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October 25, 2012 by Marius Z. Nepomuceno

Can Your Company Afford to Lose its Knowledge?

Hold on to your bits!

Welcome to the first in a series of posts on Information Security for Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). In this post, I want to describe why IT security is so important for any business today.

We have all experienced the loss of documents on our computers and gadgets at home, at work and while mobile.  We rarely worry about it – that is, until we lose something important and quickly call someone for help.

Data Security, defined by Wikipedia, “means protecting a database from destructive forces and the unwanted actions of unauthorized users.” In a broader sense, what drives data security is business continuity and data recovery. This can range from a system failure, to a cyber threat and to a natural disaster.

Security is ubiquitous in modern day life. Are you surprised with the numbers below from the Google search words?

Security: 2,510,000,000 results

Data security: 1,140,000,000 results

Network Security: 907,000,000 results

Cybercrime: 10,000,000 results

The collective knowledge across a company and all locations is its main competitive advantage.  Roberto Goizueta, the late CEO of Coca-Cola, famously said:

“All our factories and facilities could burn down tomorrow but you’d hardly touch the value of the company; all that actually lies in the goodwill of our brand franchise and the collective knowledge in the company.”

A company’s knowledge about its internal operations, processes, people and customers is the business.  Lose access to your network or data and the business quickly loses money.

Why do so many business invest so little in securing their data and protecting themselves from cybercrime? Cybercrime, according to this 2011 article, is a high growth industry, experiencing double-digit increases year after year.

A recent joint 2012 study between the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Symantec says, “There is a big disconnect between cybersecurity perception and reality at small and medium sized businesses.” Michael Kaiser, executive director of the NCSA, says:

77% of respondents said that their company was safe from the likes of hackers, viruses and malware, a massive 83% have no formal cybersecurity plan in place. Cybercriminals know that small businesses are less defended than large businesses and could appear as a very easy entry point for a lot of cyber criminals.” Laura Garcia-Manrique, vice president of SMB Customer Experience at Symantec says, “a small business is four times more likely to suffer a general malware attack than a larger organization.”

Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) do not have the same resources to protect themselves like large companies. Yet, a security breach and data loss can devastate an SMB and put them out of business. SMBs need to make data security a priority.

In a 2012 Cost of Cyber Crime Study, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by HP,

“The occurrence of cyber attacks has more than doubled over a three-year period, while the financial impact has increased by nearly 40 percent. The most costly cybercrimes continue to be those caused by malicious code, denial of service, stolen or hijacked devices, and malevolent insiders. When combined, these account for more than 78 percent of annual cybercrime costs per organization.”

 Annually, information theft accounts for 44 percent of total external costs, up 4 percent from 2011”. According to Websense Security Labs, Canada ranked second globally in 2011 for countries with the most phishing threats (see image below).

Much like securing physical assets, securing soft assets like a company’s data is crucial.

Data security and data theft is preventable and begins at the employee level. Every piece of data must be captured and made secure. For more on this, please come back for the Part 2 of my series on security for small and medium sized businesses. I will share strategies about how you can secure your data with minimal cost, time and effort.

Image sources here and here

September 28, 2012 by Veejay Makwana

How to maintain your Paperless Office?

In my previous blog post, I spoke about converting your “paper office” into a “paperless office”.  In this post, I will address the aftermath of the conversion.

Maintaining Data Integrity

After you have converted those mountains of paper documents into bits and bytes on a disk, you are likely seeing an increase in productivity.  You are able to see more patients in a day because the inefficiencies of pen to paper have been eliminated and the time to keep those documents sorted has been greatly reduced.  These new efficiencies are great but can quickly come to a halt if you aren’t maintaining your digital data and data networks.  The last thing you want is to discover all your data has been lost due to data corruption or disk failure; this should be your primary concern.  There should be a plan to guard against this, such as redundancies for your data and regular disk maintenance on the servers and workstations where your data is stored.

Some disk drives will have self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (S.M.A.R.T) built in to give you pro-active alerts about imminent disk failures. Your data should be kept on a redundant array of independent disks (R.A.I.D.) which depending on the R.A.I.D. level configured, data will replicate onto a secondary disk.  In the event the primary disk fails, the secondary Disk will take over so you can continue working.  Of course the R.A.I.D. array should be restored as quickly as possible!  To protect against data corruption on these disks, a disk check should be run no longer than a month apart and to further your redundancy, data should be backed up nightly to an external drive or cloud based backup service.

Most people who backup data recognize the importance and do it regularly.  A more important question to ask is: “Are they regularly checking their backups?”  How do you know your backup data is not corrupt?  Do you know if the data is being backed up at all?  While data backups are important, it is also important to have a plan in place that checks the integrity of your backups at regular intervals.  Otherwise, what good is having a backup?

Northeast Blackout of 2003

Disk failures and corruption easily happen during sudden power spikes, brown outs or black outs.  Some may recall the huge Northeast Blackout of 2003 and power outage that occurred throughout parts of Ontario, Canada and the Northeastern and Midwestern United States.  To protect your disks and the health of your server and workstations, they should be plugged into a UPS (uninterruptable power supply).  This provides battery backup to these devices and depending on the UPS, can be configured to gracefully shut down the server and workstations during extended blackouts.

Network Connectivity

What roads are to maintaining order and traffic flows, network maintenance keeps data flowing preventing bottlenecks and outages.  Clinics may not seem like a very complex network but when examined closely, do share similarities and hence important factors that must be considered.

Pre-Testing Equipment can give you useful information, from the retinal imaging cameras, OCT machine, visual fields machine and OPD scanners.  These modern devices can be connected to your network so you have the images and data immediately, rather than having the results printed out.  Some devices do require specific network settings for optimal network communication.  Believe it or not, even one misconfigured port on a network switch can take the whole network down and can often be the cause of slow speeds over the network.  Consequently, it is important to know about the device’s network interface capabilities and how the network port on the switch should be configured.

Voice over IP (VoIP) has become very popular over the last few years because of the affordability and cost savings on phone bills provided to their customers.  Offices that run their voice traffic over the same network as the rest of their data traffic need to consider the configuration of their network to allow for crisp clear voice calls without affecting data transmission, so it is not crawling.  These two different types of network traffic should be separated with quality of service given to voice traffic, while still maintaining enough bandwidth to pass data traffic without any sluggishness.

Some offices will choose to have a wireless access point or Wi-Fi to provide to their customers while they are in the waiting room.  Even if they secure the access point with a network encryption key (password) and only give patients the password, this is still a security risk if this traffic is not separated from the rest of your network.  Not only is it a security risk, users could slow down your network by hogging all the bandwidth.  For this reason, it is important to separate these users onto a separate virtual local area network with specific access and limited bandwidth.

This is the end of my three part series on the Paperless Office.  I hope the posts helped you think about the why and how of converting to a paperless office.  If you have a question or a concern that I did not address, please leave a comment below this blog post.  I will follow-up with you directly.

Thanks for reading!

 

Images here and here 

 

September 14, 2012 by Carmine Tiano

How to increase your Blackberry’s battery life with Application Resource Monitor?

If you ask a busy professional what they accomplished this past week, they will likely say, “Where did the time go?” More recently smartphone users are asking, “Why does my battery die so fast?”

Smart phones are now an integral part of a user’s daily life at home and at work.  Findings from a study called “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users” describe how consumer usage is growing quickly.  The video below shows the growth among users.

One of my biggest complaints about the new Blackberry Bold 9900 is battery life. As phones become lighter and more powerful, bulky batteries of the past will continue getting smaller. 

The Blackberry is well known for optimizing applications. However, third party apps are less efficient compared to built-in apps and drain your battery while running in the background.  A new and free utility offered to Blackberry users, called Application Resource Monitor (ARM) was designed to extend battery life by automatically closing resource intensive apps.

For users who forget to close apps, battery life can be saved with the Application Resource Monitor utility. The utility also provides an option to receive notifications about apps that may drain the battery instead of automatically turning them off.

Many users are curious to know if there is an equivalent automatic utility for closing iPhone apps running in the background? Currently, Apple only allows apps to be closed manually one at a time by accessing the multitask bar. Please go here to learn how to manually close apps running in the background on your iPhone.

If you have a question about a technology service, gadget or application and how you or your team can be more productive and competitive, please write to us at BusinessInsiderTips@manawa.net 

 

 

 

Images here and here

August 13, 2012 by Veejay Makwana

The Paperless Office: 3 Steps To Help You Get Started

“I get it … So, how do I go paperless?”

Let’s not forget the old adage, if you fail to plan, then plan to fail.  Having said that, a step-by-step plan ensures optimal success when converting to a paperless office.

Step 1: Getting the Right Stuff

The first step is to obtain the right computers and network hardware and correctly configure equipment.  This step is a plan unto itself and may warrant a future blog post.

Regardless of office size, it is important to carefully plan before implementation.  This means obtaining the right stuff, including software, hardware and the correct sequence of tasks to be performed.  Every office has unique needs and a skilled team of experts is recommended to provide strategic guidance, customization and implementation for the project.

Below is a basic checklist to follow before going paperless:

  • The appropriate ISP service and service plan has been purchased and is active. 
  • The network closet is clean, with patch panels and cables neatly dressed. 
  • All network equipment is setup and configured correctly with a secure firewall. 
  • The server is up and running with optimized hardware and compatible third-party software. 
  • Workstations have all necessary software installed and are configured on network. 
  • Power requirements for additional hardware have been met with an available battery backup in case of power failures. 
  • A data backup and recovery plan is documented in addition to contingency plans. 

As mentioned, planning and designing an optimal solution that benefits a business is complicated.  I recommend seeking expertise from a professional services firm that is both trustworthy and experienced.

After the network and hardware are properly setup in an office, the next step is the paper conversion.

Step 2: Beam Me Up: Paper Conversion

The second step is to convert all paper into digital format.  There are two schools of thought on this based on the amount of paper being converted into digital format.

Using the example of a smaller medical practice, if there are less than 3,000 patient files, the conversion will take approximately 4-5 days.

For a larger practice, it is recommended doing the conversion over a longer period to minimize stress and disruption.  One suggestion is to convert all patient data for patients booked one week before their appointment.  A more ambitious plan is to convert files one month before patient appointments, which will make the shift to a paperless environment faster.

Regardless of choice, the task will be easier by choosing a team to carry out the conversion.

While a cumbersome time-consuming process, a range of tools is available to assist a business in going paperless. The Wall Street Journal has an article called Ending the Paper Chase that discusses hardware devices and software tools to facilitate a smoother transition.

It is important to obtain a decent scanner that can scan both sides and multiple pages to speed up the conversion period.  Some scanners can scan to a searchable PDF format.  Otherwise, there are tools available that perform this task such as Adobe Acrobat X Pro and Nuance’s PDF Converter 8.  Searchable PDF’s will be important for the next step.  If you have many hand written documents, CVision Technologies has an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) solution for converting them into searchable PDFs.

At this stage, it is useful for an office to begin organizing and grouping files together.

Step 3: A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

The third step involves scanning all comment files into appropriately named folders.  Some examples include Accounting, Patient Data and Receipts.  As already mentioned, having an enthusiastic team is ideal when carrying out this task.  If you do not have a team, there are data entry services available for a reasonable cost to handle this.

You may have already researched several different EMR (Electronic Medical Records) solutions on the market and chosen one that meets your budget and needs.  My recommendation is to choose a solution that allows you to reference or link scanned patient information such as retinal images, X-Rays or any other relevant patient data normally contained on a paper documents. This solution is optimal because it allows all patient data to be found by one searchable name in the EMR, thereby saving considerable time.

Creating the actual patient file in the EMR needs to be done manually.  I am not aware of any EMRs that automatically fill in all patient fields by reading a scanned PDF.

At the same time, importing scanned documents into the EMR and then organizing those scanned documents into their applicable folders is an easy practical solution because they are in a searchable PDF format.

Before beginning this task, I recommend drawing a suitable folder structure that will makes sense and is intuitive for office staff.  It is ideal if everyone is in agreement, rather than the chaos that can result from individuals making their own folders and creating their own definitions.  It’s also important that the proper permissions are applied to the confidential folders so that they are visible only to those who require access.

Now that you are done with the implementation, the next step is to maintain your paperless office.  I’ll write more about this next time.

Admittedly, while I’ve outlined 3 steps, they are not simple and require significant planning and thinking.  Ultimately, the reduced stress and increased productivity, convenience and client satisfaction make the conversion to a paperless office well worth it. 

 Images here and here
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

August 3, 2012 by Matthew Held

Most Ever Connected Olympics Requires Big Technology Investment

For companies managing information technology at the London 2012 Olympics, the payoff could be quite big. 

Take for instance Atos, a French IT consultancy, one of the companies  managing information technology for the games.  Their  command centre overlooking London’s Docklands will have 450 technicians and support staff on hand, continuously monitoring screens.  As the Economist reports, two of the most important tasks are to create a database to handle the  accreditation system for all 250,000 athletes, trainers and hangers-on.  Secondly, every system must have backups, with some having  four for each Olympic event.   It helps to be reminded that Olympic events, for instance, like the Men’s 100-metre race, have no room for errors as one-tenth of a second can separate a gold from a silver medalist. 

Companies are taking extra precautions to ensure their people are on hand.  IT & engineering staff at several data centres monitored by Interxion will not have to worry about leaving work, subway delays and traffic jams during the London Olympics.  They will sleep in newly purchased pods at the data centres.  According to Wired Magazine, the 4 x 4 x 6.5 foot pods come with lockable doors, a power supply, LED lights and a magazine rack.

Data Center Sleeping Pods

London 2012 plans to be the most connected Olympics ever.  The numbers behind the huge  investment in IT network infrastructure is noteworthy.

According to the Data Center Knowledge website, some of the infrastructure numbers are:

  • British Telecom installing a fiber network for the 2,818 suites in the Olympic Village
  • Laying 5,500 kilometres of cables to support the network, which will transmit 60 Gigabits per second
  • The Olympics network will span 30,000 connections across 94 locations

Network infrastructure for Cisco Systems:

  • 2,200 switches
  • 1,800 wireless access points
  • 7,000 cable TV sockets
  • 16,500 telephones
  • 65,000 active network ports

 Streaming 

  • Nearly 20 percent of UK residents expect to stream some coverage on their PCs, laptops or tablets
  • The BBC predicts live footage, streamed to computers across Britain, will exceed a terabit  per second of traffic at peak times.  That equates to 1,500 people downloading a feature-length DVD-quality movie every minute.

Wireless

  • With up to 1 million visitors to London, the Wi-Fi network at the Olympic Park will handle an additional 100,000 users.

If the spectacular display of  lights, special effects and fireworks on the opening day is evidence of how technology is performing, the 2012 Olympics look to be a great success for the companies working so hard to make it happen.

Images here, here and here

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