Over the last few years the healthcare ecosystem has revolved around innovations in Electronic Health Record (HER) based systems. This evolution has helped us achieve much desired interoperability. Now the focus is shifting to other equally important aspects – scalability and performance. While applying cloud computing environments to the EHR systems, a special consideration needs to be given to the cloud enablement of Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), i.e., the largest single medical system in the United States. Aug. 1, 2014 02:17 PM EDT Reads: 660
It’s time to face reality: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus," and in today’s increasingly connected world, understanding “inter-planetary” alignments and deviations is mission-critical for cloud.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems, will discuss cultural expectations of privacy based on new research across these elements.
The Internet of Things is not new. Historically, smart businesses have used its basic concept of leveraging data to drive better decision making and have capitalized on those insights to realize additional revenue opportunities. So, what has changed to make the Internet of Things one of the hottest topics in tech?
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Chris Gray, Director, Embedded and Internet of Things, will discuss the underlying factors that are driving the economics of intelligent systems. Discover how hardware commoditization, the ubiquitous nature of connectivity, and the emergence of Big Data and analysis are providing the pull to meet customer expectations of a widely connected, multi-dimensional universe of people, things, and information. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that Esri has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Esri inspires and enables people to positively impact the future through a deeper, geographic understanding of the changing world around them.
For more information, visit http://www.esri.com.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloudian is a Foster City, Calif.-based software company specializing in cloud storage. Cloudian HyperStore® is an S3-compatible cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions. Cloudian actively partners with leading cloud computing environments including Amazon Web Services, Citrix Cloud Platform, Apache CloudStack, OpenStack and the vast ecosystem of S3 compatible tools and applications. Cloudian's customers include Vodafone, Nextel, NTT, Nifty, and LunaCloud. The company has additional offices in China and Japan.
There will be 50 billion Internet connected devices by 2020. Today, every manufacturer has a propriety protocol and an app. How do we securely integrate these "things" into our lives and businesses in a way that we can easily control and manage? Even better, how do we integrate these "things" so that they control and manage each other so our lives become more convenient or our businesses become more profitable and/or safe?
We have heard that the best interface is no interface. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Chris Matthieu, Co-Founder & CTO at Octoblu, Inc., will discuss how these devices generate enough data to learn our behaviors and simplify/improve our lives. What if we could connect everything to everything? I'm not only talking about connecting things to things but also systems, cloud services, and people. Add in a little machine learning and artificial intelligence and now we have something interesting...
After a couple of false starts, cloud-based desktop solutions are picking up steam, driven by trends such as BYOD and pervasive high-speed connectivity.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, cuts through the hype and the acronyms, and discusses the emergence of full-featured cloud workspaces that do for the desktop what cloud infrastructure did for the server. He’ll discuss VDI vs DaaS, implementation strategies and evaluation criteria.
Cloud computing started a technology revolution; now DevOps is driving that revolution forward. By enabling new approaches to service delivery, cloud and DevOps together are delivering even greater speed, agility, and efficiency. No wonder leading innovators are adopting DevOps and cloud together!
In his session at DevOps Summit, Andi Mann, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, will explore the synergies in these two approaches, with practical tips, techniques, research data, war stories, case studies, and recommendations.
Cloud Computing is evolving into a Big Three of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Cloud 360: Multi-Cloud Bootcamp, being held Nov 4–5, 2014, in conjunction with 15th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA, delivers a real-world demonstration of how to deploy and configure a scalable and available web application on all three platforms. The Cloud 360 Bootcamp, led by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with Gigaom Research, is the first bootcamp that introduces the core concepts of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on the workings of the Big Three platforms – Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Azure VMs.
Bootcamp attendees will get to see the big picture and also receive the knowledge needed to make the best cloud decisions for their business applications and entire enterprise IT organization. 
“Distrix fits into the overall cloud and IoT model around software-defined networking. There’s a broad category around software-defined networking that’s focused on data center, and we focus on the WAN,” explained Jay Friedman, President of Distrix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the Internet of @ThingsExpo, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Internet of @ThingsExpo 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world.
The Internet of Things promises to transform businesses (and lives), but navigating the business and technical path to success can be difficult to understand.
In his session at 15th Internet of @ThingsExpo, Chad Jones, Vice President, Product Strategy of LogMeIn's Xively IoT Platform, will show you how to approach creating broadly successful connected customer solutions using real world business transformation studies including New England BioLabs and more. 
Scott Jenson leads a project called The Physical Web within the Chrome team at Google. Project members are working to take the scalability and openness of the web and use it to talk to the exponentially exploding range of smart devices.
Nearly every company today working on the IoT comes up with the same basic solution: use my server and you'll be fine. But if we really believe there will be trillions of these devices, that just can't scale. We need a system that is open a scalable and by using the URL as a basic building block, we open this up and get the same resilience that the web enjoys.
“The Internet of Things is a wave that has arrived and it’s growing really fast. The concern at Aria Systems is making sure that people understand the ramifications of their attempts to monetize whatever it is they build on the Internet of Things," explained C Brendan O’Brien, Co-founder and Chief Architect at Aria Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the Internet of @ThingsExpo, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Internet of @ThingsExpo 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world.
The Internet of Things is a natural complement to the cloud and related technologies such as Big Data, analytics, and mobility.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Joe Weinman will lay out four generic strategies – digital disciplines – to exploit emerging digital technologies for strategic advantage.
Joe Weinman has held executive leadership positions at Bell Labs, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, and Telx, in areas such as corporate strategy, business development, product management, operations, and R&D. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that DevOps.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's “DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo,” which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
DevOps.com is where the world meets DevOps. It is the largest collection of original content relating to DevOps on the web today Featuring up-to-the-minute news, feature stories, blogs, bylined articles and more, DevOps.com is where the thought leaders of the DevOps movement make their ideas known.
Some companies are still hanging on to the belief that they can manage their own data centers better than the various cloud providers out there.This state of denial should all but go away when the influx of petabyte scale data becomes a reality for enterprises. Enterprises are going to have to ask themselves, “Do we want to be in the infrastructure business?” because that is what it will take to provide the appropriate amount of bandwidth, disk storage, and compute power to keep up with the demand for data ingestion, storage, and real-time analytics that will serve the business needs. If there ever was a use case for the cloud, the IoT and Big Data is it. Check out my latest post on Forbes that discusses Big Data strategies for tackling the IoT.
Of course, IoT is in the midst of a major hype cycle, so there’s a lot of industry buzz about IoT, along with a thousand interpretations of the term. As IT prognosticator Jason Bloomberg points out in a recent post, “the IoT explosion is rather curious if you think about it, as the Internet has been with us now for nigh on two decades, and everything connected to it has always been some kind of thing. But now it seems every kind of thing from dishwashers to doorknobs require an Internet connection, since after all, we all know our dishwashers have long harbored a pent up desire for scintillating conversation with our doorknobs.”
One funny thing about DevOps is that it is often touted that constant, on-the-fly changes are the way of the future in operations, and DevOps enables those changes. While this sounds really good, and some organizations are actually doing this type of DevOps, I think it is time that, for the enterprise, we strongly question that premise.
While it is really very cool to think about moving an entire web server from a farm to the cloud with just a script, upgrading a system while it’s hot, or spinning up more instances of a server without having to configure anything, I propose that, for the average enterprise, it is simply not necessary.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is focused on improving the security of software. Their mission is to make software security visible, so that individuals and organizations worldwide can make informed decisions about true software security risks and their OWASP Top 10 provides a list of the 10 Most Critical Security Risks. For each […]
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new hot buzzword and like most buzzwords, its purpose and definition are grossly misunderstood. When some people hear the term IoT they immediately associate it with a refrigerator reminding us to order milk or our Fitbit wearable device tweeting how we just “crushed a 4.1 mile run”. Neither of those use cases are very compelling to most of us which makes it hard to fathom how experts can predict that by 2020 there will be greater than a one trillion dollar market that vendors will be trying to claim a piece of.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “Internet of Things,” where all kinds of devices – everything from clothing to appliances to vehicles — will be interconnected via the cloud.
Sounds enticing, but really not much of a stretch from what’s already happening now via smartphone apps connecting us with the physical world.
Let’s look at a typical recent Saturday for a twenty-something New Yorker who I’ll call Fred.
It’s 2:30 pm. Fred is in an unfamiliar area of Brooklyn finishing a great brunch that he’d found due to a deal he’d picked up on Groupon. He checks Facebook and sees that his friend Joe has posted about going to today’s Mets game at Citi Field. It’s a 4pm game, followed by a Huey Lewis & the News concert. Fred likes those old bands, but can’t quite place Huey Lewis. So he checks the group out on Spotify – hey, that song “Power of Love” is pretty good. He adds it to his music collection and decides it’s a good day for a ballgame
One would think that small businesses have things easy because fewer employees means a smaller and easier team to manage. In fact, there are a lot of challenges that are unique to small businesses, and one of the big ones if "growing pains."
It's difficult for a business owner to lock themselves into contracts, whether it's a lease on an office building or a contract with an internet provider, because it's sometimes impossible to predict how quickly the business will grow and whether these existing arrangements can sustain a larger team. At least, that was true until the cloud came along.
Small business owners that have unexpected success will more than likely have to withstand some stressful aspects of business growth, but cloud-based phone systems at least take away some of the stress and allow you to focus on the more exciting aspects.
Application delivery is always evolving. Initially, applications were delivered out of a physical data center, either dedicated raised floor at the corporate headquarters or from some leased space rented from one of the web hosting vendors during the late 1990’s to early 2000’s or some combination of both. Soon global organizations and ecommerce sites alike, started to distribute their applications and deploy them at multiple physical data centers to address geo-location, redundancy and disaster recovery challenges. This was an expensive endeavor back then even without adding the networking, bandwidth and leased line costs.
Cisco has been ridding itself of consumer products for some time, which is why it was surprising to see Cisco at the International Consumer Electronics Show this year. According to CEO John Chambers, however, the new IoE (Internet of Everything) plan at Cisco is set to change the trajectory of everyone on Earth, in both the consumer and the professional arenas.
Bigger than anything that’s come before. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: Cisco isn’t going to sell IoE to consumers directly. But Internet of Everything will impact our daily lives in ways we can’t yet possibly imagine. From improved efficiency in the industrial arena to personalized retail encounters to the ability to control an entire building’s infrastructure with one simply smartphone app, IoE means big.
So you won your first Government Contract… Congratulations!
Among the new issues you will need to consider, your accounting systems, both practices and technology, will need to pass muster with Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) auditors. This will require a combination of internal processes and controls. Your accounting system will need to properly delineate direct and indirect costs, must properly pool indirect costs, and must properly handle unallowable costs.
I love receiving gifts in the form of new insights! It doesn't matter if others received the same gift years ago and I am just getting it now. If it is new to me, I get excited. It is like waking up in the morning and discovering a new room in your house. I read an article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times this weekend titled, "And Now for a Bit of Good News." The subject of the article was the new "sharing economy," think Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. In the article, Friedman calls Airbnb a "Trust Platform." To me, this weekend, this term was a gift. He is so right.
I have used Airbnb many times when traveling with my family, and to date have been very pleased with our experiences. Often the transactions are sizeable as I am reserving a home in a desirable location for a week. I am engaging in a transaction of some size with a person I don't know, in a home I have never visited, most often in a foreign country using different currency, involving different laws and customs. Why did I risk it? I trusted the platform.
I like this word re-imagination from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. We are seeing so many aspects of our life being transformed by the internet.
Take for example, ordering a cab to go somewhere. Either we phone for a yellow cab here in California or if you are in New York city, then you stand and wave for an incoming yellow cab to stop. The new game-changer is Uber. All you do is touch your smartphone screen for UberX or Black car and you get an instant message about the car coming in less than 5 minutes time with the driver and car info. It is cheaper and you pay by card (pre-registered in your Uber account). This is re-imagining the transport sector. Uber, a San Francisco company is worth about $17B and is operating in 70 cities around the world. Quite a disruptive force! 
We live in interesting times for sure. Who would have thought ten years ago that IBM and Apple would become partners? Here is the announcement as reported in eWeek:
Apple and IBM surprised many on July 15, announcing a global partnership that will see the companies attempt to “transform enterprise mobility.” The announcement, punctuated with comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, served notice of the companies’ intentions to make Apple smartphones, tablets and mobile services pre-eminent in the enterprise, replacing the BlackBerry devices and security services that long held the dominant position in that market. The partnership only confirms what Apple has been doing for years with its smartphones, tablets and even its notebook and desktop PCs, moving deeper into enterprises. The company has been touting its success in the corporate world, saying that many of the top companies in the world are now using its iPhones and iPads. In the IBM announcement, Apple’s Cook said that the company’s iPhones and iPads are now running in more than 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and 92 percent of the Global 500. Both Apple and IBM expect those figures to grow with this new pa...
A key development for the Internet of Things will be the evolution and emergence of the ‘Cloud Name System’, a directory system for Cloud applications in the same way DNS (Domain Name System) works for the web and email.
Lori MacVittie wrote a while back about the need for an ‘SNS’ – a Service Name System, a DNS type directory approach but for Cloud Services so that they can be entirely loosely coupled from their IT infrastructure.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, himself described a scenario of ‘Socially Aware Cloud Storage‘ that applies this same ideal of abstraction to our personal data across all the social networks we use. This refers to a distributed (Cloud) storage service that is used to store personal user data for social networks, rather than the social sites holding it themselves.
When people talk about Big Data, the emphasis is usually on the Big. Certainly, Big Data applications are distributed largely because the size of the data on which computations are executed warrants more than a typical application can handle. But scaling the network that provides connectivity between Big Data nodes is not just about creating massive interconnects.
In fact, the size of the network might be the least interesting aspect of scaling Big Data fabrics.
