Epic River, a leading provider of software, data, and process consulting for hospital and financial institutions, today announced that it has signed an agreement to become a co-title sponsor of Team MONARX, an expedition adventure racing team.

In a beautifully irreverent tone, Brian Barrett from Wired magazine took on the long-standing and much maligned "password expiration" policies that have become a mainstay in most modern businesses. You may know password expiration by its more familiar Active Directory message, "Your password will expire in 14 days. Do you want to change it now?" No. Sorry, force of habit. Most organizations and banks, in particular, have been good soldiers of security and implement impossibly difficult password requirements with astonishingly short expiration periods. All of this has led to a situation where users either come up with a creative means of barely altering a favorite password or they forget it all the time or they write it down. None are beneficial to actual security. These expiration policies more resemble flailing and yelling at an armed assailant. Sure it might work, but it's just as likely to not work.

...you can conduct an amazing and often eye-opening customer interview and site visit.

My last post generated a lot of great discussion by friends and peers who work in bank IT. The overwhelming tone of the conversations was, "If I move our bank to hosted infrastructure, am I eliminating my own job?" I couldn't respond "no" fast enough. True cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide lots of cost savings and reduce the burden on IT, but everywhere we have seen financial institutions roll out cloud services, internal IT groups have grown and prospered. Less of the IT budget goes to hardware and network infrastructure and more goes to strategically improving IT and InfoSec.

If you ask a banker if it's safer to cloud host their IT infrastructure or keep it in-house, most will tell you the cloud is a great idea and probably where the industry is going, but it's not for them right now. Do you see it? Do you see the comedy in talking to bank management about whether they should keep something important at home or trust a respected third-party with it? Trust someone else with what you value most. Isn't that the cornerstone of the banking industry?

10 years. A decade. According to David Wallace of Small Business Trends (http://smallbiztrends.com/2013/03/infographic-failed-small-businesses.html), if a business is started with fewer than 20 people, only 9 out of every 100 make it to 10 years. I'm glad I didn't know that statistic 10 years ago because 3 people is DEFINITELY less than 20, making that 9% survival rate worse than dismal!

The award for Best Software for New Revenue in a Financial Institution goes to...........MyLoans!

In President Obama's State of the Union he made several comments about healthcare. Some were vague and point to the fact that change is going to continue to be slow. One good example of this was, "For decades, few things exposed hard-working families to economic hardship more than a broken health care system. And in case you haven’t heard, we’re in the process of fixing that." Yeah. I spent almost 10 years in DC. In my experience, anything the federal government is "in the process of" usually means you'll forget they were working on it well before they make any significant improvements. But I digress...

I see the word "affordable" used in conjunction with "healthcare" a lot. Even more now that there is a little known bill that made its way to law called the "Affordable Care Act."

Warning. The sanity in this post decreases as you scroll down. There. You've been warned.