Paymaster Payroll Solutions – International Profile

Paymaster Payroll Solutions

Paymaster Payroll Solutions is the leader in cloud Payroll and HR software in South Africa and Africa.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions will do everything we can to simplify Payroll while making sure that you always have access to your payroll and Human resource information by doing things more dynamically and more intelligently than ever before. It’s about access to relevant and valuable information at anytime, anywhere. It also gives staff member’s greater access to their payslip, tax information and HR data to reduce dependence on payroll and HR administrators.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions is a business tool that helps you grow and drive your business processes with the complete confidence that you are using the benchmark of today’s available payroll and HR management systems.

Over and above delivering world class easy to use functionality which delivers automated results, giving you your time back, we back it up with outstanding professional service and a vastly unique support model when you need it. (everything can be done via the internet- no more waiting for consultants to arrive on site – this is real time, now support)

International

Paymaster Payroll Solutions has expanded its cloud based offering into 35 African countries. The countries that are currently included are Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, South Africa, Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ghana, Eritrea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gabon, Senegal, Madagascar, Mozambique, Guinea Conakry, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon, Mauritius, Angola, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Mauritania, Reunion, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia and extending to the rest of Africa,  in the near future.

In order to deliver the best possible solution as well as comply with latest legislative changes, strategic relationships have been set up with various world-renowned global accounting firms and together with multinational specific functionality, Paymaster Payroll Solutions provides powerful delivery that assists clients in rolling out into international regions literally overnight.

Some of the features offered include:

• All international legislation is automated and updated by Paymaster Payroll Solutions – Clients need not worry about understanding complex legislative rules.

• Access to Payroll or HR functions from anywhere in the world – Paymaster Payroll Solutions cloud access eradicates the need for onsite admin personnel and allows all stakeholders; Administrators, managers and employees access at anytime and anywhere.

• Advanced Expatriate functionality:

o   Paymaster Payroll Solutions covers the requirement for expats working in other countries to gross up their earnings by relevant statutory contributions according to currency and contracts offered in their home countries. This allows for simple conversion of net home to host earnings.

o   Expatriate tax management reporting offers home country currency specific tax year to date reports, providing expats with an abundance of information to complete personal tax returns.

• Paymaster Payroll Solutions is able to supply employee and company-based reporting in host and home currencies, as well as comply with consolidated reporting in any currency required by the multinational’s headquarters.

• Automated currency exchange rate conversions either on a monthly or daily basis for the entire multinational group. The choice of currency conversion information source is up to the client.

• Workflow business process engines drive corporate governance and improve efficiency by offering limitless approval chains from initiator (employee / manager) to HR and Payroll admin. Clients can take advantage of the Paymaster Payroll Solutions technology to get data input from the source, electronically approve it in locations around the world through advanced workflow capability, and ultimately, process the information from anywhere in the world. Examples of business process workflow functionality include:

o   Onsite timesheets incorporating complex payroll interpretation of employee raw time and shift pattern capture either via online web capture or automated interfacing from access control systems.

o   Employee Claims and applications for advances or loans.

o   Annual increase review processes with automated increase letters and pre-payroll analysis tools.

o   Document approval workflow. o Performance evaluations.

o   Leave applications.

o   Recruitment requests.

o   Simple commission administration incorporating complex commission rules not exposed to end users.

• Language and statutory specific reporting.

• Simple employee transfer processes from country to country while retaining original employee number and biographical record.

• Apart from offering all legislative payroll possibilities, country specific payroll collective agreement rules in industrial and mining sectors are also offered.

Employee Management

By handling the entire lifecycle process of any employee, Paymaster Payroll Solutions provides a centralised and cohesive solution to managing your workforce.

On-boarding – Manage the transition of any worker from applicant to employee through our recruitmentmodule, post a job vacancy, track interview dates with candidates, send regret letters automatically and get feedback electronically from interview panel. Paymaster Payroll Solutions contains a configurable workflow engine that will guide the user through specific forms to ensure that all required employee details are captured i.e. biographical details, dependant details, job title, cost center, reporting line manager, salary grade, package details etc

Employee Maintenance – Maintain employee details such as name, contact and address information orlet them do it themselves using ESS, record job history such as promotions, cost center changes, manage performance appraisals and full leave administration.

Record Additional Info – Record all disciplinary actions, track all equipment given to employees, recordtraining courses and associated costs, record an employee’s skills and qualifications.

Movement – Manage the movement of employees within an organisation, including transfers, promotions,and demotions.

Off-boarding –Manage the transition of a worker from employee or contingent worker to terminatedworker or retiree.

Work Flow – Administrators can configure and define workflow processes by choosing the type of inputthat needs to be gathered and consolidated from their geographically dispersed workforce. Examples of these include:

• Annual salary review process

• Employee expense claims

• Commissions and overtime

• Timesheets Leave approval

Client specific workflow approval chains can be setup where flexibility exists to create as many approvers as is necessary (based on security profiles). Initiators (employees or managers) of the data start the workflow process through online single view capture sheets. These sheets are then passed along the approval process where rejection and alternate approver options are in place (if an approver goes on leave and assigns this task to an alternate approver).

This information finally reaches payroll / HR who can then analyse and audit the input before influencing the payroll in real time by merely approving the batch.

Extensive audit facilities are available where administrators can investigate the details of what was captured for the month as well as pinpoint who or where outstanding batches are located in the process.

• Notifications are sent to approvers and stakeholders throughout the workflow process through email and Paymaster Payroll Solutions inbox notification.

• Furthermore, documentation and reports are available throughout the process that guarantees efficiency and stakeholder communication.

Examples of these include:

• Automated Employee increase letters according to performance predefined templates
• HR initiates the capture and it is completed by payroll who fill in the missing data

• Commission and expense claim electronic sign off sheets

• Budgeting reconciliation reports for the remuneration committee during increase process

Payroll

Starting from Scratch

Our product and technology teams had the luxury of designing and building Paymaster Payroll Solutions from scratch and were therefore able to create an intuitive and modern payroll solution. We threw out many legacy payroll approaches such as the month end pay-run concept and greatly simplified data capture by embedding legislation into the software thereby minimising the number of fields and forms that a user is required to fill in.

No Downtime

Paymaster Payroll Solutions has a real-time calculation engine which means that as input is added to the system, the relevant employee figures are automatically calculated. This means that there is no need to run a formal pay-run to close off or finalise a period at month end which usually means the entire business needs to log-off the system in order to perform calculations and do backups – this is an extremely time consuming exercise. With Paymaster Payroll Solutions there is no downtime and all users can access the system and pull relevant up-to-date reports at any time thereby maximising all users’ productivity.

Compliance

Paymaster Payroll Solutions helps you comply with all legislative requirements by automatically calculating the correct

PAYE, Social Security and Compensation funds figures. There is no need to download any “newversion” in order to update your software with the latest tax tables and legislative changes – you are always using the latest version whenever you log onto Paymaster Payroll Solutions. For the larger organisations we provide employment equity reports and a report for Statistics SA. We automatically declare all employees’UIFearnings to the Department of Labour so there is yet another task you no longer have to worry about. All leave payments are calculated according to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and Paymaster Payroll Solutions also caters for various tax calculation methods such as directive, director’s tax etc.

Year End Process in South Africa

SARS have released a software package called e@syFile to assist taxpayers manage their interactions with SARS quickly, easily and conveniently on their desktop. Paymaster Payroll Solutions provides an electronic file that can be imported directly into e@syFile, saving an employer all the effort of having to manually reconcile and submit their employees’ earnings to SARS.  Download e@syFile.

Payroll Processing

It goes without saying that Paymaster Payroll Solutions has all of the usual payroll functionality that is expected of most payroll systems, however, we have vastly improved the way in which typical tasks are performed on a monthly basis allowing the user to work more efficiently. Here is a list of some of the payroll features we offer:

• Ability to pay weekly, fortnightly and monthly employees in a single company
• Tax certificates are available instantly every period (not just at year end)
• Ability to set up limitless earnings and deductions
• Automatic backpay
• Create limitless additional runs to cater for late payments, bonuses and commissions
• Administer all components, funds and contributions etc on a single form
• Administer changes directly on an employee’s payslip
• Upload figures in mass via excel spreadsheet
• Paymaster Payroll Solutions contains all medical aid rates, no need to obtain these manually
• Draw a bank file for all major banks at the click of a button
• Full audit trail on all forms
• Schedule standard reports or draw immediately in pdf or excel format
• Ability to cost figures to any cost center
• Ability to configure your GL requirements based on cost center codes
• Add components to employees via predefined templates instead of capturing one by one
• A simple easy to use YTD take on facility is available so that 1 tax certificate can be produced
• Full reconciliation and exception reports
• Payslips in multiple currencies
• Full history available instantaneously

Employee Self Service / Manager Self Service

Paymaster Payroll Solutions is all about access to information and therefore employees are able to access their information at all times. Historical payslips are always available without the need to do perform a restore operation to obtain previous payslips.

Employee can also request that payslips be sent to their  mobile phones via a text message.

Payroll and HR departments do not get involved at all when it comes to providing employees access to their profiles, employees register themselves and define their own password hereby eliminating the maintenance burden typically involved with administrating employee self service.

Employees can apply for leave, access tax certificates and  capture expense claims that are sent via a workflow approval chain where the payslips are automatically updated without having to compile complex batch files outside of the system in order to upload into the payroll.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions has a configurable commission calculator that allows a manager to capture their teams  commission input whether it is monetary or unit based and Paymaster Payroll Solutions will automatically calculate the commission value based on the company’s commission rules and send it through a workflow approval chain where it is automatically added to the employee’s payslip.

Managers have a manager view screen which allows them to see the relevant information for the employees reporting to them and drill into the down line of employee’s within the employees reporting to their directly report to employees.

There is a manager change request screen which allows the manager to request changes to certain areas of the employees profile reporting into the relevant manager as well as the line of employee’s within the employees reporting to their directly report to employees.

Managers can define the relevant period ’s performance KPA’s for their employees and group them into relevant areas. These KPA’s then slot into the relevant area of the company/position template.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions for Mobile Browsers

Paymaster Payroll Solutions is the 1^st Payroll and HR platform in Africa to offer Employee Self Service access to employees on smartphone and tablet devices.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions allows employees to access their details using any smartphone and tablet device without the need to download, install or upgrade a native mobile application. It looks and feels very much like a native mobile application except that it is deployed using the power of the web and therefore is accessible from anywhere in the world.

Job Profiles and Organizational Management

Getting a headcount should not be one of the most difficult questions to answer about your business, nor should detailing costs or spend by a department, region, or group. Paymaster Payroll Solutions enables companies to accurately model their company structures as well as provide information based on any organisational dimension.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions gives companies the ability to accurately represent their organisations structure and act on relative information in a timely manner. If you have a very simplistic structure, Paymaster Payroll Solutions hides the involved fields to allow you to capture your information quickly.

Multiple Organisation Types – Paymaster Payroll Solutions supports limitless organisation types which can all existsimultaneously and be updated independently from each other. Types include: company, department, region, division, cost center, business site and more.

Flexible Reporting Dimensions – Each organizational type can be used to segment data aboutthe company. For instance, users can analyse spending patterns by department, division, cost center, or region – Instantly.

Segmented Security Access – Organisations allow much more flexible distribution ofresponsibilities, allowing different individuals to have rights only to specifically assigned organisation units. Administrators can be granted access by individual department, region, group, or any other organisational dimension.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions enables companies to capture, track, and report on the current state of their business with confidence in the accuracy and relevance of their data.

Developing and defining accurate job descriptions as well as various requirements for each of the positions in the company plays an important role when measuring an employee’s performance and when the need arises to recruit for a particular position a job specification can be printed out immediately.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions gives companies the ability to store information relating to a position that includes overall purpose of the job, what grade the job is attached to, who the position reports to, what occupational category and level the position falls under which is critical for employment equity reporting and much more.

Companies are able to define the following detailed requirements and information for a position:

Skills Requirements – Indicate exactly what skills are required, how many years experience, whatlevel of competency and how important the skill is for the position by indicating a weighting figure.

Qualification Requirements – Record the minimum qualification requirements.

Outputs or Tasks – Define all duties or tasks that are expected of a position so that employees areaware of what they will be measured on when it is appraisal time.

Competency Requirements – Depending on which competency framework your company utilises,you are able to indicate what competencies are required for a position. This greatly assists in driving an interview in terms of what questions are asked to a candidate.

Other Requirements – Record any additional requirements that do not fall into the categories abovesuch as the position required a driver’s license.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions is not just an HR system, it is a comprehensive Human Capital Management solution.

Leave Management

Caters for Simplistic & Complex

Our leave module is all encompassing and extremely easy to use. Whether your company offers stock standard statutory leave accruals or if your requirements are more advanced such as multiple annual leave types with complex non-accumulative forfeiture rules, Paymaster Payroll Solutions can manage your leave processes while integrating to Payroll seamlessly.

Great Flexibility

Paymaster Payroll Solutions delivers pre-configured statutory leave on top of which users can also configure as many additional leave types as necessary in accordance with simple or complicated leave policies. Leave can be given upfront or accrued in units such as days or hours. More advanced accrual definitions can be based on length of service or salary grade.

Forfeiture rules are flexible and can be configured to drop off completely or shift leave to different leave buckets based on anniversary date or a fixed date for all employees.

Advanced settings allow users to restrict negative leave, only accrue leave for new employees if they joined before a certain day of the month, ability to toggle mandatory attachments and much more.

Access to Information

Employees can view current and projected leave balances when applying for leave, cancel leave, attach any supporting documentation to leave requests as well as channel a leave request through an approval path according to simple reporting lines. More advanced workflow configuration is also available where administrators can define unlimited workflow approval paths.

Seamless Integration with Payroll

Automated accurate payroll leave provision calculations are fed directly via the leave administration module where any fluctuation in employee leave balances translate into accurate provision costing for budget purposes. Upon termination, automated leave encashment options can be utilised where the user can firstly, view the amount of leave pay, perform the necessary payout, and reduce the leave balance accordingly – all in a single action.

Vast flexibility is also available with regards to defining leave pay income. Although the BCEA averaging leave pay income requirement is a standard delivered feature within the product, Paymaster Payroll Solutions allows the user more flexibility around averaging options.

Recruitment and Selection Management

Automate Your Entire Hiring Process

Paymaster Payroll Solutions allows you to automate your entire hiring process from requisition, placing an advert, response handling, scheduling and tracking of interviews, electronic panel feedback and onboarding.

Requisition

Administrators are able to create a vacancy that is linked to a position and upload a requisition form that can be sent to the relevant parties for approval via a workflow process. Once approved, high level qualification questions can be attached to the vacancy to immediately rule out candidates that do not meet the minimum requirements.

Job Advertising

Jobs can be advertised internally via the careers dashboard in Paymaster Payroll Solutions and can also be placed externally on the company’s website. Candidates are able to apply for a position by entering their details and uploading their electronic resume after which they will receive an SMS confirming receipt of their application.

Response Handling

Candidates can be short-listed based on their resumes and templated regret emails can be sent to unsuccessful candidates. Interviews can be scheduled and managed for each phase of the recruitment process and for each candidate individually. Interview panel members are attached to each interview and are also invited to attend electronically. Once the interview has been completed, panel members are sent an electronic feedback form where they are able to rate the candidate. The vacancy owner is in turn notified via email and is able to view the consolidated feedback in order to make an informed decision.

Onboarding

Once the successful candidate has been identified and signed an offer of employment letter, the candidate can immediately be enrolled as an employee where Paymaster Payroll Solutions will ensure all necessary information is captured via a workflow guided process.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions improves the turn-around time of placements by providing a single integrated system for management of both internal and external recruitment, ensuring an efficient, streamlined recruitment process is maintained throughout your company.

Performance Management

Effectively Manage your Organisation’s Performance

Paymaster Payroll Solutions has a comprehensive performance management tool that will assist an organisation in assessing their employees and ultimately help to develop, motivate and retain a high performing workforce all year round without the added burden and cost of a separate appraisal system.

For Large and Small

We have created a powerful combination of features that is easy to use and affordable for any size business. It is equally important to have a performance appraisal process in place for a small business as it is for a large organisation and by using Paymaster Payroll Solutions’s evaluation module you will have the benefit of powerful software usually only available to large organisations due to the cost factor. Employee performance appraisals shouldn’t be a dreaded task that yields a lot of paperwork and little value for your organization, we guarantee that the Paymaster Payroll Solutions evaluation tool will greatly streamline performance appraisal processes within your organisation and reduce HR’s administrative burden.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions lets you:

• Create your own company appraisal processes that can be actively monitored i.e. 2010 Annual Performance Appraisals.

• Create company key performance indicators (KPI’s), attach them to a predefined process and using our performance dashboard, visually see how these indicators are performing based on predefined targets across departments or cost centres. Areas requiring attention will be highlighted immediately.

• Create an unlimited number of appraisal templates from scratch. Templates can be position or job specific or simply general templates that suite all employees. Assign relevant weightings to sections of the template that indicate higher importance than other sections.

• Create your own scales that are relevant to a specific areas or questions, for example, 1 = Unsatisfactory, 2 = Below Average, 3 = Average, 4 = Above Average, 5 = Excellent – this scale could be used for a variety of questions where as, 1 = Did not meet expectations, 2 = Met Expectations, 3 = Exceeded Expectations could relate to project specific questions.

• Automated 360 degree evaluations – get broader, richer “multi-rater” feedback without the processing hassles. Raters will be notified via email that they need to assess a person, they simply need to login into Paymaster Payroll Solutions and complete the evaluation in their inbox. It is all online therefore you eliminate all paper!

• Managers can define the relevant periods KPA’s for their employees and group them into relevant areas. These KPA’s then slot into the relevant area of the company/position template.

• Managers are able to view all raters’ feedback.

• Employees as well as managers are able to log entries throughout the year in an employee’s performance journal so that at appraisal time these are taken into account.

• Log goals and create development plans for an employee and review these at the employee’s next appraisal.

• A complete history of an employee’s appraisals or reviews are stored and can be viewed at any time.

Moving from a paper based to an electronic performance appraisal system saves time, money and significantly improves the evaluation process for both the employee and the organisation.

Skills Development Management

Manage a Skilled Workforce

Paymaster Payroll Solutions assists companies in managing their workforce’s training requirements by enabling users to create training courses and capturing details such as course cost, NQF level, credits, whether the course is SAQA registered and much more.

Companies are able to build up a qualifications and skills repository that in turn is linked to employees so that employees can quickly be identified when specific skills or qualifications are being looked for.

Set Employees up for Success

Easily schedule employees for training, inform them electronically and monitor their progress. View an employee’s skills gap analysis against a specific position’s minimum requirements to assist in creating a career development plan to help them integrate into the company and their role.

Paymaster Payroll Solutions also provides various reports to assist you in completing annual training reports and compiling workplace skills plans.

Reporting

Paymaster Payroll Solutions comes with the ability to view, analyse, and take action on data right from the source in real-time. Available to both line managers and power users, anyone can use our packaged reports to get the answers they need to do their jobs more effectively.

Types of reports range from various costing reports, HR related reports such as new engagements and terminations, leave balances report, training reports, employment equity reports, Payroll reports include variance reports between periods, garnishee reports, group life and pension reports, SDL and UIF reports and much more. All reports can be drawn in a number of formats including Excel and PDF.

Users are able to draw reports for data they have access permissions to and filter the data based on the organisation structure. Users are also able to schedule reports so that they are delivered to their email at the close of every period automatically. These reports are secured in a password protected zip file ensuring confidentiality.

Accurate Historical Data

Reporting on historical data is instant, there is no need to restore any backups to retrieve information. Paymaster Payroll Solutions has the ability to report on historical data based on an “as at” date, this means that reports being pulled for previous months will reflect data as if you were physically pulling the report in the past. For example, if an employee’s cost center changed in June, the report will reflect the old cost center for reports pulled for periods before June and the new cost center for reports pulled after June.

Cloud Analytics

Cloud Analytics delivers true self service BI that empowers users by driving innovative decision-making. It lets you interact with data without limitations to generate insight in ways you never imagined. It delivers answers as fast as you can think up questions. Explore data, make discoveries, and uncover insights that enable you to solve business problems in innovative, new ways. Conduct direct and indirect searches, and interact with dynamic dashboards and analytics from any device. You’ll gain unexpected insights with Paymaster Payroll Solutions Analytics because it works the way the mind works.

User accessibility

Secure for Every User

Paymaster Payroll Solutions offers a flexible security model that functions on a “what you can see” and a “who you can see” basis. Depending on the type of users you have in your company, various security roles can be defined where permissions are allocated that restrict users to selected screens or provide read-only access. Furthermore, users can be restricted to only see employees that reside under certain orgnisation units based on your organisation structure. If you have more than one legal entity or frequency, you can further restrict users on these levels.

Embedded Auditing

Paymaster Payroll Solutions tracks all changes to data on every form in the system, meaning customers can view who changed or inserted data and on what date. Audit trails are available on each form as well as a report to check all changes for a particular period.

128 bit SSL encryption is present on every form within Paymaster Payroll Solutions – this means your information is encrypted during transmission from our servers to your browser. Further to this, Paymaster Payroll Solutions has various world-class security measures in place to ensure the protection of your data.

Top Class User Experience

When a company effectively and successfully redistributes responsibility to all employees, a business culture based on real information and informed decisions is the result. The delegation of administrative tasks to employees and managers, enables both HR and IT to refocus their attention to more strategic, bottom line issues. The Paymaster Payroll Solutions user experience is singularly focused on extending access to every user while ensuring simplicity is always at the forefront in the execution.

Security

Paymaster Payroll Solutions is a fully web based system.

Security is critical for any organisation. Paymaster Payroll Solutions security goes far beyond what most companies have been able to achieve for themselves. Using the latest firewall protection, SSL encryption, and proprietary security products, Paymaster Payroll Solutions gives you the peace of mind that only a world-class security infrastructure can provide.

Security is a multidimensional business imperative that demands to be considered at every level, from security for applications to physical facilities to network security.

Here is an overview of how we handle security at various levels.

Protection at the Application Level

Paymaster Payroll Solutions protects your data by ensuring that only authorized users can access it.

• Paymaster Payroll Solutions provides each user in your organisation with a unique email address and password that must be entered each time a user logs on.

• Paymaster Payroll Solutions issues a session “cookie” only to record encrypted authentication information for the duration of a specific session. The session “cookie” does not include either the username or password of the user. Paymaster Payroll Solutions does not use “cookies” to store other confidential user and session information, but instead implements more advanced security methods based on dynamic data and encoded session IDs.

• All access to Paymaster Payroll Solutions is governed by strict password security policies and all passwords are stored in encrypted format in the database.

• 128 bit SSL encryption is present on every form within the system – this means your information is encrypted during transmission.

• Administrators can define security roles and attach users to these roles. Roles can be defined to restrict or allow users to any form within the system

• Administrators can give users access to view specific employees that are in turn attached to organisation units defined on company level. This restricts users to only see employees details in specific units.

• All employee self-service users are only able to view their own profiles.

• Reports that are emailed to users are sent in a password protected zip file. o An audit trail exists on every screen for traceability purposes.

• Paymaster Payroll Solutions uses safe bank EFT transfer technology to receive information and to interact with the banks for bank account validations.

Protection at the Facilities Level

Paymaster Payroll Solutions utilises one of the most modern data centres in South Africa. The security in the data centre consists of visible and invisible physical measures and other facilities to guarantee an uninterrupted service.

• Paymaster Payroll Solutions is backed up every 15 mins to an offsite backup server and every evening a full backup is also done.

• No public access – Public access to the hosting facilities is strictly forbidden.

• Video surveillance – Live video surveillance of the entire data centre is in place 24 hours a day. All entrances are monitored to the data centres to ensure that only authorized personnel enter them.

• Access cards – A data-centre access proximity card system represents the second layer of security for entering the data centre. Access to the data centre itself is restricted to Certified Technical Points of Contact.

• Biometric security – Biometric security systems are the third layer of security for entering the data center. Biometric hand scanners are used to restrict access to the data centre and only Certified Technical Points of Contact have use of the biometric hand scanner system to enter the data centre.

In addition, the following safety and redundancy measures are in place to ensure continuity and stability at the data centre:

• Redundancy – All critical systems in the hosting centre are redundant, and there are regularly audits and tests on all data centre systems to ensure their readiness and smooth operation. (N+1 redundancy indicates having a complete replica of the system in place, as backup should the primary system fail.)

• Environmental monitoring – The data centres have N+1 redundant heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems to ensure that, even in the event of a system failure, the hosting environment will not be affected. The data centre also has an advanced fire-suppression system in place to contain fire.

• UPS (uninterrupted power supply) systems – The power systems are designed to run uninterrupted even in the event of a total power outage. All production systems in your hosting environment are fed with conditioned UPS power that will run whenever utility power fails. The UPS power subsystem is N+1 redundant, with instantaneous fail-over to generators to ensure continuity.

• Diesel generator systems – Onsite diesel generators automatically start up in the event of a power surge or interruption in the power supply. The power and generator systems are regularly tested to ensure that they function properly in the event of a power failure.

Protection at the Network Level

Paymaster Payroll Solutions uses proven security practices to ensure network security.

• Paymaster Payroll Solutions utilises a perimeter firewall that protects our network from malicious or unwanted behaviour from traffic entering our network as well as keeping our network safe from Zero Day attacks, DOS (denial of service) and DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, spoofing attacks and malicious code.

• Our Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) is a network security service that monitors network and/or system activities for malicious or unwanted behaviour and can react, in real-time, to block or prevent those activities.

McAfee Vulnerability Scanning Process

Audit – Port Scan

The first audit phase is a thorough, interactive port scan. Accurately determining which ports on an IP address are open is the crucial first step to a comprehensive security audit. The McAfee Secure proprietary firewall and IDS/IPS aware network discovery technology is designed to accurately map out any size or complexity of network topology. This is often not a simple process. Unlike most scanning solutions based on Nmap, our advanced dynamic port scanning can handle all targets, from desktop PCs to the most aggressive firewalls, IDS and IPS systems.

Audit – Network Services Scan

During this second audit phase of the audit process, McAfee thoroughly interrogate each service running on every available port to determine exactly what software is running and how it is configured. Once this information is acquired it is matched to their Knowledge Base of vulnerabilities in order to launch additional application specific and generic tests of each available service. These tests are based on their extensive knowledge base of over 10,000 vulnerabilities, which is updated every 15 minutes.

Audit – Web Application Scan

Web application testing is the third audit phase of the McAfee Secure daily security audit, and perhaps the most important. According to analyst firm Gartner Group, an estimated 70% of all security breaches today are due to vulnerabilities within the web application layer. Traditional security mechanisms such as firewalls and IDS’ provide little or no protection against attacks on your web applications. During this testing phase, all HTTP services and virtual domains are checked for the existence of potentially dangerous modules, configurations settings, CGIs and other scripts, and default installed files. The web site is then deep crawled, including flash embedded links and password protected pages, to find forms and other potentially dangerous interactive elements. These are then exercised in specific ways to disclose any application-level vulnerabilities such as code revelation, cross-site scripting and SQL injection. Both generic and software specific tests are performed in order to uncover misconfigurations and coding error vulnerabilities.