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What are the best practices for cloud governance within healthcare?
When you think of cloud computing in the healthcare vertical, you also have to think of security and governance. Indeed, the need to control and secure healthcare data in the cloud is a big issue, and thus cloud governance is critical.
On the whole, cloud computing needs governance to succeed. If you think about it, at the end state of the cloud computing implementation, we’ll have thousands of services and data elements under management. To control how they are accessed, added, deleted, and altered, we need a solid approach, processes, procedures, and technology. That is why we call it ‘governance,’ or, more specifically, ‘service governance.’
Service governance is important in the world of healthcare in the cloud for a few key reasons:
Laws and regulations within the healthcare vertical make it necessary to control access to data, services, and processes in very fined-grained and configurable ways.
- Cloud services that …
New EMC Storage Arrays & Software-Defined Storage Speed IT Transformation
EMC Corporation has kicked off a 24-hour, around-the-world live broadcast announcing new products that help give customers the speed they need to lead their IT Transformation. Today’s news includes revolutionary technology advances in the EMC VNX line of midrange storage, new capabilities for the world’s fastest growing reference architecture – EMC VSPEX, the upcoming general availability of EMC ViPR – a new Software-Defined Storage platform, and finally, a preview of «Project Nile» – which EMC expects to be the world’s first commercially-available complete, Web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Cloud Marketplace for Enterprise Customers
Setting up a single instance of a cloud application, let alone multiple ones, can be complex, time consuming, and prone to mistakes.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Alex Sousa, Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, at SHI, will show how the SHI Cloud Marketplace can quickly deploy sophisticated multi-tier applications across multiple geographically diverse servers, located at different cloud service providers.
Alex Sousa is Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, at SHI. He oversees productization aspects of the SHI Cloud Backup as a Service (Baas).
Combining business, technical, and legal expertise, Sousa is a cross-functional hybrid. Most recently, he was the legal counsel of two solar cell start-ups, where he drafted patents and negotiated commercial agreements. He was also in charge of building out and managing the datacenter at one of the start-ups.
Help for the CFO: Pinning Down Your Vendor
A recent article by Rob Livingstone on CFO.com [1] attracted my attention. In the article, Rob talks about the need for a tighter, ongoing working relationship between your company and its IT vendors for “as-a-service” technology-delivery models. We have in previous blogs also discussed the changes required in the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) movement. Clearly, Rob’s target audience here is primarily the CFO, and Rob’s suggestions are intended to help financial officers focus on some of the vendor selection issues that are emerging as the technology evolves, and as the customer-vendor relationship evolves in parallel.
As a billing vendor, I look at this from the other side of the negotiation fence, but nevertheless I find I’m pretty much in agreement with Mr. Livingstone.
The article contains a number of useful reminders, some of which I may return to in a future blog. However, for today, I’ve picked out a couple of Rob’s comments, because they happen to resonate with discussions we are constantly having with our customers and prospective customers. They both address adaptability and flexibility, important tag words for us here at MetraTech.
«Syrian Electronic Army» Reminds Us of Importance of Internet Security
by Elliot Curtis, Senior Director, Mass Market Hosting Sector, Parallels
The recent attack by the “Syrian Electronic Army” on media outlets including the New York Times and Huffington Post websites are a renewed reminder of the challenges around internet security. While SMB websites are an unlikely target for organized hacking or distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, these highly visible and widely reported security issues raise a wareness and concerns for everyone. Most SMBs are exposed to risks from malicious viruses and hacks, as well as, problems caused by bot-nets or even simple content control.
Awareness of internet security continues to rise, but high-profile incidents like this presents a specific opportunity for Web Hosters and Service Providers to have a discussion with their customers about solutions to protect their Web presence and cloud applications. Parallels products and ecosystem of partners enables a variety of security solutions including; hacking protection, anti-virus, anti-spam, email security, DDOS prevention, backup & disaster recovery. Our SMB Cloud InsightsTM research shows that security solutions are the most popular and the fastest growing add-on to both Web Hosting and VPS core services, so every Web Hoster and Service Provider should have a security bundle as part of both their core offering and their up-sell strategy.
Why Is Cloud Security Such a Big Challenge?
For many enterprises, moving business processes and data to the cloud has become a next step for improving both operational and technological capabilities. The cost savings and efficiencies created by utilizing cloud applications continue to increase, including opportunities for more business functions to be put on the cloud. For those currently using the cloud or planning to begin or expand cloud adoption, a growing concern is cloud security and specifically this question – “Why is cloud security such a big challenge?”
The challenges of cloud security begin with an enterprise’s need to keep control over their data and to ensure that their data is kept private and protected. Whether it is outsourced data storage or the use of popular cloud SaaS applications, putting more data in the cloud inherently means more opportunity for unwanted or unauthorized access to that information. But cloud adoption by the enterprise is simply too compelling because of its business benefits, so enterprise security and IT teams have to search for ways to secure their data in the cloud while permitting access and use by legitimate corporate users.
Helping IT Get Its Mojo Back
Anytime we in IT encounter a new paradigm, our natural reaction is block, control, stop. In many shops, our first response is to prohibit users from accessing websites that the company has not approved, including cloud-based software, mobile applications, and other “bring your own apps” candidates. Instead, we ought to put more of our attention on words like partner or enable. That’s what IT is really striving for.
IT managers want to serve their company’s needs and to enable employees to do their job better. But the perception of IT is that is has been on a long trajectory towards (let’s face it) irrelevance.
What Value Can I Expect from Cloud Computing Training?
No student has walked away from a cloud computing course knowing less about the role, impact, and potential of implementing cloud in nearly any organization. Normally, when we think of technical-related training, images of rooms loaded with switches, routers, and servers might come to mind. Cloud computing is different. In reality, cloud computing is not a technology, but rather a framework employing a variety of technologies – most notably virtualization, to solve business problems or enable opportunities.
Cloud Expo: Building Programmable Data Center Switching Fabrics for Cloud
Software Defined Networking and overall network programmability concepts are becoming top of mind for many cloud providers seeking to drive efficiency and simplicity into their Data Center switching fabrics.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, David Klebanov, Technical Solutions Architect at Cisco Systems, will review various deployment options leveraging centralized and distributed control plane models to help guide organizations in their journey to build next-generation programmable Data Center switching fabrics for the cloud.
David Klebanov is Technical Solutions Architect at Cisco Systems.