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 …
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Everyone in the IT industry knows how amazing cloud computing is – it can cut overheads, introduce flexibility and make previously unobtainable services affordable for even the smallest of businesses. But with 60 per cent of the American public claiming to have no clue at all about cloud services, it seems that the sector’s enthusiasm is yet to turn into mainstream awareness.
It’s tempting to dismiss such findings out of hand – after all does it really matter if people don’t know how iTunes, Gmail and other products work as long as they actually do what customers want? The answer is a resounding yes, it does matter. Too many small business owners don’t understand the benefits of cloud computing and they’re missing out.
As described in the last week’s post NIST defines three different cloud computing service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS and SaaS are really easy to grasp but I see people struggling to understand the PaaS model. As a long-time application developer though I find the PaaS model the most compelling one for new applications. Here is why.
I will look at two examples: one enterprise and one from the consumer world.
Let’s start with the enterprise scenario. If you examine any enterprise application portfolio you will find out that almost every development team has implemented it’s own code for handling common functionality like authentication, authorization, database access etc. There are also numerous cases when the same team developed the same functionality over and over in each new project. Even the componentization model doesn’t help in this situation because either developers are often not aware of the existence of the components or there are too many options they can choose from and they cannot find the right fit for their scenario. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the holly grail for this problem but many enterprises are still far from achieving this goal.
While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.
Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.
During a recent conversation with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and his top executives, it became apparent that amid all the new technology advancements like cloud computing and Big Data, organizations are struggling to seek the concrete advantages in applying these technologies to their own real-world scenarios. Even more worrisome is the situation that occurs when an organization cannot leverage any of the already-proven solution approaches or services to address a specific problem or a concern and the situation remains unresolved over time.
These issues could very well be rooted in the way an organization goes about solving problems. Or they can reflect the inability of their service provider and technology vendor to identify the need for change and the implementation of the right solution.
This year, Eucalyptus Professional Services is going open. All the way open,” blogged Jason Eden, Senior Director of Professional Services at Eucalyptus Systems, this week as the open source cloud company ushered in changes in the realm of Education, Consulting, and Certification.
Cloud compliance is always a hot topic, but recent updates to the HIPAA and PCI regulations, have further enhanced the need to clarify some important points around cloud compliance and regulatory compliance. In this blog post, I would like to address some issues as highlighted in the valuable PCI DSS Cloud Computing Guidelines (available here), around compliance and Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. (While the trigger is the PCI guideline, the discussion applies to HIPAA as well).
First and foremost, the level of control and your ability as a cloud customer to implement security in your cloud environment is dictated by your cloud type. For example a customer using Software as a Service (SaaS) will have the least amount of control and the SaaS provider will have the greatest level of responsibility for data security, while in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the customer has much more control on data security implemented in his cloud account while the IaaS provider will emphasize “shared responsibility”. And to translate it to compliance: A customer in a SaaS environment must rely heavily on the provider’s compliance (which is either there or not), while in a IaaS environment the customer must take active responsibility for compliance together with tools provided by the IaaS cloud provider.
During a recent conversation with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and his top executives, it became apparent that amid all the new technology advancements like cloud computing and Big Data, organizations are struggling to seek the concrete advantages in applying these technologies to their own real-world scenarios. Even more worrisome is the situation that occurs when an organization cannot leverage any of the already-proven solution approaches or services to address a specific problem or a concern and the situation remains unresolved over time.
These issues could very well be rooted in the way an organization goes about solving problems. Or they can reflect the inability of their service provider and technology vendor to identify the need for change and the implementation of the right solution.
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 …