If you are a healthcare covered entity or a business
associate to a healthcare provider you better get on your encryption game. If you have not done your risk assessment you
better do that, too. Here is a good article
on the topic of the HIPAA Omnibus Rule that took effect on March 26th,
2013. I will lead off with this quote
from an article titled HIPAA Compliance in the Spotlight by
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee who I have been following for years.
“Experts point out
that the lack of timely risk assessment has also played a key role in
organizations failing to take other important measures, such as widespread
implementation of encryption.
OCR’s “wall of shame” website shows that of the 556 major breaches
that have occurred since September 2009, more than half have involved the loss
or theft of unencrypted computing devices (see: Breach
Tally: Encryption Still an Issue).”
http://www.healthcareinfosecurity.com/hipaa-compliance-in-spotlight-a-5630
My team at Alvaka Networks has been working hard creating
a family of managed HIPAA compliance oriented services to help you meet your regulatory
obligations. I am proud of the new
encryption service they created for our covered entity and business associate
clients. Call or e-mail me if you have
questions at 949 428-5005 or oli@alvaka.net.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.