At the end of 2012, Forrester Research’s James Staten summarized Forrester’s vision for how they see cloud computing affecting enterprises in 2013.  The top ten trends for the enterprise cloud include:

- Understanding of the cloud will lead to better IT architectural decisions.  IT finally has a firm grasp on the scenarios which benefit most by applying cloud technologies.
- Cloud technology will continue to be complemented by mobile.  Glenn O’Donnell, Forrester analyst, says that cloud plus mobile is “more than the sum of its parts.”
- Non-critical apps in the cloud will mean that high SLAs become less important. James Staten, Forrester analyst, wrote that “What’s the value of having your sourcing and vendor management team negotiate a high and tight SLA from the cloud vendor when only 10% of the applications deployed there need that level of protection?” >>Read more

Source: Formtek Blog

Cloud Computing is taking off in various parts of the globe, partly because companies are now realizing the great potential of cloud computing technology when it comes to cost efficiency, productivity, agility, and operational flexibility. However, Canadian companies seem to be lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to the adoption of this newly matured technology.

Canada’s Slow Adoption of the Cloud
The chief reasons why Canadian companies are slow to adopt cloud technology despite its maturity is due to security and privacy concerns. Canada has extremely stringent data privacy laws, and many Canadian companies are still waiting for the provincial and federal governments to standardize and update the policies in order to accommodate the cloud. With the Canadian government’s lack of clear policies on data privacy and their effects on the cloud, companies will not be willing to risk possible legal troubles regarding cloud use.

Essentially, Canadian companies are concerned that the ownership of the information they keep in their own data centres could be called into question, as the existing privacy laws still have conflicts regarding which data belongs to whom based on the physical location of the server, as well as the location of the person accessing the files.

It’s also the main reason why many Canadian users choose to go with foreign providers, such as Microsoft and Amazon, as the two companies have the most stringent security mechanisms in place, and have deep enough pockets to fight drawn out court battles if they run into legal trouble.

Canada’s Privacy Laws
As mentioned above, many Canadian organizations are on the fence when it comes to adopting cloud technology due to fears that they could run into legal issues when transfer of data across borders happens. This is because under Canada’s current federal and provincial private sector privacy laws state that the organization that collects and uses personal information will be solely responsible for its maintenance and security throughout its lifecycle.

This puts many organizations in a risky position as they become automatically locked in a contractual obligation with individuals whose data pass through their servers. Organizations that want to operate in the cloud would have to meet with their legal advisors in order to assess if cloud service transfers of personal information will have an effect on their existing legal commitments, and if it is necessary for them to provide special notice to individuals concerned, as well as provide opt-out or termination opportunities to users. >>Read more

Source: CloudTimes

Temasys provides medical professionals with an internationally acclaimed, high    value, low cost, cloud based video conferencing service that enhances interdisciplinary collaboration, accelerates the access to medical images (whatever the acquisition modality) and creates improved patient care.  Always available, fully managed, encrypted, and secure so that you – the Clinician – can focus on diagnosis and treatment, without the need to think about technology.

The practice of medicine is inherently collaborative and in hospitals around the world actions are constantly being taken to achieve the goals of Integrating the Health Care Enterprise (IHE).  The realm of medical diagnostics, the premise is simple: when primary physicians, pathologists, radiologists, and other medical professionals work together, they can treat patients more effectively. Telemedicine has promised to make collaboration more efficient, by using video-based communications to replace travel by medical providers and their patients, accelerating the transfer of information between experts, and calling on second opinion at a moments notice. The fundamental objective is to improve patient care and save lives.

In the critical areas of Pathology and Radiology rapid access to the results of tests, and the ability to quickly federate the results amongst professional clinicians, can make the difference between an effective intervention and one that is possibly less timely due to the process of receiving, reviewing and taking action on patient test data.   Visual communication via Temasys’s Global HD Cloud Video Conferencing Service brings clinical information directly to the specialist wherever they may be.  By displaying DICOM imagery over a fully encrypted communications infrastructure, to ensure patient and data confidentiality, clinicians can be confident of the efficacy of shared content and can have face to face, real time visual conversations with their colleagues and invited experts using any device – whether a simple desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet, or even a smartphone.

Effective telemedicine technology, such as Temasys Global Cloud HD Video Conferencing Service, work anywhere, transmit high-quality images over normal Internet connections, provide real-time access to case data such as lab results and histological sections, allow several people to interact simultaneously, and is easy to operate.  Temasys, provide a simple to use platform and provide turnkey solutions to bring a hospital or clinic on line and effective rapidly and economically.

Contact Bill Lewis, Managing Director, Temasys Communications, Singapore, for help in imporving processes in your hospital, clinic, labaoratory, or medical instituition. 

Temasys Cloud HD Video Conferencing Service is powered by software from Vidyo Inc. (www.vidyo.com)

bill.lewis@temasys.com.sg
+65 983 953 71      

If you work with multiple computers and devices, and especially if you collaborate with other writers, then the combination of SkyDrive and Office 2013 is fantastic. Got an email with an attached document or some notes you've started making? Save the file on SkyDrive (you can even do that from your phone in some cases); not only can you open it in Word on your PC and carry on working, but it will appear in the recent documents list on the File menu in Office 2013 so it's easy to find.

If you're working on a document with someone else, both of you can open it from SkyDrive and edit it at the same time. Yes, that's useful, because you're often adding different things to the document. You don't get the other person's changes until you both save the document, so you're not distracted by half-finished thoughts or false starts. And you can't change the paragraph someone else is already working in, so nothing gets overwritten. You can use Track Changes to see and revert changes, and if you work in Simple Markup view you won't feel like you're drowning in a sea of red-lined corrections and you can make changes without worrying about losing your favourite sentence. Don't worry about slips of the finger: SkyDrive has a recycle bin, so as long as you turn on the setting in Word to make a backup you can even go back and retrieve a paragraph the other person deleted without turning on Track Changes (or if they accepted their change before you got a chance to check it).>>Read more

Source: ZDNet

During the last decade, the enterprise war was among the handful of players. Microsoft wanted to be the de facto choice of the IT by pushing .NET application platform, integrated tools through Visual Studio, a set of servers in the form of SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk and System Center. Same was the case with IBM who was trying to compete through the Rational, WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli and MQ Series platforms. Sun and Oracle complemented each other and ran an integrated GTM to win the enterprise customers. The goal of every player was the same – Displace competition and own almost every aspect of enterprise IT including the directory services, messaging, databases, business intelligence, systems management, collaboration and enterprise integration.

In the era of Cloud, it is unrealistic to think of just one player providing end-to-end capabilities for the enterprises. Whether it is infrastructure services or platform services, there are a set of essential services that are expected by the enterprises. Most of the enterprise customer requirements go beyond the basic set of services like compute, storage, networking and databases. For example, a CDN service is essential to complement the storage, a NoSQL database to handle the scale out operations on the data tier and Hadoop for big data processing and analytics. Infrastructure service providers want to leverage the investments by exposing a PaaS layer. With the rapidly evolving landscape of Cloud driven by the customer needs, traditional platform companies like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle cannot match the pace. They cannot any more play the role of the big brother in the context of the Cloud. Amazon Web Services comes close to being the Cloud platform that offers a native set of building block services, application services, management services and deployment services. Cloud brought everyone to the same level playing field. Of course, an early mover like Microsoft has an advantage over IBM and Oracle but they still cannot enjoy the same dream run they had during the last decade.>>Read more

Source: Janakiramm