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8 hours ago | Jamie Bourassa

The IT architecture at the heart of todays healthcare innovations is shifting to the edge. Schneider Electrics Jamie Bourassa explores

Today, IT within the healthcare industry is undergoing profound changes. This has been driven, in part, by the development of advanced new treatments, including robotics, analytical imaging and robust data networks, which enable the lessons learned from pioneering medical practitioners to be distributed to peers around the world, more rapidly than ever before.

For healthcare providers, ensuring a quality environment of patient care is paramount. New technologiesfrom digital imaging to security-enhancing baby finders to always-on wearable technologyare helping to reduce errors, improve care, and decrease costs simultaneously.

In the 2019 Global Health Care Outlook Report Deloitte states that, there is an exponential increase in the pace and scale with which digital healthcare innovations are emerging. Digital technologies are supporting health systems efforts to transition to new models of patient-centered care and helping them develop smart health approaches to increase access and affordability, improve quality, and lower costs.

Such disruptive digital technologies described by Delloite include Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications; all of which are helping medical professionals diagnose and treat patients with increasing speed, quality and accuracy. However, underneath them, the role of the IT system and in some cases, the data centre, has become increasingly important.

With the emergence of these disruptive technologies, the adoption of a new hybrid IT systemcombining the ubiquitous nature of the cloud with local computing resource closest to where healthcare professionals both create data and need access to itis both changing the business models of many health organisations and helping to solve many of their associated problems.

Consider, if you will, the impact of robotics on new medical treatments, those specifically used in modern surgical procedures. It is now possible for the most advanced medical instruments to carry out the most complex surgeries, under the control of a doctor who is positioned in a room separate to the patient undergoing treatment.

In this case, the surgical team will be surrounded by monitors and control systems, which they use to direct robotic equipment through the procedure. Miniature cameras operating both close to, and often inside, the patient, relay images that are analysed by the on-site IT equipment allowing surgeons to make life-changing decisions with greater accuracy and less risk of error than ever before.

Although not a subject yet synonymous with the healthcare industry, such IT equipment is an archetypal example of an edge computing deployment.

Latency, for example, is a vital factor; the images have to be relayed and analysed in real time for the treatment to be effective. Using a remote server somewhere in the cloud is a poor option for such applications, and so the necessary IT equipment must be positioned close to the point of use.

Typically, racks of IT equipment, or micro data centres, will be found in networking closets near to the control room in which the surgeon operates as will Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs), which are used to protect the equipment itself from power surges or outages. In this case, resiliency and availability are absolutely essential to the healthcare organisation.

Another consideration might be Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) functionalities. For example, as imaging information, which is essential to the surgical operation, is analysed locally, key data points are shared via the cloud to other medical systems around the world.

These data pools will analyse and document outcomes of similar surgeries that have taken place, forming a feedback loop that uses a database of crowd-sourced information. In this way, the lessons learned by surgeons pioneering advanced medical techniques can be disseminated around the world rapidly, increasing awareness of new and potential treatments that benefit humankind in a manner that was previously unimaginable.

Finally, data security is another key aspect for the healthcare IT professional. The IDC Data Centre Operational Survey, published in January 2019, found that 45 percent of respondents cited data security and compliance as the #1 issue they are tackling. Within the same survey IDC found that 17 percent of respondents had also experienced a physical security breach in the past year. Furthermore, IDCs March 2018 Enterprise Data Centre Edge Survey highlighted cyber and physical security as top concerns for businesses exploring edge computing deployments.

Since the technologies that run healthcare are becoming more and more of an extension of IT, these assets require a higher degree of both physical security and cyber security. How does one, for example, ensure that patient information, and indeed data centres and server rooms, remain safe and secure at all times? There are of course the software and cyber security services that an IT Manager must employ, but the biggest risk to patient information remains with human error; an unauthorised person gaining phyical access to its IT system.

Physical security therefore becomes paramount to the healthcare organisation and whether through ID cards, environmental monitoring or indeed, via secure access to IT racks or network closets, the protection of the patients data remains crucial.

Its clear to see that as healthcare evolves so will the technology architectures that supports it. However, in order to enable these technologies, healthcare facilities need a rock-solid physical infrastructure to support their assets.

Edge computing is the IT architecture required to deliver these new and digitised medical services, ensuring that patient care and treatment remain the primary concerns for medical professionals and not the resiliency of their IT systems.

So why should IT Managers within the healthcare industry take note of the edge? The answer is simple. This computing architecture is directly supporting tomorrows advancements in medical surgery, patient treatment and recovery.

In the future, as medical services continue to become more digitised, the challenges that accompany them the need for continuous power, avoidance of Internet congestion or low latency, the security of IT, data and rapid access to patient information can only be enabled by localised edge computing systems.

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AI, Cloud Computing and IoT: How digitalisation is driving dramatic IT changes in healthcare - Techerati

Since the introduction of cloud computing, more and more companies have been flocking to cloud computing, because it has proven to be cost effective and inherently more secure than on premise data centers. However, no one has ever claimed that making switch magically happens by pressing a button. Cloud computing needs to be properly managed and configured. Processes and policies that protect the data and applications that reside in the cloud need to be developed and continuously monitored to stay within best practices.

Cloud providers offer a higher level of infrastructure security whether its protecting the data through physical security armed guards behind fenced-in facilities with dual or triple authentication to get into see the actual servers or making sure the underlying servers software is patched. But, they cannot and do not ensure that the clients apps and processes are secure, just as it is on your own on premise data center. Therefore, leaving yourself exposed to workload and application layer attacks.

With the switch to cloud computing, IT professionals need to develop a new skill set, especially within the security area. This influx of valuable data in single locations makes cloud providers a prime target for malicious activity. Case in point Capital One.

Capital One accidently left its data exposed by poorly configuring its infrastructure and the security surrounding it. When a company is breached in the cloud, this is usually the most common reason. Basically, it comes down to that humans will make mistakes.

With more and more businesses moving to the cloud, companies may find it beneficial to hire a cloud security consultant to analyze its set up which would have helped Capital One alleviate this public relations nightmare. Security consultants will examine how an enterprise processes and stores data and then craft a custom governance protocol for comprehensive protection. Professional security assessments are instrumental to helping ensure cloud-service providers meet your compliance needs to responsibly protect your valuable their data.

Regardless of the infrastructure, the tools or processes in place, you must also continuously monitor to detect dubious activity. The threat landscape is constantly evolving and your security posture must evolve as well. Unfortunately, this on top of everything else that needs to be done to make sure that you are meeting your companys needs. That is where many firms are finding it necessary to hire cloud security professionals or firms that specialize in this area, especially in regulated industries where 24 by 7 monitoring is necessary. Because anyone in the industry knows that most events happen on Friday afternoon at 5:30.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from CCSI authored by CCSI Team. Read the original post at: https://www.ccsinet.com/blog/cloud-secure-maybe/

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Its in the Cloud, So it Secure . . . Maybe! - Security Boulevard

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As Per New Report on Hybrid Cloud Computing Market Will Touch a New Level in Upcoming Years | Microsoft Corporation, Cisco Systems, and Amazon Web...

DETROIT: I get so frustrated, fighter pilot turned Microsoft exec Mark Valentine said, when senior program officials and my former colleagues from the Air Force [ask me] Dude, I need to get me some of that AI. And I shake my head.

To do what? Col. Valentine asked the AUSA conference on autonomy and AI here. What are you trying to accomplish?

Then there are the customers who know just enough to be dangerous, added Leonel Garciga, an expert in military intelligence IT on the Army headquarters staff (G-2). Hes gotten requests like, hey, Leo, I want to move my instance of SharePoint a popular collaboration tool to a Google cloud platform a popular cloud provider. And I said, really? That sounds like not a great idea, Garciga recalled.

Army soldiers access the DCSG-A intelligence system during an exercise.

Why? SharePoint is a Microsoft product that comes standard on Microsofts cloud service, Azure, Garciga tried to explain. Why would you pay Google to do that integration work all over again?

And then, Garciga said, I get a blank stare.

Heres an analogy: Imagine you want a car with a sunroof. Do you buy a car that has a sunroof, or do you buy a car that doesnt have one and pay a mechanic to take a blowtorch to it?

You really, really, really dont want to reinvent any wheels by integrating new software you dont have to, agreed Matt Carroll, a former Army officer whos now CEO of startup Immuta. Of course, he noted, the companies selling you that software wont necessarily warn you. All too often, they believe they can just hand their product over, it goes into cloud infrastructure, and its magic and it works, he said. In reality, he went on, in one case, it took us a year-and-a-half just to install our product. A year and a half!

Installation and integration arent the only hidden costs, Carroll continued. The Defense Department wants cloud computing so it can pool data previously scattered across the bureaucracy, making it easier to analyze; machine learning in particular requires a massive central collection of data to train the algorithms. But running sophisticated analytics let alone AI requires much more computing power than just dumping 1s and 0s in a database, and its correspondingly costly.

Modern machine learning AI relies on the fact that, in any large set of data, there will emerge clusters of data points that correspond to things in the real world.

It is very different than a database, very different than cold storage, Carroll said. Analytics run in that computer infrastructure, and guess what? its wicked expensive. Its like 10 times the cost.

People freak out .holy crap, how am I going to pay this bill? he said. Well, the whole point of moving your data to the cloud was to make it easier for people to use it, and now theyre using it more. Thats what you want to do! he said. Guess what, theres a cost for that.

Such unpleasant surprises in cloud billing were all too common across the defense industry as well, Garciga said but theyve learned how to manage it, when the Pentagon has not.

All major defense contractors that are here, I talk to the folks on the IT side, and I get the same exact story: Leo, we went to cloudand we had like 3,000 PCs out there, and people were just leaving stuff running, and we had a bazillion dollar bill, Garciga said.

The companies responded by instituting new rules for cloud use much of it the 21st century equivalent of reminding employees to turn the light off before they leave the building but that lesson has not been learned by DoD yet, he said. That lesson has definitely not been learned by the Army.

Then-director of the Defense Digital Service, Chris Lynch (at center, in grey hoodie) surrounded by his casually-clad tech geniuses.

Bureaucracy Hackers

The Army CIO, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, is now creating an enterprise cloud management office to get a handle on the devilish and expensive details of moving to the cloud. In the intelligence world, which is particularly enthusiastic about cloud computing, weve actually stopped a lot of the technical pieces, Garciga said, [while] were hiring more business folks to manage the business of cloud vs. technical [aspects]. Thats going to be a bigger challenge.

Pentagon officials often fixate on hiring people who know computers, but they really need to hire people who know their way around the governments own bureaucracy, agreed Don Bitner, chief of infrastructure strategy & development for the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

We need to have policy hackers, Bitner said. That is a skillset we really need: people that can hack the bureaucracy and get through the red tape, [and] you really only get that skillset through experience.

(Its worth noting the Defense Digital Service was created to bring hackers of both technology and bureaucracy to the Pentagon from the private sector, but their most ambitious project, the JEDI cloud computing initiative, has repeatedly run afoul of legal and procedural problems).

The Pentagons plan to consolidate many but not all of its 500-plus cloud contracts into a single Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). Note the suggestion that the single pathfinder contract for JEDI might evolve into multiple JEDI contracts.

The lack of experience manifests in different ways at different levels of the hierarchy. Nave generals, admirals, and senior officials all too often try to order up AI or cloud, or whatever the latest buzz word is as if it were a side of fries, without thinking through what they really want it to do. But uneducated procurement and contracting officials often see obstacles to high-tech projects, obstacles they could actually bypass if they understood all the options already available to them in acquisition law and regulation.

Special Operations Command, for instance, has a reputation for getting its commandos high tech at high speed and manageable cost, often attributed to SOCOMs special legal authorities. But in fact, said Bitner, I might have been doing a SOCOM project, but nine times out of 10 wed use a standard FAR [Federal Acquisition Regulation] warrant to buy our stuff, and we bought it just faster than the services.

Its because we knew how to work the system in our favor, Bitner said. You need bureaucrats that are willing to hack the system, not just sit back and tell us [no].

All too often, Garciga said were delaying operationalizing stuff that I go could build right now in my house, and I could deploy from my laptop, tonight, and were turning it into a six-month effort. And DoD is suffering this self-inflicted wound, he said, in large part not because of what the regulations actually say, but because of how acquisition officials have gotten used to coloring well within the lines rather than using all the leeway they really have.

Listening to one litany of obstacles, Garciga said, at almost every single point, my thought was, oh, well, theres already policy that allows you to do that. Its just not being used.

Sometimes, officials just arent aware of new reforms. About four months ago, Garciga said, the undersecretary for acquisition & sustainment issued new rules for rapid software provisioning. He asked anyone whos heard of the change to raise their hands, then scanned the cavernous conference hall.

One person. Outstanding, he snarked. Everybody should be raising their hand.

In many other cases, though, the flexibility has been available for years. How many people think OTA Other Transaction Authority, a favorite tool of reformers is a new thing? Garciga asked. Its been around forever. We just werent using it.

The policies that are actually in place right now and the law thats in place allow us to do this, Garciga said. Everybody has the authorities to do this. Lets get that done.

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'Guess What, There's A Cost For That': Getting Cloud & AI Right - Breaking Defense