CalCPA Technology Resources

By Bruce Gray, CPA, Technology Committee chair

The CalCPA Technology Committee met Aug. 13 at CalCPA’s Redwood City offices. High on the list of concerns was computer security, both physical and data-related. Part of the meeting included a presentation about data encryption by a representative from PGP—the data encryption standard used by the U.S. government. The speaker’s presentation started with “A day in the life of data,” which illustrated just how widely information is distributed over the course of a day. As CPAs, we are subject to both ethics and regulatory requirements related to the protection of our clients’ data, but we also learned that 45 states have laws and regulations governing the protection of data. If you haven’t addressed this serious issue, the time is now, before you have an incident of lost data.

We also had a presentation about LinkedIn and an update of CalCPA’s use of social networking. Using social media has become almost as important as having a website, even though the technology is relatively new (LinkedIn started in 2003, YouTube and MySpace started in 2004, Facebook started in 2005 and Twitter started in 2006).

The committee has a number of resources available to CalCPA members, including webinars, a listing of the top websites for CPAs and information and resources for members. To access the information, visit CalCPA’s website. The most recent webinar held Aug. 25 covered three topics: Using Excel for Management Reports Virtualization and Office 2010. The best part is that it was free to members.

For more technology information, plan to attend our Jan. 27 chapter meeting, which will focus on technology gadgets and computer security with guest speaker and tech guru David Cieslak.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 10:56 am and is filed under Chapter News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.