Five Technologies Impacting Healthcare

Leading healthcare organizations investing in digital capabilities require a framework designed for change –one that supports new business strategies and ensures agility while delivering value-added patient services.

We are witnessing an unmatched era of digitally driven innovation. Breakthrough technologies have matured and hit scale together, which will change how we provide healthcare. A digital network solution is arising that blurs the lines between patient, professional, and provider for more responsive, patient-centric care. Five defining technology trends have already emerged which are powering this digital healthcare network according to SAP:

• CLOUD COMPUTING - Technology adoption and business innovation now move at lightning speed. Technology infrastructure can be rented to eliminate barriers to entry, and transactions among healthcare players are moving to new cloud-based collaboration platforms that can connect millions of users.
• SMARTER DEVICES - “Smart” devices, wearables, sensors, robotics, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence are the new normal. This technology can turn Big Data in healthcare into smart data, resulting in insights for clinical decisions relevant to each patient’s specific situation.
• HYPERCONNECTIVITY - Every patient, healthcare organization, and machine is connected –changing all the established rules for healthcare channels. Connectivity drives the collaboration of patients, providers, and supporting businesses and assets in the digital healthcare network.
• SUPER COMPUTING - Networking and in-memory computing allow for the creation of an infinite number of new business opportunities for the healthcare industry. For example, genome sequencing costs decrease even faster than Moore’s law.
• SECURITY - The digital healthcare network is a prime target for digital attacks and sabotage. Because trust remains the ultimate business currency, healthcare organizations must make cybersecurity a top priority in designing and operating a digital business network.

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Mid-year review – 2018 Technology Predictions from Approyo

Every year, the team at Approyo puts together a few predictions for the upcoming year. We published our original predictions back at the start of 2018 and now that we are half through the year, we thought we would revisit these predictions.

IT predictions for 2018

• Cloud First - It's not a question of "if" the Cloud and more. Companies of all shapes and sizes need the cloud to innovate in a digital world. You can't be on the sidelines anymore and 2018 is the year to fully embrace the cloud. 
• Everything as a service - Traditional business products are being re-imagined as services.
• AI and Machine Learning - Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously. SAP introduces SAP Leonardo this year that has many features for AI and Machine Learning that can help companies today. 
• Security – As we mentioned in our first bullet point, the cloud is the new normal. Your data is one of the most important aspects of your business. Cloud and hosting partners will need to continue to adapt security measures to protect this valuable information.

Observations from the first half of 2018
Through the first half of the year, the Cloud continues to be more and more important. One of the major themes from this years SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference was that the cloud is the foundation to achieve the intelligent enterprise through SAP Solutions.

Additionally, security continues to be an important topic throughout the year and into the future. As your company continues to create more and more data, securing that data becomes more important. That’s why we recently announced a new partnership with Bohh Labs. BOHH Labs brings an easy to implement service that acts as a layer between the user/ application and the back-end data store. BOHH enables total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, removing it from the source and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed through keyboard, text-and-type from any device and voice commands to enhance the access flow to data within the system. This means sensitive and non-sensitive data residing in SAP HANA can easily be searched at once in real-time to extract valuable analytical insights without putting sensitive data that must stay protected at risk by hiding it away for access by authorized users only.

Data also continues to be an important trend. We already talked about the security side of data, but another important aspect is how companies are using that data. Another major focus on SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 was how companies need to implement the right technology foundation in order to use all the data they are producing in an intelligent way. This will continue to be an important trend for the rest of the year and beyond.

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“What planning is needed for initial cloud projects?” – Q&A from the Trenches Series

rganizations typically conduct a lot of research on cloud providers and enabling technologies before making the decision to embark on their first cloud project. However, sometimes this extensive research and vendor selection effort gets confused with the actual project planning required for success of that initial cloud project.
After the decision is made to move forward with a cloud initiative, sometimes the urge to get our “stuff” on the cloud quickly is hard to resist. There hasn’t been a time in recent memory with more opportunity for IT but, with great opportunity comes great risk! We’ve all heard the saying that goes something like “automate a bad process and make bad stuff happen more quickly”. Cloud brings a myriad set of options for improving how your enterprise utilizes IT and executes its business objectives, but implementing it without sufficient upfront planning can bring serious risk and bring it very quickly.
Some of the biggest gaps I see in cloud project planning occur in the areas of Security, Policy and Governance. These are important considerations everyone should include in the review and planning portion of any project, before moving applications and workloads on to a cloud.
First let me say that I’m not an expert in security, policy or governance. If I have to be classified as an expert, it’s on the ownership and management characteristics of IT infrastructure. So, I’m not going to give you a detailed technical strategy for implementing your security or policy framework. Rather I’m going to focus on the planning and “ownership” point of view, both of which encompass having a clear set of goals and objectives for its implementation, management, and lifecycle.
Security: Planning here should include a well understood set of security requirements and usage characteristics for the project:
Who uses it?
Where and how will data be stored, shared, backed up, etc.?
Who will be supporting it?
What are the individual roles required?
Will it be a private cloud, hybrid cloud, or public cloud?
What are the characteristics of the network?
What experience does your internal network team have with cloud or highly virtualized environments? What are the current skill gaps & where can you get help?
What tools do you already have? Have you compared them against newer products/services on the market that are focused on security in a cloud?
Do your tools allow for automated policy enforcement on new instances?
What type of reporting and auditing will you have?
What about identity management? Is it integrated with your cloud management platform?
What are the partner requirements? Do you have the right partners, with appropriate experience? Should you audit current and proposed service providers? Have you evaluated team skills to identify gaps and training opportunities?
Where and how has security been factored in to your business continuity planning? Security, like an earthquake or a hardware failure, can be a threat to your availability. As such, your security strategy should match enterprise objectives for availability.
Governance and Policy: This includes governing how an instance is created, why it’s created, by whom, and under what restrictions it operates.
Governance and approval work flows should be well understood.
Document and enforce regulations/restrictions regarding data availability, storage location, and performance.
Establish a governance lifecycle that includes the creation and enforcement of policies for cloud workloads as they are planned, built, shared, and deployed.
Where will your instances reside and under what context or situations while they be put there or moved?
What is the performance criteria to determine right placement of workloads?
Define role-based access to assets and environments.
Ensure that automated approaches to scale, distribution and shutdown encompass enterprise policy controls.
What are the guidelines for allowing scale? How is scale approved?
How are Business Critical priorities mapped against threshold limitations
Change management strategy.
Roles and ownership
Who’s responsible for the delivery of cloud services
Who’s responsible for the cloud environment?
Are all the roles well defined?
Many times, the most valuable time spent on a project is the time spent during planning. Moving to cloud is no different. Make your move in a well-planned and controlled fashion so you can more rapidly benefit from new services, while not putting your team or the enterprise at risk.