Cloud computing seems to have taken the IT world by storm within a number of industries and the medical field and all it entails is no exception.
The medical industry in all its forms has embraced the cloud in a number of manners as varied as the industry itself, from simply keeping patient information and histories in the cloud to using it for new drug discoveries, innovative medical treatments, and efficient storing, distribution, and analyzing of medical imaging and real-time data.
Throw in the everyday operations management of medical facilities and employees within and the use of cloud computing in the medical industry grows even further.
Basic record keeping
Hospitals and medical practices in general are well-known for the sheer amounts of data created on each individual patient, from histories to procedures to medications to x-rays and charts to billing.
Up until the advent and facilitation of cloud computing this …
The biggest eye-opener in Gartner’s recently-published study on the current agenda regarding the digital landscape for Chief Information Officers is that CIO’s recognize that cloud computing will not only be a significant part of the future, but that their own roles and behavior need to be updated to survive in the modern enterprise.
“CIOs will have to develop new IT strategies and plans that go beyond the usual day-to-day maintenance of an enterprise IT infrastructure…. technologies provide a platform to achieve results, but only if CIOs adopt new roles and behaviors to find digital value.”
Most CIOs recognize that the future of enterprise IT lay not with sitting and writing code and patching servers, but rather one of strategic development and as an integrator of business goals: riding the sea change from a person plugging in cables to an analyst; from a compiler of stacks to a broker …
Guest Post: Ilyas Iyoob, Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist, PhD at Gravitant
We first went from reserving cloud capacity to securing capacity on-demand, and then we even started to bid for unused capacity in the spot market – all in an effort to decrease cost in the cloud. Can we take this one step further? Instead of us bidding for capacity, wouldn’t it be interesting if we can get providers to bid for our demand?
Retail supply chain market analogy
In fact, this is a common phenomena in the retail supply chain industry. For example, Walmart has a large amount of freight that needs to be shipped between different cities over the course of the year. So, every year an auction is conducted in which Walmart lists all their shipments, and carriers such as JB Hunt, Schneider, Yellow etc. bid for the opportunity to carry these shipments using …
Many clients I talk to are simply not ready for the ever-changing conditions in the business world as cloud computing gains in popularity. My company started using it years ago, when we needed to expand our horizons in our IT department, to include flexibility in transferring data when our workers were away from their desks.
We quickly realised we could maximize mobile cloud computing technologies to our company’s benefit, with virtually no additional costs of buying needed equipment or extra personnel. The model we use in optimising mobile cloud computing technology can easily be incorporated into any business model.
Mobile Applications Will Be Common for the Workplace
With the ever-increasing popularity of laptops, tablets and smartphones in the workplace, the mobile network will soon replace all other preferred methods of Internet connectivity in the United States. Mobile devices are expected to increase up to over 250 million individuals by …
Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications.
Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to. As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’.
In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.
Enter Unified Threat Management
10 years ago the first perimeter architectures consisted of a fast packet processor (the firewall) and a battery of content scanning servers. Each server was dedicated to a specific task (a duty) such as locating spyware or virus scanning. Each was from a different vendor and each was managed separately – it was genuinely best of breed and from a pure performance perspective it was ideal.
However this design is a complicated multi-component perimeter infrastructure …
The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner has released a document discussing data and security implications for companies moving to the cloud.
Even though the report looks at the relative basics of cloud computing from an enterprise perspective, the guidelines it recommends still make interesting reading.
The key tenet from the research was that nobody else except the user is ultimately responsible for the information they put in the cloud. “If there’s a privacy breach, you’re going to be the one answering questions about what went wrong,” the report notes.
Yet in terms of security, the report advocates that users be clear on the different elements of security and whose responsibility they are; the user’s or the provider’s.
Above all, however, the report advocates that if all goes wrong, check the contract and the SLA and perform due diligence on the cloud provider. This is particularly key for …
The bursting of the dot-com bubble left a long and lingering scar on the IT industry for many years.
Some would argue, rather successfully, that the industry never fully recovered after the 2001 implosion of an industry that had been propped up by the mad dash to prevent Y2K from changing life as we had come to know it.
Once disaster had been averted and the frantic race to the finish line was over, companies that had been spending big and living large suddenly had little money coming back into the business to support its ridiculous expenses, and the layoffs began.
Today’s IT job market is not nearly as grim as what was being faced by the newly unemployed of 2001. However, with the overall job market in such a state, it’s a very bright sign indeed that the IT job market seems to be recovering at a …
The 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was the usual media frenzy, with as many new technology announcements as ever. Although CES focuses on mass-market, consumer products, entertainment, and services, it does provide a preview of technologies and products that will most likely enter the enterprise market eventually. It also gives IT departments some idea of what the corporate end user is going to expect in terms of corporate IT services, user interfaces, and service flexibility.
Mobility, cloud-based services, and end-user empowerment
Mobility, cloud-based services, and end-user empowerment were the major themes of many of the new products and services on display at CES. Another prominent topic was the “Internet of Things” or the “Internet of Everything.” Manufacturers introduced devices of all kinds with wireless capabilities, and unveiled enhanced versions of existing devices that had been upgraded with flexible applications such as location-based services, text …
IT is an acronym crazed world. So crazy that sometimes – when running out of three letter ones – we simply recycle them or add sequence numbers. Remember MRP, which used to mean Material Requirements Planning, but then became Manufacturing Resource Planning (called MRP II to avoid confusion), to only a couple of years – and a few trillion of investments – later, resurface as ERP.
In that era the term BPR also became popular. BPR stood for Business Process Re-engineering (see for example Hammer, M. and Champy, J. A.: (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution), a movement that in my perspective* really gained steam from the realisation that throwing new technology (ERP) at existing processes, only offered limited improvement potential.
As Business Process Re-engineering often resulted in massive redundancies and layoffs, BPR got kind of a bad rap, especially among employees and unions (remember those?)
The financial ROI of cloud security and compliance is judged by decision makers in end-user organisations by the same measures as is done for Cloud computing in general, i.e. by how much it cuts up-front capital expenditure and in-house manual maintenance cost. However, manually translating security policy into technical implementation is difficult, expensive, and error-prone (esp. for the application layer).
In order to reduce security related manual maintenance cost at the end-user organisation, security tools need to become more automated. With the emergence of cloud PaaS, it is therefore logical to move all or parts of the model-driven security architecture into the cloud to protect and audit cloud applications and mashups with maximal automation.
In particular, policies are provided as a cloud service to application development and deployment tools (i.e. “Policy as a Service”), and policy automation is embedded into cloud application deployment and runtime platforms (i.e …