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Education Reading Technology

Latest Read: The New Normal in IT

The New Normal in IT: How the Global Pandemic Changed Information Technology Forever by Gregory S. Smith. Gregory is CIO for the American Kidney Fund and previously served in the same role for Pew Charitable Trusts and the World Wildlife Fund.

The New Normal in IT: How the Global Pandemic Changed Information Technology Forever by Gregory S. Smith

He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a former adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. The New Normal in IT is part of Wiley’s CIO Series.

The pandemic certainly changed everything. The information technology industry was no exception. The downstream impacts placed tremendous pressure on IT teams to maintain service delivery as the world went home and Zoom entered our lexicon.

Reflecting upon this move away from the office, how have IT leaders communicated the change necessary now and moving forward? Change is indeed hard.

We all witnessed the fundamental shift regarding remote work. From optional to mandatory over the next 18 months. How many organizations scrambled like mad to secure and deploy to every employee a laptop?

Can you recall the immediate infrastructure upgrades stood up in weeks versus months? IT faced many critical challenges starting in March 2020. Yet, our IT infrastructure teams kept delivering in those early weeks in order to keep their organization alive and employees functioning.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Ransomware Smartphone Technology

Mobile ransomware in healthcare

After WannaCry mobile ransomware is infecting hospital-issued mobile phones and tablets.

mobile ransomwareMobile ransomware attacks in 2017 built upon the sharp increase from earlier years. This is simply malware that steals sensitive data or locks your smartphone permanently.

This is exactly like the WannaCry ransomware attacks that occurred in 2017.
Those same criminals will demand bitcoin payments before unlocking your device.

These mobile ransomware attacks on hospital-issued mobile devices carry risks of exposing PHI data. This is especially important if a hospital workforce employee is accessing PHI data on a personal device that is not secure.

Today healthcare needs Mobile Device Management (MDM) more than ever. Respectable MDM services install a “secure container” on a mobile device that ensures hospital data downloaded to a mobile device is stored in a secure, encrypted directory on the device. This can even prevent the user from copying the data from the container.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Google Innovation Milwaukee Network Technology

University cloud computing contracts

Did you hear about the university professor signed up for a cloud service and unknowingly left his department on the hook for two years of service beyond his grant….or the university who had more than 500,000 student records (social security, addresses and grades) hacked? Cloud computing poses special demands upon Universities who can no longer employ the same procurement process used to acquire computers and software since the 1980s.

Are you aware that today many Universities (and K12 School districts) use a popular email marketing program that sells contact information of students to vertical marketing firms who in turn re-sell them to other marketing and product companies?

Today’s aggressive marketplace and the business of cloud services has radically changed the procurement process. Many of us have a fiduciary duty to protect data of our students, research and institutions.  Regardless of how students freely give away their data on Facebook, our institution will still be held responsible to  protect all of our institution’s data.

My views on the impact of Cloud Computing in Higher Education have been slowly evolving. This past May I was given an incredible opportunity to further my learning by participating in an Engineering & Technology Short Course with the UCLA Extension.
Remember those “must-take classes” in college?  UCLA’s Contracting for Cloud Computing Services is one on my list of those opportunities you cannot afford to ignore.  My advice: Find your way to UCLA.

Again, I hope this can help as many people as possible understand the lessons taught in class.  Due to the nature of the beast they are in no specific order. They are all top level concerns:

BACKGROUND
For over a generation traditional desktop PC vendors focused on features and price. Since the late 1980s schools established trust in vendor’s products to conduct business, educate students and store student data. From floppy disks to magnetic tape all data was stored locally on campus.

Today’s globalized internet marketplace is radically different when compared to the modem era of computing. The cloud computing model represents a number of fundamental shifts including Software as a Service(SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) are well established.

And although it’s a bit ahead on the radar we should not overlook the quickly emerging SuperComputer as a Service. While there is no  standard acronym, there are established vendors like SGI’s Cyclone, Amazon’s Cluster Compute, IBM’s Watson, and with forthcoming merge between PiCloud and D-Wave‘s quantum computing….more options for High Performance Computing will be available to many smaller, lean and aggressive institutions.

These new services are directly tied to the “consumerization” of technology: advanced technologies at affordable price points. As a result the new focus is around access.  The shift to mobile computing via netbooks, smartphones and tablets is well underway, yet many school’s do not have a sufficient wireless infrastructure. Students, faculty and administrators are today carrying a laptop, smartphone and probably an iPad. Schools are struggling to to handle bandwidth demands of so many devices in concentrated areas around campus, from the Student Union to the ResHalls.

IMHO the tipping point with Cloud computing and digital devices is the convenience of access. Today many diverse schools have a campus community that simply demands anytime/anywhere access to data. And it’s no longer just email and web.  Its BIG data from data base research to the delivery of HD media. For better (or for worse) society has become trained to demand mobile solutions that easily integrate into the app economy and their mobile lifestyles.

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Design Education Innovation Tablet Technology

Welcome to the iPad’s Digital Golden Age

Few would imagine what creative minds at Apple and Pixar would invent when the iPad was introduced.  With compelling content and affordable mobile devices my children are growing up in the Golden Age of Pixar, Apple and Disney.  The idea of playing an old school ‘board game’ pales in comparison with the iPad’s interactive, digital game and adventure opportunities.  Beyond driving around Radiator Springs, I believe a gold mine awaits with education for all ages.  But for now….off to the Apple Store to pickup a Lightning and Mater.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Flat World Globalization Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest read: Corporate Agility

How do organizations compete today?  Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary New Model for Competing in a Flat World provides a good reference on how major US companies have adopted a new business model for competing in a flat world.

corporate agilityAfter reading Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century book series on globalization and the breakthrough work by Jerry Wind and Victor & William Fung in Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World.

I found chapters in Corporate Agility a fit perfectly to the above works.  Corporate Agility supports business case studies throughout the book that span a wide range of industries with lessons for all who are seeking new models for business in the 21st globalized century.

The strongest chapter is early in the book surrounding the shift in company buildings and the move to a mobile workforce that permits companies to break expensive building leases and create smaller ‘offices’ with limited administrative staff and resources.

I have experienced these efforts directly in working with clients who have been forced to trim staff and yet end up in an dry office complex with over 50% of their office cubes empty.

Actually I’m reminded of a PR company who hired temporary workers to “work” in all their empty cubes while a potential client made an office visit.  Needless to say they did not understand the basics of a company’s need for agility as described in the book.

I feel the early chapters of Corporate Agility is an expansion of The World Is Flat while the book’s case studies just touch the surface that is presented in detail by Competing in a Flat World.

Corporate Agility’s book website