How to better monitor, manage, and protect your applications and your business

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Introduction

This article introduces a secure, stable and cost-effective means to maintain near-time visibility into how, when, and where your applications are being used. Whether you manufacture, distribute, or simply rely upon applications to operate your business, reliable and timely insight into application activity in a form that stakeholders can act upon will protect revenue, improve business performance, and reduce risk.

Applications are a part of virtually every business function today, yet our ability to monitor and manage their use has been extremely difficult due to privacy concerns, security requirements and the fact that the community of developers, implementers and users of applications typically work for different companies with different interests.

The following article introduces Runtime Intelligence � which is both an approach and a technology that can enable you to enhance applications to provide unprecedented visibility into your applications� usage - quickly, safely and in a way that is likely to be as useful to your users as it is to you.

Introducing SO-signal�: a runtime intelligence service

SO-signal enables application stakeholders (both developers and consumers) to efficiently and securely maintain a near-time view into application activity and behavior. SO-signal aggregates application usage data, and enriches that data with relevant business information to provide runtime intelligence.

SO-signal is offered as an enhancement to Dotfuscator�, the most widely deployed .NET obfuscator. This marriage between the preventative control of obfuscation (that makes reverse engineering, IP theft and software piracy more difficult) with detective controls that can notify stakeholders when these very same applications are being used and/or misused offers a number of material efficiencies including

• the ability to instrument (inject) communication logic into your .NET applications during obfuscation � no programming required.
• linking of multiple DLL�s to embed SO-signal functionality into "the DNA" of your application rather than having to manage and track external agents - simplified distribution and management
• compaction of the final application minimizing any changes in the application footprint - efficient
• the reuse of custom attributes to eliminate the need for additional coding � training and development efforts are minimized
• automatic integration into the development lifecycle through an existing build task � secure, stable and verified

SO-signal applications

The following capabilities are available immediately as runtime intelligence applications.

Tamper notification: The SO-signal Tamper Notification Service notifies your organization by email, phone and, if necessary, by registered post when one of your applications detects tampering. Tampered applications cost millions in revenue to suppliers, and introduce material security and liability risks to consumers.

Other dashboards and reports: also included with every SO-signal subscription seat are specialized dashboards detailing product adoption, application usage, and application & user benchmarking. This information is invaluable to product, development, IT, and operations management.

Fully integrated into your development lifecycle

Tight integration with Visual Studio and bundling with Dotfuscator, the recognized obfuscation market leader, ensure that SO-signal technology is simple, secure, and stable.

If you use Dotfuscator (including the Community Edition distributed with Visual Studio) you are already setup to take advantage of the following capabilities:

• For the independent software vendor (ISV)
  • Tamper notification and tracing
  • Client environmental usage and stability by product line and release
  • Evaluation, installation, adoption, and usage across product lines and communities
• For the enterprise
  • Tamper notification and tracing
  • Application usage and stability across platforms and frameworks
  • User adoption and other behavioral trends
• For all users
  • Availability of the most widely trusted and deployed obfuscation solution. Advantages of using Dotfuscator Pro with SO-signal include:
    • Combining the SO-signal DLL into application DLLS to maintain a single, agent-less footprint
    • Pruning to reduce the overall size of the resulting DLL by removing unused code in both the SO-s and application DLLs

Delivered through Dotfuscator� delivering obfuscation functionality including advanced renaming, control flow, and string encryption transformation to protect application IP, prevent vulnerability probing, and make circumvention of SO-signal materially more difficult 

Application stability and operations management: sample dashboards

Use case summary

SO-signal provides near-time transparency into the usage, stability, security, and performance of .NET applications, providing insight to enable smarter and faster decisions in support of each organization�s core business objectives. The limitations and complexities found in logging, monitoring, and auditing technologies are eliminated at a fraction of the expense of these labor and administratively intensive approaches.

SO-signal clients are offered as a subscription starting at $900 per user.

From a trusted source

PreEmptive Solutions has been selected by Microsoft to be the exclusive supplier of obfuscation technology inside the Visual Studio box since 2003. Today, over 3,000 corporations across the globe trust PreEmptive Solutions to protect their applications

Request a free evaluation today to manage your applications tomorrow!