How much time does your business waste emailing documents to different team members, searching for the latest version of important files, trying to figure out who edited which document last and who currently has access to what? If your business needs a reliable centralized store for all of your knowledge assets, and you don’t trust commercial cloud offerings to protect your confidential information, CERF ELN can help.
CERF for Security:
With CERF, all of your most important documents can be kept on a single machine inside your secure network or on a cloud host of your choice, offering your organization top-down management awareness, tightly controlled granular access and continuous activity monitoring, so that you know exactly who has access to what, who has read or edited your files, where they were accessed from, when they were edited and even what all the previous versions looked like. CERF fully supports FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) requirements, and has been used at government research institutions and defense contractors.
CERF for Due Diligence:
If your company works in a field that is subject to auditing, or if you hope to be acquired or win external investment for your business, you may be subject to due diligence or some other type of third party inspection. Ad-hoc, chaotic communication, missing or incomplete agreements, poor historical documentation of your company’s legal protections or absent records of key decision events will make a very poor impression during the due diligence phase. Depending on who you talk to, industry specialists report that anywhere from 50% to 90% of all companies run into serious issues with due diligence. The path to VC, mergers, acquisitions and IPOs can be totally blocked by the avoidable inability to unambiguously show a properly documented organizational history. Your inventions, intellectual property (IP), investor agreements, partner relationships, company ownership, legal provenance and records of dispute resolution all need to be available. Failure to do so may even kill your business if the ownership of your IP is challenged, or if disputes lead to lawsuits, FDA warnings or patent denials.
CERF for Compliance:
CERF is fully 21CFR11 compliant, and as such it is superior to ad hoc, home grown document management systems and old-fashioned, generic tools like MS Sharepoint. CERF is especially useful for companies that work in tightly regulated, time-sensitive or compliant environments. CERF is designed for use anywhere that managers need to keep —and show that they kept — accurate records of events. Initially created for use in scientific research organizations, and recommended for use in biochemical, medical, financial, legal, real estate, insurance, and engineering sectors, CERF has proven equally indispensable for any business that needs to keep a log of their activities, understand the provenance of their data, examine embedded metadata, or add rich annotations to documents, images, spreadsheets, PDFs and other assets so that their meaning, authorship history and relationship to other resources stays crystal clear and legally indisputable weeks or years from their date of creation. This is why the BEST time to deploy CERF is the first day your organization is activated, so that every file you create is stored safely from day one, but if you have missed that opportunity, then the second best time to deploy CERF is right now!
CERF for Continuity:
CERF ELN serves as your corporate memory and helps your company to maintain an accurate record of events occurring over time, especially when the main players and contributors may be distributed across the country, or across multiple time zones world-wide. CERF knows what happened and who was involved long after the human beings have forgotten, after the original staff have all left your organization or after the project your organization started working on has evolved into something quite different. CERF is specifically designed for ultra long-term storage and is made up of industry standard components selected for their technological longevity, robust design. CERF also has the ability to function independently without any connections to external servers, services or vendors, which means that your data will not be disrupted by vanishing third party services or deprecated technologies that no longer function after a couple of years.
CERF for the Future of your Business:
CERF has a proven record of long-term sustainability and has been in continuous production and development for more than 10 years. With CERF, you can expect your onsite install to function efficiently not just for years, but for decades into the future, reducing data migration or validation hassles and making your total lifetime cost of ownership unbelievably low for a solution of this caliber. This commitment to longevity is exactly why CERF includes features like:
- Available Perpetual user licenses that are built into your server and which never expire. Your system will continue to operate forever and your data will be always be accessible from the server on which it was installed, even if it is installed on a secure LAN with no access to the internet. If CERF is ever discontinued or if you decide not to pay for annual maintenance, or if Lab-Ally is destroyed by some natural disaster, your data will always be retrievable.
- Open-source components. All core CERF components are open-source industry stalwarts, or created by Lab-Ally and licensed to you perpetually, so no external co-operation from commercial third party vendors or internet-based services is required for the system to run.
- Fast export via drag and drop or bulk export using the available CERF export manager makes fast extraction of all data and metadata from your CERF server simple and reliable. Bulk exports can be moved easily between CERF servers as your organization grows. Better yet, the CERF export manager returns your data files to you in exactly the format that they went in, with all resources organized hierarchically just as they were in CERF, and all metadata provided as .xml files.
- Native file formats. Because data in CERF is stored as files in a secure file system and not “blobbed” into a database, you always have the option to have your IT team extract your data intact as native files, even if your server is somehow damaged or corrupted.
- Unlimited data storage capacity that can be expanded at any time. With onsite installs, there are no ever-increasing “per megabyte” fees to pay, and no possibility of outgrowing your server, even if you use it continuously for decades.
CERF for total Knowledge Asset Management
For a CERF demo, email Lab-Ally or phone us at +1 (614) 407-4547