Our Product Marketing Manager, Aaron, and I had a watercooler chat the other day about taking a fresh approach to a corporation’s IT Security in the likes and regularity of spring cleaning. An approach like this would be ideal – you would have an up-to-date inventory of your hardware, you would have up-to-date software, and a complete 360 view of your organization. After completing what might be an onerous task, you would be able to identify the robustness of your environment, where your gaps might be, and where you have room to improve. In general, one might argue you would feel ‘in control’.
We Spoke with Healthcare IT Leaders – Here’s What We Learned
Businesses and Organizations in the U.S. Healthcare Industry are arguably subject to the most stringent data privacy and security laws on the planet. If you’re a Healthcare IT leader involved in compliance efforts – we certainly sympathize with you. Recently, Aaron McIntosh and I held a webinar on HIPAA Compliance for 2017 and Beyond in partnership with HiMSS – a 60,000+ member not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving healthcare through the best use of IT1. Our aim was to improve Healthcare IT leaders’ understanding of HIPAA in the context of the trends, breaches and common compliance issues we’re seeing across the industry so far in 2017. But it turns out that we gained far more insight than we shared with our audience of more than 140+ IT and Compliance leaders.
The Key to Protecting Data, Featuring Gartner
If there is one absolute truth in business, it’s that data is now everywhere. Big or small, companies wrestle with keeping data secure with an ever expanding mobile and agile workforce. Increasingly companies are turning to endpoint encryption as the answer to protecting their data.
The 6 Point Data Security Spring Cleaning Checklist
As an enterprise, you should not need an occasion to ensure that your security practices are up-to-date, fine-tuned and resilient. However, when immersed in the day-to-day it’s easy to overlook or neglect some of the standard best practices to securing your environment. The first signs of spring seem to trigger an inherent need to clean, and it’s no longer isolated to the garage or the cottage. It’s easy and worthwhile to apply the concept of spring cleaning, an annual event, to getting your security house in order too.
Here’s a 6 point checklist to get you started!
Flexibility in IT
We often talk about flexibility in IT in instances of user-friendly experiences like knowing your Microsoft Word doc will open in Apple’s Pages, or the ability to accept or decline a meeting request from your iPhone with an Outlook account. But, what is being developed behind the curtains for IT flexibility is going to change how the world uses technology.
Are Companies Safeguarding Their Customers’ Personal Identifying Information?
As data privacy concerns and supporting regulations escalate, are companies really prepared to ensure protection of their customers’ personal identifying information (PII) and to quickly and accurately report a breach should one occur? WinMagic recently conducted a survey of IT decision makers in the U.S., UK, France and Germany to assess their companies’ capabilities in these areas – and the findings should raise some red flags.
Sending the Elevator Down for the Next Generation
To be frank, I wouldn’t be where I am right now if I didn’t cross paths with people who believed in me and gave me a chance. Thus I need to send the elevator back down to bring the next generation of talent up to where I am. That’s why I was thrilled to have been invited to represent WinMagic at the Glenforest STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) Conference as a “speed mentor.” That meant that I would be set up in a room, and high school students in groups of three to five will come in and be seated with a mentor. From there, the students will be given five minutes to ask questions pertaining to my career before rotating to another mentor. The logic was that by doing these “speed mentoring” sessions, the students would get an amazing opportunity to learn more about the STEM careers available to them as well as to ask questions in a more personal environment. Thus I agreed to be a “speed mentor” for roughly 1000+ students.
EU GDPR – The Final Countdown
In May 1986, a little-known Swedish band called Europe released their international breakthrough album, The Final Countdown – topping the charts in 25 countries. Thirty years later in May 2016, the European Commission released the official EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – another international breakthrough with a far greater global impact, albeit on the data privacy and protection landscape. But when legislation becomes law on May 25th 2018, will you be prepared? With just one year left, it’s the final countdown.
The Increase of Data and Compliance Regulations – How Can Businesses Best Keep Pace?
Data flow is evolving from the ground up – quite literally – with Big Data, the Cloud and IoT changing the way we store, process and share information. But with the rapid growth of data – expected to reach 44ZB by 2020 according to IDC – comes an exponentially larger surface area for hacks, attacks, loss and theft.
Requirements of Security Independence in a Virtualized World
As we evolve more and more to complete self-contained services like the mainstream Cloud services of Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Google, I often express concerns about the Cyber aspects being coupled. Enterprises and users are, if they haven’t already, getting more and more comfortable with giving up their physical/virtual servers, applications and storage but are not, and should not, be comfortable giving up control of their sensitive data. The shared responsibility models of Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) delineates between the physical aspects (network, disks, memory, etc.) and the responsibility of what resides in the storage and computer.