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How ISG handles HIPAA compliance

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Health care data is heavily monitored in the U.S. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act has very strict regulatory standards about how this kind of information can be handled. One wrong decision could result in some hefty fines, even if the person or organization didn’t know they were making a mistake. The American Medical Association has stated that even accidentally violating HIPAA could cost a medical facility up to $50,000 per violation.

Clearly, making a mistake when handling medical records isn’t an option, which is why ISG Technology works with health care providers to ensure they don’t stumble. But what exactly can ISG do for you?

“Accidentally violating HIPAA could cost a medical facility up to $50,000 per violation.”

Issues with security aren’t always apparent

The main advantage of partnering with ISG is that we can help you get ready for an actual HIPAA compliance audit by zeroing in on problems you might not even notice.

One of the main issues our engineers run into when assessing a hospital’s network is the fact that security credentials often aren’t taken as seriously as they should be. Basically, employees who only need to view certain kinds of data are often able to access information they shouldn’t be able to see. In an average hospital network, only about two or three employees should be given admin privileges. However, ISG experts often come into an assessment and find that 100 workers in a 700-user system will have domain admin accounts.

This is a problem because it creates a huge number of entry points for a hacker who can socially engineer her way into accessing one of these accounts. According to past experience recounted by security firm Social-Engineer, more than two-thirds of employees will provide a stranger with their information such as their birthday, Social Security number or their personal employee ID. A hacker could easily call into this hospital and use this information to trick a staff member into giving them login credentials to an admin account, thereby allowing the criminal free reign over a network.

Hackers use social engineering to get data. Sometimes, accessing private information is as easy as asking for it.

ISG can help you fix these problems and pass an audit

HIPAA audits are extremely comprehensive, and getting a perfect score is next to impossible. In fact, as the above example shows, health care facilities often have numerous issues that they don’t even know about, which can decrease an organization’s standing if an auditor were to discover these problems.

ISG can help these facilities decrease the number of red flags to a manageable and reasonable number, thereby increasing the chances of passing an inspection. Health care data is extremely private, and ensuring its safety should be a top priority.


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How does culture affect hybrid IT integration?

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The culture you have created at your business should be something you are constantly evaluating. Not only does it affect employee retention and recruiting, it also has major repercussions when attempting to implement a hybrid IT solution. Blending your own IT team’s services with that of an outside provider is never a completely smooth process, but having a poor internal culture can make it even bumpier than it has to be.

That said, culture does not exactly have a quantifiable metric, so deciding whether or not your employees are ready for this kind of service can be difficult. What does an office that is prepared for hybrid IT integration look like, and what can you do to get your workers to that position? Let’s find out:

“IT departments have become overwhelmed.”

Your IT team hasn’t failed

A good place to start with a hybrid IT integration is to make sure everyone understands that your internal IT department is not at fault here. Many employees jump to the conclusion that contracting a managed service provider to handle certain functions is the first step toward fully outsourcing IT. As an administrator, it is your job to quell these notions.

With the massive increase in technological reliance in recent years, IT departments have become overwhelmed. In fact, Robert Half Technology found in a study that CIOs believed their tech teams to be understaffed by about 42 percent. Explaining that this integration of hybrid IT is to allow your internal department to focus on future goals rather than putting out daily fires can help quell any panic from employees.

Emphasize innovation from the top

Another reason employees are hesitant about hybrid IT is the fact that they probably have gotten used to the old way of doing things. In fact, getting employees out of a rut is actually one of the best benefits of this service. Shaking things up from time to time helps fight complacency, but it has to come from the top of your organization. This means getting all executives on board and actively engaged in this transition.

If not, you could become part of the roughly 90 percent of respondents in a recent Hitachi Consulting report that stated legacy systems were getting in the way of innovation and growth. Innovation should be a major part of any company’s business model, and hybrid IT can help you work toward it.

Innovation is a key part of business. Hybrid IT can help with innovation.

Be specific with what will need to happen

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, administrators need to keep employees as informed as possible about this transition. This starts by being specific about what operations will have to be moved when discussing the integration with your current IT team. Just saying “we need to move to the cloud” is not good enough.

On top of that, you’re going to need to be extremely transparent with the rest of your employees. Backlash from workers is very common in these situations, and the only way to minimize this is to make sure everyone knows what’s going on and why these operations are changing.

Hybrid IT is certainly a deviation from the norm, but that’s the whole point. Change is a good thing if handled correctly, so make sure you choose a solid managed service provider to get the job done right. ISG Technology’s years of experience integrating hybrid IT can help make sure your transition is as pain free as possible.





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Tech in law

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Technology today is all about doing more with less, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the legal industry. This sector’s market in the United States has been valued by the Legal Executive Institute to be worth around $437 billion, and with so much money invested, administrators in this field are doing everything they can to streamline the legal process. But what kind of technologies are law firms adopting?

“The cloud has quite a lot of benefits for those working within law.”

The cloud and e-discovery

Like in every other industry, the cloud has quite a lot of benefits for those working within law. Although this technology has a wide range of uses, perhaps the most relevant for legal firms is its ability to quickly and efficiently implement e-discovery applications.

When legal proceedings begin, lawyers start what is called the discovery process. As the name entails, this is where employees at the law firm comb through hundreds or thousands of documents in order to uncover any wrongdoing and to get to the heart of the matter. This is often an extremely inefficient way to handle discovery, and can very easily result in a worker missing a crucial piece of evidence.

Computers are better at discovery than people. Computers never skip a sentence or fall asleep on the job.

E-discovery applications work to cut through this process by using specific searching algorithms to find what the lawyers are looking for. Computers are infinitely better than humans at searching large amounts of data, which is why many law firms have opted to include this technology in their arsenals. However, when choosing to work with e-discovery applications, these organizations have to make a choice between on-premises computing or accessing this technology through the cloud.

Even though e-discovery is revolutionizing the legal industry, it has also increased the risk of a data breach. These documents are often extremely private and contain personal data that a hacker could later use for personal gain. This need to keep information secret certainly isn’t specific to law, but it’s something that is keeping many firms out of the cloud.

However, as many experts have noted, the cloud really isn’t as unsafe as many believe it to be. In fact, Big Law Business contributors Daniel Garrie and Yoav M. Griver stressed that on-premises computing systems can be hacked just as easily as the cloud. Considering the initial costs associated with setting up an in-house computing solution, avoiding the cloud because of a false sense of danger is a mistake.

Contract management software

Another technology a lot of law firms are seeing the benefits of is contract management software. This is a platform through which administrators can easily view the progress of each contract they have created. Modifications can be made quickly and easily to unsigned contracts, allowing everyone with access to the system the opportunity to read and comment on the exact same document. Lawyers can even view how well signers are following up on their obligations on existing contracts.

That said, perhaps the most interesting part of this technology is its ability to manage digital signatures. One of the biggest issues holding legal firms back from adopting more advanced solutions is the fact that a physical ink signature is seen to hold more weight in court than a digital one. This viewpoint is rapidly changing, however, thanks in part to contract management software.

BYOD

The bring-your-own-device trend is sweeping just about every industry, whether company administrators know about it or not. In fact, a Gartner study found that around 37 percent of people currently using their own gadget for work purposes don’t currently have permission. Considering how people often don’t protect their mobile devices, this is an absolute nightmare for the IT department.

In fact, quite a lot of organizations have had to deal with hackers due to the increased use of personal gadgets for work purposes. A study conducted by IDG Research Services discovered that just under three-quarters of respondents saw a data breach event as a result of poor cybersecurity measures concerning mobile devices.

That said, BYOD has some amazing benefits for legal firms. Lawyers often meet with clients outside of the office, and carrying around important documents is cumbersome and can result in lost or stolen client information. What’s more, other staffers who aren’t lawyers are seeing similar advantages. While this is good in terms of flexibility and mobility of the workers, it’s also putting a major strain on the IT team. Employees should be able to use their own devices to access company data, but only after having implementing certain safety guidelines.

This is why any organization wishing to ensure the security of company records should contact an ISG Technology BYOD specialist. Our experts have years of experience with this trend, and we know what it takes to keep a law firm’s data safe.

What do you need to do to move to the cloud?

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Technological development often moves so fast that companies have trouble keeping up. The cloud is one of these advancements, where it feels like just yesterday the service was new and untested. But the cloud has been around for a while now, and its worth has been proven time and again. In fact, the cloud is so useful that a Spiceworks survey found that 93 percent of respondents were using it for at least one function.

That said, there are still a lot of organizations that haven’t included a cloud solution in their IT strategy. Many of these businesses want to make the move, but they aren’t sure where to start. To that effect, let’s discuss what you need to do before you can make a move to the cloud:

Know your workload

As with any other change in IT protocol, the first step here is to ensure that you know as much as you can about your current workload. For a movement to the cloud, this means figuring out just how many of your operations have been virtualized so far. Transitioning these kinds of tasks to a cloud environment is much easier than doing so for a non-virtualized workload, so you should also be looking to see if you can virtualize more than you already do.

The hard part of this step is that no one can tell you what your workload looks like. Each company is different, and you’ll need to investigate and speak with your internal IT team in order to get all the details you need. This might end up taking up the most time out of these steps, but it’s more than worth it.

“Should you choose public or private?”

Learn about the different kinds of cloud

Now that you have a deep understanding of the data and workloads you want to transition, it’s time to start thinking about the type of cloud you want to be working with. Basically, this is going to boil down to two distinct options: a public or a private cloud. A lot of people like to include colocation into this discussion, and while this service is certainly beneficial for many clients, it technically isn’t part of the cloud.

That aside, should you choose public or private? Well, the answer to this isn’t that simple as they both have advantages and disadvantages. The public cloud is incredibly popular across multiple industries for the lower cost that comes from sharing resources between separate organizations. In fact, Gartner predicted the public cloud services market to hit $204 billion sometime this year. That said, because these computing resources are shared, many in the industry have noted that public cloud options have certain security issues. This isn’t to say that the public cloud is unsafe. Rather, it’s less secure than the private cloud, which is this service’s main advantage

Because private clouds are – by nature – built with a specific client in mind, they are often viewed as the most secure cloud option. Having your own private cloud also has some benefits in terms of control over the server, which is something a lot of organizations want. On the other hand, all of these benefits come at a high initial cost.

Do you really need private cloud services?Which is best for your company?

Understand your security posture and need for control

There’s no perfect cloud solution that fits all industries and business models, and as such you’ll need to figure out what your company can afford and whether or not you really need the control of your own private cloud. Some administrators who need to be heavily involved in their cloud infrastructure often opt for a private cloud. If you don’t need to be this hands-on and aren’t looking to spend a lot of money up front, the public cloud is probably for you.

In a similar vein, it can be hard for administrators to realize the reality of their security situation. These officials sometimes jump to the conclusion that less security means no security, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The public cloud is a perfectly viable option for keeping your data safe, and it shouldn’t be viewed as a dangerous option just because the private cloud is more secure.

Migration is work

Regardless of which cloud you end up choosing, or even if you go with a combination of the two for a hybrid cloud environment, it’s important to remember that this transition is going to take a lot of time and effort. That’s not to say this process isn’t absolutely worth it, but administrators need to know that moving to the cloud requires a lot of skill and expertise.

This is why company leaders should look to partner with a knowledgeable cloud provider such as ISG Technology. Our cloud experts have years of experience in the field, and can help smooth the transition for your company and its IT workloads.

Tips to improve your facility's physical security

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A lot of companies tend to focus on digital data breaches when prepping their defenses. The quasi-magical nature of accessing information through a few lines of code and an investigation into a network’s security infrastructure can make cybercriminals seem like modern-day wizards. Despite their malicious intentions, it’s hard not to be impressed by the skills of hackers these days.

That said, the public’s fascination with digital hacking has allowed many administrators to shift their focus away from physical security. Cyber security is flashy and exciting, and as such many officials forget that improperly protecting the facility itself can lead to data breaches. Criminals don’t care how they get private information as long as they can make a profit from it, and they sometimes break into offices to steal what they need.

Although the notion of some outside criminal burglarizing your company is an unsettling thought, there are a few things administrators can do to ensure the physical security of their facilities.

“Administrators should look to authenticate employee identities as often as possible.”

The more levels of authentication, the better

Verification of a person’s identity and security credentials is absolutely vital to ensure the physical security of any office. The more barriers there are between the outside world and secure areas, the more chances a criminal has of slipping up and getting caught. Administrators should look to authenticate employee identities as often as possible. We’ve already discussed the three ‘What’s’ of physical security in length, but their importance bears a quick recap:

  • What you have: These are the physical items that you use to gain access to an area, such as an ID card.
  • What you know: This has to do with phrases or codes you memorize to pass a security checkpoint, like a password.
  • What you are: Your physical attributes, such as your fingerprints or DNA, are extremely hard to forge. As such, they are great ways to authenticate your identity.

Ideally, every single part of a facility should have all three of these security measures. However, this simply isn’t feasible for more client-friendly areas. Regardless, administrators should install at least one method of authentication for even the least secure areas of the office. Areas that require higher levels of security should have as many authentication barriers as possible, with the optimal setup using a combination of all three.

Employee education is key

Once you’ve set up the physical infrastructure of your authentication systems, it’s time to train employees on the importance of proper security. Even the best biometric scanner in the world can’t prevent a worker from holding the door open for a nefarious stranger. It’s vital that staff members understand their role in all of this.

The first step in this is to train workers to see the difference between compassion and gullibility. Buzzing in an employee that forgot his or her ID badge is fine if this person has been working at the company for 10 years, but doing the same for an unknown “repair man” that left his credentials at home opens the office up to a breach.

What’s more, it’s important to stress that staff members are the last line of defense against theft. Security experts at Social-Engineer stated that they have a perfect record when it comes to physical break-ins at companies they test, with a portion of their success being attributed to impersonating employees. Workers need to know who has access to specific parts of the building, and they should be able to recognize an unfamiliar face if they’re in an area containing sensitive information or expensive equipment.

You’ll need security cameras, too

Finally, administrators intent on ensuring the physical security of their facilities need to invest in top-notch security cameras. In a perfect world, every company would have several employees with the sole job of watching security camera footage to ensure nefarious individuals don’t make their way into the office. Sadly, this isn’t possible for a majority of organizations, which is why surveillance equipment is generally used after a crime has taken place to identify the burglar.

Security camera footage can help track down robbers. Without security camera footage, burglars are just shadows in the night.

While this is still an incredibly useful function, it does pose the problem of video data storage. Cameras should be placed at all entrances and exits as well as in high-security areas. For larger facilities, this is going to result in hundreds of hours of footage every week.

All of this data is going to need to be put somewhere for a certain period of time, as break-ins aren’t always immediately apparent. Considering the fact that TechVision has estimated that companies generally double their data storage needs every 12 to 18 months, adding even more to the pile can add unneeded strain to a company’s IT department.

This is why company officials looking to decrease the chances of a burglary in their office should look to partner with ISG Technology’s physical security experts. Not only can we help set up authentication and surveillance systems, we can also store and manage the data created by cameras to ensure the recordings are quickly and easily accessible if a break-in were to occur.

Tips to improve your facility’s physical security

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A lot of companies tend to focus on digital data breaches when prepping their defenses. The quasi-magical nature of accessing information through a few lines of code and an investigation into a network’s security infrastructure can make cybercriminals seem like modern-day wizards. Despite their malicious intentions, it’s hard not to be impressed by the skills of hackers these days.

That said, the public’s fascination with digital hacking has allowed many administrators to shift their focus away from physical security. Cyber security is flashy and exciting, and as such many officials forget that improperly protecting the facility itself can lead to data breaches. Criminals don’t care how they get private information as long as they can make a profit from it, and they sometimes break into offices to steal what they need.

Although the notion of some outside criminal burglarizing your company is an unsettling thought, there are a few things administrators can do to ensure the physical security of their facilities.

“Administrators should look to authenticate employee identities as often as possible.”

The more levels of authentication, the better

Verification of a person’s identity and security credentials is absolutely vital to ensure the physical security of any office. The more barriers there are between the outside world and secure areas, the more chances a criminal has of slipping up and getting caught. Administrators should look to authenticate employee identities as often as possible. We’ve already discussed the three ‘What’s’ of physical security in length, but their importance bears a quick recap:

  • What you have: These are the physical items that you use to gain access to an area, such as an ID card.
  • What you know: This has to do with phrases or codes you memorize to pass a security checkpoint, like a password.
  • What you are: Your physical attributes, such as your fingerprints or DNA, are extremely hard to forge. As such, they are great ways to authenticate your identity.

Ideally, every single part of a facility should have all three of these security measures. However, this simply isn’t feasible for more client-friendly areas. Regardless, administrators should install at least one method of authentication for even the least secure areas of the office. Areas that require higher levels of security should have as many authentication barriers as possible, with the optimal setup using a combination of all three.

Employee education is key

Once you’ve set up the physical infrastructure of your authentication systems, it’s time to train employees on the importance of proper security. Even the best biometric scanner in the world can’t prevent a worker from holding the door open for a nefarious stranger. It’s vital that staff members understand their role in all of this.

The first step in this is to train workers to see the difference between compassion and gullibility. Buzzing in an employee that forgot his or her ID badge is fine if this person has been working at the company for 10 years, but doing the same for an unknown “repair man” that left his credentials at home opens the office up to a breach.

What’s more, it’s important to stress that staff members are the last line of defense against theft. Security experts at Social-Engineer stated that they have a perfect record when it comes to physical break-ins at companies they test, with a portion of their success being attributed to impersonating employees. Workers need to know who has access to specific parts of the building, and they should be able to recognize an unfamiliar face if they’re in an area containing sensitive information or expensive equipment.

You’ll need security cameras, too

Finally, administrators intent on ensuring the physical security of their facilities need to invest in top-notch security cameras. In a perfect world, every company would have several employees with the sole job of watching security camera footage to ensure nefarious individuals don’t make their way into the office. Sadly, this isn’t possible for a majority of organizations, which is why surveillance equipment is generally used after a crime has taken place to identify the burglar.

Security camera footage can help track down robbers. Without security camera footage, burglars are just shadows in the night.

While this is still an incredibly useful function, it does pose the problem of video data storage. Cameras should be placed at all entrances and exits as well as in high-security areas. For larger facilities, this is going to result in hundreds of hours of footage every week.

All of this data is going to need to be put somewhere for a certain period of time, as break-ins aren’t always immediately apparent. Considering the fact that TechVision has estimated that companies generally double their data storage needs every 12 to 18 months, adding even more to the pile can add unneeded strain to a company’s IT department.

This is why company officials looking to decrease the chances of a burglary in their office should look to partner with ISG Technology’s physical security experts. Not only can we help set up authentication and surveillance systems, we can also store and manage the data created by cameras to ensure the recordings are quickly and easily accessible if a break-in were to occur.

Colocation: Having your cake and eating it too (Part 1 of 2)

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With all of the information collected as a normal course of conducting business these days, it’s not surprising so many companies are beginning to focus more heavily on their data storage needs. Keeping things in line used to mean having a properly labeled file cabinet, but client information has evolved well beyond this.

As a solution to storage woes, many companies are beginning to lean toward colocation. This is where a business takes its own servers and stores them at an outside data center. Once the servers have been transported, the facility’s staff take care of requirements such as cooling and bandwidth. The popularity of this service has been exploding recently, and MarketsandMarkets has predicted the global colocation market to be hit more than $54 billion by 2020.

Colocation is an amazing innovation, so let’s take some time to discuss the advantages of this service in depth:

Colocation has a lot of benefits. Colocation just makes sense for many businesses.

Advantages you can expect

As touched on above, one of the biggest reasons companies make the switch is that they don’t have the ability to actually care for their servers. Whether it’s a concern about not having the proper staff to care for the machines or even just not having the physical space, colocation allows companies the unique opportunity to utilize data center services without actually building one themselves. CAPEX and OPEX costs such as these are severely reduced when implementing a colocation solution, allowing business administrators a little more breathing room in their budgets.

On top of receiving services like server cooling and power without directly having to pay for them on premises, companies that purchase a colocation plan are also likely guaranteed certain conditions under their service-level agreement. According to TechTarget’s Margaret Rouse, an SLA may include anything from uptime guarantees to performance benchmarks.

“Data is at the center of your business.”

Another amazing benefit of colocation is that the managed service providers within the data centers often also offer disaster recovery solutions. While this is certainly a great addition to a colocation package, it also means that a facility that provides disaster recovery is most likely safer than any other company you’ve ever dealt with. These professionals are experts at mitigating the risks of a disaster, which means your servers will be incredibly secure in their hands. Data is at the center of your business, and making sure that it’s safe should be your top priority.

ISG Technology can help you implement a solution

If you’re thinking of taking advantage of this amazing innovation, there’s been no better time than now. ISG Technology is a leading colocation expert, with years of experience satisfying the data storage needs of our clients. Even a single server can be relocated to an ISG Technology facility, making this service right for businesses of multiple sizes.

Although colocation has quite a lot of advantages, certain companies can benefit more than others by implementing such a solution. In the second part of this series, we’ll delve more deeply into which organizations can expect the most out this service.

What happens when your employees can't get to work?

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There was a time when waking up after a massive snowstorm was a joyous occasion. You’d sit down to watch TV or listen to the radio, hoping to hear your school’s name on a list of those closed for the day. There really wasn’t anything better in the winter than a snow day.

Sadly, however, those days are long gone. There are a lot of perks to being an adult, but one of the drawbacks is that having an entire office stay home for a few days when the weather gets rough simply isn’t an option.

That being said, working from home poses a lot of challenges too. Aside from having to deal with kids loudly enjoying their snow day, remotely accessing business applications can be difficult.

Forcing employees to come in during a blizzard is reckless

Many more thoughtless employers believe the answer to this problem to be simply requiring employees to get to work regardless of the weather conditions. While maintaining business continuity is incredibly important to profits, at the end of the day your employees are really the only irreplaceable part of your operation. With the U.S. Department of Transportation having found that more than 31 percent of fatal weather-related car crashes happened due to snow and ice between 2004 and 2013, requiring people to come into work under such conditions could prove to be deadly.

Don't force your workers to come in on a snowy day. Driving in the snow is dangerous.

What’s more, getting to the office in a blizzard can actually be illegal. During winter storm Jonas in January 2016, New York City and Long Island were forced to ban traveling. This included trains and city mass transit, and also driving in the tunnels and onto bridges. So not only is forcing employees to come in during a massive snow storm incredibly heartless, it could be illegal.

Working from home is a start, but there’s a catch

All this being said, your business likely can’t just stop operations for a few days while a storm blows over. Your clients and partners demand continuity, which means employees will have to work from home when the snow falls heavily. Certain business applications are absolutely vital to your company’s work, and yet quite a few of these systems may not be able to be accessed while at home. They require employees to be in the office when utilizing them, severely cutting down on what your employees can do while at home.

While this is clearly a major problem for employees that rely on mission-critical applications to get their work done, there are other logistics to be considered when implementing a work-from-home initiative in the wake of a disaster. According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of Americans have a broadband connection at home. While that’s still a majority, it shows a massive hurdle many companies will have to overcome when trying to maintain business continuity after a disaster. A proportion of your employees may not have high-speed Internet at home, which means their ability to stay productive is going to severely drop.

“Employers need to have a plan in place.”

Proper planning is vital

What all this means is that employers need to have a plan in place for the eventuality of workers being snowed in. This includes having a lengthy discussion with employees about their home situations, including their ability to connect to the Internet if the need for them to work from home should arise.

It also means that cloud-based disaster recovery is an absolute must for those businesses operating in colder climates. Blizzards are a very real threat to business continuity, and not being able to access your applications in the event of such a disaster could be costly to your operations.

Consult with an ISG Technology disaster recovery professional today and save yourself the headache of an adult snow day.

IT infrastructure challenges: Big data in healthcare

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One of the most common issues within the medical industry is deciding how to manage all of the data being generated on a near-constant basis. The amount of information created by hospitals and health clinics is astounding and isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

In general, big data is increasing at an accelerated rate across every industry. The IDC predicted in November 2015 that by 2019, spending on big data infrastructure and services would reach a total value of 48.6 billion, growing at a compound annual rate of 23 percent. This is a clear indication that organizations are learning that they need specific tools to measure and analyze the data they collect.

What is all of this information being used for? Let’s take an in-depth look at how the healthcare industry tackles big data:

“Data provides a good foundation for making value-based decisions.”

Value-based purchasing

Big data is helping the medical industry make better decisions about what tools are going to help patients the most. According to HealthcareITNews, the Affordable Care Act has created an incentive for hospitals to prove their value – but how to do that? Data, it turns out, is providing a good foundation for making these value-based decisions.

The value of pharmaceutical and medical devices can be quantified by determining how these tools are being used to help patients. For instance, an organization can measure quality-adjusted life years.

“At its core, big data is about massive amounts of electronic patient information that can be mined to yield tailored medical results,” Scott Zeger, director of HopkinsinHealth and a biostatistics professor at Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Health Data Management.

In other words, it all comes down to how medical tools are being used to increase the quality of life for patients and improve outcomes, which the analysis of big data can shed light on.

Medical instruments and pharmaceuticals are given value based on how they're used to improve outcomes.Medical instruments and pharmaceuticals are given value based on how they’re used to improve outcomes.

Storage issue: Genomic research

One challenge presented by big data is the question of where all the generated healthcare information is going to reside. The problem of storage is a very real one, especially in an industry that’s governed by compliance regulations and strict legal boundaries. To that end, the big data storage problem is nowhere as acute as it is with human genomic research.

A report published in July 2015 in the scientific journal PLoS Biology found that by 2025, between 100 million and 2 billion human genomes could be sequenced. This sequencing is going to create as many as 40 exabytes of data. To put that in perspective, here’s a fun fact: According to High Scalability, as of 2012, every word spoken by every human throughout history only adds up to about 5 exabytes of data. This creates an issue with data management within the healthcare space.

What’s the answer?

Some say that cloud infrastructure offers a ready answer to the challenges presented by big data in the healthcare industry. No matter how big your big data problems are, at ISG Technology, we can help you find solutions that will meet your needs. Whether you want to store your data in the cloud or in on-premises environments, our managed services experts will know what the answer is. Contact us today for more information.

Why should you invest in cloud-based UC?

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One of the most important aspects of conducting business is the ability to communicate easily, quickly and efficiently across the company and between partners. Promoting effective communication is critical to business operations, and the technology your employees use to conduct these communications – via messaging, email and voice – can make a real difference in the long run.

How do companies ensure in-house and external communication is as effective as it can be? Technology solutions can be utilized to fill the gaps where human interaction lacks. Email, phone and instant messaging are all key tools that companies can use to promote efficient, effective communication between teams and employees in general.

Therefore, investing in a unified communications strategy can be one of the most important decisions a CIO can make for his or her organization. Both on-premises and hosted UC tools offer a slew of advantages. For instance, implementing cloud-based UC solutions is a step in the right direction. In a 2015 survey of 451 IT executives, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found that 72 percent of respondents view collaboration as a top advantage of cloud computing. This is a clear indication that the benefits of UC are enhanced by the fact that these tools exist in the cloud.

“Both on-premises and hosted UC tools offer a slew of advantages.”

Top benefits

There are several key advantages to utilizing a hosted UC solution. Here are only a few:

  • Mobility: In today’s business landscape, everything is going mobile. Bring-your-own-device policies have become a key aspect of the technology strategy of many organizations. In addition, the fact that these tools are powered by the cloud makes it easier to take them with you wherever you go. Need to answer an email on the run? Or conduct a conference call from the airport? No problems with hosted UC solutions.
  • Productivity: Because cloud-based UC allows for this enhanced mobility, workers can boost their productivity to new levels. Being able to collaborate during the commute and from home has been known to increase the amount of work employees can accomplish. A 2015 study conducted by Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom found that call center employees who worked exclusively from home made 13.5 percent more phone calls than their office-bound counterparts, according to the Harvard Business Review.
  • Cost-effectiveness: Hosted solutions are cost-effective due to their cloud-based nature. Cloud computing itself has been proven to save organizations in both capital and operational expenses, and hosted UC is no different. Instead of having to invest in phone lines that won’t travel with your business if you have to move to a different office, outsourcing UC means you don’t have to pay extra to switch landlines.
Enhanced collaboration is possible with hosted UC solutions.Enhanced collaboration is possible with hosted UC solutions.

The coming year

As 2016 gets underway, industry analysts are hopeful about the future of UC. According to Information Age contributor Ben Rossi, organizations have the opportunity to gain better return on investment for their UC tools in the coming year. Once the challenges of security and utilization are surmounted, along with maintaining value and determining whether on-premises or hosted solutions are the best for a particular organization’s strategy, companies that adopt these kinds of tools will start to see real ROI.

Collaborate with ISG Technology today to gain the benefits from implementing cloud-based unified communications tools. We offer on-premises UC solutions, along with cloud-based tools made possible with our data center services.