January 28, 2013
Volume XLII, Issue 7
Cloud Computing Is Disrupting Businesses Everywhere
Excerpted from Business2Community Report by Lindsey Nelson
Cloud computing is a catalyst for faster development and delivery of information, and pretty soon it will become a standard rather than a breakthrough technology.
I've written frequently on how cloud is a disruptive technology, but now let's talk about how it's altering your business.
Now I know what you're thinking. This doesn't or won't ever affect me. In reality, cloud computing isn't just changing the role of developers; it is changing the role of marketers; it's changing the roles of the sales force.
And in the coming years, even the roles that having seemingly nothing to do with cloud will be affected. There are of course the skeptics, but here are a few ways it'll transform the business.
It's no longer up to the IT department to make decisions on which software will be used. Shadow IT is lurking in every department where 30% of IT spending being done is happening outside the official IT budget.
You don't need any approval; just a credit card and a third party service provider can deliver your department the cloud computing software it needs to run quicker.
Budgets and project timelines are two hot topics, or should I say issues, in the IT and business world. Who is going to pay for what? And how many man hours will it take?
Cloud computing helps reduce both. This in turn gives companies the ability to experiment with wild ideas. It cuts down the time of testing and simulation.
We all know the common complaint about the IT department. It takes weeks to get something done, even if it's critical to the business, because they're overworked and understaffed. When your company has its data stored in the cloud, it makes it easier for the end-users to create a front-end of what they want.
Gone are the days of divide between the suits and the techies. Take a look at your kids, nieces, nephews, basically anyone under the age of 16 and you'll see they are already a part of the technology culture that's upon us.
Our future business leaders will lead with technology like the cloud. Cloud computing gives companies an advantage to do things quicker and with less red tape.
This alteration won't happen overnight, but it will continue to be a key aspect of the future business. It will affect job descriptions, and if I were you, I'd get on-board. Check out the Business Innovation Cloud to help get up-to-speed.
Demand for Cloud-Based Skills Will Grow Rapidly
Excerpted from Baseline Report by Dennis McCafferty
The acceleration of demand for cloud-based tech skills will increase far beyond that of other IT niches, according to Microsoft-sponsored research conducted by IDC.
In fact, there are 1.7 million open cloud-related positions right now.
But managers can't fill them because job seekers lack the required training and certification to excel in a cloud-enabled world.
The resulting white paper, Climate Change: Cloud's Impact on IT Organizations and Staffing, also pinpoints the tech specialties that organizations will most depend on in this fast-paced environment.
"Cloud computing is crucial to the bottom line of the company — it creates cost savings and efficiencies for companies and their customers," says Cushing Anderson, Program Vice President at IDC.
"But workforces around the world are steps behind when it comes to attaining the skills necessary to thrive in the cloud computing industry. There is no one-size-fits-all set of criteria for jobs in cloud computing. Therefore, training and certification are essential for preparing prospective job candidates to work in these jobs."
More than 600 hiring managers worldwide took part in the research.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 At the request of several of our Member companies, the DCIA has agreed to initiate an exploration of prospective approaches for the establishment of cloud-computing standards in order to further industry advancement.
As part of this effort, we intend to evaluate the multiple entities now vying for the privilege of serving in the role of facilitator of such standards-setting.
We will also evaluate the fundamental practicality of seeking to set cloud standards given the rapid pace of technological change in this space.
Our work will proceed in parallel with a related initiative of the US Department of Defense (DoD), which in a strategy intended to ensure flexibility and choice among cloud services vendors, recently engaged Fusion PPT to assist in the area of cloud standards and best practices identification.
We plan to discuss our preliminary findings at the CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NABShow in April.
Why even look at the issue of cloud standards at this juncture? One reason is to enable prospective customers to evaluate products and services competitively.
We have already voiced our support for the implementation, in an enlightened way, of common terminology for cloud product and service components in billing for the benefit both providers and customers, without reducing market competition.
Even for something as straightforward as CPUs, cloud providers have created their own measurement units: Amazon Web Services has the Elastic Compute Unit, Google has the Google Compute Engine Unit, and Microsoft Azure provides the clock speed of its processors.
In the past, the DCIA has found it enormously valuable to bring together representative parties from among affected private sector constituents into working groups to attack clearly defined problems.
Such groups are well-positioned to quickly develop hypothetical models, perform proof-of-concept testing, and conduct field trials.
It has also been extremely productive to present certain DCIA working-group results to established industry standards-setting bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to fully define protocols and business processes using their longer-cycle methods for disciplined and inclusive collaboration.
At this point, however, advantages may be achieved if more modest instances of standardization can be swiftly applied to certain requirements associated with security assurance.
In addition to making prospective customers more comfortable and willing to adopt cloud solutions in the first place, standards in this area can also provide the market with greater flexibility with respect to adding or changing vendors as their needs evolve.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), comprised of most large cloud providers, already offers the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) for implementing good cloud data center security practices. It provides detailed security concepts and principles in numerous domains and coordinates with major federal security standards. This provides an excellent basis for further work to quickly build upon and expand it.
Longer term standards can help lead the way to greater interoperability among data centers and the offerings of cloud services providers, which in turn can increase the industry's ability to provide redundancy for protection against power outages and other causes of server downtime.
Openstack, originally created by Rackspace and NASA and now operated by a foundation using fairly informal procedures, benefits the industry by commoditizing hardware to provide massive scalability. But whether its approaches comprise a true standard or merely represent a popular open-source endeavor — and whether this matters — is an open question.
Data, software, configuration, and images portability issues present additional multiple components and questions to answer in ascertaining their relative comparability.
The ability to share cloud services across multiple environments, ranging from private internal data centers to public multi-tenant clouds, raises even more questions.
Identity and access management (IAM), for example, can simplify rolling-out new services by relying on three de-facto standards: security assertion markup language (SAML), system for cross-domain identity management (SDIM), and other cloud service authorization functionality (OAuth).
A key question remains, given the very rapidly evolving marketplace for cloud-based offerings, is whether the pace of innovation itself will challenge the conventional standards-setting process. With cloud products and services being updated on a monthly if not more frequent basis, the typical multi-year cycle to formalize technology sector specifications may be impractical.
In this regard, and as a worthwhile first step for those who wish to participate with us in this effort, we recommend reading Cloud Standards by Joe Masters Emison.
He offers some good news about cloud standards: They're not as necessary as Internet standards were at this same point in the development of the Internet.
However, with the rapid commercial emergence of cloud computing, there is a lack of orderliness, with standards-developing organizations and would-be standards-setting entities devising standards that aren't being adopted by the cloud-computing industry.
And on the other hand, cloud services providers that develop original APIs, which they may intend to keep proprietary for competitive reasons, find their work being adopted by competitors without authorization — and in some cases becoming a de facto standard.
The dominant "standard" in cloud provisioning and orchestration today, for instance, is the Amazon Web Services API. What would happen if AWS made material changes to it?
Emison's report explains the drivers for cloud standards, discusses the importance of evaluating whether any given standard is worthwhile, and walks through the main cloud standards (formal, de facto, and otherwise) by category.
It also offers a sneak peek at results from a new InformationWeek Standardization Survey. Share wisely, and take care.
IBM's Cloud Computing Business Boosts Earnings
Excerpted from Fierce Enterprise Communications by Fred Donovan
Gains in its cloud computing business helped IBM beat Wall Street expectations for its fourth quarter earnings released late Tuesday, according to a report by the AP.
IBM posted a net income of $5.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, up 6 percent from the $5.5 billion recorded in the same quarter in 2011. For the full year 2012, Big Blue posted a net income of $16.6 billion, a 5 percent year-over-year increase.
At the same time, IBM's revenues declined slightly for the 2012 fourth quarter and full year. However, revenue in its cloud computing business jumped 80 percent year-over-year.
The strong earnings results sent IBM's stock up from $196 per share at close of the market on Tuesday to $205 per share at market close on Wednesday. IBM's stock rise pushed the Dow Jones Industrial average to a five-year high on Wednesday, according to the AP.
Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, said the firm would continue to invest in big data, mobile technology, social business and security in the coming year.
On the big data front, IBM received some good news this week. According to data gathered by DataSift and analyzed by Ovum, IBM was among the top big data vendors based on Twitter mentions and sentiment of vendors.
Other top big data vendors included The Apache Foundation, developer of Hadoop, 10gen, developer of MongoDB, Teradata, and Splunk.
"While Twitter streams are not a scientific focus group for detecting brand awareness, they provide a valuable window on market thinking. The data showed that while some players, such as IBM and Teradata, successfully scored high recognition in Twitter mentions, other enterprise players need to better focus their message to get Big Data recognition," observed Tony Baer, principal analyst for Ovum.
IBM's strong showing in both the cloud computing and big data markets have boosted its sagging reputation in the enterprise IT space, a space it dominated for decades.
DDN Is Fastest-Growing Company over $100 Million
DataDirect Networks (DDN), the world leader in highly scalable big data and cloud storage solutions, today announced its selection by the Los Angeles Business Journal as one of 2012's 100 fastest growing privately held companies.
Thanks to its sustained, rapid growth, DDN has been awarded recognition on the list for the third consecutive year, and is also the No. 1 fastest-growing technology company with over $100 million in annual revenue.
"We are very proud that we continue to create new jobs and do our part in boosting the economy," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DDN.
"By enabling organizations to harness the power of Big Data, DDN helps drive innovation in many fields, from new drug discovery to better global social media and entertainment offerings, and even insight into the origins of the universe. We look forward to helping our customers continue to capture, store, protect and distribute Big Data, while growing the DDN team in California and throughout the world."
The Los Angeles Business Journallisting is the latest in a long list of awards and recognition for DDN, including Inc. Magazine's fastest-growing privately held computer company over $200 million in annual revenue and Federal Computer Week's "12 Hot Companies to Watch."
DDN is hiring highly-motivated people across all functional areas to contribute to its innovative, fast-paced staff. Please visit www.ddn.com/careers for more information.
Microsoft's Azure-Based Video Streaming Goes Live
Excerpted from InfoWorld Report by Mikael Ricknas
Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offerings with the general availability of Windows Azure Media Services, which lets enterprises skip building their own infrastructure for streaming on-demand video.
The service, released Tuesday, can be used to deliver training videos to employees; stream video content from a website; or build video-on-demand service similar to Hulu or Netflix, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie said in a blog post.
Like many cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, Windows Azure Media Services aims to make it easier, in this case, to roll-out video streaming services.
Building a media distribution platform that encodes and streams video to various devices and clients is a complex task, which requires hardware and software that has to be connected, configured, and maintained, according to Guthrie. Windows Azure Media Services makes it easier by eliminating the need to provision and manage a custom infrastructure, he said.
With Windows Azure Media Services, enterprises can stream video to laptops, tablets, smart-phones, game consoles, and TVs based on, for example, Windows, iOS and Android.
Developers can build workflows for automatically uploading, encoding, and delivering video using REST APIs or .Net and Java SDKs, which can be downloaded from the Azure developer website. At that website, developers can also find documentation to help them get started.
A version that allows for live streaming is currently available in a private preview, and a public preview will be coming next, according to Guthrie.
To encoding Windows Azure Media Services, users pay a flat rate, which starts at $1.99 per gigabyte and is then discounted for larger volumes. For streaming, users pay for storage and bandwidth when streaming low to moderate traffic volume, and can then add more origin servers to handle a larger number of users.
BitTorrent File Syncing App Competes with Dropbox
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Janko Roettgers
BitTorrent's upcoming Sync app promises identical copies of any of your files on all of your computers. The company is now looking for first alpha-testers.
Sync that uses P2P technology to sync your files between your devices. The company announced the pre-Alpha test of Sync on its blog Thursday, where it also highlighted the launch of its new BitTorrent Labs website that offers additional details about this and other projects it is working on.
The announcement blog post is somewhat scarce on details, but here's what I've been told by the company: Sync will enable direct synchronization between your machines without any cloud caching. File transfers will be protected via 256 bit AES encryption. There are native apps for Mac OS, Windows and Linux, as well as a native NAS integration.
The post doesn't mention mobile devices, but a screenshot provided by BitTorrent shows a device icon that clearly features a mobile phone — so it wouldn't be too surprising to see syncing to phones and tablets at some point as well. I asked BitTorrent about this, and a company spokesperson responded, "It may be too early to say when mobile will be in play, but BitTorrent is committed to mobile across the board."
Users who want to find out more can sign up for the Sync Alpha test online.
BitTorrent has been rolling out a number of new projects and experiments lately, including the Chrome extension BitTorrent Surf that enables Chrome users to download torrents from within their browsers, the Facebook file sharing app Beam It Over and the Javascript BitTorrent platform Torque.
On Thursday, the company launched a Labs section on its website that is dedicated to all kinds of things that aren't quite ready to become mainstream consumer products. "We call it our test kitchen. Our playground," the Lab announcement blog post read.
BitTorrent's new Sync is going to compete with a number of established players. File syncing has been a key functionality of cloud storage providers like Dropbox and Sugarsync, and big players like Google and Amazon also offer syncing as part of their consumer cloud storage solutions.
BitTorrent's advantage is that it has an impressive app distribution reach. The company has more than 170 million active users for its BitTorrent and uTorrent clients. If it can convince just a fraction of those to try out Sync, then it might actually have a chance.
Akamai Releases State of the Internet Report
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report by Ned Sherman
Akamai Technologies, one of the largest Internet content delivery networks (CDNs), headquartered in Cambridge, MA, today released its Third Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report. The report provides insight into key global statistics including connection speeds, attack traffic, network connectivity, and availability, among many others.
A few of the highlights of the report include:
Its review of attack traffic from 180 unique countries/regions during the third quarter of 2012 shows that China maintained its position as the single largest volume source of observed traffic at 33 percent. The United States, at number two, experienced a slight increase in originated attack traffic with 13 percent. Russia replaced Turkey in the number three spot by generating 4.7 percent.
The global average connection speed decreased by approximately seven percent between the second and third quarters of 2012 to 2.8 Mbps. South Korea continued to have the highest average connection speed at 14.7 Mbps. Japan (10.7 Mbps) and Hong Kong (8.9 Mbps) rounded out the top three countries for average connection speed in the quarter.
In the third quarter of 2012, average connection speeds on surveyed mobile network providers ranged from a high of 7.8 Mbps to a low of 324 kbps. Seven providers showed average connection speeds in the "broadband" (>4 Mbps) range. An additional 68 mobile providers had average connection speeds greater than 1 Mbps. Average peak connection speeds for the quarter ranged from 39.2 Mbps down to 2.8 Mbps. Based on data collected by Ericsson, the volume of mobile data traffic doubled from the third quarter of 2011 to the third quarter of 2012, and grew 16 percent between the second and third quarter of 2012.
To download the figures from the Third Quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report, please click here.
Cloud Key Driver for Redefining CIO Role
Excerpted from CloudTech Report by James Bourne
A new survey from Brocade has revealed the extent of the changing CIO role in enterprise — and put cloud adoption as a major driver of it.
The research, which asked 100 CIOs from the EMEA sector (Europe, Middle East, Africa) found the following top-line takeaways: 50% of the CIOs polled expect that cloud adoption will result in their jobs involving less time fretting over the company IT infrastructure; one third of CIOs confirmed that cloud services had been deployed by their business without involving the IT department; and two in three envisage that by 2020, this trend will continue with business units procuring cloud services much more frequently
There were other interesting results, with 75% of respondents unsure whether their company's service level agreements (SLAs) will meet minimum requirements, which may come as a surprise.
Of course, a downwardly revised SLA will mean downtime and greater IT costs, but Forrester predicted that 2013 will see SLAs given less importance — so it's worth noting where this will end up.
Cloud computing featured heavily in CIO technology and business predictions for 2013 according to a Gartner survey, with cloud computing (incorporating SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) ranked as the third tech priority and CRM, virtualization and ERP all making the top 10.
But what will the priorities be for CIOs by 2020? According to the Brocade research, policy enforcement and mediation between business units and service providers will be the key watchwords. Similarly, two in three survey respondents stated their belief that the COO (chief operations officer) and CIO role will merge by 2020.
"This study has flagged some critical concerns about network deployment in modern business, and the strategic importance of the evolving role of the CIO," said Alberto Soto, Brocade VP EMEA.
Soto added, "The CIO will remain strategic to the business, but will assume a myriad of new responsibilities as network usage evolves in the coming years."
Brocade has also come up with an infographic looking at the different types of CIO today. Are any of these character traits familiar to you?
Get Ready for Bring Your Own Cloud
Excerpted from MSPmentor Report by CJ Arlotta
Take a look through MSPmentor, and you'll discover that we've covered bring your own device, bring your own technology, bring your own applications, but not bring your own cloud. Yet.
(By the way, if you're looking to name a new bring-your-own trend, you're slowly running out of letters.) Managed services provider Logicalis recently warned chief information officers about this emerging trend and how its effects will play out in the industry. How can you avoid the pitfalls of BYOC? Here are some tips.
Businesses are taking advantage of the BYOC movement through various free cloud solutions, ignoring firewalls established by IT. These solutions are going unchecked and paving the way for "poorly managed end-user cloud purchases and deployments [which] make for fragmented, redundant, unmanaged, and inefficient cloud-based outsourcing decisions with little or no input from IT," according to the company. To avoid these issues, Logicalis offered four important steps for MSPs to help mitigate this IT crisis:
Consult — Identify and define the needs of your clients. Afterward, match a cloud strategy to those needs, and develop a plan that makes sense now and that includes a roadmap for the future.
Build — Create a customized cloud solution. Solutions should be tailored to the needs of each client. Decide if the solution needs to be public, private or hybrid.
Operate — Determine where cloud solutions will reside. How will they will be operated? From where will they be operated ?
Manage — Who will manage the cloud solution that's been created? Who on your staff will take on this role? Be sure to identify all the resources that will need to be allocated to do the job right.
"We've managed to move from physical to virtual, which introduced virtual sprawl, and now from virtual to cloud," said Logicalis Cloud and Data Center Solutions Senior Director Kevin Gruneisen, in a statement. "But without proper management and strategies in place, moving to the cloud in an unchecked manner will result in cloud sprawl and a less relevant IT organization overall."
Logicalis released its fourth annual Top 10 Tech Trends to Watch study a week ago. The company conducted the study in December 2012, looking for insights into what CIOs and CTOs in the IT industry are saying on social networks. The study analyzed social media conversations between CIOs and CTOs in the industry to help identify important buzzwords and trends. The top 10 topics included discussions about managed services including mobile device management.
How Are People Using Cloud Computing?
Excerpted from Cloud Ave Report by Dan Morrill
With all the power and possibilities of using cloud computing, how are people actually using the technology? You might just be surprised by this late 2012 data gathered and presented in this latest survey data.
From the latest survey in how people are using cloud computing, 41% of the people taking the survey say that they are using cloud computing for their external customer facing applications.
In many ways this makes a lot of sense and is something that would be a good way to use cloud computing. This means that companies are not having to provision bandwidth, and can easily scale their external facing applications without having to purchase new hardware, software, or bandwidth.
This also means that companies can be much quicker in responding to customer requests or spiky demand scenarios that happen depending on your industry. This also supports trusted providers and others that have a need for limited data sets from the companies providing this service.
Surprisingly though, 36% of the respondents said that they were using this to host their internal applications as well. I would think that companies would be more cautious about this, unless they are using a dedicated provider like Salesforce.com or travel, or companies that provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) that a company might be using.
I have a hard time with this one, unless they are going through a SaaS provider for those services, which could be easily associated with "being in the cloud".
Looking forward, companies are using cloud computing for media, and big data munging. Big data is turning into a good use for cloud computing due to the scalability of the cloud and how easy it is to set up systems like Amazon's Hadoop processes to do this. I have seen many research labs and research colleges saving significant money by scaling big data into the cloud.
On media delivery this is also a viable option rather than trying to provision bandwidth and support via the company's assets.
However, one down note though is in massive CGI rendering in the cloud as a render farm. If you buy rendering in the cloud as a service, you might be able to get a cost advantage rather than building your own render cloud, or purchasing hardware to do this. This one is still out for debate, and still waiting solid numbers to be reported back by companies.
Service providers are addressing cloud security issues, and helping ease that tension in the market place. The survey reported that "just 23 percent of respondents said they are concerned about the lack of perimeter defenses and network controls in the public cloud. Only eight percent voiced fear about providers having access to their guest servers, whereas 20 percent are worried about the multi-tenancy of the public cloud."
Overall this paints an interesting picture where cloud computing will be going in 2013 and most likely well into 2014 as companies start working out how they will use the cloud, and what they hope to get out of it.
CloudPassage, an information security company that helps secure cloud computing resources, shared this data. There is no business relationship between this writer and CloudPassage.
Government Agencies to Adopt Cloud This Year
Excerpted from PhilStar Report by Ehda Dagooc
More government agencies will be adopting cloud computing this year, in efforts to maximize the benefits of technology.
DataOne Asia, an independent provider of IT services in the Philippines, President and Chief Executive Officer Cyril Rocke said that the government's adoption of cloud computing technology will be one of the biggest trends in 2013.
"First, government agencies intend to avoid capital expenditures whenever possible, since they cause a long, tedious and sometime risky process. All capital expenditures are subject to R.A. 9184," Rocke said explaining further that "because the process is long, there is a tendency to 'over-procure' which results in unnecessary costs".
Rocke believes that the adoption of cloud computing will downsize the government's lengthy process of acquiring resources and services, and cut costs. Aside from this, cloud computing lets government agencies deal with reliable IT service providers, which allows them to save more time, man-hours, skills development and troubleshooting.
The subscription-based procurement of highly customizable cloud computing services also provides numerous benefits to government agencies.
"They can subscribe for one month or several years, and the resources they procure can be increased or decreased on-demand. Therefore, the risk of making wrong decisions is eliminated. If the wrong resources or application is procured, the engagement can be easily terminated."
Another compelling reason Rocke cited that will enable government agencies to turn into cloud computing is that subscription-based services save costs.
"It is generally observed that about 90 percent of computer resources are never used. Eventually, they become obsolete, and will be simply replaced later without having been ever used. This is an enormous waste of public funds," Rocke said.
Aside from being reasonably priced, subscription-based cloud computing services are also customizable, which helps eliminate the need to purchase more computer hardware or software for upgrades.
Rocke also believes that the adoption of cloud computing services will greatly improve government services and prevent security issues.
"In addition, working hours in government agencies generally last from 9 AM to 5 PM, and this exposes the government's IT infrastructure to security and service availability issues beyond normal working hours," explained Rocke.
"Even netizens nowadays expect online government services to be available 24/7. With cloud computing, the government can simultaneously address these issues in access, availability, security and performance over time."
Finally, Rocke said that the considerably low pricing of cloud computing services can help attract government agencies to adopt them quickly.
"Cloud providers offer very transparent pricing and guaranteed performance through a Service Level Agreement," he explained. "All these factors significantly reduce cost and improve customer satisfaction."
He believes that the bright future of cloud computing in the Philippines in 2013 offers a lot of long-term benefits for the government.
"Through cloud computing, the government will be able to introduce new services faster. Costs will be reduced and performance will be increased. Experimentation on a small scale will be possible, with low risk and low costs, before launching on a large scale. All of these will help the government be more innovative with e-Government services," said Rocke.
Considered as one of the cloud computing pioneers in the country, DataOne Asia launched in 2012 a cloud-based business productivity and communications service for enterprises that comes with expert, round-the-clock support.
Last year, the Philippines was established as a promising market for Cloud when many enterprises, as well as small and medium businesses (SMBs), have learned to adopt the technology in their operations.
President Benigno Aquino III also recently showed his optimism for a government cloud computing project that will revolutionize childhood education in the country. Other government officials have also affirmed that outsourcing and cloud technology will be further encouraged this year.
DataOne Asia, created in 2000 by the Keppel Corporation, a multi-billion Singapore company, has both the world-class equipment and personnel, capable of supporting a wide range of businesses in managing their IT and data infrastructure.
DataOne Asia's services include data center hosting, web hosting, email, remote tape storage, back-up and restore, server hosting, disaster recovery to full IT outsourcing. VoiceOne, a subsidiary of DataOne Asia, is a new generation telecom provider that offers Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to enterprises in the Philippines.
Cloud Computing and the Healthcare Industry
Excerpted from Smart Data Collective Report by Vanessa Parks
Cloud computing is now not just about uploading your files in Yahoo! Groups or Google Communities for sharing with a common group. Cloud computing today speaks of large data and resources used by enterprises.
There are many businesses and industries affected by this trend in technology. One of which is the healthcare sector. In this article, we will talk about the impact of cloud computing to this industry in the nearest future.
There's a saying that doctors can never tell who their patients are to prevent judgments. Patients' information contains such confidential pieces of data that need to be protected at all times. This is the very reason why the hospital's IT infrastructure and network must be so secured from hackers or anyone who attempt to get data illegally.
Cloud computing, in its most initial state, has had issues regarding security. However now that many experts joined in to make the system really hard to break into, organizations can rest assured that there are increased levels of security and privacy in the cloud. Hospitals who want to use cloud computing must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).
Typically, businesses buy an additional storage system for backing up their data aside from the storage space where they have the resources to use. Cloud storage costs about 10 times less than the server space and hardware materials plus training of human resources to maintain and support the system in daily operations.
Cloud computing storage requirements only adapt to the needs of the client. Hence choosing a package well from the available offerings of the vendor is critical.
Getting access to the hospital system is prohibited unless permitted by the doctor or physician in charge. But visibility and login details are not given to patients in normal cases. With the use of cloud computing, since data are available in the cloud, patients can then log on to the system to refer to the prescription fitted to their ailments.
For instance, physicians who are out of the country can give patients accounts to be able to share data to them even when he's not physically in the clinic. Some sicknesses can lead up to death when not treated quickly. Since time is gold, understanding facts about the sickness immediately is gravely essential. Medical histories, symptoms and cures to it can be determined easily through cloud computing.
Cloud computing applications for health care would have constant updates which give way to raising the bar for security. While hackers are trying to get into the files in the current app, the system updates its current security measures and goes on for higher protection.
Cloud technology can perform updates without causing any downtime and possible data loss in real time. This matches the efficiency requirement of hospitals to run and access their networks for 24/7.
Unlike the usual intranet-based systems utilized in hospitals which are mostly desktop-dependent, cloud computing systems offer convenience and much mobility to its users. The cloud structure allows both healthcare professionals and authorized patients to access important files and data on a smart-phone, tablet and other mobile gadgets without special permissions and settings.
The world is fast changing. At the heart of this change are cloud technologies that are also being accepted by the health care industry. Cloud computing which enables computers and various other mobile devices to access shared files and applications online through the Internet instead of the local environment. Medical professionals now can share and promote information among others in similar fields in different locations.
The Right Cloud Solution for the Financial Sector
Excerpted from Verizon News Report
In today's challenging economic environment, the financial sector is leveraging technology to streamline operations and accelerate productivity. So it's no surprise that the adoption of cloud computing makes sense for this industry as financial organizations seek to improve efficiency, security, and scalability.
In response to market demands, Verizon Terremark recently announced enhancements to the Enterprise Cloud platform directly applicable to the needs of retail banks, capital markets, and insurance segments to help the finance industry adopt cloud computing and realize its benefits. Here are some of the ways these enhancements can directly benefit financial institutions.
Having cloud infrastructure in London is important to the financial sector because this is where several large financial institutions have centralized operations. As these institutions adopt different technologies to drive efficiencies and pass along benefits to their clients, cloud is understandably gaining the attention of CIO's within these financial organizations.
Strong security plays a critical role in the use of technology for the financial sector. The sensitive nature of the data involved in the industry demands a high level of protection. Now, with the Company's cloud enhancements, financial institutions around the world have access to federal-grade security controls that were previously available exclusively to federal government customers through its Enterprise Cloud Federal Edition.
Extending the Enterprise Cloud service to include instance-based compute and storage in addition to dedicated compute resource bundles means a more distributed internal model. This is important for financial organizations that wish to offer the Cloud as part of the "service bureau" of Shared IT Services inside their organizations. The flexibility and agility instance —based pricing provides will give these organizations a better value proposition to offer their "internal customers."
By integrating CloudSwitch software into the Enterprise Cloud, hybrid clouds become easier to manage. This helps financial institutions to enhance the automation and efficiencies of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and the customer experience. This will accelerate the migration to cloud with certain use cases, as new and legacy applications can be deployed into the cloud with point and click simplicity requiring no re-architecture of the application, no re-IP effort, and all in a secure and encrypted process.
Large financial institutions manage a wide range of applications to support their business. Some are legacy applications and others are unique as a result of consolidation through M&A activity, and yet others are complex with very specific dependencies. Verizon Terremark's Enterprise Cloud technology integrates CloudSwitch software to safely and securely migrate complex applications to the Cloud, allowing for a more rapid adoption of the secure benefits of cloud computing in the financial sector.
Many challenges and cloud adoption barriers faced by the financial sector have been addressed in the enhancements being made to the Enterprise Cloud. When selecting a cloud provider for your financial institution, be sure to address the critical considerations shared above and choose the right cloud provider that fits your business needs and understands the environment in which you operate.
Big Data & Cloud Computing Empower Smart Machines
Excerpted from StarTribune Report by Paul Wiseman, Bernard Condon, and Jonathan Fahey
Art Liscano knows he's an endangered species in the job market: He's a meter reader in Fresno, CA. For 26 years, he's driven from house to house, checking how much electricity Pacific Gas & Electric customers have used.
But PG&E doesn't need many people like Liscano making rounds anymore. Every day, the utility replaces 1,200 old-fashioned meters with digital versions that can collect information without human help, generate more accurate power bills, even send an alert if the power goes out.
"I can see why technology is taking over," says Liscano, 66, who earns $67,000 a year. "We can see the writing on the wall." His department employed 50 full-time meter readers just six years ago. Now, it has six.
From giant corporations to university libraries to start-up businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks that humans used to do. That means millions of workers are caught in a competition they can't win against machines that keep getting more powerful, cheaper and easier to use.
To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.
The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America, and Asia.
In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through last June.
Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.
"Everything that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look like science fiction."
Google and Toyota are rolling out cars that can drive themselves. The Pentagon deploys robots to find roadside explosives in Afghanistan and wages war from the air with drone aircraft. North Carolina State University this month introduced a high-tech library where robots — "bookbots" — retrieve books when students request them, instead of humans. The library's 1.5 million books are no longer displayed on shelv
In the US, more than 1.1 million secretaries vanished from the job market between 2000 and 2010, their job security shattered by software that lets bosses field calls themselves and arrange their own meetings and trips. Over the same period, the number of telephone operators plunged by 64 percent, word processors and typists by 63 percent, travel agents by 46 percent and bookkeepers by 26 percent, according to Labor Department statistics.
es; they're kept in 18,000 metal bins that require one-ninth the space.
The advance of technology is producing wondrous products and services that once were unthinkable. But it's also taking a toll on people because they so easily can be replaced.
In Europe, technology is shaking up human resources departments across the continent. "Nowadays, employees are expected to do a lot of what we used to think of as HR from behind their own computer," says Ron van Baden, a negotiator with the Dutch labor union federation FNV. "It used to be that you could walk into the employee affairs office with a question about your pension, or the terms of your contract. That's all gone and automated."
Two-thirds of the 7.6 million middle-class jobs that vanished in Europe were the victims of technology, estimates economist Maarten Goos at Belgium's University of Leuven.
Does technology also create jobs? Of course. But at nowhere near the rate that it's killing them off — at least for the foreseeable future.
Here's a look at three technological factors reshaping the economies and job markets in developed countries:
At the heart of the biggest technological changes today is what computer scientists call "Big Data." Computers thrive on information, and they're feasting on an unprecedented amount of it — from the Internet, from Twitter messages and other social media sources, from the barcodes and sensors being slapped on everything from boxes of Huggies diapers to stamping machines in car plants.
According to a Harvard Business Review article by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more information now crosses the Internet every second than the entire Internet stored 20 years ago. Every hour, they note, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. collects 50 million filing cabinets' worth of information from its dealings with customers.
No human could make sense of so much data. But computers can. They can sift through mountains of information and deliver valuable insights to decision-makers in businesses and government agencies. For instance, Wal-Mart's analysis of Twitter traffic helped convince it to increase the amount of "Avengers" merchandise it offered when the superhero movie came out last year and to introduce a private-label corn chip in the American Southwest.
Please click here for the full report.
Coming Events of Interest
2013 Symposium on Cloud and Services Computing - March 14th-15th in Tainan, Taiwan. The goal of SCC 2013 is to bring together, researchers, developers, government sectors, and industrial vendors that are interested in cloud and services computing.
NAB Show 2013 - April 4th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. Every industry employs audio and video to communicate, educate and entertain. They all come together at NAB Show for creative inspiration and next-generation technologies to help breathe new life into their content. NAB Show is a must-attend event if you want to future-proof your career and your business.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB - April 8th-9th in Las Vegas, NV.The New ways cloud-based solutions have accomplished better reliability and security for content distribution. From collaboration and post-production to storage, delivery, and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find this a must-attend event.
Digital Hollywood Spring - April 29th-May 2nd in Marina Del Rey, CA. The premier entertainment and technology conference. The conference where everything you do, everything you say, everything you see means business.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 - May 20th-21st in Boston, MA. CCE:2013 will focus on three major sectors, GOVERNMENT, HEALTHCARE, and FINANCIAL SERVICES, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency and streamlining costs.
P2P 2013: IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing - September 9th-11th in Trento, Italy. The IEEE P2P Conference is a forum to present and discuss all aspects of mostly decentralized, large-scale distributed systems and applications. This forum furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of large-scale distributed applications and systems.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 — October 27th-29th in Las Vegas, NV. Three conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
|
