Expert content marketing writer and editor. B2B specialist. Niches: Enterprise IT, cybersecurity, VARs, MSPs, healthcare, biopharma, fitness/wellness, marine energy, industry, insurance.
Preventing the Next Data Breach in Health Care Organizations
Health care organizations are slowly waking up to a troubling new reality: Criminals increasingly see web applications as a promising path to lucrative patient records. Why are web apps so tempting?
Because they can often be breached without setting off intrusion-detection alarms or getting flagged by anti-virus software.
Read on to learn more about the health care web-application ecosystem and potential HIPAA audit concerns. This playbook will outline potentialvulnerabilities and offer guidance on securing health care apps to prevent expensive data breaches.
Data, devices and DNA: Driving a healthier future
Scientists are gathering immense databases exploring how our genes influence our health. And even more data is coming from wearable devices and app-enabled smartphones.
Sooner than we may expect, gene science, big data and wearable technologies will converge to forever change the way we prevent, predict, diagnose and treat diseases.
“I think we're going to see an explosion of all kinds of data that will help manage people's health and predict medicines they should use at a level that's never been done before,” says Michael Snyder, PhD, Professor and Chair of Genetics and Director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine.
Keeping Intruders out of Your Web Apps
Intruders love to attack web applications. Why? Because lots of web apps are designed to do a specific job quickly and efficiently — and start paying off as soon as possible.
The sad truth is that too many times, security takes a back seat in the get-it-up-now world of web app development, especially when we’re talking about custom code rather than commercial software. Hackers know this, so they do everything they can to exploit vulnerabilities in web apps.
A web application exposes your network to the public internet. If you don’t harden your web apps, you’re basically leaving the front door unlocked and inviting the world in. The world is full of great people, of course, but often the ones who want into your network are precisely the ones you want to keep out.
Managed Services: Say Goodbye to Computing Hassles
First you needed a few PCs. Then you needed a server. Then you needed a phone system. Then you needed a network. Then you heard about the business down the street getting hacked. Then you got hacked.
And then you said: “I didn’t sign up for this.”
We all need computers, networks and data to get our work done these days. What we don’t need is the River of Chaos that comes with keeping our IT gear updated, secure and running at full capacity.
Fortunately, there’s a bridge over the River of Chaos. It’s called Managed Services, and you want it because it gets you out of the information technology business and hands your IT headaches over to seasoned experts who know how to cure them.
Digital Transformation — Peeling Away the Hype to Reach Real Business Value
It’s easy to be skeptical about the notion of digital transformation, which admittedly sounds fresh off the production line of Silicon Valley’s hype factory. Yet transformation represents genuine value because it enables companies to improve profitability, elevate customer service and strengthen bonds with vendors and suppliers.
The principal challenge of digital transformation is integration — disentangling the technologies of databases, hardware, platforms, mobile devices and operating systems of wildly varying vintages and keeping them all talking to each other.
Crash Course in SEO
This Crash Course in SEO will help you understand the fundamentals of search engine optimization. We’ll cover algorithms, keywords and strategy — including what to do before you publish and after you publish.
Forensic Engineering Solves Culpability Question In Water Damage Cleanup
Forensic engineering occasionally requires explaining phenomena that seem to defy the laws of nature. Such was the case recently when CTL Engineering was hired to figure out how an apartment’s bathroom shower apparently turned itself on—causing considerable mold, mildew, and moisture damage.
How could a shower turn itself on?
The case involved a brand-new apartment that had never been rented or otherwise occupied. It had never even been entered in the eight months since its final construction inspection. Eventually, a maintenance worker entered the apartment on a routine inspection and noticed something unexpected: black splotches discoloring the walls and ceiling.
Understanding HIV criminalization
If you know you have HIV, you should tell your sex partners before doing the deed.
That’s just the right thing to do.
But HIV criminalization takes this to the extreme: More than half of U.S. states have laws that can put you prison for years if you know your HIV status and don’t tell it to a sex partner.
This is bad news for doctors and nurses, because HIV criminalization discourages people from getting tested. If you don’t know your HIV status, you can’t be prosecuted under mandatory-disclosure laws.
It’s not hard to put two and two together: “If I don’t know my status, they can’t put me in prison.” And that means people won’t get tested because they’re afraid of going to jail.
Artificial Island Sparks Innovation In Wind Energy
A shallow patch of the North Sea is the site of an intriguing plan to reduce the cost and complexity of offshore wind farms.
Announced in March 2017, the plan calls for the construction of an artificial island to form the hub of a massive network of wind turbines. One key advantage of a hub is that it shortens the distance between the wind turbines and land — slashing cabling costs and reducing the risk of cable damage. The hub would then distribute the electricity to mainland power grids.
4 Reasons Why Hotels Need Cyber Insurance
Businesses everywhere have to defend against the rising threat of ransomware and the growing sophistication of cybercriminals. Hotels are no exception.
Hotel News Now keeps a running list of the most well-publicized data breaches; no doubt many smaller attacks go unreported. These cyber intrusions are not altogether surprising when you consider four distinct challenges facing hospitality industry: third-party vendors, FTC oversight, physical threats, and the potential for human error.
Analytics: Measurement Means Everything to the Future of Offshore Wind
Server farms are increasingly crucial to the success of wind farms — offshore and otherwise. Data scientists armed with cloud-hosted analytics applications and tower-based telemetry can track every minute in the life of a wind turbine.
This is especially crucial in the rugged offshore environment, where storms, corrosion, sea life and everyday wear and tear test the survival of offshore wind turbines.
Today we’ll take a quick look at why analytics — the sciences of measurement and analysis — are so important to the evolution of offshore wind power.
America’s First Offshore Wind Farm Is Finally Ready for Prime Time
May 1, 2017, is the scheduled cutover date for the Block Island Wind Farm, whose five turbines will begin transmitting up to 30 megawatts of wind-generated power to the mainland power grid. The towers are arranged near Block Island, a tourist destination off the coast of Rhode Island that has about a thousand permanent residents.
At full strength, the turbines can power about 17,000 homes. They can supply up to 90 percent of Block Island’s energy needs, and surplus power can be transmitted to the mainland grid.
Looking to Asia for Offshore Wind Opportunities
While Europe gets all the credit for the rise of efficient offshore wind farms, there’s a lot of potential brewing in Asia — especially in countries that already have active land-based wind power.
China has already built so many inland wind farms on land that it has more capacity than its interior population can use — which frequently idles many turbines. Coastal cities, however, are much more hungry for power, so offshore wind is still a priority.
Why the U.S. Ocean Energy Market Faces One Big Challenge that Europe Doesn’t
On average, European offshore wind turbines stand in 29 meters (95 feet) of water about 44 kilometers (27 miles) from the shore, WindEurope reports.
These two stats underscore one of the key reasons why offshore wind in U.S. waters is a flyspeck compared to the installed capacity of European wind farms.
Innovations Shrink Offshore Wind Timelines
There’s nothing quick about developing an offshore wind farm. It takes years of site selection, political and financial wrangling, environmental reviews, and careful construction to make it all happen. But those timelines could be getting shorter thanks to developments in the European offshore wind market.
An article in IEEE Spectrum in June 2017 noted a major breakthrough: Three new German projects are expected to be built without government subsidies — a first in the history of European offshore wind projects.