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Ben Baumann from Akaza and Open Clinica fame, recently blogged about clinical trials in the cloud.  Ben is pitching the relatively new offering from Akaza called Open Clinica Optimized hosting that offers quick startup using validated Open Clinica instances and resources on-demand on a SAS-70 compliant platform. As Ben noted that in the clinical research field, …

Let’s say your’e a payment processor going through a PCI DSS 2.0 audit: Does this sound familiar? (just replace certain words by certain other compliance related words): Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed …

Did you ever have a feeling that your IT integrator was treating you like a couple of guys selling you a Persian rug?  ”Take it now – it’s so beautfiful, just perfect for your living room, a steal  for only $10,000 and it’s on sale” and when you ask if it will last, they tell …

A recent HIPAA violation in Canada  where an imaging technician accessed the medical records of her ex-husband’s girlfriend comes as no surprise to me. Data leakage of ePHI in hospitals is rampant simply because a) there is a lot of it floating around and b) because of human nature.  Humans being naturally curious, sometimes vindictive and always …

An exceptional post by Lilac Sigan “To bad it doesn’t pay to be a nice guy” suggests that Israel may be better off in the long term with its relations with Turkey by demanding a quid-pro-quo (The Turks are demanding reparations and an official apology from Israel for boarding the now infamous Gaza flotilla boat …

This is an essay I wrote in 2004.  There is nothing here that doesn’t still ring true, especially with the latest round of Wikileaks disclosures. I wrote then and I still hold that  compliance and and data security technology cannot protect an organization from a data breach. The best security countermeasures  for protecting a company’s …

switched.com is having trouble understanding the attack vector of a data breach.  They apparently believe that  software vulnerabilities can be mitigated by consumers “actively protecting their information”. Hackers recently attacked WellPoint, a health insurer which reportedly covers 34 million people. As a result of the breach, the company notified 470,000 individual customers that confidential information, …

Operational risk management has been the buzz word du-jour in recent years, due to the Basel II initiative in the banking industry and Solvency II in the insurance industry. The Basel II definition of operational risk is “the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems, or from external events.” …

To be able to do something before it exists, sense before it becomes active, and see before it sprouts. The Book of Balance and Harmony (Chung-ho chi). A medieval Taoist book Will security vendors, large to small  (Symantec, Mcafee, nexTier, ANBsys and others..) succeed in restoring balance and harmony to their customers by relabeling their product suites as unified content …

I think it’s only a matter of time before someone exploits a wireless mesh network that controls and reads home utility meters to get free water and electricity. Until then, there is a problem of range and coverage. Greentech media reports that Trilliant ( a smart meter neighborhood networking startup) has bought SkyPilot for it’s …