Cloud computing must have been brushing up on its bedside manner.
HIPAA requirements now stipulate everyone in the health-care industry must begin migrating patient records and other data to cloud computing. By 2015, all medical professionals with access to patient records must utilize electronic medical and health records (EMR and EHR), or face penalties.
A recent study by MarketsandMarkets revealed the health-care cloud computing market, which is only currently about 4% of the industry, is expected to grow to nearly $5.4 billion by 2017. The cloud migration process, however, can be daunting for health-care organizations since they have to move an incredible amount of data, according to an article on Forbes.com.
Cloud service providers are now offering a variety of new ways to access information via cloud applications and microsites designed for mobile devices. To specifically address the needs of the health-care industry, cloud service providers continue to improve technology platforms to improve lab order entry, pharmacy records management, medical billing, imaging service requests and more.
Service virtualisation provides a practical approach to delivering DevOps
Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst Ovum IT
Even today’s most successful organizations will not survive the converged business future by merely doing the same things they currently do only differently. What is needed is a shift to do different things.
Ovum believes that rapid, assured, and sustained business innovation is imperative to an organization’s success. IT leaders therefore need to effectively harness technological advances, cut time to market, and improve quality and performance.
Many organizations are facing significant changes in the application development process, particularly with intelligent computing now in nearly every piece of equipment shipped. This is driving the world toward environments that are becoming so complex that operations needs to be taken into consideration before the first line of code is written.
The need to build and deploy applications quickly is significantly blurring the traditional boundaries between development and operations. Ovum believes that the move to agile …
Spanning Cloud Apps Launches Reseller Program for Spanning Backup
Spanning Cloud Apps, Inc., creators of Spanning Backup for Google Apps, has launched the Spanning Authorized Resellers Program. Through the program, partners can provide their customers a product for protecting Google Apps data.
Spanning Backup provides backup and recovery of the complete Google Apps suite: Gmail, Drive, Sites, Calendar and Contacts. The solution features a secure cloud-to-cloud environment for protecting Google Apps data and SSAE 16 Type II audited processes that ensure its integrity. Spanning also provides constant monitoring of data backup, allowing administrators to correct issues before they become problems.
“We have designed a program that extends the value of reseller services, and brings together the key support pieces for their ongoing success,” said Jeff Erramouspe, chief revenue officer, Spanning. “We’re excited to already be working with leading VARs and system integrators worldwide and look forward to expanding into new relationships.”
“As enterprises encounter obstacles in moving to the cloud, Spanning Backup provides a unique solution that solves the challenges facing our customers in North America, Europe and Asia,” said Doug Shepard, president of the Google Business Unit for Cloud Sherpas, the world’s largest cloud services brokerage and two-time Google Apps Global Partner of the Year. “We look forward to a successful partnership with Spanning as we integrate their solution into an overall cloud strategy for our clients.”
Key features of the Spanning Authorized Reseller program include:
- A discount structure with strong margins that gives reseller partners complete control over end-user pricing and a higher average revenue per user (ARPU); potential for increased ARPU by 60-80 percent over selling Google Apps alone
- Lead referral and distribution of new business opportunities
- A simple contracting process to get resellers into the market quickly and efficiently
- Customized marketing programs for specific territories, market segments and business practices, including email marketing, webinars and other co-marketing activities
“We have found Spanning Backup to be an excellent platform for delivering value-added services to our clients,” said Rob Morgan, managing director for PIT Group in Wollongong, Australia. “Managing data protection policies isn’t always easy and many of our customers contract with PIT Group to do that for them. The Spanning program gave us the flexibility to bundle our services with Spanning Backup and deliver them both to our clients in one cost-effective package.”
Spanning has partners reselling Spanning Backup around the globe, including in North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia/New Zealand.
Cloud Expo New York: Bridging IaaS and PaaS
As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Evangelism at WSO2, and Frank Rego, Business Development Manager at SUSE, will show how the combination of IaaS and PaaS enables enterprises to more efficiently and flexibly tackle the challenges of the modern connected enterprise.
Vendor-agnostic data centres: Fact or fantasy?
In some ways, everything about IT is about creating uniformity. Standard configurations. Synchronized patches. 1000 identical laptops shipped to all employees.
We place a high premium on «everything being exactly the same.» And for good reason – if everything is the same, management and administration becomes far far easier.
And while we enjoy the fantasy of racks and racks of identically-configured servers humming away in the icy cold data centre of the future, anyone who knows what a data centre smells like (mmm, silicon) also knows that we can, at best, approximate that fantasy – but never truly taste it.
Why? Life is a big, hairy exception.
Exceptions for different workloads. Exceptions for supported software packages. Legacy systems where updates are either impossible or cost-prohibitive. New environments needed to support fun new applications and capabilities. Servers bought by enterprising LOB folks and stored under their desk until they were confiscated like gum …
Splunk and Cloudera Team on Hadoop
Splunk, the real-time operational intelligence platform, and Cloudera, the Apache Hadoop player, have fashioned a strategic alliance to deliver Big Data analytics across the enterprise.
Splunk Enterprise can integrate with Cloudera’s Enterprise Hadoop distribution using Splunk’s Hadoop Connect, which provides bi-directional integration to move data between Splunk Enterprise and Hadoop. It’s supposed to let customers to use Splunk’s machine data ingestion and management to deliver data to Hadoop, or ingest data into Splunk from Hadoop, such as the output of Hadoop MapReduce jobs, then analyze and visualize the data.
Together they expect to attract a broader spectrum of end users.
SNAP Interactive is a joint customer of Splunk and Cloudera. It owns and operates AYI, one of the largest social dating applications on the Internet, with more than 20 million Facebook-connected profiles and more than a billion interest data points.
Splunk collects analytics data from all of its online systems so engineering and business users can do ad hoc analysis and visualize important trends. Splunk Hadoop Connect then sends data from Splunk to Cloudera for the specialized batch analytics that powers many features on Splunk’s site.
Building Open Interoperable Cloud Infrastructure
At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure.
This session will share industry best practices for deploying cloud infrastructure that maximize the benefits of cloud economics, agility and interoperability. Learn how Intel is working with industry leaders to deliver open, secure and efficient cloud computing based on optimized compute, networking, storage and software technology and what are key tools and resources to help you achieve your cloud computing goals.
New Features, Bells and Whistles: Google I/O Conference
Guest Post by Paul Williams, a copywriter with InternetProviders.com
The Google I/O 2013 conference started with a bang on May 15th. Developers, tech journalists and venture capitalists crowded the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where CEO Larry Page and VP Amit Singhal delivered masterful keynotes that set the tone for the rest of the event.
Although Google I/O events are mostly for developers, the conference thus far has produced many interesting items for users to dissect and marvel at. In fact, the buzz surrounding the I/O conference has mostly been focused on developments and new features that will soon be ready to enhance the Google user experience. The major announcements are related to maps, music, finances, pictures, education, games, social networking, and search.
Providing Instant Answers with Conversation and Learning
Google is leaning on its Knowledge Graph to deliver a rich search experience that draws from a massive relational database that stores 570 million entries. According to Amit Singhal, Knowledge Graph will progressively learn from the queries entered by hundreds of millions of users. To this end, a film enthusiast searching for information about director Kathryn Bigelow, will instantly see highlights from her filmography, biographical data, reviews for Zero Dark Thirty, discussions about the possible remake of Point Break, and even more nuggets of information right on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).
Google is moving beyond the traditional keyboard-mouse-screen input methods of Internet search. “OK Google” is the new approach to conversational search. In this regard, Google’s plans for voice search have already impressed users and developers alike with an interface that will surely rival Apple’s Siri. The Google Now voice-activated personal assistant is also becoming smarter with reminders, recommendations and alerts that conform to each user’s search history and preferences.
Mapping and Finance
A revamped Google Maps for mobile devices will serve as a full-fledged handheld or in-vehicle navigator while the Maps version for tablets will feature an interface that encourages exploration. Google Wallet does no longer seem to be pursuing a debit-card strategy, although it intends to take on rival PayPal with an electronic funds transfer system powered by Gmail.
Advanced Social Networking
More than a dozen new features have been added to Google Plus (G+), the search giant’s promising social network. One of the most significant upgrades is Babel, a communication tool that integrates G+ Hangouts with other messaging applications such as Voice, Talk, Gmail, and the G+ Messenger.
Google is borrowing a page from Twitter with its own set of hash tags for G+. These smart tags will search across the G+ network for user-generated content that can be analyzed and organized by hash tags that can be clicked and expanded to reveal related content. This is similar to the discontinued Google Sparks feature of G+.
The most visible G+ upgrade can be appreciated in its user interface. Multiple columns that stream updates with animated transitions and photos retouched with Google’s patent “I’m feeling lucky” style of image editing make for a much more visually-pleasing experience on G+.
Streaming Music and Game Services
Google Play is no longer limited to solely serving as a marketplace for Android apps. For less than $10 per month, users can listen to unlimited tracks streamed from Google Play’s vast online music library. Users will be able to listen from their Android mobile devices or from compatible Web browsers.
Gamers will now be able to begin playing a game on their smartphones or tablets and later resume playing on a different device or Web browser. This is similar to the popular Xbox Live online gaming service from Microsoft, although Google plans to let developers come up with third-party gaming apps on Apple iOS and non-Chrome browsers.
Paul Williams is a part-time tech blogger, and full-time copywriter with InternetProviders.com. You can contact him via email.
The Who, What and How of Selling Cloud to SMBs
Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how.
In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMBs are through market segmentation; understanding what cloud services they will consume; and understanding how best to sell to SMBs and from which channels.
Speaker Bio:
Manjula Talreja is Vice President Global Cloud Business Development for Cisco, where she is creating new business models and partnerships with technology vendors, SPs and SIs in cloud. In addition to her focus on key customers and partners, she is helping shape the next phase of Cisco’s enterprise cloud strategy. She is a highly sought-after industry thought-leader, and was recently named to CableFAX Magazine’s ‘Most Powerful Women in Cable 2012’.
Cloud Computing Bootcamp at Cloud Expo New York: Full Agenda
New, «Super-Sized» 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.