The convenience, efficiency and cost benefits cloud computing offers organizations has made moving healthcare data and records to the cloud make sense for hospitals, physicians and other healthcare providers. Security and data breaches are a concern for any industry utilizing the cloud, but healthcare unfortunately seems to be particularly vulnerable to attacks. The Washington Post recently reported that The Department of Homeland Security is fearful that the health industry is “inviting” an attack with its out-of-date policies and lack of oversight.
A recent WIRED article discussed the current state of healthcare information in the cloud, including specifics on the vulnerabilities facing healthcare providers using cloud applications and why consumers should be concerned about their healthcare data being on the cloud.
According to the article, hackers are particularly interested in healthcare information because of its comparatively substantial dollar value. An individual’s medical identity can be worth as much as $50, a significant amount considering a social security number is worth just $1. With personal medical information in hand, thieves are able to commit medical identity theft by using someone else’s personal information to receive goods or services, potentially wreaking havoc on that person’s records and creating liabilities for service providers and increasing costs for everyone.
Cloud Expo NY | How Private Cloud Works in Real Life: Deployment Examples
Companies around the world are moving into on-premise private cloud environments. Many connect their private cloud to their public cloud service providers.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, will talk about examples of what worked, what failed and why we should think about this evolution. Questions covered will include:
Can you really move from virtualization into automated and orchestrated private cloud?
What are the benefits? Costs in money and time? Risks?
Most operators to opt for cloud-based RCS
Despite the operator support behind Rich Communications Services (RCS), it will only be the very biggest international players that deploy the technology in their own networks. The rest will look to cloud-based offerings to fulfil their needs, according to business systems firm SAP Mobile Services.
John Sims, president of SAP Mobile Services, recently told telecoms.com that “only the biggest operators in world will deploy RCS in their networks. But beyond the top five or ten operators globally, the rest of the industry will look for a hosted solution.”
Open source cloud tools show signs of maturity
Open source cloud computing software CloudStack, which is developed by all-volunteer association the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has this week graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project. The move signifies the maturity of CloudStack as an open source tool for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.
CloudStack uses existing hypervisors such as KVM, vSphere, and XenServer/XCP for virtualisation and supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API as well as offering its own. Target environments include service providers and enterprises where it can be used to set up on-demand cloud computing services or a private cloud for use by internal employees.
IBM to Present Opening Keynote at Cloud Expo New York
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes.
In his Opening Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Danny Sabbah, CTO and General Manager Next Generation Platform at IBM, will detail the critical architectural considerations and success factors organizations must internalize to successfully implement, optimize and innovate using next generation architectures.
Cloud, DevOps, and the Enterprise
The lack of emphasis on self-service Private Clouds is a telling indicator of the state of Cloud Computing (in particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS) in the enterprise. If an enterprise IT shop were to truly implement a self-service Private Cloud, and actually got it to work properly, then the enterprise development teams would be able to manage the entire production environment for themselves. There’d be nothing left for the operational IT folks to do except make sure to replace bad hard drives and the like. No more server or network administration. No more break/fix. No more reason to get that healthy salary – or any salary at all, for that matter.
Six Steps to Get Started with Windows Azure Active Directory
Windows Azure Active Directory ( WAAD ), a cloud-friendly REST-based implementation of Active Directory for identity management of cloud applications, is now generally available for production cloud apps as a FREE service. WAAD provides consistent centralized identity management for Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and your own cloud-based applications. In addition, WAAD can be integrated with an on-premise Windows Server Active Directory via DirSync and Active Directory Federation Services ( ADFS ) gateway components.
In this article, I’ll provide a set of resources that you can use to get started exploring and leveraging Windows Azure Active Directory for your applications …
Navigating the Crowded Cloud Market
Cost, tech, service: Which do you value most in a cloud solution?
Whenever you go shopping there are usually a few factors that determine what you buy and what you pass up.
One is obviously money (though we all wish this wasn’t the case). Price can be a deciding factor, but often we will pay a little more for something if it offers measurable value.
Another factor is trust: Do you know what’s being sold? Do you trust who’s selling it? Can you trust that it will fulfill your needs?
The flipside of trust is often chance: Are you willing to take a chance on a new product that will hopefully deliver the same or better results than your tried-and-true choice?
Private cloud drives data centre expansion, says survey
Half of those polled in the latest cloudy survey have said they will “definitely” look to expand their data centres in the coming year, with the vast majority of remaining respondents claiming they will expand in 2014.
The survey, commissioned by data bods Digital Realty Trust and conducted by Campos Research and Analysis, spoke to 300 IT execs and concluded that this explosion in data centre usage was primarily down to the proliferation of private clouds.
Three in five (61%) cited an internal cloud as an “extremely important reason” for expansion, with the main data centre driver being security (67%).
Other interesting drivers noted in the top 10 were disaster recovery (62%), new apps and services (61%) and virtualisation (57%).
The most popular place to build a new data centre is New York, according to the research, with 65% of those surveyed citing the most interest in the Big Apple …
When the Cloud Is Run on a Cloud
At first blush, it sounds like a mystic’s riddle, somewhere in the vicinity of the sound of one hand clapping. But in reality, it’s a setup that makes perfect sense: Rackspace runs its OpenStack cloud in another OpenStack cloud.
“We’re running our cloud inside of a cloud,” John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, recently told Wired.com. “All of the control nodes that are necessary to serve the customers on our cloud are running in another OpenStack cloud.”
The arrangement is only natural. “It’s a better way of doing things,” Engates said. “We’re merely eating our own dog food. The application we’re offering to customers is running on that same application.”
OpenStack is a way of pooling resources from a vast collection of machines, including processing power and storage space. Rather than running your software application on a particular server, you run it on OpenStack, a platform that spans hundreds of servers, and this platform can grab you as much processing power as you need, whenever you need it. This makes it easier to launch applications, but it also makes it easier to expand or “scale” them – to reach more users with more servers. And when a server fails, the platform is smart enough to move the machine’s work to a new one.