Author: David

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

The healthcare industry hasn’t been a big fan of cloud computing. In fact, even co-located and hosted data centers are a stretch due to security and privacy regulations. Verizon, however, aims to change that equation and just might succeed. Verizon’s enterprise unit, bolstered by its Terremark cloud computing portfolio, on Monday launched a portfolio of services designed to meet HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements.

In a nutshell, health care players—payers, insurers and hospitals—will be able to host patient information in Verizon’s Terremark data centers. Verizon also plans to offer co-location, managed hosting, cloud and private cloud services. Verizon’s enterprise cloud services plan starts with healthcare, but can scale to other industries. How will Verizon court healthcare? HIPAA requirements and various providers in the industry are held together by something called a business associate agreement (BAA). The BAA dictates that each party that touches patient data is required to meet HIPAA standards. If one party in the data chain fumbles it is liable for penalties and fines…

Grazed from AMEInfo. Author:  Editorial Staff.

Citrix will be showcasing network and cloud computing solutions that equip organisations to support the growing trend towards mobile workstyles in the region. With global research showing that corporate employees are increasingly relying on multiple computing devices to access corporate apps, data and services from a range of locations outside of the traditional office setup, Citrix’s technology showcase is set to show how businesses can meet the resulting challenges of security, access and management today and into the future. Mobile workstyles are shown to have been adopted today by a quarter (24%) of organizations worldwide, a figure expected to reach 83% by 2014. In line with this trend, many organisations in the Middle East are also exploring the efficiencies and benefits this can bring to the company and its staff.

Citrix will display its flagship product range designed to support mobile workstyles on its stand (CLD 16 in Hall number 6), including Citrix XenDesktop for centralized virtual desktop delivery as a service, Citrix Receiver and Citrix CloudGateway , an enterprise mobility management solution that securely delivers mobile, Intranet, Web, SaaS and Windows apps and data to any device, anywhere. Also at the Citrix stand, a networking and cloud solutions demonstration will feature NetScaler, the most advanced cloud network platform deployed in thousands of networks around the globe to optimize, secure and control the delivery of all enterprise and cloud services…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunication. Author: Fred Donovan.

Whether it is a regulator threatening fines or a CEO fuming about a data breach, IT managers are well aware of the enterprise security risks of adopting cloud computing. The latest news to drive home this point was a recent statement by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that companies face fines if they do not secure customer data held by third-party cloud providers.

UK companies are responsible for securing customer data whether they store it internally or externally, the ICO stressed. "The law on outsourcing data is very clear. As a business, you are responsible for keeping your data safe. You can outsource some of the processing of that data, as happens with cloud computing, but how that data is used and protected remains your responsibility," said Simon Rice, ICO’s technology policy advisor…

Products included in this release are: Acrobat XI Pro, Acrobat XI Standard, Adobe Reader® XI and newly integrated document services, Adobe FormsCentral and Adobe EchoSign.

Philippine cloud computing services provider ArcusIT (www.arcusit.ph) recently announced the latest update on their ArcusIT Cloud Server offering.

“With the new platform upgrade, the ArcusIT Cloud Server now has even more extensive configuration and Virtual Machine (VM) management features, including load balancing, autoscaling, availability & performance zone selection, network, and storage management. All cloud management and provisioning takes place through an intuitive web-based Control Panel,” said Oamar Gianan of ArcusIT.

ArcusIT virtual server service provides users with a simple, web-based interface for ordering, deploying, configuring, and monitoring cloud resources on demand.

Grazed from Who’s Who Legal. Author: Clive Gringas.

To appreciate why the “cloud” is the future of computing, one must understand a law of economics coined in 1890 and learn what happened around the same time at 57 Holborn Viaduct in London, England. In 1890, Alfred Marshall finished a decade’s work. His eight-volume Principles of Economics was finally ready. Those who read the fourth volume were introduced, for the first time, to the concept of “economies of scale”. Marshall’s analysis, then novel, was that in some trades “in which a man gains no very great new economies by increasing the scale of his production, it often happens that a business remains of about the same size for many years, if not for many generations.” These could be contrasted with trades.

“in which a large business can command very important advantages, which are beyond the reach of a small business. A new man, working his way up in such a trade, has to set his energy and flexibility, his industry and care for small details, against the broader economies of his rivals with their larger capital, their higher specialization of machinery and labour, and their larger trade connection. If then he can double his production, and sell at anything like his old rate, he will have more than doubled his profits. This will raise his credit with bankers and other shrewd lenders; and will enable him to increase his business further, and to attain yet further economies, and yet higher profits: and this again will increase his business and so on. It seems at first that no point is marked out at which he need stop.”…