Apex Technology Blog

As data collection by businesses becomes more prevalent and complex, so too do the legislative and legal policies relating to the protection of that data. This goes for if your business operates in the health industry and has to comply with HIPAA, or you handle large amounts of international clients and need to ensure your data collection methods are compliant with the European Union’s GDPR requirements, or any other number of legal and legislative requirements that might exist for your business at the local, state, federal, and international levels. Ensuring compliance saves your organization money and reputation over time, but can be a daunting and complicated process. 

As managed IT services become popular solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses in handling IT services, there’s a term that gets thrown around with increasing abandon. Businesses with little in-house IT experience might get swept away by the lofty connotations when IT consultants start to extol the benefits of a shift to the Cloud, especially when it comes to data storage. But “the Cloud” remains perhaps one of the most mysterious locations in business today. 

At some point in your career, you’ve likely worked for a company that uses a software solution that seems to be extremely out of date, only a few employees know how it works, and there’s likely a cabinet with a large, well-worn binder full of very complex instructions. This is the curse of legacy software and in complex IT systems, legacy components can often be a major pain point for staff, despite the benefits the software might still be providing to the organization.

How successful can your organization be if your management infrastructure is built around being reactive rather than proactive to business challenges, regardless of the department involved? Modern commerce moves at the speed of the customer’s ability to Google your business and clicks on a link to purchase your services or product. Your organization needs to be able to support that process from website to fulfillment, and the logistics of that? All supported by and made possible through the IT systems you have in place. 

With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2012, HIPAA privacy requirements relative to patient records were strengthened and expanded. The act required that US physicians and medical practitioners transition from paper records to electronic medical records (EMR) by 2014.