Leading U.S. Health Care Cloud Provider Releases Exclusive Health Care IT Study

Peak 10 has released its 2nd National IT Trends in Health Care study that revealed health care CIOs are under pressure to keep up with rapid advancements in interoperability, big data, and security challenges. Peak 10, which published its inaugural National IT Trends in Health care study last year, surveyed another 157 C-level executives and information technology professionals across the U.S. again this year. The study delivers unique insights based on data that illustrate industry challenges and provides a window into the future of the health care industry. Among these, the study shows that hospital groups are moving to outsource IT functions; adopt SaaS and cloud-based solutions; implement telemedicine portals; and rely on analytics and big data to accommodate the rapidly growing analyst-based workforce.

“Technology is changing at a rapid rate and while it is making patient’s lives easier, it is also increasing the amount of information that is at risk of falling into the wrong hands,” says David Kidd, VP of governance, risk and compliance at Peak 10. “Although health care organizations have been cautious about moving to the cloud, they are now recognizing the benefits and security in the cloud. This allows for more time to be spent on patients and the organization’s core mission.”

Additional findings from the study include:

• Now more than ever hospitals are seeing the benefits and efficiencies of moving towards outsourcing and trusting the cloud, cited by up to 50% increase in cloud services (IaaS)
• Data privacy and security are still primary concerns due to recent ransomware attacks on hospitals according to 59% of respondents
• IT budgets are expected to increase in the next 12 months according to 67% of health care IT leaders
• Some of the top initiatives that CIOs and IT leaders at health care organizations are concerned with, include hardware and software upgrades, EHR systems, analytics and big data initiatives, patient portals and leveraging IT to manage their population health initiatives
• The main challenges they face are system interoperability issues, meeting security and compliance, and balancing their human capital resources to meet regulatory and business requirements

As the role of information technology in health care rapidly evolves, sound technology infrastructures allow organizations to become more efficient but also recognize the barriers they face in protecting patient data and meeting government regulations. In addition to other health care IT content and resources from Peak 10, the complete, complimentary research findings from The Peak 10 2nd National IT Trends in Health care study can be downloaded exclusively here.

“It’s important to Peak 10 to stay ahead of the trends in the Health care IT industry and be able to support where needed,” says Christina Kyriazi, product marketing and analytics manager at Peak 10. “By researching and completing studies, such as the National IT Trends in Health care study, we are gaining insights to provide the best service for our customers and their staff.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

TIBCO Launches Cloud Services Solution

TIBCO Software Inc. has announced the launch of TIBCO® Cloud Services, a comprehensive toolset for enterprises leveraging the cloud in pursuit of digital transformation. With the massive growth in big data, cloud, the Internet of Things, and mobile technologies, enterprises today must be equipped to quickly discover and leverage emerging business opportunities in a hyper-connected world. TIBCO provides the connective tissue for this type of digital business transformation through cloud services that enable DevOps-ready, container-based architectures and scalable, persuasive integration. TIBCO Cloud Services are customizable by design, allowing organizations to create bespoke usage solutions depending on the workflow and needs of a particular operations model or division. Developers can create, publish, and consume APIs and use packaged connectors or create their own integrations. Line-of-business users can connect SaaS applications to run only the business processes necessary for the operation of their domain. Industrious digital citizens are enabled to connect existing SaaS services and new sources of data together to streamline their work. To facilitate these capabilities, the core of TIBCO Cloud Services proffers three key solutions: TIBCO® Cloud Integration, TIBCO BusinessWorks™ Container Edition, and TIBCO Simplr™.

“The cloud is now the key resource for providing enterprises with the ability to extend access to and understand data, and to draw meaningful insights from that information to grow their businesses,” said Matt Quinn, executive vice president of products & technology and chief technology officer, TIBCO. “TIBCO Cloud Services make up a comprehensive platform to enable organizations to achieve their digital transformation, letting users connect everything and augment their intelligence with data.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

The Sixth Flag Named A 2016 Gartner Cool Vendor In Endpoint Computing

The Sixth Flag, Inc. has announced that the company has been included in the “Cool Vendors in Endpoint Computing, 2016” report by Gartner for its Desktop-as-a-Service solution. This report examines innovators in endpoint computing. Companies recognized in the report were selected because their technologies or solutions are innovative, impactful and intriguing.

Each year, Gartner identifies new “Cool Vendors” in key technology areas. Cool Vendors are reviewed in a series of research reports evaluating their products and services. The Sixth Flag was specifically recognized for its Desktop-as-a-Service as a true cloud- based solution. The Gartner report states “products that require no special software on the endpoint and are OS-neutral are especially better in that they can enable CYOD and BYOD — and effectively allow users to pick the device of their choice.” By using standard web browsers, The Sixth Flag (TSF) actively supports growing organizational mandates for BYOD. Furthermore, TSF’s patent-pending watermarking technology known as dewdrop.tsf offers strong protection for organizations concerned about the loss of intellectual property.

“We are honored to be selected by Gartner as a 2016 Cool Vendor for Endpoint Computing. We believe it validates our vision of delivering a true cloud orchestrated and delivered Desktop-as-a-Service,” said Pete Kofod, founder and CEO of The Sixth Flag. “We will continue to raise the bar by adding groundbreaking capabilities to our offering, extending a solution that is simple, secure, easy to manage and that won’t break the bank.”

The ability to securely deliver Windows™-based applications to a distributed and dynamic work force continues to challenge technology leaders. According to Gartner, technology leaders should “plan to provide Win32 applications virtually or remotely in a container to users, or as part of DaaS to enable more agile management and diversity for user endpoint devices.” Pete Kofod agrees with this assertion and states, “the ability to confidently and securely deliver legacy applications to remote users is a recurring problem facing our customers.”

Gartner points out, “Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is maturing; I&O leaders can now run DaaS in HTML5 browsers without additional software and there are now options to purchase short-term DaaS services leveraging pay per use and accelerated speed of deployment for temporary or seasonal needs.” From its inception, The Sixth Flag has recognized this need. Darren Witmer, Vice President of Business Strategy, concurs. “We are seeing requests for short term and dynamic pricing in DaaS solicitations, particularly from mid-market and enterprise customers. We believe that The Sixth Flag is uniquely well suited to meet such demands.”

Since its debut, The Sixth Flag has been transforming DaaS with its award-winning solution. Easy to integrate and deploy, the company’s clients have reported great results in delivering legacy applications to remote users where uncompromised performance, global availability and ground-breaking security is paramount.

Reference: Gartner Cool Vendor Endpoint Computing, May 11, 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

FBI Subpoenas Tor Developer to Testify in Criminal Hacking Investigation

Tor developer Isis Agora Lovecruft has traveled from the US to Germany to avoid an FBI subpoena, fearing the agency will attempt to coerce her into helping them crack the anonymity network.

The FBI reportedly seeks the testimony of Lovecruft (which is an alias) in a criminal hacking investigation, but details are scant beyond those provided by Lovecruft in a blog post, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken her case.

“The FBI needs to open up and tell Isis what it is they want before she can decide if she will meet with them,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo told Sputnik. “They’ve said she isn’t under investigation, but there are still too many unanswered questions. Isis has a right to know what’s going on instead of playing this strange guessing game as she’s pursued by federal agents.”

OK computer: When pop music meets machine learning

It’s Moogfest season here in Durham, so there’s been a lot of the discussion in the office around music, data lakes, and the heat map we’re building for the festival. But the conversation took a different turn, thanks to a tweet.

Many months ago when I was at IBM Insight, I tweeted a snide remark about computer-generated jokes. Fast-forward to this week, when former “Monk” and Letterman writer Joe Toplyn responded with a link “proving” that computers could generate jokes that were funny … at least to the easily amused. Amid the discussion, someone drove by playing crappy autotune pop music.

This got me thinking about whether you could generate hit pop songs. Most of the popular songs are written by two middle-aged guys from Sweden anyhow. Plus, there are algorithms that can detect which songs are likely to be a hit. While the current hit song generator is simply song titles with performers, we also have an algorithm that can generate tweets for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. It seems like a short trip to get from hit detector to factory songwriting to neural net for political speech to full-on pop song generator!

We’d need parameters like a genre (pop, hip-hop, dance) and probably gender, as well as whether it’s a party track, a love song, happy, sad, angry, and so on. Then maybe we’d train a neural net on the corpus of songs by the two Swedes. Add that to an adaptation of the hit detection algorithm and you should have not a great song, but at the very least a popular one.

Google: AlphaGo Powered by Custom AI Chip

Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge

Last October, a computer system beat a professional human player at the ancient Chinese board game Go. The AI system, AlphaGo, was built by Google and trained using machine learning techniques.

Google built the hardware that powered AlphaGo in-house, as it does with most of its infrastructure components. At the core of that hardware is the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, a chip Google designed specifically for its AI hardware, the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said from stage this morning during the opening Google I/O conference keynote next to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

VentraIP Grabs 4,000 Hosting Customers as Part of Servers Australia Deal

Servers Australia has agreed to sell its shared hosting customers to VentraIP, and the companies will work together as part of a deal to streamline the focus of each within the Australian web hosting market. While financial details were not released in the Tuesday announcement, it appears that VentraIP will send back an undisclosed amount of cash, as well as close its dedicated servers business, and will instead market Servers Australia’s dedicated line to its customers.

Nearly 4,000 shared hosting customers will be migrated from Servers Australia to VentraIP’s hosting platform, and VentraIP will market Server Australia’s dedicated hosting to its own customers when they outgrow VentraIP’s shared or virtual servers.

SEE ALSO: Australian Cloud Provider Zettagrid Acquires Hosting Firm Conexim

Cloud-Based Security Solutions Encourage Faster Deployment: Report

Nearly half of all information security professionals said faster deployment is the top driver of cloud-based security solutions, according to a report released Tuesday by CloudPassage. The 2016 LinkedIn Cloud Security Spotlight Report shows industry professionals are concerned about public cloud security, and not convinced that traditional security tools work adequately with cloud infrastructure.

More than 2,200 information security professionals from among the 300,000 members of LinkedIn’s Information Security Community were surveyed for the second annual report. It shows that the top barriers to cloud adoption are growing security concerns, with an increased number of professionals citing general cloud security (from 45 to 53 percent)and legal and regulatory compliance concerns (29 to 42 percent).

SEE ALSO: Organizations Feel More Confident in their Security Than a Year Ago: Report

Media Temple Unveils New Managed WordPress Plans for Enterprises, Agencies

Media Temple is expanding its portfolio of managed WordPress hosting solutions for enterprises. The company announced Tuesday that it will offer two new plans for enterprises and agencies, featuring its new round-the-clock white glove account management service (mt) One and hosted on the AWS cloud.

Media Temple began offering WordPress hosting specifically designed for enterprises as one of four categories released in an update of its managed WordPress hosting portfolio in early 2015. It has now split the enterprise category into two different offerings: Enterprise WordPress and Enterprise WordPress Max Performance.

SEE ALSO: Agencies Plan to Spend More Time and Money on WordPress Projects in 2016

SAP seeks to simplify IT with a beefier new version of Hana

SAP has updated its flagship Hana in-memory computing platform with a raft of new features designed to make IT simpler while giving organizations a better handle on their data.

The updates, announced Tuesday at the company’s annual Sapphire Now conference in Florida, include a new hybrid data management service in the cloud and a new version of the company’s Hana Edge edition for SMBs.

“We’ve taken an already rock solid platform and further hardened security, enhanced availability, unified the development and administration experience, and expanded advanced analytic capabilities,” Michael Eacrett, vice president of product management for SAP, wrote in a blog post detailing the new release.

Launched more than five years ago, Hana forms the basis for S/4Hana, the enterprise suite SAP released in early 2015.