Guidelines for compliance reporting.
Having guidelines your corporation has to strictly adhere to is going to keep all of your private information safe and secure, and having a private IT organization maintaining all of these programs and software is going to take the heat off of your back and allow you to work on the tasks at hand. Compliance reporting is going to allow this outside company (which obeys all of the governances that you put in to place) to keep track of all infractions and whose hands have touched which pot, which will keep everyone on the same page and security auditing much more beneficial to everyone involved. Having an internal process for tracking progress throughout the mainframe is going to give your clients and customers the serenity of knowing you are not only taking good care of their money, but also their confidential information that put in to the wrong hands can cause a lot of damage.
HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) has put laws and sanctions in to place regarding the privacy of patient records. If you are in the medical industry you have to follow these guidelines or risk your entire practice, not to mention lawsuits and sanctions by the government and private citizens that used to be your patients as well. Having programs and practices in place that allow for network security and different levels of access is going to not only be helpful, but hold those accountable that need to be. Having an outside firm consistently monitor the IT systems available to you and your patience is going to give you and them the peace of mind needed to concentrate on giving them the care they deserve. Encryption and coding are just one of the many ways the government tells you that you must handle a patients data, and not knowing the right way to handle this can land you in jail. Take the time, energy, and money needed to save yourself the heart ache and head ache and do it right the first time. Hiring someone on the outside who does nothing but IT security initiatives is going to make your job a lot easier.
We rely on computers for our everyday functions now. They should be able to rely on us to keep them safe.