Capstone Works Blog

If you’re a Texas business owner staring down the barrel of HIPAA regulations, feeling pretty overwhelmed by the jargon and the fear of massive fines, you're not alone. Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Austin and across Central Texas struggle to understand what it really takes to be compliant.

Here’s some good news: navigating HIPAA doesn't require a law degree, just a clear, practical roadmap. Let’s demystify it together.

Data breaches can lead to significant financial losses, damage to reputation, and loss of customer trust.

Data breach prevention is not just about technology. It's about understanding the risks, implementing robust security measures, and fostering a culture of cybersecurity within your organization.

Disasters tend to happen when you least expect them to. That’s what makes them disasters. A bad situation is often made much worse simply because you didn’t expect it, and that can be the case here. Let’s say an employee suddenly quits, and deletes all of their files on the way out. This can be a sticky situation, so here are a few ways to handle it when it happens, and a few ways to prepare for it just in case.

We talk a lot about how to be proactive and prevent IT issues and data loss when facing bad weather, power outages, and other disasters, but that usually doesn’t help anybody when they are in the middle of a problem. Let’s switch the perspective, since a lot of our state is dealing with cold, wind, and ice right now while we’re writing this, let’s talk about some things your business will need to take care of when things get back to normal.

The weather can pull some pretty unexpected punches, even here in Texas. Take the snowstorm we had a few years back. Businesses that lacked any kind of plan to manage this weather suffered as a result… both due to the event itself, and the costs associated with the aftermath.

While I don’t really want to bring up unpleasant memories, I want you to think back to the winter storms of February, 2021. Now, I want you to consider your current business continuity preparedness…if a similar storm were to strike this winter, how would your business fare?

Microsoft Office’s suite of applications are famous, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint becoming almost generic terms for word processing, spreadsheet generation, and presentation creation. While these three applications certainly have their value in the office, there’s a lot of other capabilities that the Microsoft 365 platform adds that take it to the next level.

With winter here, now is the time to evaluate whether or not your business has the tools in place to remain up and running in case disaster strikes. Here are three steps you can take.

Most Texas businesses were caught off-guard by last winter’s storm and, as such, suffered data loss due to power outages, structural damage, and other environmental issues. As Texas businesses now face an extreme summer, they face the same challenges caused by winter. The question is, are they prepared this time?

As of July 29, 2015, Microsoft launched Windows 10 for PCs and tablets, which is a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users. According to Microsoft, Windows 10's features include:

Your days are filled with making decisions that will guide your business into the future.  It is easy to put your IT needs on the backburner, but that will lead to days spent putting out IT fires rather than focusing on your growth.  In the 21st century technology is at the center of any business.  Your entire operation can grind to a halt due to one computer snag; costing you lost productivity and the potential for lost clients.  According to recent research by CompTIA, the proactive monitoring that a managed service provider offers, reduces your costs by 50% per downtime incident.  Outsourcing your IT needs to Capstone Works is the best way to ensure that your business is running smoothly.  We have the Enterprise level software applications to support your business as well as the wealth of knowledge of multiple IT professionals at your immediate disposal.

Angry customers, negative media coverage, frustrated employees, untold revenue lost, lingering anger from customers: that’s the status for Delta Airlines this week.  Of course this is not news to anyone; unless you have been living under a rock you have heard the numerous news reports detailing the Delta computer disaster.  Whether caused by a minor power outage at Delta headquarters or an internal computer hiccup, the airline was forced to cancel over 500 flights causing gridlock across America’s airports at the height of vacation season. You may not be running an international transportation corporation, but imagine what would happen to your clients if you had an unexpected IT failure.  Think something like this can’t happen to you? Think again.  The problem that Delta airlines faced was not the power outage at their headquarters; it was an inadequate IT Disaster Recovery Plan.  As a business owner you don’t want to be caught off guard in the middle of an IT nightmare.  An IT Disaster Recovery Plan may sound like a great idea, but you might not even know what one looks like, let alone know where to start.  Here at Capstone Works we are your IT partner and are ready to put together a comprehensive IT Disaster Recovery Plan.  The goal of any good plan is fivefold, it should: