If your business belongs in the healthcare industry, you handle patient data. As such, you may have heard of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA is a piece of US legislation that requires organizations that regularly collect, process, and store patient data or protected health information (PHI) to protect it from unlawful and unauthorized disclosure.

Losing data is more than an inconvenience. In today’s digitally driven marketplaces, it can result in serious enterprise setbacks. To give you an idea, ransomware — a form of cyberattack that hijacks data until a ransom is paid — has cost the US healthcare industry $150 million in the last four years.

In recent years, new technologies have enabled small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to level the playing field with large companies, streamline processes, expand their offerings, and connect with their customers more efficiently. If you own or manage a small business, these are some of the technology solutions you should consider, to gain an edge over your competition.

Growth-minded companies are constantly looking for ways to enhance their operations and unlock cost savings. Digital technologies offer numerous ways to achieve these goals. One provides those advantages while saving office space and eliminating the need for investing in numerous expensive pieces of IT hardware — it’s a perfect fit for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Have you heard of virtualization?

What is virtualization?
Virtualization is the process of creating virtual machines or simulated versions of IT infrastructure such as servers, hard drives, networks, or operating systems.

A small company receives thousands of spam every year. A report by Symantec attests to this, revealing that a single employee gets 16 malicious spam emails every month or 192 spam emails a year. According to another report, 92.4% of spam contains malware attachments.

Email is one of the most popular ways for businesses to reach potential customers and make sales. And yet email is still vulnerable to unwanted messages called spam, which adversely affect business productivity. What’s worse, spam has been known to be a common means for phishing, data breaches, and malware that can cripple systems.

Businesses can’t thrive without email. It’s an essential tool for most functions and departments, as it makes communication better and working together easier. One of its primary uses is to help a business connect with leads and customers, as well as with partners and co-workers.

The increasing amount of breaches, the globalization of supply chains, and greater dependence on technology all increase the likelihood of business interruption. This makes contingency planning more essential than ever..

Consider these findings on disruptive events:

31% of organizations reported revenue losses between $10,000 to $100,000 and data loss due to outages

A data breach results in eight hours of downtime for 40% of small businesses

Losses from data breaches cost $3.92 million, on average

Natural disasters can cause massive damage to public and private infrastructure, resulting in days of downtime.

Business continuity has moved to the cloud. Compared with manual backup systems and conventional disaster recovery methods, a cloud-based business continuity plan (BCP) offers a more efficient and cheaper solution to getting your business up and running quickly while reducing potential liabilities in the event of a data breach or other kinds of disaster.

Cloud technology has made it possible for businesses to be more productive, mobile, and cost-effective. However, some perceive certain disadvantages to using the cloud, particularly in terms of security. For businesses to optimize cloud technology, cloud service providers must create a secure cloud environment for their clients’ data.