Last April (2016) laid underscored the reason why businesses should not use Gmail.
On April 1st—yes, April Fool’s, Gmail caused many bosses (including myself!) problems. That was the day Gmail introduced the [now removed] “Gmail Mic Drop” function. The mic drop allowed users to “send and mic drop” an email that automatically attached a GIF of a minion—those weird little yellow creatures from Despicable Me.
Gmail’s prank had replaced the “send and archive” button, which lets a user close a conversation and archive the email thread, in exchange for an attached minion dropping a microphone before closing a conversation and archiving it.
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I want to briefly go through 4 questions to ask when determining whether you need an outsourced IT recovery solution. If you answer any of the following questions with a ‘NO’, you should seriously consider an outsourced solution.
Do you understand the business impact of downtime of your applications?
To sufficiently confirm that you understand consequences of application downtime, you need to have performed a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA allows you to understand the relative importance of each business application to your business operations. In particular, how application failure can affect different roles in your organization.
You also need to have mapped application inter-dependencies. In many situations, processes may require more than one application for successful completion. Understanding how different applications are linked to each other across your operational process network will paint you a clear picture of how important it is to your business. You need to understand how long your business can run without specific applications.
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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?
