NASA calls on cloud for online eclipse streaming

Countless Americans have scrambled over the last few days to find protective glasses and good viewing locations, but NASA has spent the last three years preparing for up to a billion users to view the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse through streaming on NASA TV.

Through NASAs Web Enterprise Service Technology Contract, InfoZen is responsible for hosting streaming on NASA TV, which is hosted on the agencys website. InfoZen provides the majority of its 100 cloud service applications to NASA through Amazon Web Services. One of those services is a searchable multimedia database.

We have architected a solution for the eclipse to use the most robust cloud services and other infrastructure that might come into play with streaming, Sandeep Shilawat, Infozens cloud program manager, told GCN. We have a list of vendor partners [who are] coming up with a backup plan for the backup for the backup.

NASAs 13 NASA TV streams are hosted through the AWS Simple Storage Service known as S3. The service allows NASA to segregate the stream for the eclipse and apply multiple mechanics including auto-scaling caches and time delivery.

There are multiple areas where the eclipse is being monitored, so it is not just North America but worldwide that this event can be viewed, Shilawat said. We are incorporating ways for the global service not to go down.

Viewing estimates for the solar eclipse depend on a variety of factors, including weather and cloud cover. NASA is prepping its website to be able to handle up to a billion viewers just in case more people than expected are not able to physically view the eclipse in person.

Because of how important this event is and the demand worldwide, we are treating this like a NASA launch, said Steve Penyak, senior vice president of IT modernization at InfoZen. It doesnt compare to launching a rocket ship, but with the preparations, planning and looking into contingency plans, we are treating this similarly in terms of choreographing how it is going to be done.

According to NASA, the solar eclipse will begin at 9:05 am PDT in Lincoln Beach, Ore., and the lunar shadow will leave the United States at 4:09 EDT. More information from NASA on the solar eclipse can be found here.

About the Author

Sara Friedman is a reporter/producer for GCN, covering cloud, cybersecurity and a wide range of other public-sector IT topics.

Before joining GCN, Friedman was a reporter for Gambling Compliance, where she covered state issues related to casinos, lotteries and fantasy sports. She has also written for Communications Daily and Washington Internet Daily on state telecom and cloud computing. Friedman is a graduate of Ithaca College, where she studied journalism, politics and international communications.

Friedman can be contacted at sfriedman@gcn.com or follow her on Twitter @SaraEFriedman.

Click here for previous articles by Friedman.

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NASA calls on cloud for online eclipse streaming - GCN.com

Lets face it, everyone likes something for free, and free cloud hosting is no different. Most providers offer some kind of free service to encourage you to get acquainted with their platforms. Some services actually remain free indefinitely.

Im going to explore the top Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) free cloud hosting plans currently available to help you take full advantage of whichever proves to be the best option for your needs.

Amazon Web Services is unarguably the largest cloud hosting company around. The good news is that, if you are a new customer, you are automatically eligible for the AWS free tier.

The AWS Free Tier is designed to provide you with hands-on AWS experience at no charge for the first twelve months after yousign up. Once you create your AWS account, youll be able to use any of these twenty one products and services for free, subject to certain usage limits.

Details:

Google is Google so you know just about anything they offer will work well. Google Cloud Platform enables developers to build, test, and deploy applications on their highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure. You can choose from computing, storage and application services for your web, mobile and backend solutions.

AboutGoogle Cloud Platforms free trial

Beyond the free introductory offer, Google also offers ongoing light compute services for free when you stay within their free quota. This service level might actually allow you indefinite free cloud hosting for a smaller website!

Azure provides a growing collection of integrated servicescompute, storage, data, networking, and app.Azure is the only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader in both the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market segments. This powerful combination of managed and unmanaged services lets you build, deploy, and manage applications any way you like.

About Microsoft Azures free trial offer

Like Google, Azure also offers a long-term light-use free cloud hosting tier. Using this tier, you can deploy up to 10 free web sites, or build a mobile service that supports up to 500 devices for free, with no apparent time limit.

The bottom line with all this is that for each of these free tiers you need to sign up with your credit card details, so somewhere down the track you could be charged. You can rest assured however that these are all reputable companies with no plans to steal your money, so if you play your cards right you can get a lot of free stuff for a certain period of time at least (or, in the cases of Google and Azure, indefinitely).

If you want to spend some serious time learning your way around, then you cant beat AWSs twelve month free cloud hosting tier. It also comes back to what it is you want to do. But if youre not planning on using much in the way of resources, maybe the light-use levels from Microsoft and Google offer the best deals.

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Free cloud hosting: comparing the top providers offer

Last week, UC San Diego Health, an integrated health system in San Diego that is part of the University of California San Diego, announced that it had moved its electronic health record (EHR) system to the cloud. An August 7 press release quoted Mark Amey, associate chief information officer at the health system, as saying that, By creating greater operational efficiencies, we can invest more time and resources in patient care. UC San Diego Health has deployed a number of strategies to allow its hospitals and clinics to be more agile and respond to demand at a rapid pace within a robust disaster recovery environment, Amey said.

This is our first significant milestone in moving key pieces of infrastructure into the cloud to provide always-on solutions from anywhere that can be scaled to our growing geographical print, Adam Gold, chief technology officer, UC Irvine Health and UC San Diego Health, said in a statement in the press release. The cloud approach allows us to better provide innovative technology to support outstanding clinical care, research, and teaching.

The release also quoted a senior executive from the Verona, Wis.-based Epic Systems Corporation, the health systems vendor partner in the cloud computing implementation, and its core EHR vendor. Health systems both large and small are seeking secure and cost-effective approaches to providing EMR capabilities to their users, said Stirling Martin, Epic senior vice president. UC San Diego Health is the first academic health system to make the migration from their own self-hosted Epic infrastructure to Epics state-of-the-art cloud hosting environment.

The Aug. 7 press release further noted that The information services team has moved approximately 10,000 workstations at UC San Diego Health to this virtual delivery method, allowing users to access the electronic health record via the cloud. The team has also integrated over a hundred third-party applications that work with Epic within the new cloud environment. And it added that UC San Diego Health is the hub for a single electronic medical records system serving UC Riverside Health and community practice affiliates, a cost-saving arrangement that improves coordination of care among physicians. UC San Diego Health will also share its EMR system with UC Irvine Health starting this November.

The press release also referred to Christopher Longhurst, M.D., UC San Diego Healths CIO, who is the sponsoring executive for the development of a UC Health-wide data warehouse, integrating patient data across the UCs five academic health systems, which together comprise the fourth largest health care system in California. Dr. Longhurst noted that this initiative supports medical decision making, clinical research and population health throughout the state.

Shortly after the announcement, Healthcare Informatics Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland spoke with Dr. Longhurst and Adam Gold about the broader strategic context around this announcement. Below are excerpts from that interview.

Tell me about the broader strategy around this move into the cloud?

Christopher Longhurst, M.D.: As our group of UC Health CIOs had discussed in our interview with you earlier this summer, we at the five University of California Health organizations are on a shared journey of collaborating together strategically and practically to optimize our IT development across all five organizations [UCSF Health, UC San Diego Health, UCLA Health, UC Irvine Health, and UC Davis Health]. In that context, Adam, whos been at UC Irvine for 15 years, is now the CTO for both UC Irvine Health and UC San Diego Health. His was one of the initial joint roles that were designated.

So how does this latest move connect to your broader strategic efforts around infrastructure?

Longhurst: Let me give some context. As you know, were bringing UC Irvine live on the UC San Diego instance of Epic, and were doing that on November 4. In preparation, we needed to be able to scale up our Epic platform for breadth. The implication of that was that wed be spending millions of dollars on servers in our local data center, which was state-of-the-art 20 years ago. But what happened was that Adam and some of the other CTOs came up with a strategy, focused on moving towards the cloud. So were consolidating our 13 data centers across the five UC hospitals, down to two, one northern one, and one southern one. And the least preferable option in that context is local hosting. It may be necessary long-term for things like biomed, where there are latency-dependent applications; but in general, we want to move away from that.

And within the cloud-first strategy, whenever we can host applications at the vendors themselves, thats our preference, because vendors can provide services as well. Cerner has been doing this for many years, but Epic just started doing this. Theyre doing this for new customers, but were the first academic medical center and existing Epic customer to go to cloud-based hosting by Epic. Were very impressed with their infrastructure, including with advanced technology that we dont have. And the week after we went live, comparing Monday-to-Monday performance, our system was performing better in the hosted environment.

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UC San Diego Health: Moving Its EHR to the Cloud, Strategically - Healthcare Informatics

Microsoft has snapped up a high-performance computing (HPC) company in its quest to cloudify practically all types of enterprise workloads. The Redmond, Wash. IT vendor has acquired HPC company Cycle Computing for an undisclosed amount, the companies said on Aug. 15.

The deal, along with the GreenButton deal of 2014, adds to the company's technology portfolio to make it more competitive in the increasingly crowded market for enterprise cloud services.

"The cloud war is on but it's not about price. Its more about providing services and solutions to help solve complex problems. We are not talking about development environments anymore; this is more about real workloads moving into the cloud, causing a huge demand for managed services," Adnan Raja, vice president of marketing at cloud hosting provider Atlantic.Net, told eWEEK in email remarks.

Cycle Computing, a charter member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, specializes in cloud orchestration software that enables organizations to run compute-intensive workloads, or Big Compute as Microsoft terms it, on cloud computing infrastructures. Before cloud-based HPC, such workloads typically required the use to expensive supercomputers or clusters.

Without naming names, Cycle Computing claims that its customers are among the top five life insurance companies and the top ten pharmaceutical and biotech firms, among other corporate giants. Last year, Dell tapped Cycle Computing for a proof-of-concept that demonstrated an HPC-as-a-service with hybrid cloud management capabilities.

Today, Cycle Computing is the latest example of cloud consolidation.

"Microsoft's acquisition is a perfect example of where the industry is headed, with competitive landscape of a very few specialized cloud providers," added Raja. "This acquisition shows how serious the competition is and consolidation is happening at a rapid pace. But competition is always good and healthy for the industry."

In his announcement, Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, said his company's extensive global cloud and Cycle Computing's expertise in enabling massively scalable applications not only opens up new possibilities, but will make more HPC accessible to customers. "Their technology will further enhance our support of Linux HPC workloads and make it easier to extend on-premise workloads to the cloud," he added.

The Cycle Computing buy aside, Microsoft has been steadily expanding its cloud HPC portfolio.

In 2015, the company announced Azure virtual machines that support Linux Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) with Intel Message Passing Interface (MPI), allowing workloads to better capitalize on the company's InfiniBand network for high-throughput, low-latency performance. Last year, the company released Batch Shipyard v.1 under its Azure Big Compute suite, allowing customers to quickly deploy batch-style, Dockerized workloads on the company's Azure Batch compute management and job scheduling service (itself based on the company's acquisition of GreenButton).

The technology giant faces some competition in its bid to bring HPC to the masses, however.

In May, supercomputer maker Cray announced it had partnered with cloud provider Markley, offering the HPC capabilities of its Urika-GX appliances as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. Beyond Markley, the storied supercomputer vendor is exploring other ways of bringing its innovations to market.

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Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing to Bulk Up its HPC Cloud Services - eWeek

A breach on a server managed by cloud hosting and server management provider TekLinks, may have allowed hackers to potentially access and exfiltrate the personal health information of patients from Alabama-based Surgical Dermatology Group.

TekLinks discovered unauthorized access around May 1, 2017, but access was first gained on March 23. Officials said it blocked server access after the initial discovery, but hackers could have viewed or copied data beforehand.

Surgical Dermatology hired a forensic investigation team to determine the scope of the breach. Officials said the compromised server contained patient ID numbers, names, Social Security numbers, health plan information and physician names.

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Financial information and credit card information werent stored on the affected server, officials said.

Surgical Dermatologys investigation team has secured the server, and officials said policies have been revised to improve security for the organization.

All patients were notified and offered a year of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services. Officials said the organizations also reported the breach to appropriate authorities, including the FBI.

The number of breached records was not included in the notification, and the data is not yet included on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights breach reporting tool.

Twitter:@JessieFDavisEmail the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com

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Hackers breach third party cloud vendor TekLinks - Healthcare IT News