December 30, 2015

Healthcare IT: Hot Trends For 2016, Part 1

Several technology trends are converging to give patients advantages, such as improved sources of knowledge and fast, improved medical service. "In 2016, the debate will heighten as to whether patients -- or health consumers -- will be asked to do more or less to manage their health," said Dr. Stephen S. Tang, president of the University Science Center in Philadelphia. "The more information the health consumer has, the more analytics and control he or she may want." We'll each have more opportunity to monitor our health and wellbeing through apps and products that take diagnostics and treatments out of the physician's office and into the home, Tang said. Tang sees this as a positive: Providers and research institutions will take on the burden of inventing better solutions, rather than giving already-busy people a new set of responsibilities, he says.


Data Center Technology Startups to Watch in 2016

You won’t find hot SDN, cluster management, flash, or application container startups on this list. We specifically chose to narrow it down to companies we feel are addressing some of the biggest pain points in data center design and management. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but the startups listed here are trying to solve big problems in interesting, innovative ways. Feel free to suggest other companies that should be on this list by submitting comments below or on our social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,Google+.


Effective Strategies for Data Leakage Detection

The central strategy and key resource involved in data leakage detection is pretty much the same, regardless of the amount of data or files involved: effective management of metadata. Many organizations don’t realize the real value of metadata, especially when it incorporates both conceptual metadata (the kind that comes from people’s heads and is therefore subjective) and logical metadata (the kind gathered with technology tools, which is very black-and-white and objective). If you haven’t acquired both types and resolved any discrepancies, you will not be able to interpret everything needed to manage a given data asset more effectively — because you are looking at only a “half truth.”


Five Cybersecurity Trends to Watch in 2016

To no one’s surprise, cybersecurity continued to be a key area of concern and struggle among organizations of all sizes in 2015. However, buried amongst the constant news cycle of new attacks and sophisticated breaches is the fact that more business leaders are understanding the importance of cybersecurity and its potential impact on the organization. Whether it’s a small operation within a niche industry or a major global corporation, everyone is at risk. As we prepare to ring in 2016, we have taken time to reflect on lessons learned in the past year and how these trends and major news stories in cybersecurity will affect the year ahead. Here are five things we’ll be watching for in 2016


NFV: Not Ready for Prime Time but Working on It

While real work began in 2015 on NFV MANO, our in-house analyst Scott Raynovich made the argument that the MANO model that was set up by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has served its useful purpose. He says real-world NFV management is quickly morphing beyond the constraints of the ETSI diagram. ... Sure enough, at SDN & OpenFlow Congress in Germany in October, Axel Clauberg said the cloud VPN service Deutsche Telekom (DT) launched in March “was difficult.” The VPN service is based on OpenStack. Also at the OpenFlow conference, OpenStack came under fire for lagging behind the needs of NFV deployments. If OpenStack can’t do the job, other alternatives could emerge, ranging from proprietary technology to another open source group, such as OPNFV, filling the void.


Towards an Agile Software Architecture

An important aspect of agile software architecture is when it has to start. Opposed to the waterfall model where we have well-defined phases, in the agile world there is no certain point that people agree to be the starting one. One typical approach is to introduce sprint #0 – a special sprint where the development environment is configured and some fundamental decisions are made. A common pitfall with this approach though, is people tend to prolong it as they always find things that are “almost ready”. “One more week and we can start the regular sprints” is often heard. In many cases you find yourself already working on the system, without even having the user stories, because “it will be really cool to have that helper feature implemented in advance”. In such situations you should beforehand agree on an end date for sprint #0 – this could be the duration of a regular sprint or something close to it.


6 Strategic Projects Any Business Can Implement in 2016

As 2016 begins, now is the time for businesses (regardless of industry, size, product or service offering, or location) to take stock of all resources and initiatives, and plan strategy-centric projects to implement in the New Year. There are many projects any business can implement that, if executed successfully, can create fresh opportunities or drastically reduce the chance of costly missed opportunities. Projects are often pursued for the purpose of generating revenues, creating growth opportunities, seeking innovation or even increasing brand awareness, but it can be easy to get caught up in just day-to-day operations without recognizing the actual cost of missing some more basic projects.


Reader Forum: IoT and the automotive industry

As these commercial fleet vehicles solutions increasingly began to share information bi-directionally via the Internet, they have become a part of the Internet of Things. Today, the “connected car” is rapidly transforming the consumer automotive experience as manufacturers compete to provide a wide array of factory- and dealer-installed IoT options. These consumer-oriented IoT applications range from practical to entertaining. Audi, BMW and Mercedes demonstrated automated vehicles that assist with parking and lane changing at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show. AT&T partnered with Uber to enable passengers to watch college football games from tablets in the backseat. Signing up with General Motors, Audi and Ford, AT&T is aiming to hook up cars with Internet access to stream videos and games onto passengers’ mobile devices.


Why Information Governance Initiatives Matter

“The volume and rate of growth of data do not bring the greatest challenges to information integrity across healthcare. The tougher challenges to information integrity, availability and security require information governance.” Further discussions emphasized the various aspects and value of trusted information, including safe use of IT and interoperability. While many organizations are still in the beginning phase of implementing an IG program, a recent survey by Cohasset Associates revealed that 44 percent of respondents have established IG oversight bodies, 44 percent have seen modest to significant progress, 38 percent have included IG in their organization’s strategic goals, and 36 percent have designated senior executive sponsors.


Enterprise startups: Open source may be your only hope

The reason is that open source communities can be bigger than any particular startup or company. And, if you're going to have a real chance at solving a crazy complicated enterprise IT problem, you must bring an army. This is why mega-banks, retailers, etc. buy from mega IT vendors. It's not that they believe an IBM knows more than random Startup X. Instead, they opt to buy from a large enterprise software vendor because they're big enough to understand the problem, and to have the resources (and longevity) to tackle it. This isn't to suggest there's not room to disrupt enterprise IT. There is. Just ask Amazon Web Services. But, even cloud and open source aren't enough. AWS is hitting its stride in part because it increasingly looks and acts like the legacy vendors it's displacing. CIOs trust its scale.



Quote for the day:


"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." -- George Bernard Shaw


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