UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh will discuss a model for tech product development, the role of tech in healthcare reform, and more during an InformationWeek.com radio chat on Tuesday. Innovation in healthcare technology takes a load more than really helpful. Consider telemedicine. Not just must a patient and doctor agree that a video session is fine to switch an in-person visit, but so must the insurance company that pays for the session, the federal government bodies that regulates it, and the hospital that supports it. The complexity involved is a huge reason healthcare provider the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center thinks it could help create breakthrough IT products. And it’s why UPMC has install a greater than 120-person Technology Development Center to refine technology that UPMC can use in-house and market to other healthcare providers and payers. The goal is to make UPMC in-house IT a profit source. “Almost everything I’m doing I’m thinking, ‘Can I make it right into a commercial product?'” says UPMC CIO... Read More »

Microsoft’s cloud services, including Xbox Live, were disrupted Thursday because of a DNS error. Services connected to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud suffered a disruption Thursday — the second one interruption in a under a month. Online reports indicate impacted services included Microsoft.com, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Xbox Live. Microsoft had resolved lots of the problems by Thursday night, avoiding the possibly cataclysmic possibility that Xbox Live will be down when Xbox One units went on sale just after midnight Friday morning. The disruptions began at 2:22 p.m. PT and stretched across multiple regions. Microsoft corporate vice chairman Scott Guthrie confirmed via Twitter that the issue failed to involve Azure itself. Rather, “The issue is a DNS name server issue outside of azure.” Microsoft said Thursday evening that Azure was running normally. As of Friday morning, the Azure service dashboard showed most services were functioning as intended, though partial interruptions were plaguing compute functions in Asia, Europe, and the u. s. . Despite the outage, Windows... Read More »

Vendors from Aryaka and Pertino to Cisco and incumbent carriers wish to shake up your wide area world. Here’s why you’ll want to allow them to. The cloud’s capacity to upend long-standing IT practices — and vendor business models — knows no bounds. Having changed how it organizations deliver applications and infrastructure, cloud services at the moment are changing the way in which they design, deploy, and manage wide area networks. That change is coming none too soon for respondents to the InformationWeek 2014 Next-Generation WAN Survey. Though 68% of respondents see demand for WAN bandwidth increasing (versus 34% who said so in our 2012 survey), just 15% are bringing new services or more capacity online now. Given the lead time to provision WAN links, we wonder just why they’re waiting. Enter a brand new wave of vendors, from newcomers reminiscent of Aryaka, Glue Networks, and Pertino to titans similar to Cisco, all trying to the cloud to seriously change your WAN. Through the use... Read More »

Open Compute Project picks up key new members, sets more ambitious goals, and shows its multi-faceted, multi-chip side at annual summit. 6 Ways SDN Shakes Up The Enterprise (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The Open Compute Project founded by Facebook has made rapid strides in what have been a narrow sphere of influence. The cloud is an x86 world, and, in its first three years, OCP has put out several motherboard and server designs for cloud projects. The early adopters has been primarily big financial services companies, reminiscent of Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, and Goldman Sachs. On the Open Compute Project Summit this week in San Jose, Calif., OCP showed it usually is able to grow beyond one industrial segment into others, resembling online gaming and pharmaceuticals, and expand the reach of open-source hardware in different ways. OCP broadened its technique to licensing, in addition. The hardware designs come in under an Apache Software Foundation-variety of license, where... Read More »

UK agency’s effort to gather facial images via Yahoo chat sessions brings in too many other body parts. 9 Android Apps To enhance Security, Privacy (Click image for larger view.) The Five Eyes, a term used to explain the transnational intelligence-gathering alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the united kingdom, and the united states, will be more aptly named the Million Eyes, to mirror more accurately the agencies’ ability to access webcam communications. The UK’s GCHQ intelligence service, with the aid of the NSA, reportedly grabbed snapshots from millions of Yahoo users’ webcam chat sessions in recent times, about 7% of which contained “undesirable nudity.” On Thursday, in line with documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Guardian published information about an intelligence-gathering program called Optic Nerve, which began in 2008 and continued a minimum of through 2012, designed to check facial recognition technology and to spot persons of interest. [Should Google Glass users learn self-defense? Read Google Glass Prompts Attack, Woman Claims.] Optic Nerve... Read More »