Once, there was a pin factory. It employed ten workers each of whom performed a different task. This organizational structure allowed them to generate 48,000 pins every day. If the people working at the plant were working independently, the output of each would have been limited to 20 pins at most totaling 200 pins. This story describing division of labor was used in Adam Smiths 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, as an example of operational excellence (OE).

If your company is to survive in a competitive market, OE must be sought, explained Faisal Hoque in Fast Company. In other words, the enterprise must identify, understand and create the capabilities, behaviors and focuses necessary for repeatable, continuous and measurable operational improvement, said Hoque.

True. However, multi-vendor cloud hosted environments can make achieving OE feel particularly complicated and challenging to accomplish, especially because this technology is growing so quickly. Over two-thirds of firms in the United States are budgeting more for cloud systems in 2017 than they did in 2016, according to a poll of 300 IT professionals from B2B research company Clutch. To specifically look at infrastructure as a service (i.e., cloud hosting), it is actually the fastest growing segment; skyrocketing at 36.8 percent per Gartner, IaaS is expanding more rapidly than either cloud platforms (PaaS) or software (SaaS).

Clouds rapid growth should not be an excuse to set operational excellence aside, but a call to action to ensure that you have instituted OE strategies into the way that you partner with cloud services. Lets explore this topic by answering five critical questions.

The cloud systems that are available to businesses are proliferating, and (as indicated by the above figures) adoption rates are staying strong and even increasing in some segments. If you are a CIO at an enterprise that is in the process of transitioning from an extensive in-house application hosting architecture to cloud hosting, you want to maintain your companys standards (and your own) for computing operations throughout.

When your hosting is multi-vendor, tasks you need to complete for your IT systems that can become difficult to manage include remote system monitoring; disaster recovery and business continuity planning; transaction processing; task scheduling; and administration of system changes. There is a general tendency to assume that these types of activities do not demand as much attention in the third-platform world as they did previously, but it is necessary to integrate all your operations, even if a multi-vendor or multi-cloud scenario makes that seem daunting.

When you are cloudifying legacy systems, the challenging thing is really that you are throwing numerous elements into the air and having to make a bunch of adjustments at the same time. Well, perhaps thats overly dramatic, but you do have to align various operational aspects in fast succession.

Tim Porzio, Vice President of Operations and Infrastructure at Sodexo North America, discussed this complexity in CIOReview. It is necessary to modify your operational standards, tools, and policies and procedures proactively, Porzio noted, so that your ability to provide application hosting services smoothly throughout your ecosystem continues to exemplify the principle of operational excellence.

Moving over to cloud involves making choices. The goal of the CIO should be to blend all elements into a coherent, detailed and comprehensible operational excellence management system (OEMS). A positive way to view this work is that it is often neglected, so performing it well can be a differentiator. It is an opportunity to define your expectations from cloud partnerships. In the absence of this effort, your data and disaster recovery are placed in the hands of remote services, a hodgepodge of external hosting at companies that have undergone a range of different assessments.

When you are moving to cloud aggressively, you want to be clear there is a common perception of operational excellence. To get there, it helps to build standards through a cloud services model, including tiers of service. Since service accountability with cloud is substantially different, it must be conveyed that services will not necessarily be the same with cloud as they were prior to the transition. This model should introduce your OEMS. Plus, you want to list requirements of any specific providers. There should be service levels, or tiers, and a listing of tasks that are performed accompanying each of your cloud partners. You then want to do the same with your applications: assign each to a tier depending on the extent to which they are mission-critical.

Once this model or framework is complete, you should see that you may not have identical services to your on-premise offerings; and that, while service accountability may be challenging to manage, you can control your IT in the expanding cloud environment through conscientious tiered planning.

Standardize the management system in order to integrate its disparate components. That way you can deftly manage all aspects from operational monitoring to escalation, from tracking of system modification to governance.

Now, with your OEMS in hand, meet with the cloud provider. It must be clear that the partnership is based on mutually understood expectations. Talk about the process that will be followed, how you will communicate, governance, key performance indicators and your legal agreement.

Establish a formal, built-in way to communicate at predefined intervals (monthly or quarterly) to be sure that service quality is strong. Rate the provider before each meeting, and then review the rating when you talk. Mention improvements that could be made. Verify that any issues will be resolved.

You want the points of view of each of your stakeholders to be infused within the operational excellence management system; otherwise some will view it as bureaucratic nonsense, despite its merits. Send your colleagues notes from your periodic governance assessments, or encourage their active participation.

Consider the key performance indicators of value to IT, as well as how reliable and supported the system is, so that you can quickly and effectively measure how well the service is being delivered and experienced.

It should be clear by now that cloud computing and OE are not mutually exclusive. In fact, this technology is being increasingly adopted by enterprises precisely because it improves their operations. How? Well, various ways, but one is very simple and straightforward. When you move a system to an external hosting provider, it means that maintenance and security is being handled beyond your walls. That means you are able to focus on development rather than spending all your time making sure your infrastructure is up to snuff.

Keep in mind, just because you can passively enjoy some amount of operational excellence simply by moving to the cloud, it is ridiculous to think that anything excellent will come easily. By reviewing the above points and discussing your OEMS with providers, you can make sure that you maintain your own operational standards even as your infrastructure becomes increasingly diverse and complex.

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Driving operational excellence with your cloud vendors - Network World

August 09, 2017 -University of California (UC) San Diego Health recently transitioned its EHR system to a hosted, cloud-based Epic EHR environment as part of a strategy to move from traditional data storage centers to a more secure, cost-efficient patient medical record repository.

By creating greater operational efficiencies, we can invest more time and resources in patient care, said UC Sn Diego Health Associate Chief Information Officer Mark Amey. 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.

With cloud Epic technology, UC San Diego will gain the ability to use cloud computing to store and access EHR data and programs over the internet in a shared, hosted environment instead of a local server or personal computer.

Cloud infrastructure is more resilient and offers heightened data protection that is more reliable than health IT infrastructure dependent on local servers. UC Davis Health stated it intends to fully deploy cloud-based data storage solutions for its health system within the next three years.

Health systems both large and small are seeking secure and cost-effective approaches to providing EMR capabilities to their users, said Epic Senior Vice President Stirling Martin. 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.

Using a cloud-based environment will also enable UC San Diego to meet industry standards for safeguarding patient protected health information (PHI). Additionally, the Epic-hosted technology includes periodic cybersecurity updates and patching as well as improved information security controls.

Cloud computing will also allow for more efficient disaster recovery following incidents including data security breaches. Additionally, Epic can more easily focus on application-specific security needs through cloud computing technology.

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, said UC Irvine Health and UC San Diego Chief Technology Officer Adam Gold. The cloud approach allows us to better provide innovative technology to support outstanding clinical care, research, and teaching.

Thus far, the UC San Diego information services team has successfully transferred approximately 10,000 workstations at UC San Diego Health to the cloud-based environment. The information services team has also integrated more than one hundred third-party applications compatible with Epic within the new cloud system.

Presently, UC San Diego headquarters a single EHR system serving UC Riverside Health and several affiliated community practices. The arrangement is an effort to save expenses and improve care coordination among physicians at all participating facilities.

UC San Diego also plans to share its EHR system with UC Irvine Health beginning in November.

Epic also recently kicked off an EHR implementation project with Meritus Health in Maryland expected to take five years.

Meritus Health officials signed the five-year contract with Epic last month after an 18-month health IT company review process during which over 1,000 Meritus Health employees seriously considered six other vendors for the project.

The health systems EHR selection process included a site visit to a similarly community-based hospital system with 250 to 300 beds to gauge how Epic technology suited the environment.

Expenses for the complete modernization of Meritus Healths patient health records system as well as all associated labor costs is projected to total $100 million.

Link:
CA Health System Begins Cloud-Based Epic EHR Implementation - EHRIntelligence.com

ST. CLOUD Creative minds will be filling the streets of Downtown St. Cloud at this seasons Art Crawl.The event featuring multiple vendors, street artists, demo artists, performers and musicians kicks off at 3:00 p.m. Friday.

Nearly 40 downtown businesses will be hosting artists inside their shops or on their walkways. Everything from quilting, to jewelry making, to fine art, the Art Crawl will have several artists work on display.

The night will also feature a fashion show, it will be held from 4:00 p.m. 6:00 p.m. at Mantra Salon and Spa.

During the Art Crawl, Gaslight Creative along with United Way of Central Minnesota will be collecting school supply donations. All donations will be given theSt. Cloud Salvation Army.

Backpacks, notebooks, pens, pencils, folders and art supplies are just some of the supplies that are needed.

Donations can be dropped off at Gaslight, which is located between Bumbledees and The Pickled Loon on West St. Germain Street.

The Art Crawl is a free event, it wraps up at 9:00 p.m. Friday.

More:
St. Cloud to Host Summer Sizzler Downtown Art Crawl - WJON News

When we introduced our Avid Everywhere vision in 2013, the industry was facing a period of unprecedented change. The rapid digitization of the media value chain made it difficult for content creators to connect and automate workflows, and increased the cost and complexity of monetizing assets. The consumerization of content creation and distribution forced media organizations to adjust to a new reality of diminishing control over how audiences consumed content. At the same time, declines in traditional revenue sources required a recalibration of business models and the relentless pressure for operational efficiency challenged an industry filled with disconnected people, tools and workflows.

These were the core issues the Avid Everywhere vision and strategy set out to resolve in 2013. And now, just four years later, the transformation of our vision to reality is complete. Weve created the most open, tightly integrated and efficient media platform that enables media organizations to more effectively connect disparate teams and accelerate their workflows. And new distribution and monetization capabilities are helping them connect with their audiences in much more powerful and profitable ways than ever before.

Yet even as technology advances, urgent operational and financial challenges remain. Pressure to create ever-greater volumes of high-quality content is immense, yet technology budgets arent increasing; theyre straining to keep pace. Heritage production environments arent as flexible or efficient as they need to be to handle the load and fast pace. Increasing operational capacity requires expensive, often redundant staffing and capital expenditures. And production facility real estate makes it very costly to house hardware. Compounding the problem, many organizations that have overprovisioned their on-premise hardware capacity are actually underutilizing their systems investments.

BENEFITS OF MOVING MEDIA PRODUCTION TO THE CLOUD

Extending media production to the cloudin the way that best suits an organizations unique operational realitiesopens the opportunity to both increase production capacity and ease the financial burdens of content creation and distribution. Media organizations gain the licensing flexibility and business agility to align their deployed technology solutions with the needs of their production environment. They can also connect and collaborate from anywhere, whether through a workstation, laptop, or mobile deviceall while increasing efficiency across every facet of the media value chain.

Now media organizations can grow viewership and brand affinity, connect with their audiences in new ways, and fully protect their assets by operating in a secure environment. Its easy to scale resources as needed to address peaks in demand, whether anticipated or not, and tap into massive economies of scale across workgroups and departments.

And the flexibility and elasticity of cloud services enables media organizations to maximize the value of their assets by expanding to new outlets. They can repurpose material to exploit new revenue streams and grow brand affinity across a broader range of viewers by making content available everywhere they want to consume it, whether on TV, online, or on a mobile device.

A VOTE FOR THE CLOUD

Its no surprise that the inaugural Avid Customer Association (ACA) Vote, which gave Avids customer community the unprecedented opportunity to directly influence Avids future offerings, revealed that the vast majority of media professionals (71.7 percent) are considering moving some part of their infrastructure or workflow to the cloud over the next two yearsthe most popular being remote access workflows (15.8 percent). However, just 4.8 percent are considering moving their entire infrastructure and workflow to the cloud, highlighting the important role that hybrid cloud deployment models will play in the media industrys future.

Thats why Avid is leading the media industry to a reality of full-scale media production in the cloud. Media organizations have the complete flexibility to create, distribute and monetize their content using the deployment type that works best for themon premises, private data center, public cloud, or hybrid.

At Avid Connect 2017, we announced that the MediaCentral Platform is now cloud-enabled, giving media organizations greater efficiency, flexibility and agility to meet todays most pressing media production challenges. With new cloud-based client applications, media services and infrastructure on demand, they can deploy the platform, services and applications in more flexible ways.

To help organizations easily transition their media production to the cloud, we also announced that weve selected Microsoft as Avids preferred public cloud partner. Well be working closely with Microsoft to offer innovative cloud solutions that work in concert with the Avid and Alliance Partner tools and services that our customers already use.

Weve chosen Microsoft Azure as our preferred cloud hosting platform because Microsoft provides a broad range of public cloud hosting and cloud service offerings that meet the needs and budget of any size media organization. With the worlds most secure data center environments, Microsoft can give media organizations peace of mind that their assets are protected and safe beyond the reach of any threat. And with Avid and Microsofts extensive cloud and media technology expertise, media organizations will be able to migrate existing production workloads to the cloud at their own pace and architect new ways of working more efficiently.

As media organizations look to capitalize on the efficiency, agility, flexibility and scalability that the cloud facilitates, Avid is ready to help them on their journey. And at IBC 2017, well unveil cloud innovations and demonstrate how they can realize the many benefits of cloud-based media productionfrom more efficiency and agility across the media value chain, to less complexity and lower costs.

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Planning Your Journey to the Cloud - TV Technology

August 08, 2017 08:07 ET | Source: Marias Technology

COVINGTON, Ohio, Aug. 08, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Marias Technology, a provider of software testing, project management, integrations, implementation, hosting services, and more to the insurance industry, is now offering Microsoft Azure cloud hosting. Marias is a Cloud Connected Service Provider (CCSP) for Microsoft. Marias customers and prospects can now choose between having their systems and applications hosted on equipment in the Marias data center or in the Microsoft Cloud with Azure.

Were excited to add Microsofts Azure cloud hosting to our portfolio of products and services, said R. Christopher Haines, President and CEO of Marias. Azure gives us and our customers the best of both worlds. Some companies like the security of a known, accessible, geographic location. Others prefer the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. By incorporating Azure, we can now offer either or both and still provide the kind of responsive, personalize service our customers expect from us.

By offering Azure, Marias will give its customer the benefits of:

About Marias Technology

Marias Technology, headquartered in Covington, Ohio, is a privately held company, offering insurance technology services to property/casualty insurance companies. Services range from system testing and implementation, to software hosting and management services, as well as IT management on-demand. For more information, please visit http://www.mariastechnology.com, email info@mariastechnology.com, or call 866-611-2212.

Covington, Ohio, UNITED STATES

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Marias Technology adds Microsoft Azure to its Hosting Services - GlobeNewswire (press release)