Patrick Burke| Sys-con
Home is where the cloud is. The work-at-home movement has given some momentum recently to cloud computing, as well as finding itself in the middle of the debate on whether companies should allow their employees to work from home. It’s understood that a public cloud platform is typically better at providing IT services over the open Internet than enterprise IT is capable of doing.
The public cloud can better serve a workforce that’s as likely to work at the local Starbucks as the corner conference room because they can push processing, storage and enterprise applications to a middle tier between the company and the user. In other words, connectivity, security, capacity management and resiliency become somebody else’s problem, according to an article on Infoworld.com.
The more distributed your workforce, the more public cloud computing can benefit the support of that workforce.
While a remote workforce issue is typically not the only benefit that drives business to the cloud, it’s often on the radar. Companies innovative enough to create a strong remote workforce are typically the organizations that accept cloud computing. If they trust people to work poolside, writes Infoworld’s David Linthicum, then trusting public clouds is not much of a stretch.
Top Threats Facing Cloud Computing
It can be a dangerous cyberworld out there, regardless of whether one is attached to the cloud or using on-premises application.
Cybercriminals and the mayhem they cause have become a top concern for security experts in cloud computing, according to the Cloud Security Alliance’s latest poll on the top threats the industry faces.
The nonprofit’s latest survey found a reshuffling of security priorities, pointing to the growing danger posed by cyberattacks aimed at stealing corporate data, according to an article on ReadWrite.com.
Data breaches and account hijackings that were in the middle of CSA’s 2010 list of top threats rose to the number one and three spots, respectively, this year. At the same time, denial-of-service attacks made their debut as the fifth most worrisome threat.
The CSA report is meant to give a cloud service provider and their customers a snapshot of what experts see as the greatest dangers to storing data and conducting business with customers in the cloud.
Experts agree that no organization doing business on the Internet is immune from a break-in, particularly as the quality of software tools available to hackers through the underground development community continues to grow in sophistication.
Cloud Tools for Doctors and Physicians
Is there a cloud computing solution in the house?
Cloud computing continues to grow in the health care industry. From large hospitals to physicians and administrators to small medical services providers, all have seen cost savings from implementing and utilizing a cloud-based solution.
In particular, small medical services providers can benefit from cloud computing technologies. According to CloudTweaks.com, cloud-based solutions most used by doctors and physicians are:
- Cloud storage. Information storage is of major importance for doctors as they need to keep medical records, notes, test results, cardiology and radiology images, available and secure. There are two alternatives when it comes to a cloud storage solution for medical services: the electronic medical record solution (EMR) and the electronic health record solution (EHR).
- Cloud collaboration. Doctors and physicians are using cloud-based collaborative tools and mobilized solutions such as email and calendars to improve communication, reduce data breaches and increase productivity.
