Blood sugar, Glucose meter, Machine to Machine (M2M), Medical, Qualcomm, Telcare

Telcares Blood Glucose Meter Calls Home via Verizon

Telcare’s next-generation wireless blood glucose meter – the Telcare BGM has now been certified to operate on Verizon’s nationwide cellular network. The product was developed in collaboration with both Verizon and Qualcomm, Inc., and is the first medical device to utilize Qualcomm’s new Internet of Everything module. Telcare’s product is the first technology to make CDMA connectivity affordable for consumer-focused medical devices. The product will be exhibited in Telcare’s booth, located inside the Qualcomm Life Pavilion #26715 at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show.

The Telcare product will operate with both Telcare’s FDA-cleared diabetes management portal and with other soon-to-be released mHealth care management platforms. By integrating Telcare’s FDA-cleared blood glucose meter and cloud server to the Verizon network, people with diabetes, their families, and their health professionals will now be able to integrate real-time measurement of blood glucose levels with other physiologic parameters, such as weight and blood pressure.

“Telcare is excited to establish this collaboration as it will enable us to better support Americans with diabetes, their loved ones, and their medical caregivers. Moreover, the outstanding cellular coverage afforded nationwide by Verizon wireless will be particularly valuable in continuously connecting people with diabetes to their care system,” said Jonathan C. Javitt, M.D., M.P.H., Telcare’s CEO and co-founder.

Diabetes mellitus affects 32 million Americans and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that one in three Americans born after 2000 will have the condition. Although the complications of diabetes can be prevented through daily monitoring and control of blood sugar, diabetes today accounts for one in ten healthcare dollars spent in the U.S. and results in needless strokes, heart attacks, amputations and cases of blindness.

Telcare BGM is a registered trademark of Telcare, Inc.

Data loss prevention software, encryption, Filesystem-level encryption, Virtustream, Vormetric

Virtustream Adds Cloud Database Encryption, Key Management

Virtustream today added software-based “data at rest” encryption to its cloud services portfolio through a partnership with Vormetric, a leader in enterprise encryption and key management. With this extra protection, Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software and Virtustream cloud IaaS services provide highly secure and compliant solutions that enable enterprises, governments and service providers to safely run mission-critical applications in private, public and hybrid clouds.

The company will now offer Vormetric’s database and file encryption solution to customers needing an additional layer of security to satisfy internal sensitive data policies and compliance mandates regarding business data. For enterprises required to comply with regulatory guidelines and compliance frameworks such as NIST 800-53, DIACAP, FedRAMP, FISMA, ICD503, G-Cloud, CSA Recommendations, ISO27001, HIPAA/HITECH, PCI, SSAE16/SAS70 and other industry standards, this new service provides a sophisticated approach to protecting highly sensitive data in the cloud. Virtustream’s new data encryption offering allows enterprises mandating full data life cycle encryption to take advantage of the cloud.

The addition of Vormetric Data Security adds to the enhanced security measures in Virtustream clouds which include layered physical/virtual security, cloud-to-cloud encryption, core servers equipped with new Intel CPUs that support Advanced Encryption Standard New Instruction Set (AES-NI) for optimal encryption efficiency, hardware-level authentication (Intel TXT), encrypted VPN (IPSEC and SSL), Key Escrow using Data Security Modules (DSMs), encryption in archive, GRC tools, two-factor authentication, and various additional security and compliance measures and reporting.

“File-level encryption is the most effective and flexible approach to cloud data security for enterprises concerned with regulatory compliance, protecting their IP and meeting contractual obligations around customer data,” said Bruce Johnson, vice president for worldwide sales and service operations at Vormetric. “By offering Vormetric Encryption through a pay-as-you-go model, Virtustream is providing comprehensive, built-in and transparent security for any database, that can follow customer data—whether it is in the cloud or a datacenter.”

As the Virtustream team evaluated security and encryption software to pair with its cloud solution, it found that many of the larger vendors focus primarily on end-user computing and encrypting whole drives, which only protects against specific threats and could not support a variety of deployment modes. Vormetric’s solution quickly emerged as the leader in enterprise class security, as it emphasized encryption at the file/folder level, transparently across all major database platforms. It also enables very granular separation of duties to allow for a variety of support models from zero client touch, to co-managed operations, to full key management by clients. Vormetric encryption ensures that there is no unauthorized data access from inside or outside an organization. In stress testing, Vormetric exceeded Virtustream’s performance expectations with a virtually indiscernible impact on application response time, excellent manageability and detailed logging of file access for Database Access Monitoring requirements (DAM) and Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) reporting.

Virtustream now stands as the first cloud provider to offer the Vormetric solution in a SaaS model with elastic, consumption-based pricing—services are priced per virtual CPU of each database server, as opposed to traditional perpetual licensing models.

“It can be challenging to get large enterprises to trust the cloud, so this partnership with Vormetric provides a significant security measure required to overcome that concern,” said Pete Nicoletti, director of security and compliance at Virtustream. “With Vormetric’s solution, we now have a database encryption security option suitable for customers who are required to comply with executive mandates or compliance frameworks but have not yet deployed encryption at their database or application layer. Adding this capability will make moving mission-critical data to the cloud a more feasible option for any enterprise looking for immediate risk reduction and cost savings.”

With this encryption service, Virtustream also offers and manages encryption of client databases at their location in the client’s datacenter before they even move the workload to the Virtustream cloud. This is a unique capability and allows customers that are concerned with protecting personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information to achieve regulatory compliance and avoid potential data breach costs.

“By partnering with Vormetric, we are able to combine its nimble and powerful security solution with our cloud solution for increased data protection with high performance and low overhead,” said Mike Olson, vice president of operations and service delivery for Virtustream. “Together we offer customers a more secure, compliant cloud environment with reduced infrastructure costs, and increased performance and uptime.”

Cloud computing, Featured

Is Cloud Computing Ready for Prime Time?

By John Dixon, Senior Solutions Architect

 

A few weeks ago, I took part in another engaging tweetchat on Cloud Computing. The topic: is cloud computing ready for enterprise adoption? You can find the transcript here.

 

As usual with tweetchats hosted by CloudCommons, five questions are presented a few days in advance of the event. This time around, the questions were:

  1. Is Public Cloud mature enough for enterprise adoption?
  2. Should Public Cloud be a part of every business’s IT strategy?
  3. How big of a barrier are legacy applications and hardware to public cloud adoption?
  4. What’s the best way to deal with cloud security?
  5. What’s the best way to get started with public cloud?

 

As far as Question #1, the position of most people in the chat session this time was that Public Cloud is mature enough for certain applications in enterprises today. The technology certainly exists to run applications “in the cloud” but regulations and policies may not be ready to handle an application’s cloud deployment. Another interesting observation from the tweetchat was that most enterprises are indeed running applications “in the cloud” right now. GreenPages considers applications such as Concur and Salesforce.com as running “in the cloud.” And of course, many organizations large and small run these applications successfully. I’d also consider ADP as a cloud application. And of course, many organizations make use of ADP for payroll processing.

Are enterprises mature enough for cloud computing?

Much of the discussion during question #1 turned the question on end – the technology is there, but enterprises are not ready to deploy applications there. GreenPages’ position is that, even if we assume that cloud computing is not yet ready for prime time, then it certainly will be soon. Organizations should prepare for this eventuality by gaining a deep understanding of the IT services they provide, and how much a particular IT service costs. When one or more of your IT services can be substituted for one that runs (reliably and inexpensively) in the cloud, will your company be able to make the right decision to take advantage of that condition? Also, another interesting observation: some public cloud offerings may be enterprise-ready, but not all public cloud vendors are enterprise-grade. We agree.

Should every business have a public cloud strategy?

Most of the discussion here pointed to a “yes” answer. Or that an organization’s strategy will eventually, by default, include consideration for public cloud. We think of cloud computing as a sourcing strategy in and of itself – especially when thinking of IaaS and PaaS. Even now, IaaS vendors are essentially providers of commodity IT services. Most commonly, IaaS vendors can provide you with an operating system instance: Windows or Linux. For IaaS, the degree of abstraction is very high, as an operating system instance can be deployed on a wide range of systems – physical, virtual, paravirtual, etc. The consumer of these services doesn’t mind where the OS instance is running, as long as it is performing to the agreed SLA. Think of Amazon Web Services here. Depending on the application that I’m deploying, there is little difference whether I’m using infrastructure that is running physically in Northern Virginia or in Southern California. At GreenPages, we think that this degree of abstraction will move in to the enterprise as corporate IT departments evolve to behave more like service providers… and probably evolve in to brokers of IT services – supported by a public cloud strategy.

Security and legacy applications

Two questions revolved around legacy applications and security as barriers to adoption. Every organization has a particular application that will not be considered for cloud computing. The arguments are similar for the reasons why we never (or, are just beginning to) virtualize legacy applications. Sometimes, virtualizing specialized hardware is, well, really hard and just not worth the effort.

What’s the best way to get started with public cloud?

“Just go out and use Amazon,” was a common response to this question, both in this particular tweetchat and in other discussions. Indeed, trying Amazon for some development activities is not a bad way to evaluate the features of public cloud. In our view, the best way to get started with cloud is to begin managing your datacenter as if it were a cloud environment, with some tool that can manage traditional and cloud environments the same way. Even legacy applications. Even applications with specialized hardware. Virtual, physical, paravirtual, etc. Begin to monitor and measure your applications in a consistent manner. This way, when an application is deployed to a cloud provider, your organization can continue to monitor, measure, and manage that application using the same method. For those of us who are risk-averse, this is the easiest way to get started with cloud! How is this done? We think you’ll see that Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) is the best way.

Would you like to learn more about our new CMaaS offering? Click here to receive some more information.

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Windows Azure Mobile Services

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS). It’s a brilliant technology that allows you to stand up powerful OData compliant services to support your Windows 8 Store Apps, Windows Phone 8 Apps, and even iOS apps in just a few minutes. It’s hard to oversell the sheer awesomeness of this stuff.
I’m currently working on a bunch of code that will shortly become a sample project highlighting both WAMS and Windows 8 Apps (look for a project called “FamilyPig” coming soon). In the process of building that, I ran into a couple of questions – one of which I’ll cover here, and give some guidance to people who might be running into a similar question.
One of the cool features that makes WAMS super easy to work with is the concept of “dynamic schema”. In a nutshell, that means that if you have an existing table, and you throw a Plain Old CLR Object (POCO) at it using the InsertAsync method (of the IMobileServiceTable interface), WAMS is smart enough to look at the object coming in, and make sure that it has all the columns that it needs in the underlying Windows Azure SQL Database table to store the record (assuming that “dynamic schema” is enabled on the mobile service). If the column does exist, it gets created on the fly. Very, very cool. Note, what’s actually happening under the covers is that your POCO object is being converted to a JSON object for transmission over the wire, and WAMS is pulling apart that JSON object to look at the columns.

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Houston, We Have Cloud

The data centers of the future may look more like NASA ground control – governance inside, resources out
One theme has remained consistent throughout the evolution of cloud thus far – enterprise IT wants to retain control of both its data and access to to it.
This is not an unreasonable demand. After all, it is enterprise IT – and its leadership – that will pay the price should customer data leak or regulations not complied with. Despite the growing view that cloud security is a joint, shared responsibility between customer and provider, it is enterprise IT that must put into place the mechanisms for both controlling and proving control over data and access, not cloud providers or integrators. The provider can offer services designed to provide that control, but it is not the one that must implement the polices or report on their effectiveness.

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Cloud Conversations: Gaining Cloud Confidence | Part 1

This is the first of a two-part industry trends and perspectives series looking at how to learn from cloud outages (read part II here).

In case you missed it, there were some public cloud outages during the recent Christmas 2012-holiday season. One incident involved Microsoft Xbox (view the Microsoft Azure status dashboard here) users were impacted, and the other was another Amazon Web Services (AWS) incident. Microsoft and AWS are not alone, most if not all cloud services have had some type of incident and have gone on to improve from those outages. Google has had issues with different applications and services including some in December 2012 along with a Gmail incident that received covered back in 2011.

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Does mobility and the cloud equal total compatibility?

Over the last fifteen or so years, we have seen computing make the transition from the fixed and immovable desktops and servers, through to chunky underpowered laptops, through to less chunky but more powerful laptops using Wi-Fi connectivity, through to smartphones, 3G, tablets.

We are now nearing a state of complete computing mobility. More recently, we have seen cloud computing grow exponentially with cloud hosting and remote data storage services such as Dropbox taking centre stage.

It is predicted that in 2013, there will be significant merging between the cloud and mobile computing.

The cloud and mobility have already merged in certain markets however, but under a different guise. Where ‘mobility’ has meant the access and input of data in any place and at any time, whether in business or public, it follows that there should be a convergence of such mobility with the extensive array of cloud services.

There …

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Amazon Web Services starts to assert itself

By Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

At the end of November 2012, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its first partner and customer conference in Las Vegas. Dubbed AWS “re: Invent”, the event was a success. It enabled AWS to assert itself as a large and influential player in the IT marketplace.

However, as well as AWS’s strengths, it also highlighted some of its traditional weaknesses. These include poor communications and an inability to put forward messages adapted to the needs of enterprise executives.

A growing footprint but needs more transparency

AWS shares as little information about itself as it can get away with. As the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market matures, it becomes increasingly awkward for the organisation to be so closely guarded.

Nevertheless, the conference itself, in its size, energy, and quality of networking opportunities, was a good reminder of the growing influence that AWS yields in the IT …

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Step-by-Step: Build a SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud on Windows Azure

Now that SharePoint Server 2013 has been released, I frequently get asked about ways in which a SharePoint 2013 lab environment can be easily built for studying, testing and/or performing a proof-of-concept. You could certainly build this lab environment on your own hardware, but due to the level of SharePoint 2013 hardware requirements, a lot of us may not have sufficient spare hardware to implement an on-premise lab environment.
This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure FREE 90-day Trial Offer to build a free lab environment for SharePoint 2013 in the cloud. Using the process outlined in this article, you’ll be able to build a basic functional farm environment for SharePoint 2013 that will be accessible for approximately 105 hours of compute usage each month at no cost to you under the 90-day Trial Offer.

This makes a great scenario for leveraging our Windows Azure FREE 90-day Trial Offer to build a free lab environment for SharePoint 2013 in the cloud. Using the process outlined in this article, you’ll be able to build a basic functional farm environment for SharePoint 2013 that will be accessible for approximately 105 hours of compute usage each month at no cost to you under the 90-day Trial Offer.

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