Back in July, a study released from the Ponemon Institute cited cloud-based storage and mobile applications as the typical sources for cloud security concerns within many healthcare organizations.  However, it was not understood if this worry was around just the concept of cloud computing and mobile computing, or if these organizations are dealing with true issues.  I suspect it was the former.

“The study, ‘The Risk of Regulated Data on Mobile Devices in the Cloud,’ which surveyed 781 IT and data security practitioners, found that 33 percent of respondents said that they need to access protected health information (PHI) to do their work and yet few understood how to keep data secure. For example, 15 percent of those surveyed knew about HIPAA’s security requirements, but 33 percent of respondents indicated that they work for a HIPAA covered entity.”   Figure 1 is a depiction of the outcome of this study …

The importance of privileged identity management as a means of managing risk has long been understood. After all, it’s reported 43% of security breaches involve trusted insiders, according to research group Forrester. And the most recent Verizon Data Breach report revealed some 13% of breaches result from privilege misuse or abuse, and 76% involved weak or stolen credentials (of all types).
However, the widespread adoption of cloud computing has significantly increased the consequences of these risks. As was pointed out recently by Gartner Research Director Nick Nikols, “Administrators of private cloud and IaaS environments gain more concentrated power–and the risk that goes with it–than administrators for more traditional data center deployments.” The reason for this is the highly dynamic and scaleable nature of the cloud. Administrators can do much more, much faster than in traditional environments–and attacks scale up just as quickly.

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In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Tony Shan will present a methodical approach to effectively transforming a complex heterogeneous IT environment to a Big Data-enabled technology ecosystem. First he introduce a pragmatic methodology that provides a step-by-step process to systematically develop and migrate existing applications and databases to a new paradigm: Discover, Evaluate, Analyze, and Recommend (DEAR). Then he drill down to individual components in this method, such as current state diagnosis, future state formulation, gap analysis, roadmap generation, and incremental implementation.
Afterwards, a real-world business scenario in an industry vertical will be presented, where he will apply this comprehensive method to execute a holistic transformation. We dive deep into the key barriers, limitations, and issues in specific use cases, which help derive the core technical requirements for the new platform in this case study. Multiple options in the technology components are short-listed and assessed via qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Prototypes are further developed to conduct trial runs on the final candidates with specific test cases and justification criteria. Best practices and lessons learned about Big Data, advanced analytics and public cloud services will also be discussed.

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Verizon is calling on the expertise of one of its recent acquisitions to offer a cloud computing service to its customers.
Verizon has announced details about a new cloud computing service for business, Verizon Cloud, an IaaS offering the company claims will offer better end-user control over performance than any other cloud solution.
Currently in limited beta, Verizon Cloud features an IaaS elastic computing system, Verizon Cloud Compute, and an object storage system, Verizon Cloud Storage. But where Verizon Cloud differs, according to Verizon, is that it delivers the performance you specify, not just the performance you end up with, according to an article on InfoWorld.com.

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In their session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Luke Malpass, Software Architect & Co-founder of Fasetto, and Coy Christmas, CTO & Co-Founder of Fasetto, will discuss their PDQ Offline application, which is an application that allows sharing of files, pictures, videos and any other information instantly between any device, without internet, Wi-Fi or cell data, at no cost. Next they will discuss a new concept – “Cloud Life” – and how they are going about it – bringing all aspects of your life together in a single, accessible-anywhere platform, where all your information on the cloud can access one another, opening up opportunities never thought of before.

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The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community.

Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform.  And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community.

(To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned in this post are not clients and never have been.  I track this area out of personal interest.)

The last four years I’ve made a point at every Salesforce Dreamforce event to spend the majority of my time in the developer area.  Watching mini hacks going on in the DevZone, mini workshops, the Salesforce Platform and Developer keynotes over the last few years has been a great learning experience.  An added plus: developers are often skeptical and want to see new enhancements help streamline their code, extend its functionality …

This weekend I was clever. That is newsworthy because it doesn’t happen very often. Our son is stationed at a military base that did not receive TV coverage of the Boise State football game on Saturday night. It must have been the government shut-down. I can’t think of any other reason they wouldn’t have shown it. The solution was a three hour Google+ Hangout whereby mom and dad got to talk to our officer son while the laptop camera «inadvertently» captured and streamed the Broncos game showing on our big screen TV. It was a nice Hangout – they won! We tried Skype first, but the picture was blurry. Google+ Hangout, however, was picture perfect.
Our son is stationed a great distance away, however, using real-time communication and video we can communicate and share what is going on in our lives. This same kind of technology can be used in the context of «capability projection» for companies. Here is my definition of capability projection, «The ability of a business to apply all or some of its capabilities such as marketing, sales, distribution, etc., over great distances to respond to and take advantage of new market opportunities.»

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Cloud management vendors recognize the need for transparency and are taking the necessary steps to enhance their solutions to better support active visibility. The natural evolution of a typical management system begins with gathering data and presenting it in report tables. While traditional IT tools have had a similar evolution, the infinite cloud resources and dynamic manner of the environment take the lack of controllability issue to the extreme. This, makes visualization more crucial than in a traditional, finite data center. This week, I met my good old `cloud friends` from Dome9 that released their new cloud security visualization solution, Cloud Clarity.

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The software industry is in the midst of a revolution, driven by incredible advances in Big Data, analytics, mobile devices, developer tools, and infrastructure. Platform as a Service is at the center of this revolution, providing a comprehensive foundation that spans all clouds, private, hybrid or public, and gives developers a unified perspective that is consistent whether deploying apps to a laptop or across data centers.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, John Wetherill, Developer Evangelist at ActiveState, will dive into PaaS, showing how it enables rapid delivery of modern enterprise applications, with emphasis on how it simplifies Big Data access, instant elastic scaling, service provisioning, log aggregation, and remote monitoring, while dramatically increasing productivity and decreasing time-to-market. Platform as a Service is expected to be as influential on the software industry as Linux was two decades ago. After attending this session you’ll know why.

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