Here's Your New Edition of Diplomatic, Our Bi-Weekly Newsletter

Alabama Farmer’s Secret Generosity Revealed

?When Hody Buford Childress died on New Year’s Day, he took a secret to his grave. But soon everyone in the small town of Geraldine, Alabama learned that the widowed farmer had been anonymously paying the pharmacy bills of his neighbors for the last decade. According to AL.com, Childress would give $100 to Geraldine Drugs owner Brooke Walker with instructions to use the money at her discretion and to tell no one who the benefactor was. “He said, ‘Don’t tell a soul where the money came from - if they ask, just tell them it’s a blessing from the Lord,’” Walker said. With his secret out, those who knew him are starting the Hody Childress Fund to continue the tradition.

HIPAA Compliance a Good Investment

Over at NJBiz.com they did the math and concluded that, with a $4.24 million average breach cost and increasing ransomware attacks on the healthcare industry, “Health care providers of all sizes can’t afford not to comply with HIPAA.” And it’s true. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act mandates that healthcare services organizations adopt adequate protections, and especially encryption, on protected health information (PHI) to ensure sensitive patient data remains private. The article identifies the top five threats to PHI as email phishing; ransomware; loss or theft of equipment; insider, accidental or intentional data loss; and attacks against connected medical devices. Of course, secure managed file transfer (MFT) is a great way to protect data in transit and minimize accidental exposure.

What the Heck is a Super Cloud?

Sometimes it seems like you need a scorecard to keep track of all the innovations in cloud computing, and we penciled in a new player after reading a recent article on SiliconAngle: super cloud. Our first thought was, “What the heck is that?” But the article explains that a super cloud is a “computing architecture in which resources from multiple public and private cloud platforms are blended in a way that is nearly invisible to the customer” So you may be operating a super cloud and not even know it. But whether your organization is running an accidental super cloud, or are on an intentional path there, the experts say it requires a requisite data management, governance, and security strategy.

Thanks for reading the Coviant Software Diplomatic. If you have any comments or questions related to managed file transfer, automating your secure file transfers, or related issues, let us know. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss a single edition!