While our representatives in Congress hash out healthcare reform, the executive branch of the government is already moving forward with aggressive new regulations aimed at ensuring the security of electronic medical health records and healthcare information systems. Whatever changes Washington imposes upon the healthcare industry, existing laws like the HITECH Act, a recently strengthened HIPAA, and the Red Flag Rules have put into motion a massive overhaul of healthcare IT systems–and the healthcare industry is woefully unprepared to deal with it.

The HITECH Act (officially the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) was part of President Obama’s

Raz-Lee Security last week announced two new security modules for its i OS security suite. Native Object Security will allow i OS shops to implement object-level security on their systems without the hassle of manually configuring it through the operating system, while User Profile and System Value Replication will allow shops to easily replicate security settings across multiple servers or LPARs. The Israeli software company also made changes to other modules of its iSecurity suite, including its anti-virus software.

iSecurity is a collection of about 17 products designed to automate the configuration and management of i OS servers, ranging from

Next time you are sitting around “blamestorming” about the various cans of worms that that the IT department has on its hands, toss out for discussion the idea of backup and recovery on multiple platforms. A single solution to a multiple-platform problem is a popular wish list item these days. But as we all know, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. This may be a chance for you beggars to ride.

Let’s start this off with a warning. You may not like this if you see every option through IBM i tinted glasses. But if you are a

System i shops concerned about the unauthorized distribution of sensitive data may want to consider dgmasker 3.0 and dgdiscover 3.0, which were released last month by dataguise. The software enables organizations to locate sensitive data wherever it might reside across multiple production and development systems, and then programmatically “mask” it so that it’s illegible to humans. The vendor is very close to supporting IBM‘s DB2 database on System i servers and mainframes with the new version of dgmasker.

Organizations are required by law to keep strict control over their data thanks to a host of new government and

There wasn’t a lot of System i product news coming out of KronosWorks, the annual user conference for Kronos customers and business partners that was held last week. The trend of focusing on Windows-based technologies continues for this company, which has more than 4,500 System i customers. However, some of the announcements made last week in Las Vegas may eventually affect them, such as the new mobile scheduling app, rent-to-own options, and user interface enhancements.

Kronos kicked things off at the Venetian Hotel and Casino (one of Kronos’ System i customers, as it were) by announcing financial results for fiscal

Dimensional Insight last week launched a new release of The Diver Solution, its end-to-end business intelligence (BI) software suite that runs on i OS and other platforms. With version 6.2, the company has adopted AJAX programming techniques that it says result in a more intuitive Web browser interface and make it easier to develop dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and scorecards.

Dimensional Insight is a Burlington, Massachusetts, software company that was founded in 1989. Over the years, more than 2,600 organizations have selected its suite of BI software, which includes online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities. With last week’s launch of

i OS shops that are in the market for an online backup and recovery solution for their System i servers have a number of options available to them, which have been covered in considerable depth in Four Hundred Stuff. And now there is one more vendor to add to the list: Storagepipe Solutions, a Toronto, Ontario, company that actually was a pioneer in the field of online backup and recovery for AS/400s way back in 2003.

Storagepipe bills itself as the first Canadian storage service provider (SSP) to use a pure IBM server architecture. The company’s backup and

Microsoft last week announced the general availability of Exchange Server 2010, and already, software vendors such as Binary Tree are lining up with new tools to migrate IBM Domino e-mail environments to the new version of Exchange.

The new version of Binary Tree’s Common Migration Tool (CMT) for Exchange will be available next month. According to the New Jersey software company, the new release of CMT will make it easier than ever to move Domino mail stores to Exchange Server 2010, running either on-premise or over the Internet as a service.

Many Exchange customers are expected to run “in the

Companies that rely on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 to run their warehouses and factory floors can take advantage of the latest data collection software from Data Systems International as the result of a validated integration between DSI’s dcLINK and the Oracle ERP system, the vendor announced last week.

dcLINK serves as a communication hub connecting data collection devices, such as barcode scanners and RFID sensors, and ERP systems. The software, which is commonly deployed on Windows servers utilizing Oracle or SQL Server databases, ensures that real-time connections are maintained, which is especially important in large-scale implementations involving thousands of potentially

It’s a well-known fact in the AS/400 community that most of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas rely on IBM i OS servers to power their critical business applications. So it should come as no surprise that South Point Hotel, Casino & Spa, a Vegas property that opened in 2005, has selected i OS software from Agilysys to streamline operations.

Located on 60 acres in southwest Las Vegas, South Point is unique among casino properties. Like many Vegas casinos, it operates thousands of rooms, a huge casino floor, half-a-dozen restaurants, and various other amenities. What sets South Point apart is