Field Servicers Embrace the Mobile Cloud

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Mobile cloud technology is singlehandedly changing mortgage and field servicing processes, according to at least one insider, in ways that are both evident and obscure.

In the same way electronic sales transformed the sales management world, mobile cloud technologies are in the process of transforming field operations and mortgage loan data collection, said Michael DeLapa, VP of marketing of FotoNotes.

Real estate owned property preservation and management companies “are in the early stages of adopting cloud-based applications for field services, so there aren’t good case studies just yet,” he said, but related data that measure the impact will be available soon.

At the National Association of Mortgage Field Services Annual Conference in Chicago, FotoNotes, which specializes in mobile work management, introduced FotoNotes for Property Preservation, a new mobile cloud real estate property preservation solution for mortgage field services.

FotoNotes for Property Preservation manages information exchanges. Data collected by field service providers can automatically transfer from a mobile device to the cloud making it easy for supervisors and co-workers to share data gathered from an individual field servicer.

Customers can have “direct read-only access to the data via a web-browser or printed or emailed reports,” and to other back-end systems such as Property Pres Wizard and other software. Business partners and other field service companies also can access the information remotely.

FotoNotes for Property Preservation enables users to create, assign and manage work orders in the field, capture photos and other data from the job site, automate the stream of work orders, photos and data to and from back-office systems, helps improve vendor scorecards and payment.

FotoNotes offers mobile task management, data capture and cloud collaboration solutions that allow for faster data transfers and centralized storage.

DeLapa finds demand for mobile solutions is going up fueled by REO management needs of banks and REO investors with large inventories in times when according to industry data the REO inventory disposition speed is slowing down in many hard-hit markets.

Cloud technology providers, however. both applaud the benefits and warn about the risks of transferring to cloud systems.

Financial institutions busy putting cyber-security systems in place should consider a number of factors that determine the success of these operations, according to Jim Kunick, chair of the intellectual property, technology group at Chicago-based law firm Much Shelist.

Today banks are on the defensive against cyber-attacks, he said, because sophisticated hacking technology makes it easier than ever for attackers to enter banking systems putting at risk customer data, bank assets and these institutions’ intellectual property. Such concerns have paved the way for the development of cloud protection services.

Hollywood, Fla.-based Prolexic, a 10-year-old global Distributed Denial of Service mitigation provider that offers e-commerce, SaaS and payment processing to some of the world’s largest banks, is one such provider. The firm recently released recommendations on “using real-time analytics” to identify denial of service attacks and other cyber threats, risks and events.”

Banks and financial institutions operating in the cloud must deploy faster mitigation appliances and experienced mitigation engineers who can provide “a better DDoS response” to hackers who may target “application logins, system performance network systems and mission-critical applications,” executives said.

“Today, every industry is deluged with data from multiple sources in different formats, and the business of cyber security and DDoS attack mitigation is no exception,” said president of Prolexic, Stuart Scholly, who recommends real-time data analytics as the faster way to identify and mitigate cyber threat and “build stronger cyber security strategy.”

Prolexic has learned through experience that “big data” streams are valuable for DDoS mitigation “only if data analytics are used to gain real-time insight into the trends, behaviors and events that make up today’s cyber-attack landscape,” he said. The best mitigation strategy is one that supports root-cause analysis of how a denial of service attack could affect an Internet firm using “intelligence from massive streams of data.”

Prolexic’s white paper “Data Analytics and DDoS Mitigation: Lessons Learned,” stresses however that even the best automated systems cannot replace the experience of skilled DDoS and cyber threat mitigation technicians.

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