The fourth consideration in this 9 HIPAA Network Considerations blog series, we look at whether ‘not knowing’ is a valid defense post-breach. Is Ignorance Bliss, or will that get you into trouble?
Remember, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule was released January 23, 2013, became effective March 26, 2013 with compliance to the updates se for September 23, 2013. Audits will also start up again for covered entities and business associates in late 2013 or early 2014. Continue reading “4 of 9 HIPAA Network Considerations”
By Neeraj Kumar and Kevin Suh, Cisco Consulting Services
The small and medium sized-business (SMB) commercial-services market is important for all types of service providers (SPs). SMBs account for more than half of total U.S. commercial-services spending, according to AMR Research/Gartner. And, the portion of the U.S. SMB commercial-services market that service providers could capture is expected to grow to more than $200 billion by 2015, according to analysis by Cisco Consulting Services (CCS) and industry research analysts.
To capture this opportunity, service providers need a deeper understanding of who the SMB customers are and what they buy, as well as how they purchase these commercial services. To better understand SMBs’ detailed service delivery needs and expectations, Cisco Consulting Services (CCS), surveyed 761 U.S. SMBs with five to 1,000 employees in 2012. The study revealed that although this is a big and complex market, there are specific opportunities for SPs in cloud and advanced services.
Complex, Diverse Market, with Varying Expectations
Since around the turn of the year, specific to each region of the world, we in Cisco Services have established magazines (available in both printed and online formats) to bring you help and guidance on the challenges and opportunities of new technology adoption, evolution and maintenance, across all areas of Cisco technology. If you’ve read my blogs on Data Center and Cloud adoption challenges, you’ll know that such opportunities and challenges are my passion, so I personally find these new magazines, and their perspectives from a range of Cisco writers including senior executives, very interesting.
In line with the way our customers’ challenges vary across the world, we produce different magazines for:
The Americas – “Services Perspectives” – Register and read here for Services Perspectives.
Asia Pacific, Japan and China (APJC) – “Services Discovery” – Register and read here for Services Discovery.
Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR) – “Services Dynamics” – Register and read here for Services Dynamics.
In each case, you can eother subscribe online, request a printed copy, or do both!
And in the EMEAR Services Dynamics magazine, we also discussed Cisco Domain Ten, Cisco Services framework for data center and cloud transformation.
As I say above, these are not simply magazines for data center and cloud, I’ve simply highlighted a few articles above that most relevant to my interests and this subject of this particular Cisco Data Center blog. So whatever your interests and location, we have well designed and insightful magazines for you! And we hope you enjoy and learn from them!
The ins and outs of how to use social media effectively for on- and offline events can be overwhelming. What technologies do we use…how do we integrate social media, mobile, physical and virtual environments…and how do we make it a meaningful experience for participants? It’s a lot to think about before moving forward.
The good news is that a panel of distinguished experts (from left to right: Petra Neiger, Senior Manager, Digital and Social Media Marketing, Cisco (@Petra1400), Matt Rozen, Group manager Corporate Social Media, Adobe (@mattyroze), Kathleen Mudge, Social Media Program Manager, Cisco (@KathleenMudge), and Brian Ellefritz, Vice President, Global Social Media, SAP (@BrianEllefritz)) spent some time with us today and helped to clarify all of these moving parts. Check out the Let’s Chat! #Ciscosmt Series: Social Media for Events USTREAM broadcast replay for all of the valuable best practices and tips. And in the meantime, here are a few key tweet takeaways I gathered from the panelists and participants during the session:
Join us for the next installment of the #Ciscosmt Series on Tuesday, August 20th from 9-10 a.m. PT. During this Twitter chat, we’ll focus the conversation around engaging employees in social media participation. Here are some of the key topics we are working on for this chat. Are there others you want to cover as well?
Steps to develop a culture of sharing for employees
Content types that resonate for teams to engage in social sharing
Biggest challenges that employees face in social participation for the brand
Recognizing and rewarding teams for participation
Gamification aspects of sharing strategy
Stay tuned for more details by following the Cisco Social blog and the #Ciscosmt hashtag!
Welcome back! We take things to the street in this episode of Engineers Unplugged. Ronald Beck (@tallnetninja) and Mark Gonsalves (Cisco) discuss real world two-way communications when there are radio interoperability challenges. Enter IPICS server and the policy engine. Because you really want comms in the field to work. This is a great episode full of real-world examples, let’s watch:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
The “We’re Listening” blog keeps you in the loop about what Cisco is hearing from our customers and partners, and what we’re doing to address your top pain points. Teams across Cisco work together to fix these areas of concerns, and in this blog, you’ve heard from some of the experts who lead the improvement efforts. At the center of their efforts is Cisco’s Ease of Doing Business program, which looks at all the customer and partner feedback from surveys, individual meetings and conferences to determine the biggest pain points, and then pulls in the right people from across Cisco to make change happen.
The Ease of Doing Business team recently returned from Cisco Live, where they captured valuable feedback from our customer and partner attendees. I’ve asked Steve Morrisey, who leads the program, to summarize his top moments from Cisco Live, and to give us a hint at the changes we have in the works.
Recently at the Forrester’s Forum for Customer Experience Professionals in New York on June 26, Graham Atkinson, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at Walgreens, spoke about his work to transform the company from one that traditionally differentiated based on location to one that differentiates based on experience.
As reported in a recent blog by Harley Manning of Forrester, Graham talks about three customer experience initiatives underway, including:
Delivering the well experience
Transforming the community pharmacy
Taking the Walgreens brand to the world
You may have seen a recent Cisco video commercial on the area of customer experience called “Weekend Warrior”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x64bd6pmofw
Here at Cisco, we believe that customer experience is part of the connections made possible by what Cisco describes as the Internet of Everything (IoE).
To further our knowledge in this area, Cisco recently released the Cisco Connected Customer Experience Report focused on the retail shopping experience.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), technology has become an integral part of our daily lives and promises to become even more prevalent in the near future. While this is normally a good thing – making our lives easier and more comfortable, any technology can be just as easily turned against us if it hasn’t been properly secured. In fact, there seems to be a direct correlation between the value of a connected object in our daily lives and the degree of pain inflicted if that object falls prey to hackers. Two recent articles in well-known publications highlight this fact.
Because IoT puts technology closer to home than ever before, much more is at stake than with prior networks. As a result, the need for proper security can’t be emphasized enough.
CONNECT WITH CISCO