I had an opportunity to review the website forMake Time to Vote, and their mission statement inspired me.
Workers shouldn’t have to choose between earning a paycheck and voting. Time To Vote is a nonpartisan movement, led by the business community, to contribute to the culture shift needed to increase voter participation in our country’s elections.
This movement and its overall mission to increasing voter participation by encouraging companies are quite exceptional in this moment of crisis. I immediately applied to join their movement, and I encourage other companies to join me on this significant effort.
Inspired by this Time to Vote group’s mission, we updated N2N’s Paid Time Off policies to reiterate our commitment to US elections. I am excited to announce our pledge to increasing voter participation in the upcoming elections. We are updating our PTO policies with the following language effective October 12th, 2020.
N2N pledges to offer a day off to employees and consultants intending to vote on election day. Also, N2N promises to encourage all our employees to plan to vote in advance. N2N is pleased to extend one full day of PTO to employees or consultants planning to vote in advance.
Furthermore, N2N pledges up to 3 days of Paid Time Off for employees or consultants planning to act as poll workers for their local counties.
In the upcoming election, everything is on the line – our economy, our healthcare, our liberties, and the reputation of our great nation is on the ballot. Regardless of which party each of support, we should do everything possible to ensure that everyone gets an equal opportunity to let their voice heard. I am certainly hopeful that N2N’s commitment will encourage my staff to vote with their conscience.
N2N Services, Inc., a provider of secure and holistic cloud integration, today is pleased to announce the successful completion of a System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2® Type I Audit examination for N2N’s Illuminate Integration Platform. N2N Services, Inc. retained international business advisory firm Marcum LLP for its SOC 2® audit work. N2N Services, Inc. selected Marcum LLP after an intensive search based on Marcum LLP’s reputation as a leading risk advisory and compliance firm.
Ben Osbrach, CISSP, CISA, QSA, CICP, CCSFP, National Risk Advisory Leader of Marcum’s risk advisory group says, “We were excited to work with N2N Services, Inc. from the very start. They are an intriguing organization delivering high-quality services and their business adds to our growing SOC reporting practice.”
SOC 2® engagements are performed in accordance with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) AT-C 205, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization and based on the trust service principles outlined in the AICPA Guide, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization Relevant to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, or Privacy. The SOC 2® Type I report is performed by an independent auditing firm and is intended to provide an understanding of the service organization’s suitability of the design of its internal controls. A service organization may select any or all of the trust service principles applicable to their business and N2N Services, Inc. chose to report on the control environment, communications and information, risk assessment, monitoring activities, control activities, logical and physical access controls, system operation, change management and risk mitigation. The successful completion of this voluntary engagement illustrates N2N Services, Inc.’s ongoing commitment to create and maintain a secure operating environment for its clients’ confidential data.
Marcum’s testing of N2N Services, Inc.’s controls included an examination of the firm’s policies and procedures regarding network connectivity, firewall configurations, systems development life cycle, computer operations, logical access, data transmission, backup, and disaster recovery, and other critical operational areas of their business. Upon completion of the audit, N2N Services, Inc. received a Service Auditor’s Report with an unqualified opinion demonstrating that their policies, procedures, and infrastructure meet or exceed the stringent SOC 2® criteria.
“At N2N, we take security and best practices very seriously, as we are focused on student data interchange. The successful completion of our SOC 2® Type I examination audit provides N2N Services, Inc.’s clients with the assurance that the controls and safeguards we employ to protect and secure their data are in line with industry standards and best practices. SOC2 attestation is one of the critical parts of N2N’s focus on best practices and commitment to data security,” said Joel Dunn, CTO and CISO.
About – N2N Services, Inc.
N2N Services, Inc enables secure and holistic cloud integration so that organizations of all sizes can seamlessly connect cloud applications with their enterprise applications and data stores. Headquartered in Duluth, GA, N2N Services, Inc’s flagship product, Illuminate is an iPaaS enabling turnkey SaaS-to-SaaS and SaaS-to-on premise application and data integration. Illuminate’s intuitive approach enables customers to create, manage, secure, and monetize APIs, and build bridges between two APIs without any need for programming and additional infrastructure.
N2N Services, Inc believes that secure and turnkey application and data integration, powered by APIs is critical to the success of any enterprise competing in today’s digital economy. Enterprises, irrespective of their size and business models, need APIs for integration with the cloud, mobile, and social applications, wearable devices, and partner and customer portals. Modern, digital enterprises are now leveraging APIs to support real-time process automation, workflows, artificial intelligence, and business intelligence and analytics.
Even though APIs are critical for achieving success in today’s digital economy, many enterprises have struggled with the creation, management, and security of APIs. In this context, enterprises frequently spend millions of dollars on middleware, architecture teams, and disparate technologies without realizing any significant success. Small and Medium-sized businesses have more IT spending and resource constraints and often struggle to meet the unrelenting need for integration for composing digital business processes and a seamless transition to cloud services.
N2N Services, Inc is committed to enabling enterprises of all sizes to participate, benefit from, and compete in today’s digital economy enabled by APIs. N2N Services, Inc’s iPaaS, Illuminate enables enterprises to achieve success with migration to cloud services and fosters the implementation of cloud and API-first strategies. For more information, visit N2N’s website.
About – Marcum LLP
Marcum LLP is one of the largest independent public accounting and advisory services firms in the nation, with offices in major business markets throughout the U.S., as well as select international locations.
Headquartered in New York City, Marcum provides a full spectrum of traditional tax, accounting, and assurance services; advisory, valuation, and litigation support; managed accounting services; and an extensive portfolio of specialty and niche industry practices. The Firm serves both privately held and publicly registered companies, as well as nonprofit and social sector entities, high net worth individuals, private equity funds, and hedge funds, with a focus on middle-market companies and closely held family businesses. Marcum is a member of the Marcum Group, an organization providing a comprehensive array of professional services.
Marcum offers an extensive range of professional services and a high degree of specialization. The Risk Advisory practice specializes in SOC Reporting, PCI DSS Compliance, HIPAA Compliance and HITRUST validation, FISMA, NIST, ISO 27001, and other regulatory information security assessments. Staffs in Marcum’s Risk Advisory hold several industry certifications including Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), GIAC Penetration Tester (GPEN), and GIAC Web Application Penetration Tester (GWAPT). For more information about Marcum’s Risk Advisory Services, please visit their website here.
To download our free whitepaper on machine learning and find out how Lighthouse can help your institution, click here (We won’t even ask for your email!):
According to NCES, the 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year degree-granting institutions in fall 2011 overall was 60 percent.
This statistic raises several issues – the obvious one is the fact that 40% of these students are dropping out of college and left with life-long debt. To make things worse, college dropouts generally earn $21,000 less per year than college grads, according to College Atlas. Another issue is the fact that it’s taking six years to complete a 4-year degree. In this current age of machine learning and predictive analytics – is there anything institutions can do to alleviate this crisis?
Our every entertainment whim is catered to by smart technology, with platforms powered by Artificial Intelligence, like Pandora and Amazon. These intelligent recommender platforms analyze our choices and behavior to recommend precisely the music, books, and even the groceries that we want before we even knew we wanted them.
Businesses can target their audiences online with pinpoint accuracy, taking advantage of Facebook and Google’s algorithms, and then continually refine their marketing campaigns in real-time based on the massive amounts of actionable data they’re presented with.
But when it comes to higher ed, which we look to as the formative experience of every young adult’s life, preparing them for their future careers and shaping the course of our nation?
We’re still dependent on people and paper, and there are limited applications of technology to solve the student success problem.
It just doesn’t make sense.
The world of education needs to be just as customized, targeted, predictive, and data-driven as the worlds of business and entertainment – perhaps even more so.
Providing students with the exact support and information they need to make the best choices for their college careers, and getting that same data into the hands of their advisors so they can jump in at precisely the right time with additional support as needed, at scale, is exactly what we need to move our nation forward, as individuals and as a whole.
What if a mobile app could recommend courses for students based on how well other similar students have performed in those classes in the past?
What if freshmen advisors had access to analytics that showed them the probability of a student dropping out at the end of freshman year?
What if students could see the impact of a specific assignment score, midterm grade, or final grade on their overall academic progression?
Wouldn’t customized information like this be a game-changer for students and colleges?
At N2N, we’ve created a solution to address this very issue.
I am pretty sure it was early February, I was on my way to work and heard on NPR that there was a chance that the Tokyo Olympics might get postponed this year. I laughed out loud, and I was 100% sure that this “coronavirus crisis” would be long gone by fall. I had the highest confidence in how the US healthcare system was so much better than Italy’s healthcare system. I just couldn’t see how we would “shut down” our economy because of a “stupid virus.” Also, I was “sure” that this virus would find a cure by the time it reached the United States.
During the month of February, we launched our “lunch and learn” program. This program provided all employees free lunches and we used this time to train the staff on different core technologies they needed to succeed at N2N. I certainly won’t claim that we conducted this training with the premonition of the impending office shutdown, but this training helped prepare us for the incoming tsunami.
I also had a nagging feeling that I was just being hopeful and wanted to prepare the company in case of a contingency. During one of my all-hands staff meetings in February, I informed the team that we would ensure that every team member would get a work-from-home device in preparation for this potential event. I had been discussing the coronavirus and its potential impacts on our offshore operations. We were worried about the proximity of our offshore development center to China, and the possibility of widespread infections if the epidemic reached India because of the overall population, population density, and just the cultural aspects of the country.
Though I was getting them the devices, I was worried about whether my company was ready for a scenario where everyone worked from home. I wondered aloud about the impact it would have on married employees with kids, and employees who lived with roommates, and whether they had suitable conditions to maintain a strict schedule and professional work environment. I was frankly hopeful that we could just maintain the status quo of allowing people to work from home on an ad-hoc basis.
During the early parts of March, as we heard more news about the impact of Coronavirus on Italy, it became clear that this pandemic would impact the US. I started discussing with my Directors and the team on a more regular basis how we could prepare as a team for this incoming disruption. While we made preparations – I was still in denial that this was inevitable. I was frankly hopeful that our geographical separation from Europe could protect us from mass casualties and societal disruptions. I think I was just refusing to see the facts at this point – ignoring all the evidence to the contrary, just because I did not want to face a total disruption of my personal and professional life. I was also concerned about the lives of my employees and their families in this process. Little did I know that our whole nation and worse – our executive leadership was much less prepared than we were. One can argue that they were similarly optimistic and hopeful that the virus would “die” before it reached the US, or it would disappear because of the summer, or that it was just like the flu, and nothing to worry about.
I have to agree that executive leadership of the nation and I were equally in denial about this crisis on March 15th. When one of my employees sent me an email that she wanted to work from home for a couple of weeks, I lost my temper completely. I am embarrassed with myself now – but at that moment, all I could think of was, how could someone shut everything down and not go out of their home, in fear?Why would we let fear dictate our lives? What’s the point of living if we cannot live freely? All of these were thoughtful questions to an emotional predicament, and I did not come to terms with it then. I openly inquired about these conditions in the most indifferent way possible. I was adamant that we needed to continue the status quo, and we shouldn’t give in to fear. Despite all these rejections – as I saw the news trickling down from Seattle and California, I started coming to terms with this new reality – that we would very likely have a significant portion of our staff working from home soon.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Viktor E. Frankl
After much resistance, I decided to take time and document all my concerns and discussed potential remedies for each of these concerns. Based on the input from my directors, we formulated new work from home policies and created guidelines on working from home. We shared this with employees and explained it to them in detail over a couple of Zoom sessions. We used these sessions not only to illustrate the guidelines but detail the management concerns on the reasons for these policy positions as well.
By the end of the second week of March, schools started shutting down, and that was when we knew we were in for the long-haul. We bought new laptops and distributed them to our staff by the end of the third week.
During the last two weeks of March, we had a few more work-from-home requests come in and accepted them with some deliberation and resistance. I continued in my position that having everyone work from home was “unhealthy” for the company and disrupted our team dynamic. As a result of this prejudice, I was quite reluctant to shut down the office – even when all the evidence alerted me to do otherwise. I was outraged about how this was impacting everything I had planned for this year and was still negotiating with each employee on their WFH request, the length of stay, and personally approving each request. I am not proud of this behavior. Frankly, I am embarrassed about how I behaved during this period.
We are a technology company, and well-suited for everyone to work from home. However – we had hired a few employees during Q1, and I was worried about their proper onboarding if everyone was working from home. I was also concerned about the boundary between my personal and professional lives. As a single dad, with kids at home, I was selfishly thinking about my ability to operate the company working from home. My resistance consumed the second half of March to the new norm – that everyone would be working from home for the next few days. I was trying to deny, resist, bargain, and use every trick in the book of a CEO. Despite these denials, the more I saw the news, the more I was convinced that this was unavoidable and that it was only a matter of time before we shut down the corporate office. I reluctantly prepared for this moment, but still hoped that it would never come. By the end of March, we were down to 25% of our staff working in the office. The rest were working from home, and I was able to understand why. We began making preparations to close down the office by the end of the month. I felt like we were ready, as we shared and explained the WFH policies, bought the needed infrastructure and provided training to the teams during the months of February and March. The “lunch and learn” training we had conducted in February served as a core foundation for all the staff members when we closed down the office at the end of March and allowed everyone to work from home starting April 1st, 2020.
We implemented tactical policies to meet every day at 9 am as a whole team instead of meeting twice a week. This daily meeting allowed us to get our days started with the right priorities. We are a flat organization at N2N, with a highly matrixed organization. I was concerned that our matrixed team approach would fall apart in this new model.
One of my biggest concerns about this work-from-home period was the potential loss of integration between the new employees and the staff that joined before them. I decided to bridge this gap by announcing a fun internal hackathon called N2N Exemplar to build applications using the Illuminate, Dell Boomi, and Ellucian Ethos platforms. The teams and projects selected by executive management and each side had two resources. The resources were asked to design, develop, present, and document their project to the whole staff. I frankly did not know what to expect when we kicked off the project, but I had hopes that this project would allow team members to collaborate and build products. Most importantly – this would create a sense of interconnectedness in this new normal. I also found a way to address my skepticism and lack of confidence in this new modality by creating a common platform to evaluate all my employees.
At N2N, we pride ourselves on building applications and software to transform education delivery, and the overall student experience. The last two months have revealed to me that I have a lot to learn about how my kids use their devices. I can only transform the student experience of the world if I learn how they operate. The quarantine period allowed me to see this firsthand.
The last two months have been very revealing to me on my own personal front as well. Working from home, with kids at home, was challenging during the first week, but we eventually made a schedule and set our boundaries for work and play. My son, daughter, and I have had many vacations over the years and traveled throughout the United States and some parts of Europe. However, the last two months of quarantine have transformed our relationship with each other in more ways than I can articulate. I detailed some of these experiences in my recent posts on LinkedIn.
On a professional front, I have been super impressed with my team on many fronts. They willingly complied with the policies and procedures and recommended additional strategies as well. Most importantly, some of them rose to the challenges of this new environment in ways I did not expect before. The Exemplar challenge revealed their professionalism and their collaborative spirits as well. I feel strongly that the last two months have made us stronger as a team and allowed me to have a deeper understanding of team dynamics and leadership strengths of individuals.
By the end of the month of April, we were more connected than ever, had built stronger inter-team relationships, and had broken down the boundaries between new employees and the rest of the staff. The staff also provided me with the needed confidence that we can work together no matter where we work from, and we can rise to any challenge, no matter how onerous this task is.
I remember a discussion I had with my college friend, Ravi Pydi, who advised me of their company policy; He suggested that “Working from home should not just be a privilege, but it should be a right for any employee that works in a software company.” I did not accept this policy when he told me this, but the last two months of forced lockdown and the mandatory work-from-home system allowed me to see the beauty of this statement and the power of the new normal. If I trust my employees, and if I believe my ability to monitor their performance, it should not matter where they work from and when.
Thanks to this crisis, I will be embarking on creating a Work From Home policy based on trust and respect, instead of relying on the old system of skepticism and privilege.
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