Having not been home for a couple of weeks over the holiday season, upon coming back to a cold house in early January, I realized that my thermostat was doing a poor job regulating house temperature in a smart way. When I unlocked my front door, I noticed the house was awfully cold—I recalled setting the thermostat around 64 degrees Fahrenheit, but it seemed much colder in the house than that.
Come to find out the furnace had shut off at some point while we were gone. Without warning signs that something was malfunctioning. Without someone regularly monitoring the house temperature to make me even consider having someone check for a problem during the course of the 2 weeks I was gone. Without assurance that the house was running efficiently—that we weren’t using more energy than we needed to, but that temperatures didn’t get too low to cause problems either.
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Are You Aware of HIPAA Penalties?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has established rules protecting individual identifiable health information and safeguards to maintain confidentiality, integrity and availability of protected health information (PHI). HIPAA non-compliance isn’t something you can ignore, as in-compliance can come with severe penalties and consequences.
It doesn’t matter what healthcare sector your business falls into—if you store medical records or patient data, you may be violating HIPAA compliance if you aren’t taking certain data security precautions. With hacking and data breaches are at an all-time high, I want to make sure everyone understands how serious HIPAA consequences can be.
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It isn’t something you can simply ignore. If you remain in-compliant, you risk strict penalties. Today, I wanted to spend a little time delimiting what it would look like if you continue to remain in-compliant.
Penalties from Payment Processors and Credit Card Companies For In-compliance—Certainly grow to expect penalties from payment processors and credit card companies. The risk you take is hefty fines of over $100,000 (!) if you are found in-compliant.
If you’re kept on as a client (some companies are ditching vendors that are not compliant), you should expect higher transaction fees, which will cut into your bottom line. One way or another, if your business is not compliant, you eventually risk higher costs.
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Do you ever wonder why businesses—credit unions, accountants, healthcare facilities—keep falling victim to malicious ransomware attacks? The reason is they simply aren’t doing enough to keep criminals out. 9 out of 10 businesses fail to have a ‘smart firewall’ to protect your team from infecting your networks with malicious viruses (think cryptowall, for example).
And even if you are training your team, what happens when someone ACCIDENTALLY clicks on a bad link or lands on the wrong webpage? Why not proactively protect your team from malicious attacks rather than solely relying on employee training to keep your business, your data and your customers safe?
Does your team dread company meetings?
My teams have realized that having effective meetings—specifically Level 10 meetings—make the difference between wasting time, tangential discussion and hee-hawing and solution-driven meetings with actionable outcomes. Earlier this month one of our team leads, Craig Blanzy, discussed how our team meetings have become effective strategy-driven and problem-focused sessions aimed to resolve on-going and new issues rather than a platform for unfocussed banter.
What we have learned (and what Craig helped communicate to other IT service providers) is that IT departments need to communicate effectively to not only resolve user issues, but to prevent old and new issues from occurring in the future.
Does your IT support have an ingrained process to keep your tickets low? DynOps presenter, Seth Goodell, explains how an optimized ticket flow process saves your users downtime and headaches when resolving their issues.
When your business has computer problems, are you sitting around waiting on your IT support to get issues resolved? Do they regularly contact you with updates? When you submit a ticket, are you sure that the guy working on it has you in mind—with his top priority mission to get your issue resolved?
Realize that IT guys (myself included!) often like to solve problems. That means, we’ll spend hours—even days!—thinking about and figuring out issues. And, in my experience, that is how many IT departments or IT managed service providers tend to work. The technician that is helping you resolve an issue is spending countless hours working on your problem.
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