TECH PLATFORM
Powering FigureOne is a range of “new classic” technologies including MySQL, PHP, Java and .NET, and we are proud to employ specialized web technologies from the experts at Fastream and WebSupergoo. (We run our main site on bare metal and our backup on VMs, for those who are interested.)
Web-savvy professionals and IT folks should be happy about our unbiased, end-to-end feature compatibility with all modern browsers, including Safari (and the growing Google Chrome), Firefox (and the Seamonkey suite), Internet Explorer, and Opera. Due to our users' wide range of professional roles, from graphics professionals to academics to corporate project managers (as well as having users outside of the US) we are in the complex position of having a user community that ends up almost comically sliced into many browsers and versions. We can scarcely believe it ourselves when we see 30% Safari, 30% Firefox, 25% IE, 10% Opera, then drilling down to fairly even slices across the last two browser versions!
The result of all this is that we can't ignore any browser slice: while a site that sees 80% of traffic from a single browser might impress fans by adding “progressively enhanced” features that work better in that browser, that wouldn't make sense for us. And guaranteed browser compatibility helps out our round-the-clock users who resume work at a home Mac when they get back from a school or office PC, or vice versa.
SYSTEM AND USER SECURITY
FigureOne's tech team served time in the IT trenches in the financial and pharmaceutical industries, lending a seriousness to our systems architecture and security approach. Major enterprises are comfortable extending their technological reach through our infrastructure rather than running a public-facing system of their own. This is no surprise: even if such a system could be budgeted and built, it would unavoidably have associated security, stability, and round-the-clock management concerns that would likely make using us a better choice.
The vast majority of our client areas are public-facing (indeed, the ability to safely serve a widely distributed project team connecting from home, office, and kiosk locations is a core concept), but client-to-site or site-to-site VPN connections are also available.
Expecting and dealing with outright hackers is, of course, critical. But as anyone who's used web applications knows, in practice, application-level security can be just as important. That is, it's not just a question of dealing with attacks from outsiders, you must also regulate what a user is allowed to do once they've legitimately entered the system. For example, if all registered users of a website are allowed to manipulate and delete images in an image database, you hardly need a "hacker" to wreak major damage -- you only need a user who is unfamiliar with the system and clicks the wrong button, or worse, someone with a grudge to settle. Check the security notes on our Going in Deeper page for more on post-authentication security roles.
