The business environment has never been more dynamic, or challenging. Organisations have to be able to make fast decisions to stay ahead of competitors and evolving customer needs. While strategy is paramount to keeping an enterprise at the top of its game, there are a number of other considerations that help ensure the smooth running of the business. These range from regulatory compliance to risk mitigation.
While the executive team gets most of the credit for business success, an organisation’s board of directors are the hidden heroes who steer the business. The board of directors is far more important than merely serving as figureheads. Board members are responsible for strategic planning and oversight, compliance with fiduciary responsibilities and good governance standards, as well as identifying risk.
Board directors need to be well-informed and fully engaged with all major issues that affect the corporation. Board meetings are therefore vital to the decision-making process, allowing directors to ask tough questions and vet all sides of an issue in order to act quickly and responsibly when necessary.
With board directors’ time being limited, companies have to ensure they have as much background information as possible so that the meeting can focus on decision making. This is where the “board pack” comes in. The main method of information transfer for directors, board packs contain material such as financial reports with management commentary and all other relevant information. Board packs are therefore usually sizeable documents, and putting them together requires a great deal of time and effort.
Saving boards time and money
inSite Innovative Education Solutions developed AgendaWorx to help organisations, and their boards, make this process easier, saving them time and money. An easy-to-use, powerful and secure agenda software tool, AgendaWorx allows board members to access all of the information they need, when they need it, while simplifying the job of those tasked with collating all of the information.
The encrypted meeting packs allow directors to collaborate seamlessly before and during a meeting, with a host of features making the process more effective and efficient. AgendaWorx allows for public and private comments, notifications on action items, collaboration, voice notes, surveys, tasking team members and prioritisation.
AgendaWorx enables access to its online board packs from phone, tablet or computer. Everything is securely backed up and constantly available. The software also allows a board of directors make voice notes or audio record of decisions at every agenda item, sign documents and board resolutions, and create voting polls and surveys.
Secure, available and compliant
inSite developed AgendaWorx locally, using local resources, but with many of its clients having a global footprint, soon found itself requiring secure, cost-effective infrastructure with a larger footprint. Partnering with iOCO, inSite migrated the AgendaWorx ecosystem to AWS.
Following extensive consultation with inSite to establish the company’s exact needs, iOCO recommended AWS for its security, availability and easy regulatory compliance. AgendaWorx requires both POPI and GDPR compliance, with some inSite customers being subject to extremely strict data governance rules. A great deal of the customer data is also extremely sensitive, so security was a primary consideration.
iOCO implemented a monthly security screening process using With Secure on top of AWS’s own significant security controls to ensure that AgendaWorx clients are fully protected at all times. iOCO helped inSite to implement a highly available and scalable environment, with S3 backups located in another GDRP compliant region to ensure constant availability and uptime while still remaining compliant and meeting governance requirements.
Zeldeen Muller, Founder and CEO of inSite, says that iOCO not only helped ensure its technology backbone served the company’s needs, but that the AWS implementation has provided an additional selling point for customers with the additional security now included in AgendaWorx. “iOCO has made this process easy, providing us with local billing and support alongside all the benefits that come with an international cloud environment. From the advice iOCO has provided since the beginning of the project, to monthly vulnerability screening, to ongoing support, iOCO has been a great partner every step of the way. Always available to help, iOCO has made our move on to AWS comfortable and safe,” she concludes.