NBA Fines And Non-Compliance Lessons for SMBs

Image of an arrangement with money, gavel, calculator, and contract illustrating the consequences of non-compliance with laws, rules, and regulations.

NBA Fines And Non-Compliance Lessons for SMBs

Regulations on the local, state, and federal levels are on the rise and this is putting a lot of pressure on compliance efforts of Small and Medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and exposing the fact that these organizations can only avoid costly fines and/or lawsuits for non-compliance by maintaining strict compliance throughout their information management processes.

I found the fines levied by the National Basketball Association (NBA) on players including the likes of the late Los Angeles Lakers Great, Kobe Bryant, and Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, among others, as a good lesson on the cost of non-compliance.

The NBA has consistently fined players who were in non-compliance of its rules and these violations range from the serious to what one could argue is the absurd – like kicking a ball in frustration or throwing a basketball into the stands in celebration of a win.

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Data Encryption Tools For The Mobile Business Executive

Infographic depicting various devices using data encryption.

Data encryption is not one of the security options most companies think of providing for their senior executives who use, and travel, with laptops, netbooks and tablets so they can stay productive even when on the road. This is even more true of corporate executives who sometimes demand anytime, anywhere access to data residing on corporate servers.

While the big corporations can afford to spend millions of dollars on data protection hardware and software., the same cannot be said of executives in small and medium-sized organizations, especially when it comes to loss of personal information, including credit card data, patient records or other financial information, stored by the company.

Data breaches happen and information is lost every day due to small mistakes that could have been avoided by using data encryption technologies. For small businesses, these data loss events can be devastating.

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The ABCs of a Business Continuity Plan

Image of replicated computer system to enable business continuity.

The ABCs of a Business Continuity Plan: How To Stay in Business After an Extended Outage

You’ve probably heard this sermon a million times, but we will keep harping on it until small business owners start taking the issue of business continuity and disaster recovery planning more seriously. Especially in this new era of daily reports of ransomware attacks.

Those in the trenches know the familiar drill: you get a call about a failed hard drive, a system that is down, a lost laptop, a folder encrypted by a former employee, or the worst, an inaccessible office. Of course the first statement you make is “no problem, we’ll just restore from backup“. That is until you see the guilty look on the client’s face and the reality hits you: there is no backup or if there is one, it is either not up to date or has never been verified.

Business continuity is about having a plan to deal with difficult situations, so your organization can continue to function with as little disruption as possible.

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How To Cut Costs With Hosted Digital Phones

This is the Internet Age. Broadband and high-speed connections in the small to midsize business environment is now the norm as opposed to the exception it was a few years ago. What does that mean for the small and midsize business owner? Huge cost savings for one, in the area of communication. With the many offerings available today, it is not uncommon for businesses to reduce telephone costs by as much as eighty (80) percent. Here’s the rundown.

VoIP is a term that refers to Voice over Internet Protocol. It is a technology that allows phone calls to be made using high-speed Internet connections like cable, T1 or high-end DSL. Other common names for VoIP are IP, digital and Internet phones. The unique thing about digital phone technology is that it works with regular analog phones and this is important because since not everyone may have this technology in place, your calls will still be received whether the party you are calling has VoIP in place or not.

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Drive-by Trojan Download: CNET Embraces the Dark Side

It appears that the draw of the almighty dollar has pulled CNET to the dark side. CNET is a popular technology news site with a download portal called Download.com where many users go to download software that are free, shareware and open source. The site built a reputation a while back as a dependable location for hosting software that was devoid of malicious content – trojan horses, adware, virus etc.

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How To Fix QuickBooks Error 3371 statuscode-11118

If you recently ran into a strange Quick Books error, specifically Error Code 3371 “Quickbooks could not load license data. This may be caused by a missing or damaged file.”,  with a status code of 11118, you are not alone. And it looks like this headache has been plaguing the users of the accounting software for several years.

The symptoms are usually that you are unable to open your company file in Quick Books and resolution attempts like repairing the installation fail, and you get prompts for a mysterious html file.

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