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Online Tech is exhibiting PCI hosting solutions at the 2013 ETA (Electronic Transactions Association) Annual Meeting & Expo at booth #1237. The conference will be held in New Orleans from April 30-May 2 at the New Orleans Convention Center. Keynote: The Mobile Commerce Revolution Speaker: Michael Abbott, CEO, Isis Mike opened his presentation by explaining that mobile technology isn’t new thing, it’s been around for over 10 years. Nokia was already experimenting with mobile technology in the early 2000’s… So… ‘why now?’ Why is this technology coming to the forefront now? Abbott notes that mobile phones are our personal representation. Find someone under 25 who has a landline. It’s virtually impossible. A decade ago, cameras weren’t on phones. By the end of this year half of all the pictures taken in the us will be taken on a mobile phone. Why does the consumer want this technology? Mike shared the example of consumers sifting through coupons on the weekends. They first had to search out coupons from the stores they wanted to shop at and then they had to match the coupons in the aisles of the grocery store. Is that really 21st century technology? Is that what we should…
Data Center Industry Lowers Carbon Footprint For many years, the data center industry has received a bad rap for being energy hogs. In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned everyone that data centers and servers would consume 3% of the nation’s energy by 2011. – This prediction did not happen. It is actually around 1.5% – Then last year, the New York Times published a damaging article “Power, Pollution, and the Internet” claiming that most data centers wastefully consume a lot of energy. Read How the Cloud is Changing the Data Center’s Bad Reputation for Energy Inefficiency for a response to some of the major points of the article. What organizations and experts fail to understand is how data centers are actually lowering the carbon footprint. Lowering the Carbon Footprint I had a chance to sit down with Yan Ness, co-CEO of Online Tech to discuss his thoughts on how the data center industry has impacted their carbon footprint. Watch the video below: Every piece of hardware consumes some energy. And for data centers this hardware consumes a lot of power. As a result, the data center industry has begun using technology to make hardware more efficient. “We can…
Tomorrow is Compliance Day at the 2013 ETA (Electronic Transactions Association) Annual Meeting & Expo in New Orleans; an event for the payments industry, including hosting and other IT vendors. Online Tech will be exhibiting PCI hosting solutions at booth #1237, including: PCI Cloud Hosting PCI Managed Servers PCI Colocation PCI Disaster Recovery Read our previous article featuring an interview with one of the Compliance Day conference speakers Randy Gainer, partner with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, about cloud service providers and the challenge of PCI cloud computing in Cloud-Based Mobile Payment Considerations at ETA Expo: PCI Compliant Cloud is Essential. Other notable presentations on Compliance Day, April 30, include: The Future of PCI: Securing Mobile Payments in a Changing World Speaker: Troy Leach, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), PCI Security Standards Council This session will provide an overview of what’s ahead with the release of the latest version of the PCI DSS mobile standards, as well as how to use the new PCI SSC mobile resources to ensure compliance. It will also shed light on today’s mobile payment environment as well as the associated risks and challenges when it comes to securing payment card data. Read our PCI Compliant Hosting white…
The added business value of cloud computing is multi-faceted, as Online Tech’s co-CEO Mike Klein outlined in a previous article, The Six Benefits of Cloud Computing, which I’ll summarize here: Lower Costs Pooling of computing resources means better efficiency and use of the entire shared IT infrastructure, since only what is needed is distributed to applications on-demand. Lower Maintenance Costs Save on hardware upfront and maintenance costs since the cloud uses less physical resources. If you outsource to a cloud service provider (CSP), you save on server, storage, network and virtualization staffing. Cap-Ex Free Computing The cloud allows you to eliminate the capital expense associated with building the server infrastructure. Faster Deployment Instead of installing and networking a new hardware server, a new server can be brought up and destroyed in a matter of minutes with the cloud. Scalable By buying the minimal amount of resources needed, you can easily add storage, RAM and CPU as application demands grow. Resiliency and Redundancy With a private cloud, you get automatic failover between hardware platforms, as well as disaster recovery services that bring up your server set in a separate data center in the event of an anomaly at your primary data…
Any company that stores, transmits, and/or processes credit card data needs to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). This is oftentimes a cumbersome task, involving time, money, and other resources that can put strain on a business. In order to simplify the road to compliance, many companies choose to outsource their applications to a PCI hosting provider. This can have its own set of challenges, however. The responsibility for PCI compliance is ultimately on the merchant, making the decision of who to work with an important and difficult choice. Hopefully these tips can help make that process a little easier. Get the audit reports When shopping around for a PCI compliant hosting provider, doing the due diligence to make sure they’ve followed all the necessary guidelines will save time and money when your auditor comes to call. Any potential providers should have a PCI DSS Report on Compliance (ROC) from their independent audit available to share with you. Not only will it provide you with explicit processes they use to keep them compliant, but the ROC can then be given to the QSA (Quality Security Assessor) to make your own audit simpler and quicker….
Only a week left until the 2013 ETA (Electronic Transactions Association) Annual Meeting & Expo in New Orleans. This conference is going to be held at the New Orleans Convention Center from April 30-May 2, and is expected to have over 3,000 industry executives to learn from and collaborate with. Compliance is one of the many subjects being highlighted at the expo. Compliance Day will be held on April 30th, and will have over a dozen different speakers, both on panels and running sessions devoted to compliance in the payments industry. One of these speakers is Randy Gainer, a partner with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, who I had the pleasure of speaking with in regards to his session on challenges associated with cloud-based mobile solutions. Having focused on data breach litigation for over 9 years, and with over 20 years working for Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in the IT sphere, he has great insight into key areas of prevention and risk throughout the payments industry. Gainer explained that there is a shift in focus when moving to the cloud. Instead of taking care of an infrastructure in-house, businesses are increasingly relying on outsourced cloud service providers (CSP) for the security…
Online Tech is exhibiting HIPAA hosting solutions at booth #919 at the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA)’s 17th Annual Compliance Institute Conference April 21-24 in National Harbor, MD. The conference draws in healthcare compliance professionals, risk managers, privacy officers, healthcare CFOs and CEOs, and more. The Evolving Congressional Landscape Speaker: Kimberly Brandt, Chief Oversight Counsel, Senate Finance Committee, Minority Staff *All views are her own and not Senator Hatch’s or the Finance Committee’s. What does the Senate Finance Committee Do? Quick Facts on the Senate Finance Committee: Largest committee in the Senate 24 members (Including chair and ranking member: 13 Democrats and 11 Republicans) One of the most powerful committees in congress Oversee 50% of the federal budget Confirms over 80 presidential nominations Jurisdiction of Department of HHS – Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. What the Senate Finance Committee does: Legislative Hearings – Markups and approval of legislation such as Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Oversight Hearings – deals with fraud, waste and abuse issues and the implementation of PPACA Confirmation Hearings – The Senate Finance Committee confirms: Secretary of HHS, CMS Administrator Inspector General of HHS The three biggest priorities for 113th congress include: Healthcare Patient Protection and…
Online Tech is exhibiting HIPAA hosting solutions at booth #919 at the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA)’s 17th Annual Compliance Institute Conference April 21-24 in National Harbor, MD. The conference draws in healthcare compliance professionals, risk managers, privacy officers, healthcare CFOs and CEOs, and more. Mobile Threats and How Healthcare can Reduce Risks Speakers: Rick Cam, President & Co-Founder, ID Experts Ted Kobus, Co-Leader, Privacy & Data Protection, Baker Hostetler Rick and Ted opened with a couple of questions for the audience: How many of your organizations allow use of personal mobile devices in your practices? Does your organization have policies and best practices in place for using those devices? How many are in compliance roles within your organization that set those policies and standards? They cited a study that had been conducted to find how many organizations allow their employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) to work. Roughly 81% answered that their employees can bring their own device to work. 53% of those surveyed are allowed to use unsecure wi-fi access. They continued by asking how many people in the room had longer than a 4-digit password for the cell phones and tablets. Ted and Rick went on…
Online Tech’s Director of Operations and previous Crain’s Detroit CIO of the Year, Jason Yaeger, is presenting today at the 7×24 Exchange Southern California Chapter’s meeting, Data Center Compliance – It’s Mission Critical! As Online Tech’s Risk Management and Security Officer, Jason has had experience leading the company through the successful completion of SAS 70 Type I, SAS 70 Type II, SSAE 16, HIPAA and PCI. Where: T5 Data Center, El Segundo, CA Time: 3:30-6PM Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Description: With so much confusion surrounding compliance issues, please join us for an in-depth discussion about auditing and compliance in the data center including understanding how SAS 70; SSAE 16, SOC 1, 2 & 3 reports impact the data center as well as comparing, contrasting and elucidating the features of PCI DSS and HIPAA. Find out how auditing and compliance impact processes, design and operations. After the panel, tours will be conducted of T5’s new data center. Panelists include: Lynn McIntier, IT Audit Senior Manager at SingerLewak LLP SingerLewak LLP is a regional accounting and consulting firm. Lynn was previously Senior Manager of IT Consulting & Audit at Moss Adams LP as well as IT Manager at Irving Tanner Company….
Online Tech is exhibiting HIPAA hosting solutions at booth #919 at the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA)’s 17th Annual Compliance Institute Conference April 21-24 in National Harbor, MD. The conference draws in healthcare compliance professionals, risk managers, privacy officers, healthcare CFOs and CEOs, and more. Advanced Discussion Group: The Latest Trends in Data Breach Threats Speaker: Ted Kobus, Co-Leader, Privacy and Data Protection, BakerHostetler Ted directed an open roundtable discussion among twenty or so audience members who worked within either a compliance, government or consultant role surrounding data breaches. Those that worked on the compliance side of a data breach were asked to share what their role entailed after a breach occurred and how they move forward providing information to appropriate parties in the wake of a breach. All were in agreement that their position required heavy lifting on the side of analysis in order to determine: What sort of data had been breached How much data had been breached What sorts of organizations needed to be involved in the aftermath of the breach What portion of the general public was affected by the breach Which stakeholders needed to be involved in the decision making process to move forward There…
