Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Heptio CTO Joe Beda

Ours is a world enamored with the possibilities unlocked by technological advances. And if we ever update our organizational thinking to account for those advances, we might actually follow through on those possibilities.

That issue is at the forefront of Joe Bedas mind these days. Beda is the co-founder of Heptio, a company that makes tools for developers interested in bringing containers into their development environment. Hes worked at large companies (he helped create Kubernetes and Google Cloud Engine at the search giant) and small (Heptio is up for Startup of the Year at Thursdays GeekWire Awards), and understands why so many companies struggle with the shift to cloud computing.

One of the big fallacies of cloud is everybody thinks if I run on AWS Ill turn into Netflix, said Beda, who is preparing a talk around these issues for our GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in the Seattle area in June. When people move to cloud, (there are) two things: physically running in cloud and changing development practices to take advantage of cloud.

Companies born on the cloud (which Beda calls cloud native or tech-forward West Coast Silicon Valley-ish companies) often dont realize how much legacy baggage they avoided because they set up their development organizations in the modern era of computing.

For example, developers at older companies that want to provision a virtual machine for a project often have to fill out a ticket with operations and wait a week or more for approval. This is laughable in todays era: A developer at a cloud native company would look at you with astonishment after hearing such a story, but those situations are more common than we think.

DevOps is thought to be the answer to this problem, but nobody really knows what this means, Beda said, accurately describing the DevOpspitch emails in my inbox. Too often companies scrambling to implement DevOpsideas wind up in a situation where everybody is in everybody elses business, he said.

So if youre a well-intentioned CIO trying to drag your company into the 21st century, Beda has some advice. Most of the people at these big companies arent stupid, they know there has to be a better way to do this stuff, he said.

Your actual tech strategy (cloud or not) has to be reflected in your organizational strategy: changing one without changing the other is arguably worse than whatever youre doing now. We like to talk about how computers have abstracted and automated humans out of the picture, but thats not true at all.

One easy way to set up your IT organization for the cloud is to embrace microservices, the concept of breaking down an application into various pieces that can be worked on separately by small teams and later reassembled. This allows people to focus on the task at hand without having to wait for something else to get finished before starting their work.

Another tactic is to create a culture where code or applications can be reused across your infrastructure by teams working on completely separate projects. This was a lesson Beda learned at Google, where new engineers are given an orientation showing them all the common resources at their disposal.

The most important thing to remember is that for most companies, technology is an enabler of what they should be focused on: making money in their core line of business. That means giving people the tools, resources, and support to do their jobs, and understanding the business context of any new technology before plunging headlong into a new product or service.

Beda is just one of many awesome speakers planned for the Cloud Tech Summit, which will take place June 7th in Bellevue. More information is available here, where you can also register for the event.

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Heptio's Joe Beda: Before embracing cloud computing, make sure your culture is ready - GeekWire

Healthcare has finally abandoned fear of the cloud and now realizes the value of cloud computing.

"People are actually embracing [the cloud] in healthcare," said Ed McCallister, senior vice president and CIO at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). "Now is the time [for cloud computing]. ... I've been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time."

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In the past, health IT professionals worried about the security of the cloud, but over the years, the stability of major cloud platforms has eased those concerns. Instead, healthcare organizations see the value of cloud computing choices, such as how cost-effective the cloud is and its role in value-based care, population health and patient engagement.

Of the three well-known cloud computing options -- public, private and hybrid (see "Three different cloud options") -- hybrid cloud has gained favor among some hospital CIOs.

"A lot of us ... use a hybrid approach," said Karen Clark, CIO at OrthoTennessee in Knoxville, Tenn. Along with Clark and McCallister, Indranil Ganguly, vice president and CIO at JFK Health System, and Deanna Wise, CIO and executive vice president at Dignity Health, are using a hybrid approach with the cloud.

Now is the time [for cloud computing]. ... I've been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time. Ed McCallisterCIO, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

UPMC is among those facilities that favor a hybrid approach. It takes applications already used within the organization that have a competitive advantage -- such as storage -- and moves them into the cloud, leaving everything else on-premises. "That's probably the most prominent approach that people would take," McCallister said.

Ganguly and JFK Health take a similar approach. Many of the applications used by JFK Health, based in Edison, N.J., also reside on a hybrid cloud setup, Ganguly said. The facility uses "a vendor partner [cloud platform], and multiple customers [are] hosted on it, but it's not our infrastructure," he explained. "We don't even set it up or own it. It's not a private cloud, but it is a restricted cloud, and so that's what we use right now for a lot of our applications. It's a software-as-a-service type [of] model, and the software is housed at the vendor side, and we're accessing it remotely."

McCallister said the hybrid cloud model is popular in healthcare right now because the cloud still represents a bit of the unknown. The hybrid cloud acts as a testbed for certain things in healthcare, he noted, adding, "Some of it is kind of toe in the water -- not knowing the cloud as well as they know the traditional environment."

Additionally, the hybrid cloud can take the pressure off IT staff, Ganguly said: "I don't have to have people focused on [hybrid], and it allows our team to focus more on the application itself and making sure the application is set up well for our users."

For many CIOs, the value of cloud computing includes cost-effectiveness, scalability and easier access to data. The cloud also offers opportunities for improved storage, big data analytics, population health, patient engagement and value-based care.

Access to data and population health. At UPMC, the cloud has outdistanced legacy systems in terms of data access, McCallister said. "The cloud allows us to ... lift the data from those many different sources that we have and actually allow access to that data in a way that's not possible when you think about the legacy systems," he said. For example, the cloud allows patients or physicians to access any data living in the cloud wherever and whenever they need it. When it comes to legacy systems, certain computers and devices need to be networked to a physical server, and access outside this network is difficult.

If you want to engage patients, you have to go where the patients are ... on [their mobile] phone. Karen ClarkCIO, OrthoTennessee

At this point, McCallister added, the value of legacy systems lies in the data they hold from both the payer and provider sides. "It's a very rich data source to get," he said.

However, the value of cloud computing can be realized here because the cloud allows easier access to all of this data. And greater access can be applied to and help with population health efforts, which refers to a movement in healthcare to analyze care data across a group of individuals and improve wellness. "If I know about you through your payer activity, through your clinical activity, through the provider activities and we can have that in a cloud with tools that reside in the cloud that are accessible to the consumer, that's where the cloud actually enables a better strategy," McCallister said.

Patient engagement and value-based care. Meanwhile, the cloud is critical to greater patient engagement, OrthoTennessee's Clark said. "If you want to engage with patients, you can't say, 'Well, why don't you drive to our office and complete this survey,' right?" she said. "If you want to engage patients, you have to go where the patients are. And where the patients are is on [their mobile] phone. So for patient engagement, that would be a cloud-necessary area."

Furthermore, "value-based care always requires patient engagement," Clark said. Value-based care is a national trend being pushed by federal regulators in which providers are no longer paid for the quantity of services they provide, but rather for the quality of patient health outcomes.

OrthoTennessee, which runs several area orthopedic clinics, is already pursuing value-based care with a patient-reported outcomes tool, Clark noted. Before surgeries, she explained, the organization surveys patients via a mobile device to see, for example, how they're doing, how bad their pain is, where the pain is and whether they're able to walk up stairs. After a surgery is completed, the organization uses this tool to continue monitoring the patient.

Big data and storage. One issue that many discuss in healthcare is dealing with the flood of data that comes from initiatives like population health and technology trends like the internet of things. "We can't do big data in the traditional way that we did with data centers," McCallister said. "You can't do traditional data center and storage strategies when you have something like genomics at the doorstep." Genomics is the science of sequencing the human genome, and there's a lot of data behind that activity -- petabytes of information each year.

"When you think about how much data we're collecting, it's enormous," said Wise of Dignity Health, which is headquarted in San Francisco. "And it's only going to get bigger with [genomics] and everything else we're doing. You need a place that you can increase that size as fast as you need to without feeling like you've got to wait until the next budget cycle."

The cloud offers such scalability. McCallister predicted that in the future, there will be very few data center companies. Instead, today's big cloud storage players that have the ability to expand "the way that we need them to expand in healthcare" will become the new norm, he said.

While many healthcare organizations use routine applications hosted in the cloud, some CIOs are now moving critical apps over to the cloud, including their electronic health records (EHRs).

Ganguly said JFK Health is currently moving its core EHR system over to a cloud platform. "So it's all going to be hosted in [the vendor's] data center, and then we're accessing from our site over the web, over the cloud," he explained.

Cost is the main reason for the move. "If I was to build the whole infrastructure in-house, there's a significant cost, and I have to refresh that cost every three, four, five years maximum," Ganguly said. "Whereas now, if it's on [the vendor's] infrastructure, they're responsible for keeping everything maintained [and] upgraded. They're refreshing the servers as needed, and it's invisible to us."

Managing and maintaining EHRs in-house, "I'd spend a couple million dollars upfront, and I'd leverage that investment over five years," he said. "Here, what I'm doing is I'm paying this contract-type model, and it's a uniform cost throughout."

Ganguly said that some IT pros will argue that this approach ultimately will break even. Others will say because of the ability to negotiate due to economies of scale, the price point is actually much better and there's the added benefit of not having to manage it.

Meanwhile, UPMC decided to go with a colocation model and partnered with a tier-three data center company, McCallister reported. "We had some aging data centers, and probably five years ago we would've built a new data center," he said. "By the time we move into the new data center, we will have retired probably close to a thousand servers in our existing data centers because of our move to the cloud."

An inside look at Practice Fusion, a cloud EHR vendor

Gain clarity about the cloud and the future of patient care

A CIO talks cloud adoption in healthcare

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CIOs embrace the value of cloud computing in healthcare - TechTarget

Verizon has announced it is selling its cloud and managed hosting service to IBM, alongside working with the Armonk giant on a number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services.

This is a unique cooperation between two tech leaders to support global organisations as they look to fully realise the benefits of their cloud computing investments, said George Fischer, SVP and group president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) in a statement.

Last February, Verizon told customers in an email that it was shutting down any virtual servers running on Public Cloud or Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces on April 12. The company clarified in a statement to CloudTech that it was discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments, however John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, saw things differently.

Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services, he told this publication last year. They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.

How prescient that statement is now. IBM would certainly be classified as one of the hyperscale operators; alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, the four leading players continue to grow more quickly than the overall market, according to Synergys figures.

Whats more, various links between the two companies means this move makes sense. John Considine, general manager at IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, was previously CTO of Verizon Terremark. The companies have also partnered on various initiatives, including in the creation of Verizons cognitive customer experience platform, built using IBMs cloud and infrastructure as a service offerings.

Our customers want to improve application performance while streamlining operations and securing information in the cloud, Fischer added. VES is now well positioned to provide those solutions through intelligent networking, managed IT services and business communications.

Verizon said it was notifying affected customers directly, though adding it did not expect any immediate impact to their services. The transaction is expected to close later this year.

Original post:

Verizon sells cloud services to IBM in 'unique cooperation between two tech leaders' - Cloud Tech

New York Times

Daily Report: Cloud Computing Asserts Itself New York Times Amazon Web Services is the leader in cloud computing services, but Microsoft and Alphabet are investing heavily to close the gap. Credit Elaine Thompson/Associated Press. It's been said before but it bears repeating: If it were not for its cloud ... Amazon Shrugs Off Cloud-Computing RivalsCFO Amazon, Microsoft and Google's financial results give an intriguing state of the cloudCloud Tech Despite Crazy Cloud Growth, Competitors Still Can't Touch AWSTalkin' Cloud Tech2 (blog) -SiliconANGLE (blog) all 412 news articles »

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Daily Report: Cloud Computing Asserts Itself - New York Times

When tech people talk about "the cloud," it often comes across as an abstract computer concept. But a visit to a village in India shows how cloud computing can bring about enormous change in far-flung places, and quite literally save lives.

On Wednesday, at the Fortune Brainstorm Health summit in San Diego, cardiologist Charit Bhograj spoke to a medical counterpart in India who was in the course of treating a rural man with chest pains.

As the doctors explained, it was recently impossible to offer advanced heart treatment in poor villages: It cost too much to administer an Electrocardiogram (EKG) and, even if you could get an EKG, the local physician was not in a position to interpret it.

This situation has changed dramatically, however, with the advent of portable EKG devices, specialized software and cloud computing.

In the course of a 10-minute presentation, the audience watched as the physician in India took an EKG reading from the man with chest pains, and relayed the results to Bhograj in San Diego. Bhograj then assessed the results and typed his advice into a tool called Tricog, which the Indian doctor then downloaded via a smartphone app.

This arrangement, which relied on a EKG device supplied by GE Health, represents a striking advancement in technology. But it also has huge health implications.

"It will change the odds of a heart attack taking your life from 80% to an 80% chance you will survive," said Bhograj, explaining how cloud-based medical services are transforming cardiac health in rural areas.

And according to Vikram Damodaran, the chief product officer of Sustainable Health Solutions at GE Healthcare, the transformation is only beginning. He explained that GE has made investments worth $300 million in the public health system in recent years, and that the sort of services appearing in rural India are also expanding to Southeast Asia and Africa.

All of this confirms an observation this morning by Fortune President Alan Murraythat there's an incredible burst of innovation taking place in the health care industry right now.

Read more here:

How Cloud Computing Is Turning the Tide on Heart Attacks - Fortune

Everyone is talking about the cloud. But what does it mean?

Business applications are moving to the cloud. Its not just a fadthe shift from traditional software models to the Internet has steadily gained momentum over the last 10 years. Looking ahead, the next decade of cloud computing promises new ways to collaborate everywhere, through mobile devices.

Traditional business applications have always been very complicated and expensive. The amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them are daunting. You need a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them.

When you multiply this effort across dozens or hundreds of apps, its easy to see why the biggest companies with the best IT departments arent getting the apps they need. Small and mid-sized businesses dont stand a chance.

Learn more about Salesforce

With cloud computing, you eliminate those headaches because youre not managing hardware and softwarethats the responsibility of an experienced vendor like salesforce.com. The shared infrastructure means it works like a utility: You only pay for what you need, upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy.

Cloud-based apps can be up and running in days or weeks, and they cost less. With a cloud app, you just open a browser, log in, customize the app, and start using it.

Businesses are running all kinds of apps in the cloud, like customer relationship management (CRM), HR, accounting, and much more. Some of the worlds largest companies moved their applications to the cloud with salesforce.com after rigorously testing the security and reliability of our infrastructure.

As cloud computing grows in popularity, thousands of companies are simply rebranding their non-cloud products and services as cloud computing. Always dig deeper when evaluating cloud offerings and keep in mind that if you have to buy and manage hardware and software, what youre looking at isnt really cloud computing but a false cloud.

Learn more about Platform as a Service

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What is Cloud Computing Technology?: Cloud Definition ...

Dan's Take

The company made a barrage of announcements at its recent Summit show.

Red Hat has made a number of announcements at its user group conference, Red Hat Summit. The announcements ranged from the announcement of OpenShift.io to facilitate the creation of software as a service applications, pre-built application runtimes to facilitate creation of OpenShift-based workloads, an index to help enterprises build more reliable container-based computing environments, an update to the Red Hat Gluster storage virtualization platform allowing it to be used in an AWS computing environment, and, of course, an announcement of a Red Hat/Amazon Web Services partnership.

Red Hat summarized the announcements as follows:

The announcements targeted a number of industry hot buttons, including containers, rapid application development, storage virtualization and cloud computing. As with other announcements in the recent past, the company is integrating multiple open source projects and creating commercial-grade software products designed to provide an easy-to-use, reliable and maintainable enterprise computing environment.

In previous announcements, Red Hat has pointed out that it has certified Red Hat software executing in both Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure cloud computing environments. So, the company can claim to support a broad portfolio of enterprise computing environments.

These announcements will be of the most interest to large enterprises since they are the ones most likely to adopt these products. These tools might be used by independent software vendors (ISVs) to create IT solutions for smaller firms as well, leading to potential impact on some small to medium size business.

About the Author

Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company.

Read more:

Red Hat's New Products Centered Around Cloud Computing, Containers - Virtualization Review

Verizon has announced it is selling its cloud and managed hosting service to IBM, alongside working with the Armonk giant on a number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services.

This is a unique cooperation between two tech leaders to support global organisations as they look to fully realise the benefits of their cloud computing investments, said George Fischer, SVP and group president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) in a statement.

Last February, Verizon told customers in an email that it was shutting down any virtual servers running on Public Cloud or Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces on April 12. The company clarified in a statement to CloudTech that it was discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments, however John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, saw things differently.

Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services, he told this publication last year. They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.

How prescient that statement is now. IBM would certainly be classified as one of the hyperscale operators; alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, the four leading players continue to grow more quickly than the overall market, according to Synergys figures.

Whats more, various links between the two companies means this move makes sense. John Considine, general manager at IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, was previously CTO of Verizon Terremark. The companies have also partnered on various initiatives, including in the creation of Verizons cognitive customer experience platform, built using IBMs cloud and infrastructure as a service offerings.

Our customers want to improve application performance while streamlining operations and securing information in the cloud, Fischer added. VES is now well positioned to provide those solutions through intelligent networking, managed IT services and business communications.

Verizon said it was notifying affected customers directly, though adding it did not expect any immediate impact to their services. The transaction is expected to close later this year.

Go here to read the rest:

Verizon sells cloud services to IBM in 'unique cooperation between ... - Cloud Tech

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May 2017, Vol. 5, No. 3

In healthcare, some illnesses can be cured quickly; some can't. But before applying a proper antidote, several factors need to be considered about the patient in question. The same can be said when hospital CIOs and IT pros work to formulate a strategy for moving their computing processes to the cloud, sometimes by choice and sometimes out of necessity. Critical issues need to be weighed, such as security of patient records, the cost to vacate the premises, how much information really needs to be stored in the cloud and actual savings to hospitals as a result of the move.

Our cover story examines these issues through the eyes of hospital CIOs, who see healthcare cloud computing delivering noticeable improvements in security, patient care and cost savings. They're learning to embrace the benefits of moving in part or whole to the cloud as they choose from among the various private, public and hybrid options.

In another feature, we look at the prevalence of mobile devices throughout the hospital community. They can cause migraines for CIOs and IT departments trying to maintain security with healthcare cloud computing safeguards. That's not to mention the inherent resistance IT departments can encounter from doctors, nurses and other hospital staff who share patient healthcare information over their personal smartphones and tablets.

Also in this issue, we look at some steps hospitals will need to take, including revamping IT teams, to gain full advantage of the cloud's benefits. Sometimes baby steps can go a lot farther than giant steps.

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Hospital CIOs see benefits of healthcare cloud computing - TechTarget

President Trump's proposed tax reforms may incentivize U.S. multinational companies to bring cash back to the U.S., potentially setting off a frenzy of mergers and share buybacks. However, it may also increasespending on some of the biggest trends in technology.

Cloud computing is one such area where companies are likely to increase spending over the next several years, as companies look to reduce operating costs and increase flexibility. Research firm IDC recently noted that worldwide spending on the public cloud -- the areas where the largest tech conglomerates mostly reside -- is expected to reach $122.5 billion this year, an increase of nearly 25% over 2016 spending levels.

By 2020, IDC expects that spending to reach $203.4 billion worldwide, indicating there is much more room to run as companies shift their computing habits, leaving opportunities for investors.

"Some offorecasts we've seen -- for example, Goldman -- shows cloud spending from 2016 to 2020 will quadruple," said Exencial Wealth Advisors senior analyst Rich Erwin, who helps handle$1.6 billion in assets under management. "Last year, overall spending was around $32 billion and maybe $135 billion or so is devoted to the public cloud, which is the real growth vehicle."

That growth is expected to largely be captured by the largest companies, giving an opportunity to investors to concentrate their bets and generate outsized returns if it comes to fruition.

"I've seen numbers that in roughly tenyears, Microsoft will have between 25% and 30% of its revenue and operating income from cloud services business," Erwin added. "It's a $3 billion business now, but it has the potential to be really big. It's the biggest trend in technology now and will be for the next decade."

What follows below is a Q&A with Erwin about where investors should look for cloud computing stocks to buy.It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

TheStreet: How much money can we expect to come back from overseas if we get a repatriation holiday?

Erwin: At Exencial, we're expecting about $200 billion to come back in the first year of the holiday. Much of that is in companies like Apple (AAPL) , Cisco (CSCO) , Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) .

TheStreet: Where does that money go?

Erwin: The money will likely go to stock buybacks and M&A deals -- we think the majority of that cash will be targeted for those activities.

TheStreet: Then what makes you bullish on some of these companies that are tied to cloud computing?

Erwin: Alphabet, or Google, has around $26 billion in free cash flow and they spend $14 billion in research and development spending, so they're not really dependent upon the money coming back -- they're already highly profitable.

TheStreet: What do you like about each of these companies?

More here:

5 Cloud Computing Stocks to Buy - TheStreet.com