Is Your Health Care Data Exposed to Cybercrime?

Health care's resistance to data breaches is at an all-time low, and the epidemic is getting worse. So says a recent study from Ponemon Institute, the leading data privacy and security research center. The numbers are intimidating: 90 percent of the country's health care organizations have had a data breach, such a huge percentage that it's affected more than 120 million people — one-third of the US population. Most breaches are due not to negligence, but to criminal attacks. And the pace of these attacks is accelerating: while 37 million health care records were compromised between 2010 and 2014, 99 million were compromised in the first quarter of 2015 alone.

However, the Ponemon study also offers some hope. More than two-thirds of health care data breaches are discovered during audits or assessments, and it turns out they're primarily caused by weak, stolen, or lost credentials and lost or stolen mobile devices — vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to address.

 If you're a health care company, it's time to apply some preventive care. Our security guide,"The 5 Critical Elements of Risk Assessment," will help you develop a treatment plan. After reading it, contact us for next steps.

Office 365 Bests Google Apps as Cloud Productivity Champion

Google Apps were a game-changer when they first came out, and they've owned the market for productivity software as a service ever since — largely because Microsoft's cloud-based versions of familiar Office applications lagged so far behind their on-premise peers in terms of features and functionality. Now that Office 365 has stepped up its game, Google Apps' market dominance is slipping, at least according to a new study.

The survey by cloud access security broker Bitglass shows that Office 365 tripled its adoption rate from 7.7 percent in 2014 to 25.2 percent in 2015. By comparison, Google Apps' adoption rate only climbed from 16.3 percent to 22.8 percent. Regardless of platform, though, the survey shows that worldwide, businesses of all sizes are giving up on-premise productivity suites in favor of cloud-based alternatives. Adoption rates have doubled in the last year and more than half of global businesses have now made the switch.

If you're considering moving your office productivity tools to the cloud, Xantrion can help you decide which tools to use and how to make sure they deliver the functionality and security your users expect and need.

Hack Me Once, Shame On You. Hack Me Twice…

In 2008 and 2009, Wyndham Worldwide Corp. was hacked three separate times, exposing more than 619,000 customer credit cards to more than $10.6 million in fraudulent charges. As a result, the US Federal Trade Commission sued the hotel chain for failing to take reasonable steps to protect consumer information.

Wyndham claimed it hired five different security consulting groups to audit its systems, but that none were able to find and fix the security hole that let the hackers into the company's systems. Wyndham's lawyers argued that these were reasonable steps, even though they were ultimately unsuccessful, but an appeals court ruled in August that the FTC could proceed in bringing enforcement action against the chain.

This suggests that in the future, the bar for doing enough to keep your customers' data safe is going to rise. If you aren't sure whether you need to do more, download our guide to "The 5 Critical Elements of Risk Assessment" and call us for a security audit.

Installing Windows 10: Not For Amateurs

We recently surveyed Xantrion engineers to see whether the free upgrade to Windows 10 was something that people should undertake on their own.  The answer is that, while Windows 10 is a fine operating system, most users won’t be able to complete the upgrade without some amount of professional troubleshooting. 

Our engineers have upgraded a variety of systems at this point ranging from custom gaming rigs to stock computers from major manufacturers.  The computers also ran the gamut from brand new to 6 years old running Windows 7 or 8.1.   Our experience has been that only 10% of computers upgraded without issue. 80% of computers worked fine after some troubleshooting.  Another 10% of the upgrades failed entirely with the computers needing to be rebuilt from scratch.  The 80% of computers that required troubleshooting could most likely be handled by retail support services from stores such as Best Buy.  Unfortunately, the troubleshooting is likely beyond what a typical user might be expected to handle. 

The bottom line is that Windows 10 is a good operating system and you should feel comfortable buying a new computer running it.  However, you should be prepared for a trip to your local repair shop to solve problems you are likely to encounter if you upgrade an existing system.