They do not hold confidential customer data like credit card info. (In fact, the companies that need to keep confidential data, like financial and health services firms, are still not embracing cloud based systems as of yet.) But for the rest of us, CRM systems are basically places that store activities, appointments, emails, notes and phone calls.

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Plus it's tough for researchers to even gain access to FIX-based systems to study their weaknesses since you can't just take down a financial trading app to test it, for instance.

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As the firm expanded into new markets, the task of aggregating operational and financial data became increasingly difficult because the homegrown ERP system they used was based on 15 individual systems and more than 200 spreadsheets.

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