May 5, 2014
Volume XLVIII, Issue 1
Ten Days to CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2014
Register now for CLOUD COMPUTING EAST (CCE:2014), the upcoming strategic summit for business leaders and software developers taking place next Thursday and Friday, May 15th and 16th, at the Doubletree by Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC.
Jointly presented by the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) and Cloud Computing Association (CCA), this spring's must-attend conference and expo will highlight the latest developments and issues still to be addressed in the gCLOUD (The Government Cloud) and the hCLOUD (The Healthcare Cloud).
Plenary sessions will feature principal representatives of Amazon Web Services, Google, and Rackspace, providing delegates with a real insider's view from those leading our industry's advancement.
The gCLOUD will examine the ways that local, state, and federal governments can improve services and protect citizens with cloud-based tools. It will also address liabilities and challenges that need to concern government agencies regarding cloud-based services, countering NSA-fallout gloom with energized and confident approaches that overcome concerns raised by the Snowden scandal.
The US public sector is projected to pay $10 billion per year by 2018 for cloud computing services in military and government agencies.
In fact, right now the federal cloud computing market is growing at 16% CAGR.
For government agencies, migrating to the cloud poses risks, however, associated with pricing, infrastructure security, data assurances, governing law, service-level agreements (SLAs), outsourced services, functionality, disaster recovery, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), compliance with laws, terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) modifications, contract renewal, and termination.
gCLOUD speakers will include representatives of such organizations as ASG Software, Aspiryon, Clear Government Solutions, CyrusOne, DST, IBM Federal, Kwaai Oak, NetApp, NREL QinetiQ, SAP America, Unitas Global, V2 Solutions, Virtustream, and WSO2.
The hCLOUD will explore progress being made by the healthcare industry in adopting cloud-based solutions to become more efficient, collaborative, and interactively connected. It will also address legitimate concerns that healthcare organizations must address in implementing cloud-based services.
Annual spending on cloud solutions by the US healthcare sector will grow from $1.8 billion in 2013 to an astonishing $6.5 billion by 2018.
Driven by needs for greater efficiency, the healthcare cloud market is already growing at a 20% CAGR.
In the healthcare sector, there are unique challenges, as well, in handling personally identifiable information (PII) data storage and privacy on cloud computing platforms, working with vendors to address key information security and privacy compliance issues, and addressing the HIPPA privacy and security legal requirements and public trust concerns while in the cloud.
hCLOUD speakers will include representatives of such organizations as Apptix, BrightLine, Cerner, CSC Leasing, Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, DigiCert, DirectTrust, Document Advantage, Level 3, NTP Software, ONC, Oracle, The PADEM Group, ServerCentral, SoftServe, StoAmigo, VeriStor Systems, and VirtualQube.
If how to "Go Cloud" is not totally clear to you, you're not alone. Find out about outstanding obstacles still to be overcome for continued advancement of cloud computing solutions within the public sector and healthcare industry at CCE:2014
Featured speakers will also include authors, analysts, industry observers, and representatives of such organizations as ActiveState, Canon, Dell, Edwards Wildman Palmer, FalconStor, IBM, Juniper Networks, MarkLogic, Microsoft, Numecent. SAP America, Trend Micro, Verizon, and Wahab & Medenica.
CCE:2014 sponsors and exhibitors include Acolyst, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apptix, Aspiryon, Axios Systems, Clear Government Solutions, CSC Leasing Company, CyrusOne, FalconStor, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), IBM, NetApp, Oracle, SoftServe, Trend Micro, and VeriStor Systems.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 With $28 billion spent on developing apps by businesses and professional users in 2013, the untapped potential for cloud developers in the enterprise market is enormous.
To help developers learn how to capture their share of this huge opportunity, the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) and Cloud Computing Association (CCA) are partnering to present the CLOUD DEVELOPERS SUMMIT & EXPO (CDSE:2014) in Austin, TX on October 1st and 2nd.
At CDSE:2014, highly focused business strategy and technical keynotes, breakout panels, and seminars will thoroughly explore cloud computing solutions and offerings, and ample opportunities will be provided for one-on-one networking with the major players in this space.
CDSE:2014 will feature co-located instructional workshops and conference sessions facilitated by more than one-hundred industry leading speakers and world-class technical trainers.
All aspects of the cloud computing sector will be represented: storage, networking, applications, integration, and aggregation.
Attendees will, see, hear, learn and master critical skills in sessions devoted to the unique challenges and opportunities for developers, programmers, and solutions architects in six distinct topic areas.
Three tracks will cover mobile, logistics, and big data considerations that cut across nearly every enterprise vertical migrating business functions to the cloud.
And three tracks will zero-in on three of these economic sectors that are now experiencing the most explosive growth: media and entertainment, government and military, and healthcare and life sciences.
The CCA & DCIA will debut the all new Cloud Computing Competency Certification (CCCC) program will be introduced with opportunities to qualify and receive Level One Certification (CCCC-L1) on site.
Workshops provide cloud solutions providers with the opportunity to present hands-on and how-to sessions to groups of customers and prospective customers on various aspects of using their services.
These sessions can also be dedicated to training third-party developers on opportunities for creating added-value plug-ins and related complementary offerings to be used and marketed in conjunction with the primary solutions.
An interactive expo will augment strategic conference business sessions and in-depth technical workshops by providing extended exhibit hall hours to allow participants to spend time viewing demos and exhibits and hearing first-hand from the industry's leading service and solution providers.
According to the research firm IDC, cloud computing was an estimated $47.4 billion industry in 2013 and is expected to more than double by 2017. The cloud's 23.5% compound annual growth rate is five times faster than that of the broader technology market.
Cisco, Forrester and Forbes predict that all the material on the Internet for marketing — video, text, audio, and everything in between — will be encompassed within the cloud and will be fully integrated by 2016. Based on these estimates, marketing needs for virtual space will balloon to 3.3 terabytes per user in two years.
The needs have never been greater for developers, programmers and architects to advance their knowledge, capabilities and skill-sets in order to profit from this revolutionary transformation in the business processes of the future.
The DCIA and CCA are very proud to have joined together to respond to these needs by presenting CDSE:2014 in one of the nation's most vibrant and technologically innovative cities.
To learn more about conducting an instructional workshop, exhibiting, or sponsoring CDSE:2014, please contact Don Buford, CEO, or Hank Woji, VP Business Development, at the CCA.
To review conference topics and apply to join the speaking faculty for this event, please click here. If you'd like to speak at this major industry event, please contact me at the DCIA, at your earliest convenience. Share wisely, and take care.
Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $90.7 Billion by 2018
Excerpted from Digital Lifescapes Report by David Deans
Did you know that cloud computing can be viewed as an evolution of various concepts and technologies that date back to the late 1950s? Even greater parallels to cloud computing were developed in the 1970s, as mainframe computer time-sharing emerged. Current offerings are the latest manifestation of this trend.
While cloud services adoption will reach a crescendo in 2014, it's just the beginning of the next wave of enterprise computing evolution. Juniper Research expects the total enterprise cloud computing market to reach a value of $90.7 billion by 2018, with both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) expected to grow rapidly.
Moreover, revenues generated from enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) will reach $53.5 billion in 2018, representing 59 percent of the enterprise public cloud computing market -- that's rising from $23.2 billion in 2013.
According to the Juniper assessment, SaaS will likely remain the dominant cloud model in the foreseeable future. This is due in part to the relative maturity and widespread acceptance of the model, as well as recognition of the comparative benefits and risks of commissioning cloud-based software.
However, they believe that enterprise adoption of PaaS and IaaS solutions may have been adversely impacted by some lingering concerns over data security, regulatory compliance and portability.
Nevertheless, findings from Juniper's market study uncovered expectations that both PaaS and IaaS will experience significant growth over the forecast period as new applications, developed specifically for the cloud to harness workloads such as big data analysis, benefit from the PaaS fast-track model.
Cloud service providers are increasingly providing multi-lingual support, and improving portability through open-source initiatives, while consolidation of PaaS as an extension of other cloud services is showing a rising trend.
Meanwhile, IaaS is becoming increasingly attractive to small-to-medium-sized businesses and enterprises alike -- due to a high-level of control over the software stack and security implementation, alongside a growing understanding of the need for proper risk assessment.
Besides, any remaining concerns about data security or regulatory compliance will be alleviated by the growing trend towards Open Hybrid Cloud services that incorporate both public and private data center infrastructure.
Other key findings from the market study include: confidence in the public cloud has suffered following Edward Snowden's National Security Agency (NSA) revelations; obliging service providers to (re)build trust; and due diligence is essential for potential customers to establish if, and what services can be deployed in the cloud.
Government to Surpass Private Sector Cloud Spend
Excerpted from CBR Report by Joe Curtis
Governments are set to spend proportionally more on cloud computing than private industries as expenditure is predicted to increase 35% year-on-year until 2018.
The UK government's annual budget for cloud services will grow by 35.6% year-on-year over the next four years, according to the latest statistics released exclusively to CBRby research firm Kable.
That outlay is 4.5% more than the combined predicted cloud spend of Britain's financial, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and insurance industries.
Kable also pegs the UK government to lead international public sector spend on cloud, ahead of the US (34.7% year-on-year), Denmark (30.5%), and Canada (30.1%), hitting $8.4 billion by 2018.
The British government's G-Cloud, an initiative to open up public sector procurement to small and midsize businesses (SMBs), is now in its third year and has helped boost public sector spending on SMB cloud services to around 20% of total procurement, with a target of 25% by March 2015.
Spain propped up Kable's table of European and US governments, with a spend increase of just 24.6% a year.
Communications and IT companies are set to grow cloud spending by 42.5% year-on-year in the UK - the highest of any country - followed by retailers with 36.1% year-on-year growth and insurance companies at 32.8%.
The results come a week after Forrester Research predicted private sector cloud spending will hit $191 billion by 2020 as firms turn to virtualization to replace old IT infrastructure, also predicting a rise in spending from $58 billion in 2013 to $72 billion this year.
However, Zahl Limbuwala, the CEO of data center expert Romonet, warned: "Even if a service is moved to the cloud, running a data center, fully utilized or not, still costs money. If an enterprise doesn't know those exact in-house costs, and how they will change if services move to the cloud, they can't be certain that adopting cloud services actually gives the greatest savings and makes the most financial sense."
GSA Sets Deadlines for Compliance with New FedRAMP Standards
Excerpted from Federal News Radio Report
Cloud computing providers who want to do business with the federal government will have to meet revised security standards by specific deadlines.
The change affects companies that are already FedRAMP compliant and those who undergo the security check in the future.
According to The Federal Times, there will be approximately 70 new security requirements that will have to be tested in order for a company to get its FedRAMP certification.
Agencies have been asked to include language in all cloud computing contracts that require companies to comply with the standards. However, implementation deadlines vary based on what stage of the FedRAMP process a company is in.
For example, those beginning the FedRAMP certification process before June will be allowed to complete it using the current requirements. They will be given another year to implement the new security standards.
The FedRAMP assessment process is run by the General Services Administration (GSA).
Pentagon Plays Catch-Up with Cloud Computing
Excerpted from The Fiscal Times Report by Timothy Homan
The Defense Department, considered the most technologically advanced agency throughout the federal government, is still playing catch-up with its civilian counterparts in one critical area: cloud computing.
Despite accounting for about half of US discretionary spending each year, the Pentagon has been outpaced by civilian agencies in the last five years in issuing contracts for cloud services. Since 2009, the Department of Defense (DoD) has spent about $750 million on cloud contracts, compared with about $21 billion by other US departments and agencies, analyst Alexander Rossino told C4ISR & Networks. The principal research analyst at Deltek also said that defense spending on cloud services will surge to $2.6 billion in 2018, up from $414 million last year.
Cloud computing uses remote servers accessed via the Internet to store and manage data otherwise housed on local servers or personal computers.
One reason for the gap between defense and civilian cloud spending is the simple fact that the Pentagon handles more classified information than most other agencies. The others can often easily adapt commercially available systems to their unclassified needs.
The DoD also has needed more time to certify potential vendors to make sure their cloud services meet higher standards and can operate like milCloud, the military's secure cloud network. It essentially competes with the commercial market when specific parts of the Pentagon need their own cloud platform. The certification process can take up to six months and cost as much as $5 million — a bill footed by potential contractors, according to FCW.
This might explain why certification has gone to companies with deep pockets, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing side of Amazon. The Seattle, WA based company has been providing the Air Force and Navy with cloud services for years, but the defense-wide certification means the opportunity for more federal dollars. Last year the CIA awarded AWS $600 million to create a cloud service for the intelligence community, relieving the CIA of having to build something akin to milCloud, which was developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.
"You have to understand risk and the data you're dealing with," David Bennett, Chief Information Officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said last month, according to Nextgov. "As you look at those things, you have questions like, 'What controls do I have in place?' We want to leverage commercial opportunities and reap the benefits of doing that, but we also want to verify and make certain what's out there and that we're able to understand and monitor that."
As cloud computing prospers in the civilian world, the competition for federal contracting dollars is likely to increase in the defense realm, where systems require higher security standards.
Bill Pushes Cloud Computing for DoD
Excerpted from Gov Info Security Report by Jeffrey Roman
Two members of Congress have introduced legislation that's designed to help pave the way for the Department of Defense (DoD) to make greater use of cloud computing providers to save money - as long as specific security requirements are met.
Congresswoman Niki Tsongas (D-MA) and Congressman Derek Kilmer (D-WA), introduced the Department of Defense Cloud Security Act, which would require the US Comptroller General and the CIO of DoD to assess the cloud security requirements of the Defense Department.
The bill would require a full evaluation of the overall security and potential capabilities of the current DoD cloud system; a determination of best practices related to cloud security by both public and private entities to establish security requirements for the DoD; and an examination of the potential for commercial cloud providers to host DoD information systems, the sponsors say.
Michael Hartigan, a spokesperson for Congresswoman Tsongas, says the legislation would push the DoD to take advantage of secure cloud capabilities being developed by commercial vendors and "learn best practices from other federal government agencies, including the intelligence community, that have already begun to do the same."
He notes the intelligence community is already taking advantage of cloud services to store and share unclassified documents.
"Storing benign information on internal DoD servers is an increasingly large expense, particularly given the widespread availability of secure, fast, reliable and affordable storage services utilized in the private sector," Hartigan says. "Advancements in cloud data storage by commercial sector vendors have enabled other federal government agencies to store data at a fraction of the cost of physical data centers."
In announcing the bill, Congresswoman Tsongas said: "The DoD must more effectively take advantage of technological advancements, such as cloud technology, but do so in a safe, efficient way. This legislation will allow DoD to take full advantage of the cloud services and best practices from both the government and commercial sector, which will, in turn, decrease costs, increase accessibility and allow for a more secure system overall."
DoD needs to make changes in its technology procurement process to take full advantage of cloud computing, says Allan Friedman, a research scientist at the Cyber Security Policy Research Institute in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at George Washington University, where he works on cybersecurity policy issues.
"The process makes it difficult to demand features that aren't well-tested and well-understood by the contracting community," he says. "This is not a unique problem to cloud security. This is a problem that relates to every aspect of DoD and federal IT purchasing/acquisition."
Friedman says the bill addresses a very real issue. "Both for public cloud architectures and for private, we do need easy, quick ways of thinking about it from a security perspective as a purchaser," he says. "Purchasing for the Defense Department is notoriously difficult.
On March 12th, DoD CIO Teresa Takai issued an instruction for the department to transition from the DoD Information Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process, commonly known by the acronym DIACAP, to NIST's risk management framework as outlined in Special Publication 800-37.
Eugene Spafford, a Purdue University computer science professor who's a nationally known information security expert, says DoD's adoption of the NIST risk management framework should standardize risk management practices across the government, resulting in more efficient purchasing and configuration of IT wares.
The adoption of the framework helps facilitate implementation of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as FedRAMP, which allows agencies to use the security vetting by other government agencies of providers' cloud computing services. As part of the instruction issued by Takai, the move to the risk management framework promotes cybersecurity reciprocity that's an essential element in developing the department's information enterprise. "Applied appropriately, reciprocity reduces redundant testing, assessing and documentation and the associated costs in time and resources," the addendum to the instruction states.
Why Healthcare Needs Amazon to Shake Things Up
Excerpted from ComputerWorld Report by Brian Eastwood
It's tough to make generalizations about an industry as tumultuous as technology, but there are arguably two certainties: Technology changes rapidly and innovation rarely comes from expected places.
Largely, that is, but not entirely true. The healthcare industry offers evidence to the contrary. Technology doesn't change rapidly - systems that use MUMPS, a programming language developed in the 1960s, still process many of today's electronic health records - and innovation rarely comes at all.
Some blame the risk-averse nature of an industry built on the oath "first do no harm." Some point to the murky nature of healthcare data, which is largely unstructured and therefore hard to standardize, let alone analyze and send to a smartphone. Some say the strength of healthcare's fee-for-service model gives cash-strapped hospitals and clinics little incentive to try anything new when treating sickness remains more profitable than promoting wellness.
Whatever the case, it's almost universally accepted that healthcare needs to innovate - and recent research suggests that healthcare's IT incumbents aren't up to the task.
"The ground is shifting rapidly," PwC's Health Research Institute writes, "giving way to what we call the New Health Economy."
Fed up with not getting their money's worth from a healthcare system valued at $2.8 trillion in 2013, PwC says patients will use technology to better consume services that keep them well, instead of just treating them when they're sick. Healthcare providers have little choice but to cut the fat, stop making errors, better manage chronic conditions and treat patients where they work, play and live.
Simply put, PwC says, "the New Health Economy represents the most significant re-engineering of our health system since employers began covering workers in the 1930s." Change will hit everyone, too: Hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, employers, retailers, patients and IT vendors of all stripes.
When the dust settles, those able to adapt to what analyst firm IDC calls technology's third platform - social media, big data, cloud computing and mobility - will stand tall. Everyone else will fall.
Reluctance to change drove athenahealth from the EHR Association, an industry group that the cloud healthcare IT vendor sees as stuck in the past. EHR vendors such as Epic Systems say customers don't buy into the healthcare IT cloud. athenahealth disagrees - and does IDC, PwC and, it's safe to say, most of the rest of the economy.
Reluctance to change also explains why EHR systems don't work for accountable care organizations, according to KLAS Research. ACOs have complex technical needs, and most major EHRs don't handle care management, quality reporting and information sharing very well.
The accountable care organization, it's worth pointing out, is espoused by the Affordable Care Act as the care model that will give patients better, more efficient, more coordinated and more proactive care. Oh, and if it succeeds, it will kick to the curb the fee-for-service model that got the U.S. into its healthcare mess in the first place. Vendors that ignore it do so at their own peril.
Last week, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, spoke at MIT's Information and Communication Technologies Conference. Halamka gave the audience, which included the leaders of close to 20 startups, a veritable laundry list of the technology that healthcare needs.
For ICD-10 coding, Halakma says, "We are desperate for [natural language processing] solutions to take unstructured data that doctors capture in the course of their work. It needs to be turned into structured, analyzable data."
Cloud-based analytics platforms that gather data from all facilities a patient visits, as well as from any medical devices a patient may use, and present that data in "innovative interfaces."
Biometric login solutions for electronic prescriptions of controlled substances, since federal law deems username and password insufficient.
Better security, especially for mobile devices. "We need tools and technologies that give us control over devices we don't own," Halamka says.
Improvements to the electronic medication administration record (eMAR) that "close the loop" from the time a drug is ordered to the time a patient takes it, ensuring that it's the right patient, the right drug and the right dose. Medication reconciliation that pulls data from a patient's pharmacy will help, too.
An ecosystem of applications that actually lets patients view, download and transmit their electronic personal health information. Meaningful use requires healthcare organizations to make ePHI available to patients, but there's no place to put it.
Cloud-based secure information sharing across institutions, especially in states where health information exchange hasn't quite caught on.
Cloud-hosted stores of anonymized data that patients volunteer for research purposes.
A nationally curated registry of best practices, drawing on decades of research from all leading institutions, which any physician or hospital could query at any time.
If there's a takeaway from this list, it's that "healthcare could use a lot of Facebook- and Amazon-like apps," as Halamka puts it - applications that use social media principles to make it easy to gather, analyze and share patient information. EHR systems written in Visual Basic 5 (nee 1997) aren't going to cut it, Halamka suggests.
Blogger Paul Roemer asks, What if Amazon ran population health management? Amazon collects lots of data on shoppers' purchasing behavior and makes recommendations for future purchases. Healthcare organizations collect lots of data on patients' (un)healthy behaviors - but they sit on it.
How much better would healthcare be, Roemer asks, if hospitals made recommendations based on the terabytes of data they've collected about their patients? How many hospital readmissions would be avoided? How many chronic patients would get better? How many accidental deaths would be prevented?
To borrow an analogy, healthcare faces a Blockbuster Video moment. It can stand by the status quo, watching tumbleweeds blow through its aisles of VHS tapes, or it can forge partnerships with anyone and everyone who understands the New Health Economy and keep those customers happy, healthy and engaged.
Why Cloud Is Good for Patient Safety
Excerpted from Healthcare IT News Report by Matt Smith
Patient safety is, of course, an ongoing concern in hospitals and clinics that can be addressed through better processes and technological solutions. The healthcare environment is constantly shifting in order to accommodate these new advances. The changes are leading to greater speed and efficiency throughout the organization, but the wellbeing of the patient still has to come first.
This means that, no matter how fast the clinic can eventually process new patients, it must still be able to accurately perform diagnoses, keep perfect records, and ensure that the appropriate treatment is administered at the right time. These are critical elements of providing effective healthcare, and some of the options available through cloud computing is making it possible.
Clinical cloud computing could be said to improve patient safety in one simple way: Faster technology means faster responses and treatments in critical situations. Of course, the benefits and processes go much deeper than that, but this is a good place to start. If, for example, a caregiver has to wait to use certain applications at an end-point, it can significantly delay treatment and cause other problems. Cloud technology has made it possible to access the necessary apps and data from any device, and with a single sign-on, which can reduce some of the time-consuming activities that would otherwise hinder more effective treatments.
The cloud is making inroads into hospitals, clinics, biotech firms, and more. In each of these cases, there are many ways that an IT infrastructure based in cloud technology can improve the level of care and safety that those organizations can offer.
Every patient has different needs, and if the clinic is dealing with a large number of people, things can get lost, details forgotten and diagnoses rushed. Doctors have to gather and share a lot of information -- sometimes within the building, sometimes over huge geographical areas -- which can also potentially create delays that hinder treatments. The right IT infrastructure should be able to address all these concerns by tracking the needs of each patient, even in an environment where such a thing would normally be extremely complex.
Cloud computing solutions can potentially limit the amount of time that doctors and nurses spend searching for open end-points and time spent accessing and re-accessing different applications. With a single sign-on, authentication is much easier, even at different end-points and across multiple applications. This can lead to faster, more secure access to important patient data.
Basically, moving the IT infrastructure into the cloud can create opportunities for healthcare providers to spend more time delivering effective care and less time managing client systems.
It has already been mentioned that faster responses to problems is the most directly beneficial aspect for the patient, but it goes even further than that. Cloud solutions can offer the power to perform clinical data analysis at a fast and more cost-effective rate than ever before. This can be extremely beneficial for patients who require some serious tests.
Previously, it would have taken days, weeks, or even months to complete certain blood tests, run RNA sequences, protein folding, or other procedures. Patients had to wait an indeterminably long time to "get results back from the lab," which could lead to added stress, confusion and frustration. By taking advantage of cloud capabilities, this time can be significantly shortened and the treatment process accelerated.
One of the biggest developments that have impacted IT departments throughout the healthcare environment is the move to electronic health records (EHRs) . This has been a long time in coming, and the goal has been to take some of the traditional, legacy systems and replace them with a more convenient and reliable processes. This change has taken a lot of time, but the potential improvements to patient care and treatment have also been rather large.
As data is collected for these records, it can be transferred directly to the cloud, eliminating the potential for it to get lost somewhere between point A and point B. In some situations, it may even be possible to send information directly from monitoring systems and other sensors, so there's no chance for user error to creep into the process at all. The cloud can store, process, and distribute that information as needed.
Electronic medical records are just the start, though. Eventually, cloud applications could impact communication systems, laboratory information systems, pharmacy systems, physician order entry and other elements of patient care. The more effectively these processes can be integrated with other applications and procedures in the hospital or clinic, the better care each patient will receive.
Medical procedures come with a certain amount of risk. Whether the problems stem from misdiagnoses, lost paperwork, or faulty observations, there is a potential for errors that can create safety issues. By incorporating cloud solutions, doctors and other providers can reduce the number of errors (or catch and correct those that can't be eliminated), track patient performance, and receive immediate information to make better decisions.
Legacy healthcare processes for collecting important, vital data required a lot of work to collect, input, and analyze. There is, unfortunately, room there for errors to creep in and slow the process. Anything that creates latency or hinders real-time access to data can be problematic.
The cloud offers immediate access to applications and information, making a more rapid response after unexpected and unwanted occurrences possible. These solutions can also improve communications between patient and provider and help derive the right calculations for treatments, leading to fewer mistakes and an increase in shared information. More specifically, cloud solutions can improve a number of aspects of the healthcare environment that can impact patient safety, including:
Monitoring - Repetitive activities can become very tedious in the long run, opening up room for errors. Watching to see what happens to a patient throughout an extended treatment, checking up to see if they're taking or refilling their prescriptions can be difficult for a person to consistently follow through. It's just human nature to lose focus and let mistakes happen.
Some monitoring procedures could easily be automated, sending all the important information directly to the cloud where it can be properly analyzed. If an alert is called for, the cloud application can then send the necessary information to the doctors or clinicians.
Patient history - Instant access to the medical history of every patient means that caregivers will immediately know if there are any dangerous drug allergies or certain mental conditions that may impact their treatment.
Communication process - Handoffs are common in the medical industry as patients switch from one doctor to the next, one location to the next, or one kind of treatment to the next. Handing off the necessary data could prove problematic in the traditional model, with the possibility of lost forms and information being a real issue.
With the cloud, it's not a matter of handing something off. It's a matter of multiple healthcare professionals accessing the same information from the same location. Information exchange is much easier when everyone is simply signing on to the same database to get the necessary information.
Structured processes - What happens if someone fills out a prescription incorrectly? What if they write a note that is completely illegible to the average observer? Apps are designed to disallow that kind of behavior. In other words, many cloud applications technically restrict behavior and activities, but by doing so they force the clinicians to deal with tasks in a specific way. This means they will have to provide every last piece of information in a standardized format. Ideally, the app will also inform the caregiver whether the data was entered correctly and alert them if their prescribed treatment has some adverse effects.
Emergency response - There's always a chance that, despite everyone's best efforts, some undiagnosed problems could cause serious issues. The only thing the healthcare provider can do at this point is to try to react quickly and correctly to the problem. This requires access to accurate information and a wide range of apps in the cloud. The right programs may even be able to detect some signals that things are going wrong and suggest potential causes even before they start to get out of hand.
The use cases for cloud computing in clinical settings cover a wide spectrum of applications. Many companies involved with the research side of healthcare were quick to adopt this computing model, and organizations like Bateman and Wood used the cloud to assemble a full human genome with 140 million individual reads, which required serious computing power to manage the alignment and search sequence. Kudtarkar et al were also able to use the cloud to hundreds of thousands of genome-to-genome comparisons to complete the job in just over 200 hours and for approximately 40 percent less of a budget than expected.
From the academic uses, the cloud spread to applications more directly applicable to patient care and safety. The American Occupational Network, for example, digitized its records and updated its clinical processes with these tools, allowing them to provide more accurate information for proper billing. This shortened the time it took to create a bill from seven full days to less than 24 hours. Medical transcription costs, as a result, were also reduced by 80 percent. This increase in efficient record keeping and patient tracking means fewer hindrances to the healthcare process and allows patients to get the treatment they need.
Shifting any information does concern some organizations because they want to have direct control over the security measures. In the medical industry, this is doubly important as hospitals may be saving some very sensitive data off site. This has led to a number of regulations around cloud apps for the healthcare industry.
In order to protect patient information, cloud systems must restrict access to authorized users only, and there should also be options to track access, create redundant storage solutions, and instituting plans for dealing with breaches or unexpected downtime.
Despite the observed benefits of using cloud technologies to improve patient safety, there is still some hesitation in many organizations about switching away from their legacy systems. This uncertainty could be related to the costs involved with making the switch or concerns that it may take too long to train the staff on the new procedures.
The entire organization is going to have to actively participate with the new cloud processes in order to ensure its success and provide more safety for each patient. As EHRs become the standard for record keeping in the healthcare industry, cloud applications can be even more useful and convenient.
Providing reliable, individualized care means that you are going to have to have a lot of coordinated data, which is achievable only if everyone is working together on the same systems the same way. The initial switch may seem like a difficult process, but the potential benefits for the patient make it a valuable effort.
5 Reasons Why Google Can Catch Amazon in the Cloud
Excerpted from ComputerWorld Report by Sharon Gaudin
Amazon has such a huge share of the global cloud market it would appear none of its competitors, including Internet behemoth Google, could ever catch up.
That may not be the case.
Google, according to industry analysts, is positioning itself to take on Amazon's dominance. Despite how far back it's lagging today, Google could catch Amazon and some day supplant its top position in the cloud.
"Amazon essentially has more than 80% to 85% of cloud market share in terms of providing platform as a service," said Jagdish Rebello, a research director with IHS iSuppli. "The market is in its infancy, and Amazon sort of created the market so it's got an early lead. It's not a player to be sneezed at. But somebody like a Google could catch up with them."
Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), launched in 2006 and immediately drove hard into a market it was basically creating on the fly.
Aside from holding as much as 85% of the market today, AWS has more than five times the compute capacity in use than its next 14 competitors combined, according to a 2013 Gartner report.
Business isn't slowing for AWS either.
Amazon reported last week that in the first quarter ending March 31, sales for Amazon's "other" category, which includes AWS, grew by about 60% year-over-year. That put sales around $1.2 billion for the quarter, compared to $750 million for the same period in 2013.
The company, which originally made its name as an online bookseller, also has a rich ecosystem that competitors like Google can't touch at this point.
"Where Amazon steps ahead is in its ecosystem," said Lauren Nelson, an analyst with Forrester Research. "It has the largest ecosystem out there. You can use their long list of offerings and it's ready to deploy super quickly and it's very automated and scalable. There are thousands of companies that all the work they do is on top of AWS. Some do security. Some handle compliance issues. There are a lot there."
Can Amazon hold that position in the long term, especially in the face of increasing competition? Google is considered to be in the forefront of that challenge, but it's not alone. After essentially having the public cloud market to itself for years, Amazon is watching warily as companies like Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Verizon make their own push.
There's even talk that Facebook is positioning itself to join the fray and build its own public cloud service.
With those challenges ahead, Amazon's continued growth and dominance may come a lot harder.
Google, meanwhile, has the best chance of succeeding in its advances on Amazon. According to analysts, Google, the company that dominates online search, stormed the mobile world with Android and eclipsed free email offerings with Gmail, is primed to take on Amazon. Neither Google nor Amazon would offer comment for this story, but here are five reasons that Google can catch up to Amazon.
1. The market is young and prone to change.
AWS has been around for eight years and other companies have dived into the cloud business, but enterprises and smaller companies are still getting comfortable with storing their data on remote servers on the Internet. The cloud computing is still relatively small but it's quickly ramping up.
Forrester last week released a report showing that the public cloud market is set for what it calls "hypergrowth." Forrester said the market is expected to reach $191 billion by 2020, a 20% increase over Forrester's last forecast, in April 2011.
"Today, the cloud is small but exploding," said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst. "We're still in the first inning in the game ... Remember how big Blackberry was? Then Apple came out with the iPhone and changed everything. It happens."
Kagan said the cloud computing industry will grow and change -- a lot -- over the next five to 10 years, and the companies in that space will have to grow and change too.
"Typically, the first companies that lead are not leading five or 10 years from now," he said.
2. Google has the name and deep pockets.
Amazon has strong brand recognition, but when people think of the company, many still think about going to Amazon.com to buy a book or a pair of running sneakers. Google, meanwhile, is a name that enterprises well recognize.
"When people think about Amazon, they think about the Kindle and the retail angle," Rebello said' "A lot of enterprises are using Google Docs and they're using Gmail. People also are familiar with the Android OS. When you look at it from an enterprise IT perspective, you see that Google is offering services, so you figure you can't go wrong with bringing Google into the equation."
Along with that name recognition come some deep pockets.
Amazon surely isn't searching the couch cushions for change, but Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, said the company doesn't have the deep pockets that Google does.
"Amazon spends pretty much what they pull in," he added. "Google is loaded. If Google decides this is really strategic, they could really surprise Amazon. Google could outspend Amazon any day of the week."
Several analysts noted that most companies moving into the cloud are using multiple services. It's a new area and these companies want to compare services and find out which one works better and which one is more reliable.
That means a lot of new users may give Google, a name they know, a try. If Google throws a lot of its financial muscle behind its cloud effort, that will open up the possibility that Google can win over those users.
3. Google needs to attack pricing.
Armed with massive coffers, Google is pushing down the price of using a public cloud, forcing Amazon to follow its lead.
Google executives have said cloud pricing should follow a Moore's Law-like pattern, falling by a factor of two every year. That's aggressive and Google seems to be pushing that strategy forward.
For example, in March, Google slashed its pricing. Google Compute Engine now costs, on average, 32% less. Google Storage also has been cut, on average, 68%, while prices for Google BigQuery on-demand analysis services were cut by as much as 85%.
The day after Google's pricing announcement, Amazon Web Services followed with what was its 42nd price reduction since it started the business. For instance, the price of Amazon's Simple Storage Service was lowered by an average of 51%.
"If you think about one of the key drivers of enterprises moving to the cloud, it makes it possible for many small to medium enterprises to have an IT department with minimal upfront capital expenses," Rebello said. "Google is trying to attack the pricing equation. If they do that while also attacking security concerns, then they are attacking the barriers to adoption."
Google, he added, has the tenacity to aggressively drive down prices to lure in both businesses new to the cloud, as well as drawing in what had been AWS customers.
4. Google may be making big capital investments.
Without offering specifics, Google executives said in an earnings call this month that it is focused on capacity and investing capital to make sure it has more than enough capacity to meet clients' needs.
"Google is making the capital investments it needs to alleviate some of the concerns an enterprise IT manager might have about going with their cloud services," Rebello said. "If your data is sitting in the cloud, enterprise IT is going to worry about security and having the processing power when you need it. Google wants to make sure you have the power when you need it." That, he added, will make Google a better choice when IT administrators go shopping for a cloud service.
5. Google's future strategy hinges on the cloud.
Google is placing the cloud at the center of its strategy to enable the company to remain a major Internet player in the years to come.
Early this year, Google bought Nest Technologies, a company that makes a smart-home thermostat that can be programmed from users' mobile phones. Google spent $3.2 billion in cash for the company that will put Google squarely in the connected-home market.
Rebello pointed out that Nest is also a cloud-based player.
The smart thermostat will sit in people's homes but its smarts will reside in the cloud. Since Nest is just the first step into a smart home that will have smart appliances, smart door locks and windows, the cloud will be needed to store all of that new information in the trend known as the Internet of Things.
"If you talk about a future where lights, doors, windows and appliances are all connected through a digital gateway, the thermostat is just one element, but it's a key element that can learn consumer behavior and adapt to it," Rebello said. "This is all a cloud strategy. If Google wants to be a player in this smart home market, it needs the cloud behind it."
Google's focus on the cloud is unlikely to waver, making it a long-term challenger to Amazon's cloud dominance.
Many people in IT say the future lies in the cloud. They're just trying to figure out how to get there, how fast to get there and which service they'll go with. That opens a big door for Google.
"I don't think we'll be looking at a company that's in the number one position steadily," said Kagan. "It'll be an ebb and flow. I would say Google and Amazon will be beating the heck out of each other."
New Cloud Survey Highlights Performance Anxieties
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Andrew Murray
Respondents aren't satisfied with cloud service level agreements (SLAs) and say providers hide problems that affect performance.
A new survey sponsored by Compuware asked 740 senior IT professionals about their cloud provider concerns, in particular whether cloud customers have sufficient visibility into and control over application performance.
According to the survey, 79% of respondents say typical SLAs based on availability are too simplistic. Of course, if you don't like an agreement, you can push back.
Many do. According to the 2013 State of Cloud Computing Survey conducted by InformationWeek, a majority of respondents using cloud services don't sign off on a boiler-plate SLA; 60% say they review and then negotiate terms. Another 17% give a template that the provider must conform to—a number that jumped by 6% compared to 2012.
The Compuware survey also found that customers have very little trust in their providers: 73% of respondents believe that providers hide infrastructure or platform problems that affect application performance.
And if general SLAs are a blunt instrument when it comes to real performance, what might be more suitable? The Compuware survey asked respondents what metrics they'd like to see. The largest number of respondents, 25%, selected "end user response time/quality of service." Twenty-three percent chose "availability with continuous monitoring." Fifteen percent selected "real-time SLA monitoring."
The Compuware survey did not ask respondents if they would be willing to pay more for granular metrics or higher-priced options that emphasize performance. In the InformationWeek survey, only 2% of respondents that actively monitor cloud application performance said they used vendor-provided advanced monitoring, such application and transaction throughput.
If you don't use vendor tools, you need to have your own. Thirty percent of respondents using the cloud in the InformationWeek survey said they used their own advanced monitoring tools to gather data. Another 22% conducted their own basic up/down monitoring. Surprisingly, 28% have no formal monitoring in place.
You'd expect that a cloud survey sponsored by an application performance management vendor would focus on cloud performance. However, cloud performance still takes a back seat to security concerns, according to InformationWeek's survey.
The survey asked respondents to choose three cloud computing concerns from among ten options. The top three responses were all security-related, including security defects in cloud technology and the unauthorized exposure of proprietary and customer information. Performance came in fourth, with 31% of respondents citing application and system performance as a concern.
The Compuware survey, which was conducted by Research In Action, is available for download here. The survey interviewed 740 senior IT leaders in the United States, the U.K., Europe and the Asia/Pacific region. You can download the 2013 State of Cloud Computing survey here. Registration is required for both reports.
Coming Events of Interest
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2014 — May 15th-16th in Washington, DC. Three major conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in the application of cloud-based solutions in three key economic sectors: government, healthcare, and financial services.
Enterprise Apps World — June 17th-18th in London, England. EAW is a two day show, co-hosted with Cloud World Forum, that will look at all the implications of going mobile in the workplace and how enterprise apps can help
International Conference on Internet and Distributed Computing Systems — September 22nd in Calabria, Italy. IDCS 2014 conference is the sixth in its series to promote research in diverse fields related to Internet and distributed computing systems. The emergence of web as a ubiquitous platform for innovations has laid the foundation for the rapid growth of the Internet.
CLOUD DEVELOPERS SUMMIT & EXPO 2014 — October 1st-2nd in Austin, TX. CDSE:2014 will feature co-located instructional workshops and conference sessions on six tracks facilitated by more than one-hundred industry leading speakers and world-class technical trainers.
International Conference on Cloud Computing Research & Innovation - October 29th-30th in Singapore. ICCRI:2014 covers a wide range of research interests and innovative applications in cloud computing and related topics. The unique mix of R&D, end-user, and industry audience members promises interesting discussion, networking, and business opportunities in translational research & development.
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