• Haven was founded to address the problem of escalating healthcare costs
• From the beginning, critics questioned exactly how Haven would tackle that issue
Because of both the collective power of its backers and Amazon’s gift for commercializing services and revolutionizing delivery models, hopes were high that Haven could tackle arguably the thorniest problem in healthcare: out of control costs. Continue reading “Haven’s Heathcare Ambitions Come to a Fast End”
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COVID-19 sent billions of students into a new virtual reality as schools in 192 countries closed their doors. At the pandemic’s peak, 1.6 billion students were impacted. Even the most well-funded school systems struggled to adjust, with technology platforms that faltered. In poorer systems, the lack of technology and connectivity meant many students’ education for the year effectively ended in March. Continue reading “COVID-19: The Digital Divide Drives Inequities in Virtual Learning”
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The JEDI battle lines are still as tightly drawn as when Microsoft was declared the winner in October 2019. Amazon didn’t waste any time to raise its continued objections after the Department of Defense (DoD) disclosed it was once again awarding the sought-after multi-billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to Microsoft. Posting a blog titled “JEDI: Why we will continue to protect this politically corrupted contract award,” AWS outlined some of the issues with both the initial award and the re-evaluation processes. Continue reading “AWS Continues Its JEDI Protest After the Pentagon Declares Microsoft the Winner (Again)”
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Amnesty International is issuing a warning that some of the new COVID-19 contact tracing apps may not just be an invasion of privacy but potentially put lives at risk. Contact tracing – the process of finding and notifying people who have interacted with an infected person so they can be tested and quarantine – is vital to allowing businesses, educational institutions, and governments to resume operations that are closer to normal even as the virus continues to spread. Continue reading “COVID-19: Some Countries Come Under Fire for the Potential Misuse of Contact Tracing Apps”
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• IBM is mapping its COVID-19 support efforts around seven major technology and business concerns relevant to clients during the outbreak, with business continuity and IT security being two key areas.
• Company executives think the move by so many organizations to remote work will accelerate major post-pandemic transformation projects.
The rapid shift of brick and mortar operations by enterprises and governments to a remote work model has placed technology companies front and center in the fight for business to survive. IT vendors and service providers are helping clients with everything from standing up new collaboration systems and providing critical connectivity to delivering AI-based tools to support customer communications with fewer call center resources. As one of the world’s largest providers of technology and professional and managed services, IBM has been leading a massive effort to help clients transition to and manage remote operations. Continue reading “COVID-19: IBM Helps Clients Protect their Digital Assets and Keep Newly Remote Operations Online During the Pandemic”
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• Hyperscale cloud providers report a surge in demand for both their on-demand infrastructure services and productivity and collaboration services
• Past experience is so far helping guide capacity planning but there are still some limitations that are impacting performance as some users and applications involved in critical healthcare and emergency services get priority
The COVID-19 pandemic is driving businesses in virtually every field to deploy a remote workforce model overnight. This shift comes with immediate need for cloud-based productivity and collaboration applications. Organizations are also looking to virtualize other elements of their infrastructures, and thus requiring more cloud capacity to support these changes. Continue reading “COVID-19: Hyperscalers Ramp Up, Clamp Down to Meet Soaring Demand”
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The COVID-19 outbreak is driving an overwhelming shift to virtual operations for many traditional enterprises and educational institutions. The mass migration to a remote workforce and distance learning exposes technology gaps and inspires some deeper thinking on ways in which organizations can apply innovation to their models. Can more work be done remotely on a longer-term basis? How can students with limited Internet access be connected in a cost-effective and efficient way? What transformational use cases can emerging technologies drive forward that could help resolve the pandemic and address other complex problems around the world? Continue reading “Cloud Rising: Hyperscale Providers Play a Crucial Role in the Race to Connect During the COVID-19 Outbreak”
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• Rometty, IBM’s first female CEO, is retiring after four decades at the company
• Her retirement was widely anticipated: the company’s previous two CEOs retired at age 60; Rometty is 62.
Ginni Rometty is ending her eight-year tenure as IBM’s chief executive this year. IBM named Arvind Krishna, currently senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software, as the new CEO. Jim Whitehurst, formerly the CEO of IBM’s newly acquired Red Hat, will take over as president. Rometty will stay on as executive chairman until the end of 2020. Continue reading “IBM Makes a Leadership Shift”
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• Two months after Amazon filed a protest with the courts over the JEDI contract award to Microsoft, the company asked a judge to suspend work on the project
• Amazon wants the court to halt work on JEDI while it considers whether the bid process was fair
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Fifteen years after the payment card industry settled on a single data security standard with PCI DSS, there are indications that too many organizations’ security practices haven’t risen to the level of maturity which would have been anticipated at this point. In Verizon’s annual survey of payment card industry security practices, only 37% of the 302 surveyed enterprises sustain full compliance with the 12 specifications outlined in PCI DSS consistently over time. Effectively, most organizations are focusing on meeting the basic requirements rather than developing consistent and effective security practices – not unlike a procrastinating student who is just looking to pass the test. Just 18% check to see if they are meeting PCI DSS specifications more often than what the standard mandates. Continue reading “Verizon Payment Security Research Exposes Execution Issues”
