Security is a topic that has been in the news recently far too often. If it’s not the showdown between the FBI and Apple (which is a whole other conversation) it’s the latest report out of Maryland, where MedStar Health was hit with a virus that infected the hospitals computer network.  The effect, however, spread much further than just the IT department. The extended outage has made the already difficult jobs of nurses and physicians even ...

Read More

As you prepare your Christmas checklist for those that you love, let’s not forget to include a stocking stuffer our old friend, Disaster Preparedness. After all, he never sleeps! Over the last decade, we’ve experienced a staggering increase in natural disasters as demonstrated in a recent FEMA chart (2013 not included).In our last Disaster Recovery segment, we discussed the building blocks of a Disaster Recovery program and did a high level overview of the first ...

Read More

With hurricane season looming around the corner, folks will soon be scrambling to dust off their disaster recovery plans, many of them untested, and many unexecutable.  With a three-fold increase in the number of average annual disasters since 1993, along with applicable elements of HIPAA and HITECH legislation, a growing concern of healthcare providers is fortifying their disaster posture before going to battle with the next catastrophe.In an ideal world, a comprehensive disaster recovery playbook would contain ...

Read More

After reading our CTO's blog on "Erosion", I began to reflect on my own Hurricane Sandy experience. In short, I lost power for three days, started getting water intrusion in my basement around the well pipe, took a stick through the back window of my car and, last but not least, when executing my superbly conceived "Disaster Plan”, started my generator, which instantly incinerated my cable modem, router and furnace controls.Now, after assessing the overall ...

Read More