Tag Archives: big data

Why Cybersecurity is Important For Small Businesses

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Most small businesses think themselves beneath notice in the larger corporate world. After all, without the need for IT systems or significant infrastructure, there is less to manage and fewer vulnerabilities to address. Anything related to technology is often an afterthought for small businesses, and many make the mistake of believing that cyber threats are not a potential issue.

The unfortunate reality is that cybercriminals are more than willing to prey on small- to mid-sized businesses, even with bigger targets available. Widespread adoption of technology has made just about every enterprise a potential target. Given the lack of focus on technological infrastructure and fewer resources to dedicate to systems monitoring or recovery after a breach, these organizations are especially vulnerable. And every company has data worth stealing, to sell or use as leverage. The loss of any sensitive information can cost a company in both reputation and capital.

For small businesses, a bit of investment in cybersecurity can keep records safe and ensure that larger losses don’t happen down the line. There’s no need for a dedicated IT team to take necessary precautions when it comes to adopting new technology or infrastructure. The first step is acknowledging that, while small businesses are vulnerable, they are not without options for their own protection.

Many cybersecurity breaches are the result of internal error—I can’t emphasize this enough. As a result, controlling for human mistakes such as weak passwords, clicking on risky emails, and using mobile devices on unsecured networks can go a long way. Many do not realize how many points of vulnerability exist. Small businesses should ensure that the tools in place are easy to use for employees that may not be familiar with these matters.

Mobile devices are such a massive point of vulnerability that it’s worth dedicating time to examine all of the ways that they can go wrong. Between the difficulty inherent in managing them, the risk of public wifi, and employees bringing devices from home, small businesses will have to account for every possible attack surface. Consistent regulation is necessary to ensure that personal and business devices stay safe no matter where they go.

For that matter, small businesses should consider regulating access to certain systems and technology. Though they may not have an IT department or dedicated standards for who can access what, these organizations should consider which systems each employee has a consistent need for. If an employee doesn’t require a system to get their work done, they should not have access.

Planning for a cyberattack should also account for the worst-case scenario of a breach occurring and ease the recovery process. Making backups of everything digital is the best and easiest way that a small business can protect themselves in the event of a breach and allow for the least downtime when something goes wrong. The investment to create on- and off-site backups is minimal, but the safety it provides is huge.

This is only a small sample of the tactics that small businesses can consider when investing in cybersecurity. VPNs, software audits, and proven antivirus software can also provide an additional line of defense. However, any small business should recognize that precautions do not guarantee safety, and may want to consider investing in the services of a third-party cybersecurity firm to assess risk levels and provide scalable solutions. Technology will become even more involved in business, and safe adoption is important for businesses of all sizes.

 

How Data Improves Patient Health

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Good compliance and patient engagement are two objectives in the healthcare world that converge more than one would think. Recent health trends have created patients more invested in their own health and willing to work with care providers to meet their objectives. This is outstanding for medical professionals looking to create a solid foundation for their patients and keep them as healthy as possible. However, it is all too easy to get caught up in a fad and make poor decisions, so another burgeoning aspect of patient engagement centers around correcting common misconceptions and getting individuals back on the right track.

In contrast, compliance is a process that happens beyond the perception of patients. As I’ve discussed in the past, an increase in sharing data also increases the need to secure systems and ensure that information is not compromised. However, safely giving patients access to their own data can help empower healthcare providers and patients alike.

While the mass exchange of data, both internally and to patient portals and other healthcare institutions, creates more points where it can be stolen, it also leads to opportunities to educate patients and involve them in the process. The increase in IoT wearables for patients that can track biological metrics also contributes to patient engagement as well as research. Some of these wearables, despite being an ever-present aspect of the lives of some individuals, do not provide data to the people that use them. Freeing up access to this data increases the number of ways that a patient can help sustain their own health.

This is, in many ways, the central premise of patient engagement. There is no one way to instill a desire for self-improvement in patients. The only thing that healthcare providers can do is give them the freedom and the tools to monitor their own health. Patient portals, for instance, give individuals access to their own records, allowing them to do the legwork of tracking their progress over time. Other systems may remind patients to adhere to medication schedules, or help work them through things like physical therapy.

It then falls to providers to achieve good compliance in order to safely give patients leeway to create the foundation for good health. In a competitive industry, a healthcare organization can fall behind if they do not provide a positive experience for patients—to say nothing about what can happen if compliance is not met.

These care providers stand at a crossroads, and they must decide in what ways they will innovate to improve patient outcomes. Compliance should not be a process of checking off boxes for the sake of staying in business—it should be leveraged as a strategic tool to reevaluate aging systems and promote engagement among patients. There are a plethora of other benefits as well, and savvy organizations can use compliance as an opportunity to rethink the way they conduct IT, saving costs and setting up better agility in the long term.

In short, the technology exists to help patients take control of their lives—but it’s up to organizations to adopt it in a safe way that still remains compliant. It may sound strange to some medical professionals to fixate on technology in this way, but the ideal of good patient engagement can only be reached if the systems behind it function seamlessly.

The New Age of Data Compliance

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The constant advance of tools necessary to generate and share data has created an environment in which developments are made by increments and security measures struggle to keep up with the latest variety of cyber attack. Indeed, many corporations have fallen victim to these new threats, and even a small breach can cost a company dearly in both money and reputation. Perhaps the most egregious example of this has been the recent Equifax breach, which compromised customer information and sparked a discussion about the efficacy of cybersecurity.

As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that’s where information compliance comes in. It’s worth noting that compliance is not the same thing as cybersecurity. While security is IT-centric and often a futile effort due to the ever-changing nature of threats, compliance simply involves promoting best practices in corporate communities to prevent a potential breach. A staggering number of cyber attacks are made possible due to the negligence of employees, and it’s up to corporate leadership to ensure that all are informed of the ways they can prevent a click from turning into a catastrophe.

The benefits of compliance are manyfold. Again, the difficulty in implementing security solutions that account for a business’s needs, budget, and information distribution means that compliance is more important than ever. This is also due to in-house IT often being outmoded; there’s a good chance that, if your company does not work in technology, that better out-of-house options are available. Additionally, reducing the risk of a cyberattack is valuable from a legal standpoint. Compliance also helps provide thorough documentation that allows for a better response in the event of an attack.

So how does a business leader implement good compliance practices in an impactful way? It can often be difficult to steer an entire business in this direction, especially considering that one case of negligence can lead to disaster. Many make the mistake of believing that any such initiatives should be IT-led when in fact the department should just guide teams in the right direction rather than wasting time micromanaging the entire effort.

Education is an important step in the right direction. Even with thorough countermeasures in place, a simple email phishing scheme can spread quickly if not avoided. Recognizing fraudulent emails is a great topic of conversation, as is creating strong passwords. This may require giving employees access to certain files or documents on an as-needed basis. It may seem like an unnecessary hassle, but it cuts down on vulnerability and allows for the original threat to be isolated and tracked.

Of course, even if all of this information is imparted to employees, there’s still the matter of convincing all staff members to abide by it. I cannot stress enough the importance of a business being “all-in” when it comes to compliance. Therefore, change should start with leaders and work its way down. The tools necessary to ensure compliance should also improve the quality of an employee’s life; if they are forced to take extra steps, they are far less likely to adopt these new measures. Thoroughly research solutions to compliance and work to automate as much as possible. Check websites pertaining to your industry for more information about compliance guidelines and ways to safely share information. Governmental regulations should also be researched and observed.

Ensuring proper compliance can be a difficult task, but far worse is the prospect of lost or corrupted data. It is up to corporate leaders to choose to adopt a culture of compliance and enforce the standards that continue to become more and more necessary in the wake of devastating cyber attacks.

IoT and Cloud Computing: A Revolutionary Relationship

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When tracing the taxonomy of breakthroughs in modern technology, two concepts stand as major stems in terms of progressive innovation: the cloud and the internet of things (IoT). The former has revolutionized the ways in which we store, share, analyze, and manage data across a large user base, speeding up the efficiency and productivity of many industries worldwide. The latter, a concept referring to the connectivity of devices across a potentially widespread network, as changed our perception of interactivity, and it too has revamped many aspects of the working world, from interconnected law enforcement resources to evolving possibilities surrounding smart cities.

Both the cloud and IoT, in themselves, are exciting and reflective of a seemingly limitless array of uses. However, what’s even more fascinating are the ways in which the two concepts are being utilized simultaneously, creating a relationship of vast potential.

Cloud complements

Cloud computing acts as a natural complement to IoT initiatives, mainly since both concepts strive to “increase efficiency in everyday tasks.” In simple terms, IoT’s basic functionality creates a large amount of data, and cloud computing essentially gives this data a “pathway” to travel upon. In an office with a growing dependence on connected technology, for instance, the cloud’s presence can help to facilitate stronger collaboration and quicker data accessibility, allowing workers to access this data both remotely and on location.

Symbiotic security

Both the cloud and IoT have been criticized in the past for potential security concerns, leading some to question their functionality and safety. Respective security debates aside, the IoT/cloud relationship is undeniably fruitful in terms of increased security and privacy measures. The basic nature of IoT has led to an increased emphasis on several aspects of functional infrastructure, namely connectivity, reliability, and computing power. The cloud, in turn, can act as a “backbone” of sorts, helping companies to address these points of interest by means of application programming interfaces (APIs) and backend databases.

Improved functionality

Since IoT is still technically a fledgling technological movement in several regards, its general handling has presented a lack of standards, which has subsequently led to breakdowns in manufacturer communication as well as device integration. However, the cloud can help to sharpen pre-existing IoT systems in terms of their fluidity and architecture. Often, data sets within current IoT systems are “siloed on separate servers,” and their accessibility suffers as a result. Cloud implementation can allow these servers to connect in a more seamless manner, cutting back on data stagnation and ultimately providing these servers with more value. In short, the cloud is able to make the already speedy IoT even faster, all while strengthening its functionality.

Adapting to Data as a CIO

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The data revolution has put companies in an interesting position—swamped with information, it is now their responsibility to ascertain actionable insights as fast as possible to avoid falling behind. It’s a challenge to keep up—while there are plenty of tools for collecting big data, and plenty to analyze it as well, the sheer variety can overwhelm a CIO not prepared for the influx.

Because of this, data agility is king. Anyone can collect large amounts of data, but it takes a skill to translate this data into something that companies can take advantage of. Cloud platforms and databases such as Hadoop can help this effort in many ways, but it still falls to the CIO to track recent innovations and keep current. This in of itself requires a strong knowledge of data best practices; no company can adopt every new innovation, but picking and choosing the right scalable data infrastructure can ease the burden of adapting as time goes on.

A big part of a CIO’s responsibility to agile data is choosing a cloud platform that’s right for their business. Different individuals and stakeholders may have a diverse array of opinions on which is best. For instance, Google Cloud Platform may be preferred by a company’s data scientists for its machine learning capabilities, whereas the integration capability offered by Azure may be a good choice for developers. In cases like these, where a company will have to serve a variety of cloud users, it may be smart to consider a multicloud infrastructure to accommodate for as many needs as possible. This approach, though potentially more costly, can ensure that companies are able to harness the developments of each of these platforms in the future.

Beyond infrastructure, other tools exist to help a company maximize its data agility. Apache Drill is one such tool that circumvents the need for IT assistance to query data. It’s an SQL query engine that avoids the problems associated with schema creation while being ANSI SQL:2003 compliant. This and other tools like it are the key to gaining data insight as quickly as possible by cutting down on cycle time.

And concerns about data processing have changed over time. Before, hand coding data architecture was more common, and though it may still be serviceable for small, specialized projects, it is the antithesis to data agility in that it is time consuming to develop and always created for a specific platform. A better alternative for the modern business is data integration software, which takes the burden off of the business and supports new innovations and all types of cloud data.

That said, it takes a bit of vetting to choose the right integration software. The ideal software should be scalable, cross-platform, and allow for real-time data processing. It’s called an agile data fabric, and it’s meant to synthesize all types of data a company will need to work with. Platform agnosticism is important for the same reasons why a multicloud infrastructure is valuable; it allows the company to take advantage of new innovations and specific capabilities.

Organizations should also strive to be self-sufficient with their data. A controlled move to properly distributed data can greatly enhance insight. However, this requires a number of different participants within a company, including IT staff and dedicated data analysts, all with their own needs. A savvy CIO can craft an infrastructure that meets everyone’s needs and allows for scaling as innovation continues its mad rush forward.