A Decade of Technology – 2011

A Decade of Technology

Continuing our 10 year anniversary celebrations, this month we take a look at 2011.

The rise of 4G networks between 2010-2011 sparked a new wave of mobile innovation. Combined with the rise of smartphones, 4G created the opportunity for apps like Spotify, Twitter, Uber,  Google Maps, Snapchat, and many more to exist and thrive.

• The first Chromebooks with Chrome OS began shipping on June 15, 2011
• Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies on 5 October after a long battle with cancer
• Adobe launched Creative Cloud, marking the end of one software model and the beginning of another.
• Amazon launches a low-cost alternative to the iPad, the Kindle Fire tablet.
• Apple launches iMessage, enabling users to send text messages via Wi-Fi rather than by SMS.
• Uber was founded in 2009, but the app and ride-hailing service first launched in San Francisco in 2011.

In this year smartphones and tablets grew immensely, influential tech pioneers died, cyber-security cost companies billions of dollars, and Tech trends provided new tools and created new challenges.

Join us next month to explore the highlights of 2011

Win XP – Non-compliant & Open Liability

Information Technology Pros in the healthcare industry may want to get a head start on their spring cleaning. Microsoft extended support for Windows XP ends on April 8, 2014. After this date, Microsoft will not release any security patches or updates for Windows XP. This will effectively make Windows XP non-compliant with HIPAA / HITECHafter Microsoft support ends.

Goodbye XP

Windows XP was released August 24, 2001 and has been widely deployed in homes and corporate environments alike. In the Healthcare arena, XP may be found on workstations used by clinical staff, CT machines, and other critical medical devices.

Most of these devices are connected to the network to connect to EHR/EMR systems, so simply disconnecting them is not an option. In addition, many of these devices are running old and proprietary applications that may not run on a newer operating system such as Windows 7 or 8.

What can an IT pro do when faced with this dilemma? In an ideal world your systems would already be off XP or you would be well into a migration effort. However, some of us have inherited this problem and must find a solution that not only addresses this problem, but also does so in a cost effective manner. Ideally, you will even have the opportunity to make technical improvements in your infrastructure, enhance security and manageability of your systems, and provide your clinical staff with a more efficient computing environment.

Evaluate your current situation

Getting your vendors involved is very important at this stage. You will want to find out about how to move to newer versions of their software which are compatible with Windows 7 or beyond. If you have current maintenance you may just need to download their newest software and apply your testing process. If you are not in maintenance, you may face pricey upgrades to move to their new platform.

Another option may be to run the application on a terminal server and have your clients access the application via a remote desktop connection.

Lastly you will also want to do an assessment on your medical devices to see which of these systems may be impacted by the Windows XP “sunset”.

Your next steps are to evaluate your current workstations. Do they have the resources to run a newer version of Windows? If so you can exercise your volume licensing upgrade options, or purchase the proper licensing to upgrade your environment. A more likely scenario would be that you have old workstations that are overdue for replacement anyway, in which case, upgrading would not be practical.

You can look at simply replacing your desktops with new shiny boxes and work on your migration plan for applications and user data. Another option you may strongly consider is implementing a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).

Virtualization

Virtualization has been hugely successful in the server arena. This technology uses a hypervisor on top of the hardware that allows multiple copies of an operating system to share the resources of the hardware. In most applications, there is no penalty for running multiple servers on the same hardware if your environment is planned correctly.

One can do the same using VDI. You can run fifty maybe even one hundred desktops on one physical server. These desktops would share the fast CPU, memory, and storage of the physical server to give the end user a high performance-computing environment. You can repurpose your existing desktops to connect to your VDI setup, or you can deploy thin-clients to your endpoints.

VDI also will provide your staff with centralized management and control of your desktops. This will help your lean staff manage and maintain your environment effectively.

Bottom line

Now is the time to take action. Start working on your strategy for moving your computers and medical devices off Windows XP. Size up your vendor support for upgrading to a newer OS, get an inventory of your impacted devices, and evaluate how you will update your endpoints. Moving to a newer operating system will help you provide a more secure environment in your facility and ensure compliance with HIPAA / HITECH.

Google accounts for 25% – Internet traffic

The diversified range of new products being built and provided by Google now make the company accountable for nearly 25 percent of all Internet traffic, up from a mere 6 percent just three years ago, according to a new study. Based on measurements of end device and audience share, that makes the Internet company’s reach larger than Facebook, Netflix and Twitter combined, according to Deepfield, a big data and Internet infrastructure research firm.  Some 60 percent of all Internet end devices exchange traffic with Google servers during the course of an average day, said Deepfield, which conducted the ongoing study. The analysis includes computers and mobile devices as well as hundreds of varieties of game consoles, home media appliances and other embedded devices like Apple TV, Roku, Xbox 360 and mobile apps.

The data focus primarily on North America and cover roughly one-fifth of the U.S. consumer Internet, making it “the largest ongoing study of its kind,” the group said in a blog post.

Deepfield co-founder Craig Labovitz attributed the meteoric rise in traffic patterns to server growth at Google as well as the success of a range of products such as YouTube, which the company bought for US$1.65 billion in 2006, Android-based mobile devices and various Google cloud services like Google Drive.

Only Netflix has larger bandwidth, Deepfield claims, but Netflix peaks last for only a few hours each evening during prime time hours and during Netflix cache update periods in the morning.

“The odds are, if you have an Internet-connected device, at the end of the day it will be exchanging information with a Google server,” Labovitz said in an interview.

Google, for instance, has seen serious growth in its Android mobile operating system since its launch in 2008. At the company’s I/O developers conference in May, executives reported that the Android OS had 900 million users.

“While it is old news that Google is big, the sheer scale and dominance of Google in the Internet infrastructure has significant implications on network design and evolution,” Deepfield said.

The results, Labovitz said, speak to the growing trend of not just Google, but other major technology companies like Facebook, Netflix and Apple either building out their own networking infrastructure or relying on the hosting services of other companies like Amazon’s S3 cloud hosting.

The rise in Google’s presence online is strongly linked with the deployment of thousands of Google servers in Internet providers around the world, Deepfield said.

Growth of the company’s Google Global Cache (GGC) dedicated server program in the U.S. in particular is an important factor in the trends — Deepfield’s last large-scale study in 2010 only revealed GGC deployments mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

– See more at: http://itnews.com/internet-based-applications-and-services/64751/google-accounts-25-percent-all-internet-traffic-study?source=ITWNLE_nlt_networking_2013-07-24#sthash.Pp05zCXb.dpuf