The Connection, Inc Blog

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a regulation passed by the US congress in 1996 to help streamline the healthcare system while maintaining individual ePI privacy over individuals’ health records. This regulation was put in place to allow people to transfer their health coverage, but also to minimize the risk individuals take on as far as fraud and abuse of their health records is concerned. This week we’d thought we’d discuss four ways your technology can help your organization keep its HIPAA compliance. 

If you have a computer, it has data on it that you’ve stored. Whether it’s the novel you’ve been working on in your spare time or pictures from your kid’s sixth grade graduation on your home PC, or the databases and applications that your business’ infrastructure supports, all of this data is generally stored in exactly the same way. Whatever your case, you should know that your data is terrifyingly fragile - far too fragile to ever be kept in just one place. Let’s dive deeper.

Data security, always an important topic, has been made even more urgent by the Equifax data breach and the fact that 143 million users had their personal information stolen after entrusting it (or not) to Equifax. You need to consider what would happen if your business were on the receiving end of a data breach, and prepare to handle this truly unpleasant circumstance.

Data security, always an important topic, has been made even more urgent by the Equifax data breach and the fact that 143 million users had their personal information stolen after entrusting it (or not) to Equifax. You need to consider what would happen if your business were on the receiving end of a data breach, and prepare to handle this truly unpleasant circumstance.

Below are three relatively simple measures for you to implement that can help preventatively secure your business against attacks like the one that struck Equifax.

Utilize Strong Passwords and Two-Factor Authentication Measures
Take a moment to consider what might happen if someone were to access your accounts. Do you really feel comfortable protecting that data with the name of your childhood pet, some other personal detail, or--worst of all--“password?”

The easier the password is, the easier it will be for a hacker to potentially crack. This is why we recommend that you design your passwords using capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols to create an apparently random string of characters. It makes cracking your account much more difficult for a hacker to accomplish.

Use Unified Threat Management to Secure Your Network
A proper approach to network security will incorporate both internal and external preparations. One such preparation is to include devices like a UTM, or Unified Threat Management, tool. A UTM leverages protections like antivirus, spam blocking, enterprise-level firewalls, and content filtering to prevent your network from being seeded with threats. Additionally, you will have the ability to react to issues before they can do too much damage, which will help keep problems from influencing your productivity.

Share The Benefits of Best Practices
While your business relies on its employees in order to function, it is also at the mercy of their ability to handle threats. All it could take is the wrong employee receiving a spam message or someone clicking a fraudulent link to leave your business network vulnerable. To combat this, you need to educate your employees on how to spot situations that could end poorly, like phishing attempts and social engineering emails. You can thwart a surprising number of these threats simply by making sure your staff knows what to look for.

These methods can give you the steps to help keep your business safe from threats that could otherwise cause a data breach. To learn some more ways to help ensure your security, keep reading our blog, and give us a call at (732) 291-5938 to make sure your data is safe.

If your work requires you to store medical data, you should be aware of how important your data security is, as a problem could potentially put your business at risk of closing up shop permanently. Security has to be a priority with so many regulations setting compliance standards that must be followed. How can you balance the effectiveness of your business without undermining its security?

Today, the threats businesses encounter from the Internet are more frequent and dangerous than any previous threats. To avoid being the victim of a cyberattack, you will need strategies and procedures aimed at mitigating them. Let’s look at some strategies you need to consider if you are to keep the threats off your network. 

Security is an aspect of running a business that absolutely cannot be ignored, regardless of whether or not you see it as a considerable issue in the near future. The fact remains that your organization will always be at risk unless you take actions to keep it safe today. By taking advantage of some of the latest and greatest security tools on the market, you’ll be able to protect not only from the basic threats, but more advanced ones as well.

No matter how advanced technology becomes, it can fall victim to even the most basic of threats if left unchecked. Your desktop workstation is certainly not immune to threats like viruses, malware, spam, and so much more, and even the most vigilant business could expose its infrastructure to these common threats. Since consumer-grade services are likely not strong enough to protect your business’s important data, you’ll need to turn to enterprise-grade solutions that can be tricky for small businesses to afford.

One of the greatest ways you can protect your organization is by implementing a Unified Threat Management tool that fulfills the roles of various security solutions in one convenient package. For example, you could implement an enterprise-grade antivirus and firewall to keep threats out of your infrastructure and promptly eliminate those that do infiltrate your defenses. Furthermore, preventative solutions like spam protection and content filtering can limit your organization’s exposure to threats in the first place, which saves time and money in the long run.

More advanced security protections, however, are certainly important for your business as well. Some of the more powerful measures include two-factor authentication and biometric scanning. Two-factor authentication is particularly important, as it provides a secondary credential that must be used to gain access to important information and accounts. Basically, it forces hackers to do even more work to break into an account, as they would have to physically steal your smartphone or other device to which the secondary credential is being sent to, all just to access an account and maybe find something useful.

Biometrics, on the other hand, are a bit harder to fake. Using fingerprint scanners or iris scanners make it considerably more difficult to unlock devices. A hacker would basically have to have the exact same fingerprint or iris as you, so unless there is some incredibly shady business going on, they won’t be able to access your devices.

How does your business secure its sensitive information and data infrastructure? The Connection, Inc can help your business avoid considerable security troubles. To learn more, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.