Alvaka's Blog

I am flying back from a small, private and exclusive invitation-only conference in Chicago. This conference is only open to industry's most esteemed and established IT service providers. The private technology briefings, at this semi-annual event, provide the best updates on cool new stuff that solves real business problems.

This is a question posed to me by, Aaron Goldberg of Ziff Davis Publishing and Eric Lundquist of Ziff Davis Publishing, during an IBM sponsored webinar this morning.

The fundamental questions focused around two areas, starting with, "Do Information Technology (IT) shops need to staff and prep for 24x7 operations?" In a polling question, 81% said, “Yes” they do need to do that. The subsequent discussion revolved around what options IT shops have to do that since they normally don’t have the budget, nor the human resources, required to do server monitoring and application monitoring combined with after hours staffing and remediation of issues. One solution to avoid building your own, was to contract with a firm that can provide augmented support 16x5 or 1

If you are a business owner, CEO, CFO or otherwise ultimately responsible for Information Technology (IT) in your organization, here are a few questions that you may have asked yourself at some point. If my IT staff or service provider were to suddenly fall off the map or just not show up, for whatever reason, would my company be left in a ditch?

I wrote a short blog on some of the changes that were instituted by the passage of ARRA and it incorporated HITECH provisions. If you follow the link at the bottom of this entry, you can go to an interview that I did with Search Security on the subject of VARs and Business Associates. "In this edition of “Patrolling the Channel,” see why the designation of “business associate” has given McDonald additional compliance challenges. The executive VP talks about the technical and non-technical controls being implemented for HIPAA’s sake.

In consulting with so many clients, there are some things that just seem to be universal. One of those nearly universal truths, is the tendency for clients to mix and match or use the terms, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity interchangeably. While these two terms define activities that often parallel each other, they are in fact very different concepts. The confusion or mixing of the terms can lead to clients being misled, or even left at significant risk, due to improper planning.

Many were excited by the passing of Title XIII of ARRA, also known as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). It was billed as providing up to $22 billion dollars for taxpayer money to, "advance the use of health information technology." What was not so well trumpeted during all of the excitement, were the massive increases in enforcement, penalties, the changing of the HIPAA enforcement responsibility from CMS to the Office of Civil Right and the extension of the HIPAA Rules to business associates of covered entities.