Ferrum Technology Services Blog

In today’s world of flexible working environments and conditions, you want to be intentional with how you share and distribute access to your company’s data. You’ll need to ensure that you are not accidentally putting your data in harm’s way due to outdated and insecure data retrieval policies and procedures.

In 1996, the United States Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA, in an attempt to streamline the healthcare system while also maintaining individual privacy of individuals’ health records. This regulation allowed people to more effectively and securely transfer their health coverage without the risk of fraud or abuse of health records. As you can imagine, your technology plays a significant role in making this happen.

Individual data privacy is finally gaining steam in a lot of places. There are more state laws being passed than ever before and even the businesses that prosper off the holdings of this data are doing more to allow people to protect their likeness online. Today, we want to discuss how to remove some of your personal data from a Google Search result. 

Data privacy has exploded in importance lately, especially as high-profile hacks and other types of attacks threaten businesses in never-before-seen ways. The uptick in awareness has caused lawmakers to consider many scenarios that give people more control over their data. Let’s take a look at why data privacy is important and some best practices on how to keep your sensitive data safe. 

For the past decade or so, one of the most mentioned emerging technologies is blockchain. It was hailed as the technology that would change everything, but as far as the practical uses that would facilitate that change, blockchain hasn’t seemed to have done much. Today, we thought we would take a closer look at blockchain and why it hasn’t become the world-altering technology a lot of people were expecting.

In today’s financially motivated world, financial technology - AKA “fintech” - has allowed people to manage their finances without stepping into a bank. In fact, a Bank of America study found that 62 percent of people now use digital banking. Therefore, it seems prudent to share a few ways to keep yourself safe while using these kinds of mobile apps.

If you don’t think that your business is at risk of cyberattack from the Internet, you are running your business on borrowed time. If you want to avoid this scenario, you will have to be prepared to do what you can to keep it safe.  This entails following some strict rules and being smart about where and when to deploy security checkpoints. We looked at what an organization needs to do in order to keep the threats that are bandying about from having a marked effect on your business.

Cryptocurrency, most notably Bitcoin, has made the headlines in recent months with huge fluctuations in supposed value. While the topic of cryptocurrency is one that would take far more than a single blog post to discuss, we can examine the technology that allows these currencies to exist and posit what it could likely be used for in the near future.

When a business utilizes any kind of technology, there will come a time when that technology needs to be replaced--which means that the business will need to be sure that any data on the old machines cannot be recovered. This, in turn, means that the machine’s hard drive must be destroyed. In order to be absolutely certain that this has been accomplished, it helps to lean on the guidelines established by HIPAA.

After 143 million people had their personal information put at risk in the Equifax data breach, it comes as no surprise that data security is an even hotter topic than usual. As much as you’d like to think that a breach like that would never happen to your business, this is an unrealistic hope that won’t do you any good if the threat of a data breach does come around. It is much better to be prepared.