Consider the following facts:  In the US, the street value of a stolen social security or credit card number is about $1, and it can be sold for only a few days after it’s been stolen.  By comparison, a stolen medical record number has a street value of $50 and can be exploited over a much longer period of time.  HIPPA and HITECH are the US version of “privacy and security” laws that are getting so much attention in the global healthcare information technologies industry.

Hear from Brian Higgins,  Principal Healthcare Consultant at Comstor US, his perspective on regulating the privacy and security of protected health information and what that means to you, the reseller

Read the full article:  What Partners Need to Know Before Selling into the Healthcare Sector

Tags: channel, Data Privacy, healthcare, privacy, reseller

The“We’re Listening” blog series continues to focus on specific customer and partner concerns, detailing how Cisco is responding to your concerns to improve your experience doing business with us.  In this installment, we’re joined by Steve Young, Director of Service Delivery Transformation efforts for the Technical Assistance Center (TAC).  Steve discusses customer feedback to the TAC, and what his team is doing to address your top concern with TAC support -- getting to the right TAC expert right away.

Read the full article: The “We’re Listening” Blog Series: Improving the TAC Experience Through Intelligent Case Routing.

Always interested in the unique ways telepresence is being used in education, I recently heard about one of Georgia’s technical colleges with six campus locations using telepresence in a unique way. With video communication, staff advisors and registration personnel work from one main location and use video to connect to students across the state to assist them with the often stressful registration process.

The college is a member of the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), which is the agency responsible for Georgia’s technical colleges, adult literacy programs, and many economic and workforce development initiatives. As recently published in an interesting case study, the TCSG works to unify the education system across 25 technical colleges in Georgia, representing 100 campus locations and more than 170,000 students and 11,000 employees. The TCSG team wanted to provide a technology solution to streamline internal communications between administrative staff at each college. Its goal was to migrate campus infrastructure from the older Centrex architecture to a next-generation technology model, which would help enable the efficient provisioning of student and administrative services and increase opportunities for collaboration between campuses and colleges. Read More »

Tags: community college, edtech, mlearning, TelePresence, unified workspace, videoconferencing, voip

7,929 miles (12,761 kilometers) separate Melbourne, Australia from Sacramento, California. Despite being half a world away from each other, these cities have a few  things in common – both are capital cities, both had a rich history during the gold rush, and both enjoy a riverside view.

These cities have something else in common: their data centers are the backbone for supplying clean water to their citizens. And each data center is owned, operated, and managed by the local government.

 “780 million people lack access to clean water  – that’s more than 2.5 times the population of the United States,” — Water.org

Governments in cities like Melbourne and Sacramento aren’t unique in their quest to provide clean water to residents but the way they use technology, specifically their data centers, to accomplish this is something other organizations can learn from. The data center isn’t just the backbone for clean water…it’s the cornerstone of any network.

Business Challenge

The challenges faced by Melbourne Water and the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) are common to many organizations.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Cisco Services, data center, data center migration, department of water, jill shaul, migration services

By Bayo Odutola, Managing Principal, OLLIP PC

Technology can transform small and medium-sized (SMB) organizations. For proof of this, look no further than my Ottawa-based boutique law firm OLLIP P.C.

With only a team of four lawyers and trademark agents, we protect the intellectual property (IP) assets of global enterprises, interacting with massive law offices along the way. To work with larger firms on global IP asset cases and compete with other larger outfits for clients, we were looking for a way to present OLLIP  to clients, peers and prospects in a way that didn’t scream ‘we’re a small business!’ And we found one aspect of this with technology.

We deployed a Cisco Unified Communications 540 System for Small Business as well as a variety of Cisco 7900 Series Unified IP Phones. We also take advantage of Cisco WebEx™ to conference with clients or partners around the world. Read More »

Tags: customer voice, small business