our clients.
The reports generated with Aspose.Words for .NET and Aspose.Cells for .NET do not look like they have been cobbled together – as the end documents sometimes look in other solutions. They look professional, and we can stand behind presenting them to our clients.
We look forward to implementing more automation with Aspose’s product.
Benefits gained by switching to Aspose
We have significant experience with both Office Automation and Soft Artisans’ Office Writer product. Aspose.Total for .NET is more robust, offering more functionality than anything we have used in the past. We feel like we have significantly more options available to us as we design our applications.
Additionally, we found that our time to implementation was cut significantly by using Aspose’s product. We aren’t searching forums for one-off tricks to implement a function, we are simply able to find the appropriate documentation to implement the function.
Future Implementations
Net Reaction looks forward to further implementing Aspose’s products within its EvidentSentry program. The ease of use and functionality ensure that we will be using it on a going-forward basis.
While we have used it in an existing Needs Assessment application, we plan to utilize it for the rest of our web applications as well. This includes solutions that walk our clients through the process of building policies and procedures that are appropriate to their industry vertical and size. Whether it is an Information Security Policy, Employee Handbook, or Incident Response Plan, we feel confident that we will be able to offer our clients the ability to create each of these with the help of Aspose products.
Additionally, our incident response teams are always gathering data in the field that needs to be analyzed by large numbers of people, not all of whom are always trained in forensics, or versed on the particulars of the incident.
We plan on using Aspose products to help us take data gathered in the field and disseminate it to appropriate individuals in a standardized report.
Our future uses for Aspose products are virtually limitless. The ease of implementation of their solutions allows us to seriously consider the automation of any routine task that we perform. Historically this would not have been the case, nor is it currently the case with other solutions. We plan on using Aspose products well into the future.
Conclusion
Our experience with Aspose’s products thus far has been exemplary. They are easy to work with, provide prompt answers to questions, and their products work well within our solutions. We are confident in using their products to help with the creation and automation of policies and procedures for some of our most valuable clients.
Aspose.Total for .NET has helped us easily automate the creation of Needs Assessment Results for our clients as shown below.
