Monthly Archives: July 2021

Cloud computing has become the talk of the town, especially within the healthcare niche. The adoption of this state-of-the-art tech innovation has been escalating at a frenetic pace. One recent research study suggests that the global market for cloud technologies in healthcare is projected to reach $64.7 billion by 2025.

The reason behind its recent exponential growth is simple though. If healthcare businesses were simply service providers before, today they're true progressive institutions that depend on their IT infrastructure and departments to gain better clinical, administrative, and financial insights. This helps them make informed decisions.

And that's not all - as patient expectations change with each passing day, and new payment models get added to the equation, cloud technology has become vital to drive efficiency and improve patient care.

There are several things that have been made possible in healthcare due to the rapid adoption of cloud technology.

Most cloud platforms offer better infrastructure and services than individual on-premise storage systems set up by healthcare facilities.

Renting out rack space in a data centre would cost you only a fraction of what it would to set up and maintain an in-house system at such a scale. Additionally, there are substantial savings on technical upgrades, staff, and licenses.

On-premise data centres not only necessitate an investment in hardware early on, but they also come with ongoing costs of managing physical servers, spaces, and cooling solutions among other things.While EHRs have become mainstream in healthcare, storage of data on cloud servers is set to become the new normal, explains Dr Vinati Kamani in one of her recent articles. The use of cloud computing in healthcare saves up on the additional server costs, wherein you only pay for the computing capacity you use while ensuring the safety of sensitive PHI at the same time, she continues.

Therefore, by carefully choosing a cloud hosting platform that will fit the needs of their particular practice, healthcare leaders can easily lower the costs associated with data storage and concentrate both their efforts as well as budget on making the patient experience seamless.

Cyber attacks and thefts have been on the rise in the healthcare space of late. Now is the time that practices and hospitals alike need augmented security protocols that safeguard sensitive patient data.Healthcare leaders are swiftly moving toward hybrid cloud environments which offer the benefit of both private and public cloud to achieve optimum compliance, security, flexibility and the ease to move applications between the two.

In a press release issued by Nutanix, the CIO of the Anne Arundel Medical Center, Dave Lehr said: As a healthcare organisation, were responsible for managing critical clinical and IT applications such as EHR and PACS as well as making sure we have an infrastructure that is secure and scalable to support changing needs such as hybrid cloud-based disaster recovery."

We knew that the right hyperconverged infrastructure would allow us to manage these workloads on a single, cost-effective solution, Lehr continues.

A number of cloud vendors now also offer compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Opting for a compliant cloud service can further ensure that the sensitive patient data within your systems remains protected and adheres to HIPAA rules at all times. This can help you avoid any hefty penalties and keep your facilitys reputation from getting tarnished.

The rapid adoption of collaboration tools like video conferencing and enterprise messaging since the COVID-19 public health emergency hit us last year has presented immense potential towards positively influencing healthcare teams and leadership.

The cloud-based software behind these applications helps ameliorate the clinical workflow and enhances patient care, irrespective of the providers or patients physical locations.

Today, with the developments happening on the cloud technology front, the data collected from remote patient monitoring devices can also be uploaded to the healthcare facilitys dedicated cloud server or the user's private centralised cloud. The platform then keeps a record of all the monitored data which can be retrieved for analysis by the medical personnel during treatment.

The utilisation of cloud storage for storing data from electronic health record systems (EHRs) has helped revolutionise collective patient care, making it less complicated for care providers and their staff to retrieve patient details at any given point in time, even from a remote location.

The majority of cloud platforms also employ essential security features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and access controls, that can provide patients with a greater sense of security when it comes to sharing credit card details or social security numbers.

Web-based software also makes it easier for physicians, staff members and patients to access patient portals and employ mobile health applications to receive important health information, such as lab test results, medication reminders and activity trackers.

All in all, cloud computing has presented us with an unprecedented opportunity to make value-based, patient-centric healthcare a reality.

The advantages mentioned above only scratch the surface of cloud technologys true potential. Only those forward looking healthcare leaders that are ready to embrace this technology will know how much more it has in store for healthcare.

Original post:

How is cloud computing revolutionising healthcare? - Healthcare Global - Healthcare News, Magazine and Website

The symbiosis between data governance and cloud computing is apparent to any organization with significant cloud investments. The cloud has a plethora of resources that enhance data governance, which is critical for regulatory compliance, risk mitigation, and long term profitability of data assets.

Simultaneously, however, data governance hallmarks of metadata management, data cataloging, and data stewardship are requisite for maximizing the clouds utility by illustrating where data are and employing them for singular use cases like customer 360s, real-time product or service recommendations, and advanced analytics.

Although its difficult to say which of these capabilities is more advantageous to the enterprise, they clearly complement each other.

For data governance, the clouds chief value proposition is that from a standpoint of connectivity, or data integration, or data quality, or cataloging, everythings included so you have an all-in-one solution thats possible because were in a microservices world where you can deploy efficiently and have things kind of seamlessly interoperable, Informatica MDM General Manager Manouj Tahiliani revealed.

The cloud is also a significant contributor to dispersing resources across locations which, if left unchecked, could easily result in silos and ungoverned use. According to Profisee CTO Eric Melcher, the cloud creates the much more distributed enterprise where youve got lots of applications: our HR applications, CRM applications, ERP applications, our customer experience platform. Weve got applications across the line. And by the way, the datas not in that server in the corner, its now all over the place. So, I need governance to understand where everything is.

Data governance is essential for keeping cloud deployments orderly, while the cloud enriches the very means of effecting governance by allowing organizations to position resources wherever theyre most advantageous for modern computingparticularly when supported by governance staples of metadata management, data cataloguing, data modeling, and data stewardship.

Metadata Intelligence

Metadata is utilitarian for governing data in cloud settings. Its particularly beneficial for assembling data across numerous sources to use in a single domain such as customer, product, supply chain information, and more. Tahiliani referred to the notion of metadata intelligence as foundational to implementing data quality and data integration. Coupling metadata intelligence with Master Data Management exploits the sundry of cloud sources by enabling organizations to govern how they get data from different sources, curate it, and share it across the enterprise, Tahiliani observed.

Metadata plays a couple different roles in this basic functionality. Its the key to connecting data to various downstream systems through MDMs logical model. Firms can also use the power of metadata to help them discover elements that need to be mastered, rapidly provide integration between the system using that metadata knowledge and share that data, as well as use metadata to use machine learning capabilities around matching and data quality rules, Tahiliani commented. These capabilities are instrumental for combining sources for customer insight, for example, in a well governed fashion.

Data Cataloging

Metadata also helps the data cataloging process Tahiliani described, which identifies what data are where in cloud settings. In fact, there are several cloud tools that reinforce this aspect of data governance by empowering organizations so the first thing they do is catalog what they have, Melcher noted. Now that weve cataloged it, lets start classifying and understanding what it is and figuring out whats sensitive and who knows about the data here and there. Once data are classified, its relatively straightforward to tag them and ascribe ownership to them, which provides the framework for suitably governing data across any variety of cloud sources.

Credible catalogs can point at sources to provide this functionality or allow sources to input their metadata for cataloging purposes. The latter is particularly effectual with MDM because it lets organizations push the logical definitions of Master Dataand register assets to what the end user would actually expect, Melcher mentioned. The benefit of this approach is data already adheres to MDM conventions of data quality, definitions, and other aspects of its logical model, which aids in creating catalogs and classifications that enhance enterprise use caseswhile ensuring those use cases are well governed.

Data Modeling

MDM is also useful for unifying the different data models that abound throughout cloud sources so organizations can combine them for analytics, for example. Data modeling is a pivotal aspect of data governance that can be particularly time consuming (delaying time to value) with traditional methods. MDM, however, lets organizations create models for products or any other domain partly by using data discovery mechanisms. As youre creating the models and what attributes you need to have, the discovery aspect allows you to understand across the source systems for those different entities whats the metadata thats being held, Tahiliani explained. That provides information about how often its used and updated to really determine if that should be an attribute within your master data model.

The most expressive data models unify terminology and include specific vocabularies to describe customers or supply chain needs, for instance. The metadata intelligence Tahiliani alluded to assists this facet of data modeling while allowing organizations to redress disparities in how entities are represented when you know which source systems the metadata youre pulling in is from, and what the vocabulary is across those source systems, Tahiliani added.

Data Stewardship

All of the above dimensions of data governancemetadata intelligence, data cataloging, and data modelingare invaluable to data stewards attempting to ensure governance standards are met across the enterprise in heterogeneous cloud, edge, and on-premise applications. The enhanced data modeling traits pertaining to definitions and attributes that are found in MDM (including information from data cataloging tools) are critical to data stewards validating data governance protocols.

For example, if a steward needs at-a-glance information about the data model for a customer entity, hell see this is a description of a customer associated with this glossary term called business partner or whatever the case may be, and Bob in Sales is an expert on what customer is, Melcher indicated. With this approach MDM participates in governance by pushingmetadata into a catalog, but then, as governance occurs, the output of governance is then available for end users to consume back in [MDM], Melcher concluded.

Master Data Governance

Data governance is indispensable for making good on the clouds premise of real-time access to a distributed data landscape with elastic scalability in a pay-per-use pricing model. Additionally, the cloud contains many toolssuch as cloud native MDM solutions, data cataloging instruments, and othersthat streamline governance capabilities to decrease datas risk while boosting its enterprise value over the long term.

MDM sits between each of these constructs as a viable means of balancing the usefulness of one with the other. You shouldnt do governance in MDM, Melcher cautioned. You should do governance and MDM. You should be governing across more than just your Master Data Management platform.

About the Author

Jelani Harper is an editorial consultant servicing the information technology market. He specializes in data-driven applications focused on semantic technologies, data governance and analytics.

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What Data Governance Means to Cloud Computing (And Vice Versa) - insideBIGDATA

WASHINGTON - Now that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) officials has canceled their signature $10 billion enterprise cloud computing contract, whats next for the militarys cloud needs? Patrick Tucker writes for Defense One.Continue reading original article.

The Intelligent Aerospace take:

July 19, 2021 -DOD officials say that the solution will look a lot like a marriage between whats being offered by Microsofts Azure and Amazon Web Services. It wont be the single massive cloud envisioned as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, affectionately called JEDI.

Scale is the operative word. DOD officials have made clear that theyre not going back to the old days of many clouds from tiny vendors with no central cloud environment for data access and distribution. A cloud on the scale of what Amazon, Microsoft, or Google can provide is essential to realize the Pentagons dream of joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2.

Today, the pathway looks like a joint Amazon and Microsoft cloud, the two largest companies that were fighting over the JEDI contract. Amazon and Microsoft likely will receive contracts under a new program called the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. But they wouldn't be the only ones.

Related: Civilian and military aircraft get avionics upgrades

Related: The essentials of trusted computing and cyber security

Related: Lockheed Martin flies mission-enabling Kubernetes onboard U-2

Jamie Whitney, Associate EditorIntelligent Aerospace

Excerpt from:

After JEDI cancellation, military expands competition for cloud computing that can scale to defense needs - Intelligent Aerospace

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Data Theorem, Inc., a leading provider of modern application security, today announced that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has awarded Data Theorem with a 2021 Product of the Year Award, presented by Cloud Computing Magazine. The company also announced that its award-winning AppSec solutions will be showcased in a free advanced security training session during Black Hat USA 2021.

Data Theorems AppSec experts will host the training session, titled GraphQL DDoS and OTP Bypass Attacks on Aug. 4 at 11 am PDT / 2 pm EDT. For more information and to register, see: https://resource.datatheorem.com/graphql

The 2021 Product of the Year Award, presented earlier by Cloud Computing Magazine, adds to the decorated list of distinctions for Data Theorem, being recognized for its unique dynamic and run-time analysis with offensive attack surface management and defensive protection toolkits. The unique solutions are differentiated in enabling organizations to conduct continuous, automated security inspection and remediation of their most important cloud-native applications.

Congratulations to Data Theorem for being honored with a Cloud Computing Product of the Year Award, said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. Data Theorems AppSec solutions are truly innovative products, and are among the best solutions available within the past twelve months that facilitate business-transforming cloud computing and communications. I look forward to continued excellence from Data Theorem.

Data Theorems latest offering, Cloud Secure, is the industrys first solution delivering attack surface management security for cloud-native applications that starts at the client layer (mobile and web), protects the network layer (REST and GraphQL APIs), and extends down through the underlying infrastructure (cloud services). Its combination of attack surface management and defensive protections enables both offensive and defensive security capabilities to best prevent data breaches of cloud-native applications and serverless cloud functions.

It is rewarding to accept yet another award for Data Theorem, this time being named a 2021 Product of the Year for our unique design to help customers secure their modern cloud applications, said Doug Dooley, Data Theorem COO. Cloud Secure joins Data Theorems portfolio of award-winning AppSec solutions. Our hacker toolkits continue to showcase cloud-native application attack insights, which we will demonstrate in our upcoming GraphQL DDoS and OTP Bypass Attacks session during Black Hat. We are pleased to offer this free advanced security training opportunity to help educate the security research community on some of todays modern AppSec attacks, and prevention techniques.

Data Theorems broad AppSec portfolio protects organizations from data breaches with application security testing and protection for modern web frameworks, API-driven microservices and cloud resources. Its solutions are powered by its award-winning Analyzer Engine, which leverages a new type of dynamic and run-time analysis that is fully integrated into the CI/CD process, and enables organizations to conduct continuous, automated security inspection and remediation.

About Cloud Computing Magazine

Cloud Computing magazine is the industrys definitive source for all things cloud from public, community, hybrid and private cloud to security and business continuity, and everything in between. This quarterly magazine published by TMC assesses the most important developments in cloud computing not only as they relate to IT, but to the business landscape as a whole.

About Data Theorem

Data Theorem is a leading provider of modern application security. Its core mission is to analyze and secure any modern application anytime, anywhere. The award-winning Data Theorem Analyzer Engine continuously analyzes APIs, Web, Mobile, and Cloud applications in search of security flaws and data privacy gaps. Data Theorem products help organizations prevent AppSec data breaches. The company has detected more than 1 billion application eavesdropping incidents and currently secures more than 8,000 modern applications for its enterprise customers around the world. Data Theorem is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., with offices in New York and Paris. For more information visit http://www.datatheorem.com.

Data Theorem and TrustKit are trademarks of Data Theorem, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Data Theorem Showcasing Product of the Year with Hacker Toolkits in Advanced Security Training Session During Black Hat USA 2021 - Business Wire

Verizon, Microsoft and Google were just some cloud providers to see their services interrupted so far this year from a variety of issues, from a change in the authentication system to a deadly winter storm. In the cloud computing era, some experts say we can only expect more outages but with less severity.

Miles Ward, chief technology officer at Los Angeles-based Google partner SADA Systems, told CRN that cloud outages can prove less disastrous than when data centers have issues. With cloud-related issues, providers can fix the problem in parallel with a users team, whereas data centers can require an internal team to fix problems.

Outages can mean the end for companies, depending on their choices in design and deployment, or they can be complete non-events, Ward said. Cloud has changed the nature of outages.

As cloud adoption and the number of regions, zones and cloud services grow, everyone should prepare for more outages, Ward said. But he expects the type of global, all-service outages that garner headlines to decrease.

Every cloud engineering team has seen how impossible it is for customers to engineer around these kinds of outages and is working hard to distribute, subdivide, and make fault-tolerant these central services, Ward said. The result may be a shift of focus where you might see even more minor failures in singleton services, while the global services survive seemingly unaffected by minor failures because of this investment in resilience.

Companies today need copies of their data in distant regions, to run instances in multiple zones and automation to cut down on the time it takes to fix an outage, Ward said. At SADA, even demos are designed with high availability to run across Google Cloud and AWS.

In the meantime, CRN has collected a list of some of the largest cloud outages and issues to hit computers this year. Heres what you need to know.

For more of the biggest startups, products and news stories of 2021 so far, click here.

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The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2021 (So Far) - CRN

VICKSBURG, Miss., July 20, 2021 Modeling the risk of extreme weather and natural disasters along the nations coastline is critical to the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) mission of delivering innovative solutions for safer, better world.

Increasing this modeling capacity and better dissemination of data to climate research is the goal of a new agreement between the ERDC and Microsoft Corporation. This government/industry collaboration is aimed at improving climate modeling and natural disaster resilience planning through the use of predictive analytics-powered, cloud-based tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services.

The agreement seeks to demonstrate the scalability of the code of ERDCs premier coastal storm modeling system, CSTORM-MS, inside Microsofts Azure Government, a cloud computing service for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers specifically for the U.S. Government. CSTORM-MS is a comprehensive integrated system of highly skilled and highly resolved models used to simulate coastal storms. The models provide for a robust, standardized approach to establishing the risk of coastal communities to future occurrences of storm events and for evaluating flood risk reduction measures. With its physics-based modeling capabilities, CSTORM-MS integrates a suite of high-fidelity storm modeling tools to support a wide range of coastal engineering needs for simulating tropical and extra-tropical storms, as well as wind, wave and water levels.

Currently, CSTORM-MS models are run at ERDCs Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center, one of the DoD High Performance Modernization Programs (HPCMP) supercomputing centers. In 2020, ERDC and the HPCMP performed a commercial cloud for high-performance computing workload assessment. This initial testing included a feasibility study of the CSTORM-MS models, and was successfully conducted using Microsofts Azure cloud.

Through the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between ERDC and Microsoft, two goals have been set for this second phase of the project:

Microsofts participation in this effort stems from their Microsoft AI for Earth, a working group within Microsoft established in June 2017 that provides cloud-based tools and AI services to organizations working to protect the planet across five key areas: agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, climate change and water. AI for Earth awards grants to support projects that use AI to change the way people and organizations monitor, model and manage Earths natural systems.

The CRADA between ERDC and Microsoft is made possible through the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986. The act provides that federal laboratories developments, such as those of ERDC, should be made accessible to private industry and state and local governments for the purpose of improving the economic, environmental and social well-being of the United States by stimulating the use of federally funded technology developments or capabilities.

Source: ERDC

Read more:

Army Engineers, Microsoft to Analyze Extreme Weather Risk Using Cloud-based Analytics - HPCwire

TOPSHOT - "Yokozuna" or sumo grand champion Hakuho of Mongolia takes part in a traditional ... [+] ring-entering ceremony at Meiji shrine in Tokyo on January 8, 2019. (Photo by Toshifumi KITAMURA / AFP) (Photo credit should read TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)

First there was cloud. Then there was public cloud and private cloud which (as we know) spawned hybrid cloud as the much-loved progeny of the two.

Then there was multi-cloud, a coming together of compute resources where an organization uses different cloud services from different Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) to run workloads for different applications, departments, subsidiaries or perhaps even for different specific workflow functions.

Then, after all that, there came the notion of so-called poly-cloud, the separation of different parts of an application or data service workload across different CSPs, an action taken when the price, performance, latency, legislative or other core requirements of a workload can be segmented accurately (and securely enough) to warrant splitting that workload apart over different cloud providers.

What all that creates is a world of many clouds and therefore many concerns this is the world of the multi-cloud poly-hybrid mechanics.

The complexity created here presents a challenge for enterprise organizations seeking to lock down cloud-based resources that now span a hitherto unimaginably complex and interconnected landscape of computing resources.

Aiming to provide a degree of what it likes to brand as continuous intelligence, Sumo Logic has now built a multi-cloud and hybrid threat protection offering powered by Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS). The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Powered by AWS is built on Sumo Logics own branded Continuous Intelligence Platform, with the SIEM denoting Security Information & [software code] Event Management as it does.

This is not anti-virus malware protection at the traditional consumer-level that you might be urged to install when you set up your new laptop; this is software code-centric protection and security intelligence with functions focused on areas like compliance, security analytics and cloud SIEM technologies.

The companies say they have worked together to offer out-of-the-box integration with key AWS security services, plus integrations with cloud-based SaaS and on-premises security services. This is all about creating technology that can perform deep internal inspection of cloud services and eliminate security blind spots across multi-cloud, hybrid (and indeed poly-cloud) environments.

Both Sumo Logic and AWS talk about contextualized data intelligence and, in this case, contextualized threat data. That doesnt mean context surrounding where the source of malware might emanate from, in this case it is contextualized cloud reports to highlight where an enterprises weak spots might be based upon:

For companies that dont have an internal or outsourced Security Operations Center (SOC), the offering will provide security monitoring, visibility and alerting. For organizations modernizing their SOC, the offering will in provide cross-source threat correlation with machine learning detection, automation and orchestration.

Sumo Logic VP Greg Martin claims that his company provides a comprehensive approach to quickly uncover activity that can indicate an early-stage computing event (that could be related to a risk) by identifying spikes and anomalies based on the organizations baseline of historical data.

Unrestricted by the processing power of on-premises hardware, Sumo Logics Cloud SIEM solution addresses the challenges facing todays security practitioners by providing full visibility across their IT, application development and security ecosystem, automating the manual work for security analysts, saving them time and enabling them to be more effective by focusing on higher-value security functions, said Martin and team.

This is another one of those would the CEO actually question this element of company operations in the board meeting questions. Captains of industry may not be familiar with the term security posture today, but as companies spanning a multiplicity of cloud computing supply pipes start to realize the breadth of their own IT footprint, it is arguably among the workable buzzphrases for any self-respecting business manager going forward.

Companies today take in huge amounts of data from their cloud services and applications, because everything tells you what it is doing in immense detail. Its what you can do with that data, is where things get interesting. Security is one area, but this data can be applied to operations and for improving software development. When your business process is digital, you can see the impact of your decisions in real-time, whether that is a software update or IT redesign or something like a marketing project, said Christian Beedgen, chief technology officer at Sumo Logic.

Organizations should know that data coming in can be consolidated and at this point, everyone can make use of it for their own understanding. Beedgen suggests that the smartest companies use this as an opportunity to consolidate their tools and build up their observability approaches across the whole business, as this stops duplication and saves on cost.

The long term trend here is companies have lots of tools gathering data and this can lead to problems around the volume of data coming in over time. Data obviously has a cost to store, so having multiple copies of the same data will lead to more expense and Beedgen reminds us that this can lead to financial challenges

Companies thinking about their data strategy using cloud providers might feel like resources are infinitely scalable, but the reality is that the organization will ultimately run out of budget. Consolidating and cutting duplicate data in different tools reduces that problem, keeps the business on the right side of the data cost curve and ensures that you can carry on innovating, concluded Beedgen.

Many of the resources inside our technology stacks are being exposed (in a positive way) to the benefits of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), so that factor needs to be resonated in our cloud operations management layer. In the case of this story, it is. Sumo Logic and AWS have brought together Machine Learning (ML)-driven detection, integrated threat intelligence correlation and deep search-based investigation to look into systems and provide insight. That insight is surfaced through rich data visualization (graphs, dashboards and data speedometers, basically) so that any business manager can see whats happening.

Once we can say we have sorted out our cloud security posture we can perhaps all straighten our backs and work out whether we need a lumbar support pillow. Until then, sit up straight and keep an eye on the multi-hybrid-poly cloud engine room.

Go here to read the rest:

Inside The Multi-Hybrid-Poly Cloud Workshop - Forbes

Amazon's cloud division has rolled out AWS for Health, a set of services and partner solutions for healthcare, genomics and biopharma.

Amazon says the portfolio of solutions will help to accelerate innovation from "benchtop to bedside" as the tech giant pushes further into the healthcare and life sciences markets.

AWS for Health provides "proven and easily accessible capabilities" that help organizations increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care, Patrick Combes, director, head of technology - healthcare and life sciences at Amazon Web Services (AWS), wrote in a blog post.

The services within AWS for Health can help healthcarecustomers create holistic electronic health records to help clinicians make data-driven care plans and power population genomic initiatives to expand precision medicine accessibility, as two examples, Combes wrote.

Microsoft,Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are all pushing deeper into healthcare in a battle to provide cloud computing and data storage technologyto hospitals.

RELATED:Amazon launches new tool to help healthcare organizations standardize data

As part of AWS for Health, Amazon announced last week the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a tool to make it easier for healthcare organizations to search and analyze data.

Healthcare organizations are creating vast volumes of patient information every day, and the majority of this data is unstructured, such as clinical notes, lab reports, insurance claims, medical images, recorded conversations and graphs.

This data must be aggregated, structured and normalized before the data can provide customers with valuable insights, and that is often atime-consuming and error-prone process.

Amazon HealthcareLake,which was announced in December, is a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations that aggregates an organizations complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWSdata lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning, according to the tech giant.

The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry-standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations.

More and more of our customers in the healthcare and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data, but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome, saidSwami Sivasubramanian, vice president ofAmazonMachine Learning for AWS in a statement

We builtAmazonHealthLake to remove this heavy lifting for healthcare organizations so they can transform health data in the cloud in minutes and begin analyzing that information securely at scale. Alongside AWS for Health, were excited about howAmazonHealthLake can help medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies provide patients and populations with data-driven, personalized, and predictive care," he said.

RELATED:Microsoft makes big play for healthcare cloud business in competition with Google, Amazon

Rush University Medical Center says that even in preview mode, Amazon HealthLake was an integral part of its COVID-19 response.

"It has enabled us to quickly store disparate data from multiple data sources in FHIR format in order to gain critical insights into the care of COVID-19 patients, said Dr.Bala Hota, vice president and chief analytics officer atRush University Medical Center.

Rush also used HealthLakes natural language processing to extract information such as medication, diagnosis, and previous conditions from doctors clinical notesto examine barriers to healthcare access.

"With the HealthLake API, we created a mobile app to provide insights into care gaps across theWest SideofChicago.AmazonHealthLake enables us to accelerate insights and drive decisions faster to better serve theChicagocommunity," Hota said.

Other organizations using Amazon HealthLake include Cortica, InterSystems andRedox.

Personalized medicine company CureMatch uses the analytics toolsto turn molecular profile data from the EHR into FHIR format to run advanced analytics and algorithms to assist oncologists, according to Philippe Faurie, vice president of professional services at CureMatch.

Continued here:

Amazon rolls out AWS For Health cloud services for healthcare, genomics and biopharma - FierceHealthcare

Are you looking for some great investments where you can park your money and not worry about it for years? Some of the most exciting opportunities right now are in cannabis and cloud computing stocks. Those industries are getting bigger and the companies that dominate in those areas will be sure to produce some great returns for your portfolio.

Even if you aren't sure which individual stocks to invest in, that doesn't mean you can't get exposure to those industries. There are plenty of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) out there that can give you a great group of stocks to hold without needing to commit to any particular company. Two funds that you will definitely want to consider today are the AdvisorShares Pure US Cannabis ETF(NYSEMKT:MSOS) and the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (NASDAQ:WCLD).

Image source: Getty Images.

The growth opportunities in the cannabis sector are undeniable; analysts from MarketsAndMarkets project that the global market will be worth more than $90 billion in just five years and it will grow at a compound annual rate of 28%.

And it wouldn't be surprising if those estimates were upgraded given the rate at which cannabis legalization has been moving. In 2021, several states have passed legislation, including New York, New Mexico, Connecticut, and New Jersey. A total of 19 states have passed legislation to permit recreational marijuana and more than 30 states already allow marijuana for medical use. There is even hope that marijuana will be legal at the federal level soon, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently introducing draft legislation that could pave the way to legalization. Even though it may be a long shot, if it is able to pass, it could open up the floodgates and instantly make the marijuana industry a scorching-hot one to invest in.

The Pure US Cannabis ETF, which launched in September 2020, is an excellent way to gain exposure to the U.S. pot market specifically. Big names like Green Thumb Industries,Curaleaf Holdings, andTrulieve Cannabis each account for more than 10% of the portfolio's total weight. And those are the heavyweights, the pot stocks that are industry leaders and that look to be safe bets to do well. Last year, they combined for more than $1.7 billion in revenue -- accounting for about 10% of the $17.5 billion U.S. pot market.

They will definitely surge in value once legalization takes place if for no other reason than it will allow them to trade on major exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, where they aren't permitted today because they are plant-touching businesses and thus operating in violation of federal U.S. laws.

Tech is always a popular place to invest, and there are many different areas you can focus on. One that stands out right now is cloud computing, especially as more businesses do their work in the cloud and workers want to be more remote than ever before. According to ResearchAndMarkets, the cloud computing market will more than double in size by 2025 to $832 billion, growing at a compound annual rate of 17.5%.

The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund is another great example of an ETF you can hold while you take advantage of a high-growth sector. Unlike the cannabis ETF, this one is much more diverse simply because there are more companies in the industry -- the largest holding is Asana, a work management platform that accounts for just over 3% of the fund's total weight. Other notable names in the fund are Adobe andDocuSign, two businesses that provide professionals with cloud-based software that they can use anywhere. The top 10 holdings in the fund account for just under one-quarter of its total weight, giving you some excellent diversification.

One of the downsides of that much diversification is that it can lead to underwhelming numbers. But that hasn't been the case for the Cloud Computing Fund, as its 39% returns over the past 12 months are higher than the S&P 500's gains of 35%. If you aren't sure which tech stock will be the big winner from the rising popularity of cloud computing, investing in this ETF can be a safe way to ensure long-term returns that could continue to outperform the markets.

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2 Unstoppable Trends to Invest in for the Long Term - The Motley Fool

Airlines operating aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney engines, such as the PW1100-GM pictured here, now have access to Teledyne's cloud-based avionics data service under a new partnership between the two OEMs. (Pratt & Whitney)

Pratt & Whitneys new avionics cloud computing partnership will open the aircraft engine manufacturers analytics platform EngineWise to information captured by Teledyne Controls flight data acquisition systems about the health and status of nearly every airframe part and component on a per-flight basis.

The partnership will allow operators using Pratt & Whitney's EngineWise data analytics platform to start feeding their data centers with all of the parameters captured by onboard Quick Access Recorders (QAR), such as Teledynes GroundLink Comm+ wireless cellular connectivity system. By giving EngineWise users access to this data through Teledynes Data Delivery Solution (DDS) Pratt customers now have instant cloud-based post-flight access to the same amount of raw data that is captured by the Flight Data Recorder in a clean actionable format.

Teledyne describes DDS as a cloud computing service that can redact or mask certain data parameters that airlines prefer not to share with OEMs.

"Pratt & Whitneys Geared Turbofan (GTF) engine incorporates significantly more sensors than prior engines and can generate millions of data points per engine per flight, providing significant improvements in avoiding unplanned maintenance. These parameters, when collected via devices on board over the full flight, allow us to develop a very thorough picture of the health of the engine," Joe Sylvestro, vice president of Global Aftermarket Operations at Pratt & Whitney told Avionics International.

EngineWise was first launched by the company in 2017 featuring a suite of web-based software tools that analyze engine data in search of anomalies or trends captured by the sensors mentioned by Sylvestro. As an example, an airline maintenance team can use the system for a sensor configured to monitor how much fuel is required to generate a set amount of thrust or power. As that engine completes more flights, they may assume that the engine's efficiency is degrading if the amount of fuel required to generate that set amount of power continues to increase over time.

An example of the type of engine data parameters and analysis EngineWise provides for operators. (Pratt & Whitney)

"The collaboration with Teledyne Controls will enhance engine health management services offered to Pratt & Whitney-powered aircraft, focused on Teledyne Controls global customers. Teledynes Data Delivery Solution is one option for collecting full-flight data. In any case, our goal is to minimize the data management burden on the customer," Sylvestro said. "With regard to [Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System] ACARS, we continue to use snapshot data to provide customers with analytics services while full-flight data-enabled services capture data throughout the flight."

Teledyne's quick access recorders and GroundLink Comm+ cellular system enable real-time data streaming, cabin and flight crew connectivity, wireless distribution of field-loadable software parts and automated flight operational quality assurance (FOQA) data downloads. The technology is used by more than 200 commercial airlines on more than 14,000 aircraft.

Mike Penta, vice president of Sales and Marketing at Teledyne Controls told Avionics that the partnership opens up access to QAR data for Pratt & Whitney operators, and removes some of the past barriers that have prevented such access.

"Pratt & Whitney operators can now feed EngineWise with any aircraft data captured by Teledyne avionics onboard, predominately digitally distributed by the Teledyne GroundLink Comm+ system. As to what new type of data, it is specific to each airline as some are more e-enabled than others," Penta said. "Teledyne can assist in enabling full flight data to supply the EngineWise platform everything that it needs, in a timely manner, at a more precise, higher resolution level than traditional data feeds such as ACARS messages. Being able to also enable additional data points within the aircraft data frame was part of the attraction of working directly with Teledyne."

According to Penta, airlines operating aircraft powered by Pratt & Whitney engines that do not feature GroundLink Comm+ can still take advantage of the new partnership and DDS without modifying their existing avionics systems.

"Even for airlines who do not have GroundLink Comm+ units onboard but are still using sneaker net to take data from their aircraft data acquisition units, we can still make it work. It technically does not have to be exclusively Teledyne hardware. Teledyne DDS is agnostic and can work with other QAR systems as well as other various OEMs," Penta said.

Penta said other OEMs have also expressed interest in what he describes as an "instant data lake" that can be enabled once their native analytics platforms are digitally linked to Teledyne's flight data cloud computing analytics service. Thus far, the expanded version of EngineWise is being used by one European low-cost carrier and an airline based in the Middle East, both of which requested to remain unnamed.

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Pratt & Whitney Engine Operators Get Increased Control Over Flight Data Shared with OEMs - Aviation Today