Alvaka's Blog

If you are a business owner, CEO, CFO or otherwise ultimately responsible for Information Technology (IT) in your organization, here are a few questions that you may have asked yourself at some point. If my IT staff or service provider were to suddenly fall off the map or just not show up, for whatever reason, would my company be left in a ditch?

I wrote a short blog on some of the changes that were instituted by the passage of ARRA and it incorporated HITECH provisions. If you follow the link at the bottom of this entry, you can go to an interview that I did with Search Security on the subject of VARs and Business Associates. "In this edition of “Patrolling the Channel,” see why the designation of “business associate” has given McDonald additional compliance challenges. The executive VP talks about the technical and non-technical controls being implemented for HIPAA’s sake.

In consulting with so many clients, there are some things that just seem to be universal. One of those nearly universal truths, is the tendency for clients to mix and match or use the terms, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity interchangeably. While these two terms define activities that often parallel each other, they are in fact very different concepts. The confusion or mixing of the terms can lead to clients being misled, or even left at significant risk, due to improper planning.

Many were excited by the passing of Title XIII of ARRA, also known as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). It was billed as providing up to $22 billion dollars for taxpayer money to, "advance the use of health information technology." What was not so well trumpeted during all of the excitement, were the massive increases in enforcement, penalties, the changing of the HIPAA enforcement responsibility from CMS to the Office of Civil Right and the extension of the HIPAA Rules to business associates of covered entities.

50% Bonus Depreciation in 2010 May Be A Great Deal For Your Business

Here is some important news for your budget planners, controllers, CFOs, CEOs, presidents and anyone else in charge of tax strategy at your firm. This information is provided to keep you abreast of changes in tax law and stimulus legislation that may impact your asset buying decisions. I suggest you talk to your tax advisor about how you can best take advantage of this legislation. You only have until 12/31/2010 to act.

Here is my understanding of what was signed today:

Today, I am doing a webinar for Ziff Davis and IBM. The subject is Smart IT Tool Management Strategies. As I was preparing the slides, I got to reflect on the evolution of network and server monitoring technologies over the past two decades. It has gone from very basic server and OS monitoring, over dial up lines that report to really simple text based consoles, to very sophisticated application and transaction monitoring that reports to complex graphical consoles.