Amazon Creates A Stir on Twitter and in the Blogosphere
July 23, 2012
Benjamin Coe spent a recent Friday night dealing with the AWS outage. Based on the article he wrote on his blog entitled “My Friday Night with AWS,” it seems he may have spent quite a bit of time on Twitter checking the pulse of AWS users as well.
He chalked up his experience as a testament to the infrastructure of Attachments.me. However, those on the twittersphere either complained about how awful AWS is or they complained about how no one builds appropriately redundant infrastructure. His thoughts are that redundancy comes with a cost.
He states:
“The only way to ensure close to 100% up time is replicating your entire infrastructure. Ultimately it’s a trade off. Are the risks associated with parts of a system not having redundancy offset by reduced infrastructure costs and complexity? It’s obvious that Pinterest, Instagram, Heroku, and many other sites (cough, attachments.me), had parts of their sites that were not redundant. I can almost guarantee that in many cases this was a conscious choice. From my perspective, a lack of total redundancy can sometimes be an acceptable risk if approached responsibly.”
We have to hand it to cloud technologies to keep things exciting. No local data? no problem. Uptime, reliability, and great communication are characteristics of some of the new cloud services. The problem is, “Which service? and when?”
Megan Feil, July 23, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
The Ailing State of Health Info Tech
May 12, 2012
No wonder search for medical information within an institution is darned near impossible. O’Reilly Radar reports on "The State of Health IT According to the American Hospital Association." The extensive article details the American Hospital Association‘s findings and describes the implications in depth. Journalist Andy Oram laments:
"The most poignant aspect of the AHA letter is its careful accumulation of data to show the huge gap between what health care calls for and what hospitals, vendors, standards bodies, and even the government are capable of providing."
It seems like we should have closed that gap by now, but I guess that’s like those jetpacks we still don’t have. In brief, the AHA found the following: basic quality and cost control measures are commonly skipped; the meaningful use reforms created for electronic health records are often meaningless; doctors still record much of their data in unstructured formats; quality reporting measures are unreliable and vary widely between hospitals; and government agencies are dragging their feet in making changes they are pushing others to adopt right away. (Government hypocrisy? Shocking.)
See the article for its comprehensive analysis of the issues. The part that most catches my eye is the discussion on electronic health records. The EHR concept seems simple enough, and obviously necessary, but apparently it isn’t that simple. For one thing, existing hospital and doctor office staff aren’t all computer savvy. Another problem seems to be inadequate standards, specifications that failed to take some important details into account. Vendors have had to improvise on those points, which means a huge difference in scope and quality between EHR systems. What a mess.
Oram concludes his examination with:
"What I find particularly troublesome about their report is that the AHA offers no hint that the hospitals spent all this money to put in place new workflows that could improve care. All the money went to EHRs and the minimal training and installation they require. What will it take for hospitals to make the culture changes that reap the potential benefits of EHRs and data transfers?"
Excellent question.
Cynthia Murrell, May 12, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Protected: Take a Gander at PowerShell to Generate a SharePoint Architecture Diagram
December 12, 2011
Up the Value Chain: Open Source Plus Commercial Know How
November 15, 2011
Along with open source applications comes a certain amount of risk. A recent article on Network World, titled “Advocating Open Source Management Can Be a Disaster,” explores how to balance praising the new technology and warning of the possible risks inherent.
Comparing open source technology to a four year old running free in a parking lot the article recommends combining praise for the gift of open source while keeping just the right amount of responsibility by reminding users of the risks.
The article provides several recommendations including some typical ones: be an expert in the area in which you are preaching and have buddies to back you up. They also suggest the following:
Associate with the mainstream- Communicate that having policies and procedures for managing risk are a normal part of doing business. (That’s what Sarbanes Oxley is about.) Managing how open source is used in software development is just another process like managing requirements, quality, security or issue tracking.
With so much at risk with this revolutionizing technology it pays to make sure the risk is managed right the first time. Companies which specialize in information management can offers its clients open source content connectors. Licensees can use these to handle many content acquisition needs.
After reading this information, I realized that the Paris-based Polyspot offers tools and know how which can deliver open source plus commercial know how. Whether infrastructure, search, or management processes in work flow, Polyspot is delivering.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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