Being compliant with all the industry rules and regulations will help your financial or healthcare organization stay on top of the situation and reduce the risk of sales losses, legal fees, and fines, brand reputation and more. It is for this reason why compliance management should be a top priority for all IT executives.
It will grant better internal control, allowing you to determine which employees will have access to company data and what they can do with it. Similarly, it will tell them who they can share that data with internally or externally.
Also, by maintaining compliance, you will also be taking the necessary security measures to protect yourself, your organization, and your clients from security breaches. But when it comes to the healthcare and finance industries, and being compliant with all the rules and regulations, it can be somewhat of a daunting challenge.
Things like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), as well as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the future California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), just to name several, organizations need some best practices to keep them in line with everything. Here are several examples.
Any compliance program, regardless of its thoroughness, will not be effective unless staff members are fully aware of the regulations and the impact they have on your organization. You should make it a company-wide effort to identify any gaps within the program as well as how they should be addressed.
To have a successful compliance program, you need to perform internal monitoring and verification regularly. These are essential in identifying and correcting any errors that may exist or will occur. An audit may be performed once per year to look at the overall effectiveness of your compliance program. Monitoring the program, on the other hand, should be performed more frequently, such as weekly or monthly to confirm that everything is working as it should.
Wherever possible, tasks and processes need to be automated. Automation is a driving force across all industries as IT teams are striving to bring more agility, quality, and speed to, otherwise, manual tasks. When it comes to regulation compliance, automation will be able to accelerate this delivery significantly.
The Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP) is a tool that provides a host of best practices and guidelines for organizations in the healthcare industry to provide many efficient, flexible, scalable and secure e-health solutions for patient engagement. Based on the principles of the Connected Health Framework (CHF), Microsoft CHP will provide many offerings for optimizing health information and communication technology.
It includes deployment guidance, prescriptive architecture, design, as well as solution accelerators. Tailored specifically for the health environment and Microsoft infrastructure models and tools, the CHP will be able to deliver and manage on-premises or cloud solutions, as part of your compliance management program.
Complying with all the rules and regulations is not something that should be taken lightly. Nevertheless, it's not something that cannot be achieved. Together with Managed Solution, you can make it happen.
Our Shadow IT Assessment allows you to uncover applications and tools installed on your network, and ultimately allows you to discover which of these were intentional versus accidental and authorized versus unauthorized. Our tools allow us to determine if these tools and applications are compliant and take the right next steps based on our findings. Learn more about our assessment.
Our modern day society wouldn’t even be imaginable today without computers and the Internet. The world is so interconnected that sending a message from one part of the globe to the other is possible within seconds and sometimes even fractions of a second. This is how fast the world we live in today works. However, this speed does not come without costs. Although cheap to the regular day-to-day consumer, this speed of information transfer is at a tremendous expense for companies which continually invest in their IT departments to make communication between them and their clients possible at any time and a solid backup and disaster recovery plan is extremely vital.
When dealing with clients, no matter if you’re operating in the Business to Business (B2B) sector, Business to Client (B2C) sector, or both, every IT Director, VP of IT, CIO, CTO, CEO, CFO of a company operating in the financial industry should keep this in mind.
Like in most industries, the financial services sector makes no exception. It is always better to prevent than to fix because when you’re operating in finance, one mistake could cost the company a fortune, or it could even mean the end of it.
To be sure that in case of any cyber-attacks or an unfortunate system crash your company’s and your clients’ data is safe, you need to implement constant backups for each operation your company undertakes. It means paying particular attention to details and having efficient software to deal with thousands of transactions (if not millions) each day.
In the case of a disastrous event for your company, the first department that must be contacted is IT. Make sure that the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is up to date and check the latest updates with the person in charge of supervising it, as it may be crucial to your company’s fast recovery.
Anything starting from a hacker attack to a hurricane can ruin your entire system and make it crash for minutes if not hours on end. Your Disaster Recovery Plan needs to have an analysis of all possible threats, natural or human-caused, and an action plan equipped with tasks for each IT specialist in the event of such a disaster takes place.
Having a strong updated DRP can make the difference between companies losing none, or close to none of its data, funds, and clients; and a company losing everything within minutes, hours or days.
The difference between having your own IT department undergo the best practices for a reliable backup and disaster recovery plan and outsourcing this service is that with your employees you are dealing with people who work on different fronts, thus dividing their attention, as opposed to an IT management company which oversees this process strictly.
Having the solid backup and a disaster recovery plan updated to the latest best practices in the field is a crucial aspect in running any business, whether we’re talking about the financial sector, biotech, healthcare or even non-profit organizations. Everyone is at risk if specialized people are not focused strictly on making this task a priority.
Most of the times, it only takes a few minutes or hours without having a reliable backup or a well-structured disaster recovery plan for the information to be leaked to the press. When this information reaches the public, your company’s stock, credibility, and reputation drop immediately, even if you eventually manage to solve the problems without any severe damage to your clients and their accounts.
However, it takes years to build a reputation and just a few moments to ruin it, so why take the chance? If you’re interested in learning more about best practices for solid backups and disaster recovery plans, be sure to visit our website or contact our specialists for more details and any questions you may have.
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