Virtual IT Staffing Services

Neuron Global’s Virtual IT Staffing Services:

In today’s business environment, there are many reasons why an organization would need an Outsourced IT Partner for software and application development, many of which are mandated from the top.  Some main reasons why companies looking to outsourcing include:

• A need to add HR capacity in a more cost-effective manner
• A need to acquire a specific skill set or expertise, without having to deal with the onboarding and learning curve requirements for a full-time employee or team of employees
• A need to complete project-based work within certain deadlines
• A need to reduce organizational fixed costs

But with these benefits comes a variety of obstacles that must be overcome if your organization’s outsourcing initiative is ultimately going to succeed. After all, most organizations can agree that if you can’t find a trustworthy partner – one who can deliver on time and on budget, one who is not only competent but accountable and accessible – then the outsourcing experience will not be a pleasant one, on ANY level. 

Our Commitment to Accountability:

As an outsourced service provider, we are acutely aware of the concerns that organizations have with delegating highly important business tasks to a third-party. Unfortunately, new clients often come to us with at least one outsourcing horror story. Maybe a provider’s quality of work was significantly less than what was expected. Or worse, maybe a provider “disappeared” after a significant investment of time, money, and energy was made. Whatever the case may be, partnering with the wrong outsourcing company is at best frustrating and at worst crippling to an organization.

For the reasons listed above, Neuron Global has made a commitment to each of our clients to be accessible, accountable, and transparent in all that we do. We accomplish this in a variety of ways:

• We have a physical, bricks-and-mortar presence in the US, and we welcome any opportunity to meet with clients and prospects face-to-face.
• We ensure that our development work, much of which is done in the Philippines, is managed and/or performed by US expats.
• We provided exceptional access to each level within our organization – allowing our clients to develop relationships with their outsource staff and minimize miscommunication.
• We create working relationships that allow us to be available when our clients need us. This starts with our account managers, who are based in the US, and extends out to our development teams, many of who work adjusted schedules that sync with US and European regular business hours.
• We provided informative, high-level assessments and proposals prior to any client engagement. These provide an accurate snapshot of the quality of work that we deliver throughout the duration of our engagements and help prospective clients judge our grasp of their unique business needs and objectives.

Our Team-Based Development Philosophy:

We also understand that our partners demand more than just transparency – and rightly so. They demand high-quality deliverables, consistent execution, and competitive pricing. For this reason, Neuron Global opts for a “team-based” approach for our clients. This means:

• We custom-build a development team with the exact technical proficiencies that you require – we make no attempt to “fit a square peg in a round hole”.
• Project management, architecture development, programming, and quality assurance are handled by individuals with a specific proficiency in respective task(s). We focus on maximizing the strengths of each team member, which results in well-constructed, highly-functional deliverables.
• We create a stronger “institutional memory” of your development projects via the team approach, which means that initiatives can stay on track, even when someone is out on vacation or is unexpectedly sick. Many other Virtual IT Staffing organizations will assign a single individual, and in these situations you run the risk of losing tremendous amount “know-how” a process familiarity should that individual leave unexpectedly.
• Our development philosophy allows us to provide blended-rate pricing, so you pay for the skill level you need for that part of the project, and not more. As is the case with most software projects, certain work is extremely technical while other pieces are less involved. We work to make sure that your budget isn’t consumed by high-level developers doing mundane tasks.

Reducing Organizational Risk:

Neuron Global takes the security of our clients’ code and intellectual property very seriously. Our client list includes those in the banking, insurance and healthcare sectors, amongst others, and they have driven our standards to be as high as possible in the following areas:

Internal Security:

• Firewalls on corporate networks, including wireless access
• Access logging and auditing
• Virus scanning on all servers including development, email and hosted environments
• SPOP3 mail encryption with password changes
• IP-network  lock-down and password authentication for all services, including FTP
• Back-up and back-up logging
• VPN access

Client-specific Security:

• Isolated networks via VPN
• Access restriction (time/date/IP Address/other)
• Restriction of PC storage devices, including USB storage, diskette, and DVD/CD burner
• Restrictions on keeping local hard or soft copies of files

Intellectual Property Protection:

Over the years, we have implemented a series of best practices to keep IP safe beyond the usual NDA’s prevalent in the business. Our teams are trained on the importance of client confidentiality and need to maintain a firewall between each other to eliminate information dissemination to other clients. Examples of the actions Neuron Global takes to ensure Intellectual Property protection are as follows:

• Training on the importance of keeping IP secret
• Password compliance
• Up-to-date security and virus protection software
• Identifying holes in individual machine firewalls that could allow un-authorized access
• Elimination of willful and un-willful leaking of information
• Prevention of unauthorized software installations
• Detection of unknown viruses or other Trojan horse-style intrusions

At a fundamental level, every Neuron Global employee clearly understands, acknowledges, and signs-off personally on the security policy as part of the employment agreement. For clients that have specific security policies at the project-level, another individual agreement will be executed. We ensure that all team members adhere to security policies and enforce policies through ad-hoc inspections. In addition:

• Our team monitors for code sanctity. We use a combination of internally developed code scanning tools, and third-party code scanning to check for code sanctity and audit any changes made by team members.
• Physical output (paper, CD-ROM, DVD) is shredded on-site and disposed of in a secure manner. All output is monitored and referenced at the time of destruction or storage.
• Neuron Global performs extensive wiping to eliminate any residual data left on hard drives or other storage disks. We incorporate tools such as BCWipe by Jetico, Inc. to perform these tasks.

Getting Started:

So if you’re in need of development capacity, an enhance web presence, or some other technology-based business problem, please send us an email at: info@neuronglobal.com . Or better yet, pick up the phone and give us a call at 800.311.0532 so we can schedule a time to learn more about your organization, and begin charting out a solution for your unresolved technology and business issues.