Your Local Computer is protected from the Internet:
Our software is Windows mode software.
This means that it exists only on Your Local Computer, similar to MS-Office (Word, Excel, Outlook...).
If you have a company with a Terminal Server or PC Network then it can exist there as well.

Your local computer is not open to hacker attacks via the internet.
It is protected by:
1. Your Router: Hides your PC from the Internet,
2. Your Firewall: Prevents unauthorised access and
3. Your Windows Vista/7 UAC.
The User Access Control (UAC) system ensures that everything on your computer which needs administrator privileges requires your approval.

Strategic Plan Security Needs:
The very nature of the Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard system is to expose your intangible assets to strategic scrutiny via a visibility and feedback framework.
This means it is a system that peels back all the layers leaving the heart exposed for anyone to read.

Only the highest level of security is good enough.
If you need a wide area solution, then you should use a system such as Windows Terminal Server or Citrix Terminal Server.
These systems are both safe and fast, offering state-of-the-art security, reliability and execution speeds.
(Windows 2000 WTS is adequate and inexpensive).

The other type of software exists on a Remote Web Server, it is displayed using web browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
- Your data is located on some other companies computer/s.

Your critical Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard data should never be located on remote external web servers.

Remote Website Security Concerns:
This year security warnings have been published for Interner Explorer and Mozilla Firefox from people such as Bürger-CERT in Germany.
These vulnerabilities will be fixed with the release of new versions, however new security issues are continually being exposed.

Dire warnings have been given to all public web sites that they should expect internet hacking or denial of service attacks within 2 years.
As we write this page, our state electric train network was recently hacked forcing trains to stop and others to go slow. Fortunately there were no accidents.

Security breaches occur at both the Web Server and Internet Browser level and you don't want this happening to your Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecards.
  - You don't even want outsiders to ever read this data.

Web servers are open to the Internet:
Public Web servers must sit exposed on the Internet, without Router Address Translation and without Firewall Protection.

They are not protected from hacker attacks and these can be launched from anywhere in the world.
Only the server's own access rules prevent illegal access. These rules can be broken and in many cases the server security updates are allowed to lapse.

Every time a web server vulnerability is reported, the system manufacturers have to rush to release an update.
With many web servers the update process lapses which is why approx 1 in every 1000 web servers has been hacked and infected.
Often the owners are totally unaware that their website is being exploited by hackers.