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.

A decade ago, cybersecurity was seen as a sort of luxury service for large corporations. Today, it’s something that even the smallest businesses need to prepare for. 

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are now prime targets for cybercriminals. In fact, nearly half of all cyberattacks are aimed at small businesses—yet many don’t have the tools or expertise to defend themselves effectively.

For those of you who have small children, sometimes you have to deal with absolutes. For example, most parents tend to teach their children that they simply shouldn’t trust strangers. A stranger offers you candy? You say “no thank you” and find an adult you trust.

Pretty simple concept, right?

This same concept is really important for business cybersecurity, too.

Over the last few decades, Cedar Park has been a really unique success story of pioneering spirit and growth. It’s a great place to live, raise a family, and run a business. I think anyone who has had relatives from afar visit can attest to at least a little bit of envy at just how great our city is, and being saddled up to Austin only opens up the opportunities even more.

Unfortunately, this growth and success make businesses, even the small ones, a target to cybercriminals.

When you think about the data your business processes and stores on a day-to-day basis, it’s pretty easy to disconnect it from the people you do business with. After all, it’s your company data. That being said, a lot of the information that businesses collect comes from their customers. If something happens to that data, whether it is lost, stolen, breached, or sold, it can have a negative impact on your customers, which not only looks very bad for you, it can also result in legal action.

The time when businesses could ignore cybersecurity has long since passed. For over a decade, the general consensus among decision-makers for small and medium-sized businesses was that cybersecurity was a luxury item; a want but not a need. Ten or fifteen years ago, this wasn’t too far off, as typically just covering your business with some basic protection was usually enough to stop most problems. Today, we’re in a very different landscape.

The last few years have seen an unsettling jump in cybercrime rates, with more businesses struck by various attacks, ransomware, and data breaches. Phishing attacks against end users haven’t slowed down, either—in fact, they’ve become effective enough that even the pros can be tricked. Let’s consider some of the cybercrime trends we anticipate to see in 2023.

Let’s cut to the chase: scams are everywhere out there today, which makes it important that you are aware of how to avoid them. Let’s run through a few basic tips we always recommend.

They say that everything’s bigger in Texas. Unfortunately, as of late this includes the losses that businesses incur to cybercriminal activity. Let’s discuss how serious this problem is, and what you need to do to keep it from harming your business.

Cybersecurity can be a challenging animal for any business—particularly a small business. That makes it important that you understand a few key terms. Let’s go over these terms as a review—or as an introduction, if that’s the case.

The United States as a whole has seen a growing wave of cybersecurity threats, and the great state of Texas is no less likely to see these threats. In fact, there are plenty of reasons that Texas would be targeted directly. Let’s briefly review some of these reasons, and how they support the importance of cybersecurity preparedness for Austin businesses.