Friday, October 14, 2016

Microsoft

It is fairly late in the evening tonight and I am working on my presentation for our annual HIPAA update for the staff coming up and I was updating our risk assessment for catastrophe recovery under HIPAA. We actually have six backups for our computer. We have mirrored hard drives on our server, we have what is called a NAS which is a solid state drive which backs up our server every minute which is actually 2 hard drives in it, which are also mirrored. We have a remote storage facility at McClellan Air Force base in one of their secured buildings for the old Military base that is backed up every night and then we have encrypted cloud storage making for a total of six back up procedures so that your personal health information is secured and recoverable in case of a catastrophe. As I am working on this it reminded me of an old engineering joke that my father told me a few years back. The story goes that there is an engineering conference and as with most conferences all the engineers are staying at a local hotel and they have to go to the convention center and they are transported there by a convention bus. So these 3 engineers get up in the morning and go down and get on the bus. Before they reach the convention center the bus breaks down and the first engineer jumps up says I am mechanical engineer I know this is a mechanical problem I have my tool bag right here I am going to go out and fix it. The 2nd engineer jumps up says I think this is an electrical problem I know how to fix it he grabs his tool bag and runs off the bus to go fix it. The 3rd engineer is a Microsoft certified engineer and he is simply sitting in his chair and yells out at the other engineers don’t go to all the trouble this is a computer problem everyone just gets off the bus and gets back on the bus and starts up and we go on to the convention. Obviously this is meant to be an extreme version of the story but it is part of modern society and the reason that we have six backups for recovery of all of your protected health information which includes obviously all the documentation of all the different procedures that we have done on you. Hopefully we never have to use any of our catastrophe recovery tools and we can just ride on the bus over to the convention center without having to get off. See you at our next blog.