The people assigned to rethink the role of cloud computing by those charged with HIPAA best practices management and security have a daunting task on their hands these days. There are many decisions that should be made, and not a lot of emerging information and best practices.
However, as more cloud providers hit the market, many are offering HIPAA-compliant cloud services. At least, that’s what they are selling. The trick is to arm yourself with enough information to make sure you make the right choices, and move in the right directions.
The most important best practice is to understand the existing requirements, and then understand how the emerging uses of cloud computing could provide compliant and secure HIPAA solutions. The good news is that this is not the first time we’ve dealt with HIPAA data outside of our own data centers; we’ve been working with managed services, hosting, and co-location providers for years.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
NetIQ to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that NetIQ, a global, enterprise software company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
NetIQ is a global, enterprise software company with a relentless focus on customer success. Our portfolio includes scalable, automated solutions for Identity, Security, Access, Governance, Systems and Application, Service, and Workload Management that help organizations securely deliver, measure and manage computing services across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Cloud Marketplace for ISVs
To succeed in the software business, you need good software and great business skills. The software part is probably already covered, but growing your business without busting the bank can be tough. That’s why partnering with SHI makes good business sense.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Greg Rusu SHI’s Senior Director of Cloud Product Management, will show how the SHI Cloud Marketplace, in combination with one of the industry’s largest and most successful sales force, can be a great way to grow your market share.
Cloud Expo: SHI Cloud Marketplace, Brokering for the Enterprise
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Wade Yi, Managing Director & Head of Cloud Solutions at SHI, will discuss the technical and financial benefits of using the SHI Cloud Marketplace to discover, customize, and automate the provisioning of both large and small scale cloud services, using different providers and carriers. He will also discuss the advantages of integrating cloud service provisioning with existing corporate procurement processes.
Wade Yi is Managing Director & Head of Cloud Solutions at SHI, where he oversees the SHI cloud strategy, ecosystem partnerships, & sales enablement for all of SHI’s cloud solutions.
He joined SHI from HP where he served in a variety of roles including sales management, solution sales, ISV management and software business development. Prior to HP, he worked in software development, support and sales functions for two startups.
He has a PhD in Engineering from University of Maryland and an MBA from Cornell University.
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What are the best practices for cloud governance within healthcare?
When you think of cloud computing in the healthcare vertical, you also have to think of security and governance. Indeed, the need to control and secure healthcare data in the cloud is a big issue, and thus cloud governance is critical.
On the whole, cloud computing needs governance to succeed. If you think about it, at the end state of the cloud computing implementation, we’ll have thousands of services and data elements under management. To control how they are accessed, added, deleted, and altered, we need a solid approach, processes, procedures, and technology. That is why we call it ‘governance,’ or, more specifically, ‘service governance.’
Service governance is important in the world of healthcare in the cloud for a few key reasons:
Laws and regulations within the healthcare vertical make it necessary to control access to data, services, and processes in very fined-grained and configurable ways.
- Cloud services that …
New EMC Storage Arrays & Software-Defined Storage Speed IT Transformation
EMC Corporation has kicked off a 24-hour, around-the-world live broadcast announcing new products that help give customers the speed they need to lead their IT Transformation. Today’s news includes revolutionary technology advances in the EMC VNX line of midrange storage, new capabilities for the world’s fastest growing reference architecture – EMC VSPEX, the upcoming general availability of EMC ViPR – a new Software-Defined Storage platform, and finally, a preview of “Project Nile” – which EMC expects to be the world’s first commercially-available complete, Web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Cloud Marketplace for Enterprise Customers
Setting up a single instance of a cloud application, let alone multiple ones, can be complex, time consuming, and prone to mistakes.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Alex Sousa, Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, at SHI, will show how the SHI Cloud Marketplace can quickly deploy sophisticated multi-tier applications across multiple geographically diverse servers, located at different cloud service providers.
Alex Sousa is Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, at SHI. He oversees productization aspects of the SHI Cloud Backup as a Service (Baas).
Combining business, technical, and legal expertise, Sousa is a cross-functional hybrid. Most recently, he was the legal counsel of two solar cell start-ups, where he drafted patents and negotiated commercial agreements. He was also in charge of building out and managing the datacenter at one of the start-ups.
Help for the CFO: Pinning Down Your Vendor
A recent article by Rob Livingstone on CFO.com [1] attracted my attention. In the article, Rob talks about the need for a tighter, ongoing working relationship between your company and its IT vendors for “as-a-service” technology-delivery models. We have in previous blogs also discussed the changes required in the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) movement. Clearly, Rob’s target audience here is primarily the CFO, and Rob’s suggestions are intended to help financial officers focus on some of the vendor selection issues that are emerging as the technology evolves, and as the customer-vendor relationship evolves in parallel.
As a billing vendor, I look at this from the other side of the negotiation fence, but nevertheless I find I’m pretty much in agreement with Mr. Livingstone.
The article contains a number of useful reminders, some of which I may return to in a future blog. However, for today, I’ve picked out a couple of Rob’s comments, because they happen to resonate with discussions we are constantly having with our customers and prospective customers. They both address adaptability and flexibility, important tag words for us here at MetraTech.
“Syrian Electronic Army” Reminds Us of Importance of Internet Security
by Elliot Curtis, Senior Director, Mass Market Hosting Sector, Parallels
The recent attack by the “Syrian Electronic Army” on media outlets including the New York Times and Huffington Post websites are a renewed reminder of the challenges around internet security. While SMB websites are an unlikely target for organized hacking or distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, these highly visible and widely reported security issues raise a wareness and concerns for everyone. Most SMBs are exposed to risks from malicious viruses and hacks, as well as, problems caused by bot-nets or even simple content control.
Awareness of internet security continues to rise, but high-profile incidents like this presents a specific opportunity for Web Hosters and Service Providers to have a discussion with their customers about solutions to protect their Web presence and cloud applications. Parallels products and ecosystem of partners enables a variety of security solutions including; hacking protection, anti-virus, anti-spam, email security, DDOS prevention, backup & disaster recovery. Our SMB Cloud InsightsTM research shows that security solutions are the most popular and the fastest growing add-on to both Web Hosting and VPS core services, so every Web Hoster and Service Provider should have a security bundle as part of both their core offering and their up-sell strategy.