The new and enhanced HIPAA omnibus standard brings an interesting question with regards to cloud security and the shared responsibility model in IaaS clouds. Since the release of the HIPAA omnibus, we’ve received many questions around “BAA” agreements, and how the responsibility split actually happens between (for example) the cloud provider and an ISV providing a healthcare application in an IaaS environment.
Without getting to the details of what a “Business Associate Agreement” means, I’ll simply say that the updated regulation makes business associates (Healthcare ISVs’, and potentially the cloud providers themselves) of covered entities (i.e. clinics or hospitals) directly liable for compliance with certain requirements of the HIPAA privacy and security rules (read more about it in this excellent HIPAA survival guide post). In other words, the entire “food chain” (The cloud provider, the ISV, and any other business associates in the logical flow to the covered entity), should ideally sign a business associate agreement. But what is the practical meaning of such requirement in an IaaS cloud environment? As one should expect – full compliance can be achieved only if all parties (business associates) will enforce compliance where they can actually do so. The IaaS cloud provider for example, will prove compliance on the physical and hypervisor level, while the Healthcare ISV will prove compliance on the guest OS, the healthcare application, and PHI data stored in the cloud.
Todas las entradas hechas por Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal
A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure
With the increasing prevalence and acceptance of the cloud as a viable alternative to on-premise IT, today’s IT organizations are faced with a wide range of options. In fact, had you just woken from a five-year slumber, you might find the available array of cloud service options quite daunting.
At just a moment’s notice, you can spin up pretty much anything, with Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings all readily available. Services can reside on public clouds in multi-tenant environments, private clouds within the four walls of an organization, community clouds shared between a limited set of tenants, or even a hybrid arrangement.
For the many IT organizations mired in maintaining server and storage infrastructure, IaaS appears a very attractive alternative to managing hardware in-house. While it’s still a rare organization who seeks to move all their IT infrastructure to the cloud, there is a long list of benefits to strategically and selectively partitioning infrastructure using a hybrid strategy. Take a look at just a few benefits: reduction of capital expenses, maintenance expenses and avoidance of the often dreaded refresh cycles required on a 3-5 year basis.
The Answer to Data Scientist Scarcity Lies in Automation
If zettabytes of data exist, why is less than 1% of the world’s data being analyzed today? Seasoned entrepreneur and startup CEO Radhika Subramanian believes that the inability to analyze and gain value from Big Data is that organizations are taking a services-centered approach. As the title of the session implies, Subramanian believes that the data needs to do the talking, not armies of analysts searching and querying databases. Her company has developed high-speed, advanced algorithms to automate pattern detection for rapid, real-time discovery of the “unknown unknows” in structured and unstructured data. Subramanian teams up with internationally renowned High-Performance Computing luminary Dr. David Bader to tackle Big Data’s biggest challenges. Together they ask, ‘What if you didn’t have to analyze data at all?’
Top Eight Application Performance Landmines
We have been blogging about the same problems and problem patterns we see while working with our customers over the past few of years. There have always been the classic application performance landmines in the areas of inefficient database access, misconfigured frameworks, excessive memory usage, bloated web pages and not following common web performance best practices among others.
More than two years ago we posted summary blogs of the Top Server-Side Performance Problems and the Top 10 Client-Side Performance Problems to give operations, architects, testers and developers easy-to-consume best practices. We feel that it is time to provide an update to these best practices as new problem patterns have since come into play. We also want to cover more than just problems that happen within your application by broadening the scope across the entire Application Delivery Chain. This includes all components between your end user and your back-end systems, databases and third-party services. The following illustrates which components are involved and what the typical errors are along the delivery chain.
Space Monkey May Be Nearing Public Beta
Space Monkey, the Google-backed P2P start-up that intends to compete against Box and Dropbox not to mention the likes of Google Drive and SkyDrive, seems to be slowly pumping up publicity for its widget so maybe it’s getting close to its promised public beta if it can get the Kickstarter money to bring the thing to market.
Space Monkey aims to put a cloud in every house and says it’s “building a storage network the likes of which have never been seen.”
It involves a local storage device and a $10-a-month subscription for a terabyte of online storage, which is 10 times the storage you’d get from Dropbox for the same money.
Cloud Expo New York: Secret Sauce for a Scalable Enterprise Cloud Model
AMAG Pharmaceuticals’ five-person IT team should bottle its secret sauce for a scalable enterprise cloud model. The public company eliminated its data center in 2008 and has since encouraged employees to adopt cloud applications as they see fit and ramped up security to make this possible – resulting in a reduction of over 60% in IT costs and much more productive (and happy) staffers.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Nathan McBride, Vice President of IT and Chief Cloud Architect at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, will explain how enterprises can not only move to the cloud, but create a more productive workforce, sharing the security and infrastructure strategies necessary to do so successfully.
Five Private Cloud Pitfalls
Private cloud may be the right choice for you, though it is not without its potential pitfalls.
There are many reasons to trust the private cloud – from reliability, to security and compliance, to predictability, private cloud can often be the best choice for a business.
But just because it’s private doesn’t mean it’s not susceptible to its own range of pitfalls. While the shortcomings of public cloud have been widely discussed, it’s important to note that private clouds, too, are associated with a range of potential pitfalls you ought to be aware of.
Shadow IT – The Reality Is Here
A recent survey has shown that security policies and rules set down by IT departments are not just being ignored but having a bus driven through them by staff and senior executives, who wish to bring their own device to work so that they can do more, work smarter and be in touch all of the time.
The survey shows that almost three-quarters of respondents would not bet against their own organization having a data breach within the next 12 months.
This along with other responses shows that the IT Department of 2013 is a long way from the IT Department of just five years ago, where what they said may not have been liked but was generally adhered to and, if it was not, sanctions could come into effect.
Cloud Expo New York: Getting the Most from Hadoop Development
The Hadoop framework and SSD technology augment cloud data systems ranging from analytics to on-line transaction processing (OLTP) to data warehousing. The resulting balance of processing, networking, SSD storage, and Hadoop optimization results in improving Big Data sort responsiveness from hours to minutes.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Black, a Data Center Solutions Architect at Intel, will review the background of Apache Hadoop, its application, and methods to accelerate data system clusters with Intel SSD technology. He will provide an overview of the genius of Hadoop and an overview of the ecosystem landscape, and discuss the best-known applications of SSD technology to development, real-time query, and main Hadoop clusters.
Cloud Computing Performance
“The cloud (whether public or private) is a strong driver of Big Data,” noted Michael Kopp, a technology strategist at Compuware, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “A Cisco survey said that 4 out of 5 IT professionals stated that ‘all or some Big Data projects will require cloud computing capabilities.’”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Michael Kopp: Agree – The move to cloud is about faster go-to-market, more flexibility, more agility and faster deployments. That being said Cloud costs can easily explode if not monitored and if applications are not specifically tuned toward cloud-based cost structures