Efficient HIPAA Security Compliance Measures

HIPAA, i.e. the Health Portability and Accountability Act, sets up a standard for securing all sensitive patient data. Any enterprise that owns patient details should make sure that all the needed network, physical and process safety measures are in right in place and followed adequately. This comprises of Covered Entities (CE), i.e. anyone who offers treatment, payment and operations in healthcare. It also includes business associates, i.e. anyone with the admission to the patient data and offers assistance in payment, operations and treatment. The HIPAA privacy rule addresses the accessing, saving and sharing of personal and medical data of an entity. On the other hand the HIPAA security rule defines national security standards to secure the health information received, created, transmitted and maintained electronically.

Fulfilling HIPAA compliance requirements

Regardless of the size of your enterprise or IT team, your IT workers might not be able to conduct proper HIPAA security compliance rule on their own. You might need expert HR specialists to help you in the process.

To make this job easy for you leading market players in human resource solutions and human capital management have come up with a comprehensive HIPAA privacy compliance assistance under their legal compliance scheme. This comprises welfare and health benefit plans as well. These companies harmoniously blend new age technology with expert service teams, and assists in the delivery HIPAA compliance requirements in a cost-efficient way. This can best be defined as “strategic simplicity”. Services provided by these companies are as follows:-

  • Single point of contact for all the benefits management requirements

  • Resourceful transactions

  • Easily available information

     

Furthermore, HIPAA security compliance measures offered by these companies, when executed yields the following benefits:-

  • Streamlines the monitoring of health insurance claims and helps to manage expenses related to those claims via the use of national standards

  • Offers patients a greater control over and access to their medical data

  • Secures individual health data from any sort of risks of disclosure through the enforcing and setting of standards

  • Enhance efficiency in health care delivery by standardizing electronic data interchange

     

Though initially, HIPAA security compliance comes across as centering only on IT operations, it also identifies numerous constituent elements to the total process that can be achieved in majority of enterprises only with the contribution of human resources and professionals, who are well versed with the significance of HIPAA privacy compliance. When you partner with the leading names in HR solutions for HIPAA compliance you can never go wrong with the HR requirements.

Read Also On: Employee OnboardingHuman Resource Solution

 

A Closer Look at PCI DSS Compliance

Gone are the days of paper money as it is the age of plastic money. From paying bills, booking tickets to buying groceries, people now depend on debit cards, credit cards, prepaid cards, e-purse cards, ATM cards, or POS cards. Though on one hand it has made life easier,on the other hand, it has enhanced security risks considerably. 

We live in an age where every single personal detail is worth money. For instance, in the case of plastic money, everything from Primary Account Number (PAN), Pin Verification Value (PVV), security code, service code, expiration date to cardholder name are sensitive data. With Scammer severy where looking for the right opportunity to strike and get away with the stolen personal information, the onus is upon all those who store, process and transmit credit card information to take measures to prevent the misuse of credit card data. And the best way to accomplish it is by complying with PCI compliance guidelines.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of comprehensive requirements developed by major credit card companies to prevent the misuse of credit card information. Complying with these requirements would help merchants and service providers to provide a safe shopping experience for customers.PCI DSS was originally the security programs of fivemajor credit card brands namely MasterCard, American Express, Visa Card, JCB and Discover. In 2006, the companies aligned their individual security programs to form the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The PCI DSS guidelines consist of 6 control objectives and 12 requirements namely:

1) Build and Maintain a Secure Network
i) Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
ii) Do not use vendor–supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters

2) Protect Cardholder Data
i) Protect stored cardholder data
ii) Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks

3) Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program
i) Use and regularly update anti–virus software
ii) Develop and maintain secure systems and applications

4) Implement Strong Access Control Measures
i) Restrict access to cardholder data by business need–to–know
ii) Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
iii) Restrict physical access to cardholder data

5) Regularly Monitor and Test Networks
i) Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
ii) Regularly test security systems and processes

6) Maintain an Information Security Policy
i) Maintain a policy that addresses information security

Merchants and service providers can easily ensure compliance with PCI DSS by deploying a PCI compliance management solution, but most fail to do so. In the second part of this article, we will look at PCI validation requirements and the consequences of not being PCI compliant.

Read  more on - HIPAA and HITECH, vendor management solutions 

How to Ensure Effective IT Risk Management?

Failure to recognize, evaluate and alleviate IT risks can make a business prone to grave security breaches and financial losses. With our economy being progressively more reliant on the Internet and IT systems, making the risks in these systems visible is very important. The main objective of IT risk management is to enable the organization to accomplish itsmissionby providing better security systems that store, process, or transmit organizationalinformation. Quantifying the IT security risks that support remediation activities is the primary focus of the IT security risk management process.

With the growth of advanced malware attacks, there has been a need for organizations to adopt a smart approach when it comes to assessing IT risks and managing compliance.Organizations need to understand that IT risk management is critical to achieve success in business. The inherent risks show up in complex and subtle ways, making IT risk management a difficult process to communicate and manage effectively. 

When it comes to managing information technology (IT) security, the difference between success and failure is determined by how proactive an organization is in addressing threats. A company can achieve high levels of security and compliance only when technology and the people are aligned in the identification, assessment and remediation of IT risks.

To gain a competitive advantage, companies can adopt an effective compliance risk management with governance, risk and compliance. So the first step in effectively managing IT risks is to detect and categorize the IT assets that contain vulnerable and classified information. On identifying the assets, it is possible to then assign controls and mitigate the risks to acceptable levels. Of course, prior to all this it is essential to understand the principal matters that affect the business stakeholders. 

An effective compliance risk management program involves people, policies, processes, and technology. With an effective and end-to-end compliance and risk management software, there can be a reduction in business and IT risk, reduction in compliance costs, with also a simultaneous increase in ROI. With the right tools, IT organizations can take the lead in identifying, assessing, remediating and managing IT risk.

The result of this allows companies to increase network security, reduce management costs and achieve greater compliance by effectively assessing and classifying IT risk.While organizations are looking to secure efforts and improve the visibility of risk throughout the enterprise, there are a number of risk management solutions that can help in understanding the security status of an organization, and consequently results in effective IT risk Management. 

Read on - IT Compliance, ISO compliance 

Combating Phishing Attacks with an Efficient Solution

The rapid adaptation of mobile devices and wireless networks has increased the grounds for newer and much more organized forms of cybercrime. With highly sophisticated and targeted security attacks becoming the norm, ‘Phishing’ has become one of the most commonly employed techniques to spread malware. Unlike other popular attack vectors, phishing requires very little technological capital. Today phishing is quite a serious problem as it affects not only people but also the organization that the victims work for. Phishing attackers can target unsuspecting employees to access the critical company details.

Tackling phishing attacks can be greatly challenging as phishing emails are usually very convincing, and it is hard to distinguish them from genuine emails. In order to keep up with evolving security risks, it is imperative for the risk management and control mechanisms to be dynamic against such social engineering attacks. Protection from phishing is possible an anti-phishing solution that can help companies to enhance their security levels through comprehensive user behavioral analysis. While there are numerous solutions available to offer protection from technology attacks, the two most vulnerable areas remain the people and process. As attackers are well aware that these are the most difficult zones to guard, more often than not, a strategic phishing attack particularly targets these two areas. The most important protection against phishing is constant vigilance and moderate skepticism.

Anti-phishing software works in a simple but very useful way, regardless of whether it is integrated into the web browser or operates in a standalone way. It works by identifying phishing content which may be contained in an email and is normally used in concurrence with your email service. These programs store common phishing scams and phishing sites. While some solutions may give you the option of staying or leaving, there are some types of software automatically redirect you. In the case of a browser-based program, an alert may pop up at the top of the browser's window. It is always a good idea never to rely on end-users to run malware checks.

 

While there is no doubt that phishing attacks will continue to rise, end users definitely deserve real-time protection from phishing and other malicious websites. An anti-phishing tool, along with other progressive website detection capabilities is a step in the right direction within the information security industry. Invest in a solution that aids an organization to protect their employees, from becoming phishing victims. Being able to detect and eliminate these increasingly sophisticated can aid the organization in quantifying the potential risks from social engineering.

 

Read also on: Phishing protection

Fulfilling the Critical IT needs with Compelling Compliance Solutions

The issue of IT risks will continue to plague all business organizations if the associative people, processes and technology are not taken into consideration. Negligence or delays in installing stringent and appropriate IT compliance and security measures have revealed its ugly side and made many succumb to horrifying ends. Lack of unawareness amongst the employees, willful infiltration to cause damages and ineffective practices to control the vendors and business associates have rendered permanent damages to many prestigious organizations.

Many large organizations with fragmented units have displayed a weak character in administering a comprehensive and competent IT risk management process. This has cost them punitive penalties that will not be forgotten easily. The smaller organizations fail to run an efficient IT compliance and threat management system due to lack of funds to employ sophisticated and expensive solutions. Thus it has become a matter of grave concern for large as well as small businesses to find out an efficient and cost-effective solution that can deliver concrete and affirmative results.

The automated enterprise compliance management software is the best tool that can help you address the vulnerabilities and overcome the challenges proficiently in a dynamically volatile environment. This software is intelligently engineered to detect all the risks, evaluate their level of intensity for prioritizing them and addressing them in the best possible manner. It provides real-time updates of the compliance status and any changes in the environment giving you an opportunity to make robust preparations in advance.

The software provides automated and integrated solutions that supports all compliance frameworks, and assists in the execution of a smooth vulnerability management process. It provides a centralized repository for collecting all compliance related data and mapping them with the existing compliance regulations. It also provides controlled access to only authorized users after they have been verified and authenticated rigorously. It keeps a consistent watch on the online activities and sends alerts immediately if there is any deviation. The software also provides the facility of scheduling regular audits and maintains an exhaustive audit log.

The enterprise compliance management software also strictly monitors the activities of your business associates and vendors. All online transactions and data are put through exacting vulnerability assessment procedures to ensure that no gaps or leakages are spared. It increases the visibility regarding the entire compliance process and gives you an idea about the existent status of your business. This helps you to assess the weak areas and concentrate on them to build a highly secured environment.  As the software facilitates an overall effective governance, risk and compliance process you experience better results with reduced costs.

Read on - IT governance,  risk and compliance, GLBA Compliance

Overcome Translation Woes with Website Translation Software

Times have changed from the period when different societies of the world lived a secluded life, with little knowledge of what happened in other cultures.  If they heard anything at all it would be days, weeks or even months after the occurrence of the actual event or incident.  However, today the advent of the Internet and its paraphernalia has transformed the world completely. The Internet has made it possible for different civilizations to come together. It has created a network for people belonging to different races, cultures, societies and civilizations to communicate. The Internet has bridged the cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries that once existed.

The Internet and the new media have provided a platform for people around the world to share their ideas, opinions and thoughts about any subject under the sun. Irrespective of where they are located, people can voice their opinions through blogs, community boards, podcasts, websites, and other user-generated media.  As Howard Rheingold points out "People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk." That is to say, because of the Internet and the new media people can do anything and everything irrespective of where they are located and what language they speak.

Though on one hand, the Internet has made it possible for people to transcend geographical boundaries and eliminate cultural differences to express themselves, it has on the other hand has added pressures on the companies owning website to come up with a solution to make content available in multiple languages quickly and profitably. The success of any website depends on attracting and retaining of site visitors as more visits means more revenue for the company who owns the website. Hence, it is highly essential to ensure that the content is translated accurately into multiple languages in near real time. Moreover, today’s community content is what drives markets and global buying decisions. People’s purchasing decisions largely depend on the ratings and reviews of the consumers. This makes it even more necessary to invest in a translation technology that can translate comments and new content into multiple languages in quick time.

Depending on human translators alone would not be a feasible option as the translators would not be able to match quantity with quality. Either quantity or quality would suffer in the process which is something unacceptable in today’s competitive environment. With millions of pages to be translated into multiple languages, companies who own websites must deploy online language translation software if they want to post the content shortly after it is received.

Another factor that necessitates the need of localization software is that most of the content is loosely structured and is often full of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and colloquial phrases. For human translators, it is a big challenge to overcome but for the website translation software, it is simple.

Read Also On: Localization Software

Vendor Management: A Structured Approach for Effective Communication

Globalization has provided organizations to expand their wings to regions far beyond the geographical boundaries. However, as the organization expands, there arises the need to meet the ever-changing demands of a wider customer base, which further demands for faster delivery of products and services which would eventually lead to higher profit revenues and customer loyalties in the long run. Nevertheless, in the entire lifecycle of the business process, vendors are the vital components for success of any business. 

Vendor management is a structured approach to establish an ongoing communication channel with the core aim of alleviating risks, receive excellent service and increased value from a supplier during the business process. Such vendor management services besides ensuring quality services from the vendor also provides as a forum to address business changes. With the aid of key performance indicators (KPI’s) organizations measure vendor performance against the service level expectations.  

However, the crux of the situation is identification and selection of right vendors. Gartner’s research on vendor management provides organizations with the know-how for vendor selection enabling organizations to manage vendor contracts for efficient performance. Today with technology having a strong footing in every industry sector vendor management solutions have also taken the IT way. 

Vendor management system, a web based application features order distribution, consolidated billing and enhanced reporting capability. Business houses manage and procure temporary staffing services and contract labor use this software. In the financial industry, vendor management ensures risk assessment to eliminate any third-party risks. Further to keep up with the trying times of the vendor management roadmap for the industries, leading service providers have developed vendor management solutions.  

The vendor management software will facilitate organizations to mange the risk-based vendor selection, centralized document management and remediation management in a very effective way. Such solutions will help enterprises to improve vendor collaboration. Further the vendor management services offered by these leading services providers include automated monitoring and management of sensitive data and technical controls, empowers mangers to handle risk, assess the vendor risk and derive IT compliance and risk ratings, measure the compliance levels and take appropriate actions in case of vendor non-compliance.  

However, one of the key success factor associated with good vendor management, is recognizing vendor compliance. As technological innovations turned to cloud based technology, the leading service providers have developed state-of-art cloud-based automated IT security and compliance management solution which easily adopt all security, IT governance and compliance management functions into its framework.

Read on - HIPPA compliance, PCI compliance management

 

Resourceful Decisions with Social Media Analytics

Retaining your customer’s attention by providing engaging services is the status quo in the present environment. A free and enticing market is responsible for the customer’s limited attention span and it is an uphill task to keep the customers from straying. Thus you need to employ strategies that help you deliver inspiring performances and showcase novel traits. This can only be achieved when you have tools that help you capture critical information about the customers, their interests and requirements.

 

Requirements change drastically and you need an efficient operation that can change its course and plan actions in alignment with the most recent changes in the market. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms provide you with unlimited opportunities and information. It is extremely necessary to identify your target audience correctly so that you do not waste your time and efforts on winning the wrong targets.

 

Once you have identified your target audience and your prospects you have to keep a constant watch on their activities to understand their requirements and their expectations so that you can deliver unmatched quality services and win their confidence. It is crucial to have accurate information instantly as it enables you to make important decisions that will show positive results and garner more loyal customers. It is the social media analytics tools that provide you with relevant and prompt information on the latest market events and trends.

 

Social media analytics drives the business effectively and helps in identifying the revenue enhancing opportunities. It is with the help of these analytics you can assess the current trends and the requirements of your customers. Analytics also help you view your status in the market. It provides your progress report and shares important inputs on what and how to make changes so that you can impress your customers with better performances.

 

The social media analytics tools give you a critical insight into the engagement metrics that will help keep your customers engaged for a long time. This is especially beneficial if you are associated with the social gaming market. The intelligent social analytics provided by these tools help you to develop games as per the expectation of your customers ensuring greater retention.

 

The competition benchmarks are very high and if you want to survive in this environment you have to keep reinventing your strategies to deliver appealing performances. It is a tough and painful experience to keep your business going on in such adverse conditions. The assistance of proficient tools is a must to make steady progress without any scathing experiences.

 

Know more on: Facebook analytics

 

Significance of Website Translation

Every business needs to effectively communicate with their prospective clients, globally or nationally, sometimes in a language that is not their own. Communication is the essence of every enterprise and in order to make this communication effective, language has a huge role to play. This is especially true if you are selling your services and products online, and are not present in person to go into further detail. In such a situation, it is important that your website content be the main communicator of your business. Research highlights that people are inclined to read and trust websites that have content in their native languages. This is one of the main reasons why most businesses and enterprises are making a shift in website translation to usher in online business from their target as well as probable customers.

Website translation plays a significant role in increasing your online customer base and goes beyond territorial barriers. When your website is accessible in various languages, there is a greater chance of increase in web traffic. The challenge for any website is to bring forth the level of automation that allows it to function profitably and making sure that the scale and automation add value to the online visitors. If there is not enough value, the readers either will spend very little time on the site or will not participate in any conversations.

Today, community content rules the market and influences global purchase decisions. Therefore, the successful way to make any content useful for the masses is to use an efficient translation technology. This technology makes the content available in multiple languages, irrespective of its original language. The aim of most websites having community content is to achieve certain goals. If this is what you aim to do, then it is essential to ensure that there is valuable information on your website to attract visitors on an ongoing basis. The time that a user spends on a website, functions on three important parameters. They are:

* How interesting is the data shared on the webpage?

* How significant is the information shared on the webpage?

* How connected does the reader feel to the information on the webpage?

Today, there are eminent service providers of website translations and website localization software that caters to these above mentioned community content targets and challenges in an efficient manner. These companies offer online visitors the same community contributed data, irrespective of the language they speak. Website translation solutions offered by them is cost efficient in nature and allows the enterprises to translate the entire content in real-time to attract a wide audience. The language translation tools and products offered learn to translate by example. This trains the software to produce meaningful, fluent website translations from the grammatically incorrect, unstructured and colloquial content generally found on certain community content websites.

Read Also On: Software Localization

Addressing Storage Needs with a Competent Unified Storage Solution

Most likely to become the customary storage platform in the data center, Unified storage is said to be both the present and the future of data storage. It is a significant tool that helps address many data center challenges and is a perfect data center solution for increasing storage efficiency as well as improving business flexibility while also lowering the total cost of storage. The appeal of a unified storage product is in the underlying disks that can be presented as multiple storage protocols, in a way that a large amount of disk resources will not be necessary for each storage domain. Unified storage products can offer a lot of features beyond simple storage resources.

 

Unified storage is most beneficial when both file and block access applications are required and particularly well suited for growing businesses that are adding servers and increasing their IT capabilities. Unified storage allows the provisioning of the highest levels of performance to the most critical applications while consolidating all storage on a single platform, and offers plenty of room to scale upwards as needed. Efficient solutions have fully integrated features such as mirroring, replication and data migration that is essential to keep the business running.

 

The Unified Storage platform is a cost effective storage solution because of its lower initial capital investment and relatively low operation cost. They are also considered to be more cost-effective than a single platform storage solution such as NAS or SAN, while providing the same level of reliability as dedicated file or block storage systems.The initial deployment can be small and allows for expansion over time. It also allows you to share the resources with the combination of file and block storage for different applications. Unified storage is highly scalable, and hence businesses can add and arrange as many hard drives as needed for the performance and largest amount of free space.

 

With a low barrier of entry for different types of IT projects, a competent unified storage solution uses industry-leading technologies to maximize storage assets, improve efficiencies, work with your existing infrastructure – and deliver flexibility to leverage future technologies. By incorporating a solid state drive into a storage architecture that has performance as one of its goals, companies can improve performance, increase capacity, and save money. Businesses looking to double their storage needs within a year or two, and have applications that require file-based access and block-based access, unified storage may be the ideal choice.

 

Read Also On: Storage ServerData Center SolutionsCustom Computer