Ready or not, mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets are beginning to enter the work space and are here to stay. The demand for IT organizations to understand the implications of this trend and how to integrate it successfully into their internal operations and external offerings is critical.

What is Mobile Computing?

Today more and more people are conducting business on non-PC devices and their employers are actively adopting “bring your own device” programs. These non-PC devices include smartphones, tablets, PDAs, and other electronic gadgets that have the capability to access the Internet and much more. One simple example is how people use their smartphones to access work emails. Mobile computing has three basic components, including:

• Mobile hardware – Devices such as smartphones and tablets
•  Mobile software –Applications such as email or Facebook application on the smartphone
• Mobile communication – Network infrastructure and technologies

Benefits

Increased productivity – Imagine the productivity boost when you can conduct business wherever you are. Your desk is now mobile and all the business computing resources are available not only on your PC, but also on your smartphone or touch pad.

Improved collaboration – You can collaborate with your colleagues anywhere on any device that can access the Internet through work groups, either on social media or on your own business network.

Better customer service – Since more and more consumers are using their mobile devices to contact businesses, mobile computing capability allows a business to be nimble and responsive to their customers, using the same communication methods and platforms. 

Faster decision making – You can conduct business at the point of activity. The ability to collect, access and evaluate critical business information quickly and accurately means improved decision making that can have a far-reaching effect on your company's ability to compete successfully. 

Challenges for IT

Security Standards - According to Gartner, from 2010 to 2014, almost every enterprise mobile employee will have a smartphone that supports e-mail, Internet access and a variety of applications. As enterprises look to support even more complex mobile devices, a growing challenge will be to manage the security, the costs and the applications.

 When working mobile, one is dependent on public networks, requiring careful use of VPN. The integration of multiple devices with inconsistent security standards and use of social media on those devices, also pose a serious security threat to the business network and computing resources. The IT organizations are required to address data security issues and cyber attacks while enabling and supporting mobile devices on the fleet. 

Insufficient Bandwidth - Mobile Internet access is generally slower than direct cable connections. Those organizations that support mobile computing have to ensure sufficient network bandwidth so that the employees who work on their mobile devices can deliver to meet business standards. 

Before entering the mobile computing arena, each company and employee will have to evaluate how mobile computing fits into their goals and decide how they can improve productivity, while ensuring security of the critical information.

It seems that no matter where you look in IT, you cannot escape the phrase “deduplication” these days.   According to Gartner, 47% of the respondents to a survey conducted over the summer of 2011 ranked data growth in their top three challenges. With spending returning to more normal levels after a couple of down years because of the economy, 62% said they would plan to expand hardware capacity at existing data centers by the end of 2011, while 30% would plan to build entirely new data centers.

Deduplication itself is becoming a critical “must have” for IT professionals, but it must be handled with care.  A bad strategy can quickly cause IT infrastructure costs to increase. With proper planning and implementation, a good deduplication strategy can:

• Greatly reduce cost while improving storage and backup performance
• Reduce backup windows
• Lower data center costs

There are two critical points to keep in mind when determining whether to implement a storage or backup solution that uses deduplication:

• Data that changes often is a bad candidate for deduplication
  Deduplication works by storing data one time.   When the data is changed, only the changed data is stored on disk.  If you attempt to use a deduplication solution with data that is constantly changing, you pay a premium for the deduplication software but lose out on the benefits since all of the changing data still has to be stored.
• Deduplication can consume a large amount of system resources
  There are many different options when it comes to deduplication processing.  It is important to keep CPU load in mind when determining which strategy to implement.   Whether you use your existing servers to deduplicate data or choose a dedicated appliance to handle the deduplication processing, the resource load needs to go somewhere and will require resources.

In the first wave of adopting virtualization technology, most businesses have managed to consolidate usage, improve equipment utilization rate, and optimize cost and performance. Now they are facing new challenges, including:

• An improved operational model to support the new technology of virtualization
• The organizations’ ability to transform their current operational models quickly enough to leverage the emerging technologies
• Delivery of cloud services via Internet without compromising security and integrity of business information
• Enabling the new technology (virtualization and cloud) to support operational excellence in the organizations

That’s where CBTS’ Virtualization 2.0 strategy comes in.  Our concept of Virtualization 2.0 is about automating all manual work in virtualizing the environment, expediting the process of compute resource delivery, and breaking the current barriers of network, storage, and infrastructure to deliver on-demand, flexible and agile services.

CBTS’ VDC Enterprise Solution reflects this concept of Virtualization 2.0 and delivers the value it promises. It breaks through operational barriers that inhibit the adoption of optimizing technologies, while maintaining the operational integrity of the enterprise. This solution features:

• Complete Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, charged by usage
• On-demand access to private and secure virtual servers
• Dedicated, secure environment based on organization policies
• Enterprise-Integrated Operational ITIL Practices
• Easy-to-use, web-based portal to rapidly configure, deploy and control virtual servers
• Viewable performance statistics for virtual servers

What makes this solution stand out is its ability to perform automated provisioning, which greatly decreases provisioning time to a few minutes instead of hours or even days. Its easy-to-use portal interface also simplifies the task of administrating the environment, enabling seamless and efficient work flow.

When we’ve invited guests over to our house, I usually spend the afternoon before they arrive cleaning – my wife likes the place to be immaculate. Within a few days, however, our house is just as messy as it was before. According to a recent report from Verizon Business, many organizations behave the same way with PCI compliance. The report (available here as a PDF) states, among other findings, that 79% of businesses examined in 2010 did not meet the PCI-DSS standard, and that most of those that failed the audit were compliant the year before.

The PCI Data Security Standard is a set of tools and metrics for merchants, payment processors and financial institutions to protect cardholder data. It was initially released in 2004 by a council of the major payment card industry members (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc.). The current version of the standard is v2.0, released in 2010, and defines twelve requirements that must be met by businesses that wish to process credit and debit cards. So why is it so uncommon for these businesses to remain compliant? It’s a relevant question because you and I want to do business with merchants that take measures to keep our financial data safe.

There are likely various causes for the gap in compliance. Organizations might feel the need to “just get the box checked” – and as a result they act like a teenager cleaning his or her room, covering up the disarray so that it’s just out of sight. It doesn’t take long for the place to get out of order after the auditors leave.

Cost and complexity are also factors. There’s nobody to watch the logs from the new firewall; there’s no money for the annual penetration test this year; the CIO got too busy and didn’t have time to finish updating the company’s security policy.

Properly securing a business can be like training for a marathon. It requires a long-term commitment, doing hard work that doesn’t have an immediate reward, and most of all, it can really hurt.  But remembering our responsibilities – to our customers and their data; to our shareholders and owners; and to our own employees – is key. All of these folks would be adversely affected if a breach were to occur!

The requirements mandated by PCI-DSS aren’t just good for businesses that process or store cardholder data. They’re solid recommendations that can improve the security posture of any organization with critical systems or data to protect. If your organization doesn’t have a formal security program, PCI can be a great place to learn about controls and defenses. Other resources, such as ISO 27002, NIST’s 800-53, or SANS’ Top 20 Critical Controls, describe the steps to start developing the people, process, and technology required to protect your business.

If you are subject to PCI-DSS, don’t stop there! PCI is the beginning of the journey, not the end. After all, organizations that are PCI compliant can still suffer breaches. Heartland Payment Systems, who reported a breach and the loss of millions of records in 2008, was PCI compliant at the time. A comprehensive information security program goes beyond boxes on an audit report – it includes maturity that’s baked into the business at a foundational level, and a culture that cares first and foremost about protecting its data and assets.

In today’s hypercompetitive healthcare environments, driving cost control is paramount and healthcare providers, payers and vendors must reduce cost while increasing the quality of care. Patient-centric technologies are at the core of the solution. These technologies necessitate clinical integration using health information exchanges and associated components. Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) was created to address this enterprise-centric view for all data types, not just medical imaging. HCR is a real time “active” repository that consolidates data from a variety of clinical sources to present a unified view of a single patient. It is optimized to allow clinicians to retrieve data for a single patient rather than identify a population of patients with common characteristics or facilitate the management of a specific clinical department.

Unfortunately, the care environment is littered with application-centric technologies like PACS and provider-centric technologies like EMRs. Neither of which delivers a patient-centric, portable view of the patient. The concept of the holistic electronic health record has been extenuated in recent moves toward personal health records. The use of clinical data mining in genetic records will change the outcomes of various disease states. Once healthcare providers gain access to comprehensive electronic patient records, the drive toward predictive, personalized medicine will be possible.

Here is an interesting article by Brian T. Horowitz of eWEEK, on the challenges cloud computing presents to the healthcare industry.

Will the role of VNAs in the healthcare of tomorrow be central or peripheral? The continued evolution of IT solutions is likely to be the catalyst propelling the VNA approach either into the limelight or the shadows.

What do you think?