Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

As enterprises across industry verticals around the globe are drawn into the obvious benefits of adopting cloud computing to begin their own cloud journeys, IT management solution providers such as CA Technologies are a unique case study. They not only deploy cloud computing–based technologies and solutions within their organization and reap huge benefits in their business processes, they also deal with issues of supporting their offerings. Before the advent of the cloud, their offerings were mostly on-premise. Now such companies are moving these offerings to the new SaaS-based model, making them cloud ready, so to speak. In addition, large companies are always on the lookout for technology acquisitions which can augment their portfolios. This is where the startups part of the ecosystem and innovation become relevant, especially with reference to cloud computing. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Moving on to the topic of integration, when you put together your cloud strategy, there are a lot of different pieces that need to come together. How do you deal with integration? In terms of strategy, what do you do for integration? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What you are saying here is bio medical researchers would benefit from solutions, SaaS maybe, which can take the hard technical side out and enable them to focus on what they are trained to do.

Let me ask you a follow-up question. If you were to give some guidance to entrepreneurs who come from the software service world and want to help provide that infrastructure to the bio medical research community, where would you suggest they begin that exploration? What fields of biomedical science are most active at the cusp of computational modeling and biosciences? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What are the vendors that are involved in this process at HMS? What roles and responsibilities are the vendors playing, and how do you evaluate them and bring them in? What are some of your criteria for vendor evaluation?

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: While you manage the research infrastructure, are you also managing a lot of data that comes from these affiliated hospitals such as Massachusetts General or other partner hospitals? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dennis Hodges, CIO Of Inteva (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: That brings us to the final portion of this discussion where we focus on entrepreneurial opportunities in the cloud. You are managing not a $50 billion company, but you are managing a relatively large IT challenge. What are the main needs of your organization regarding cloud computing that you don’t find current vendors addressing properly? What are some of the entrepreneurial opportunities that you see ? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dennis Hodges, CIO Of Inteva (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma

SM: How concerned are you about securing and controlling your IT assets in the cloud?

DH: As in regard to what kind of assets do you to think will be in the cloud?

SM: Whatever is part of your cloud architecture. Let’s say you have all these analytics that are going to come on the cloud in short order. How do you secure data access when you have distributed users of analytics accessing from multiple touch points? Again, it’s a distributed security challenge right? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, Harvard Medical School (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

Healthcare and life sciences is a vertical that can gain tremendously from technological paradigm shifts such as cloud computing. Despite obvious deterrents in the form of data security and privacy, HIPPA, and the sheer volume of unstructured data in terms of storage, management, analytics and research, there is no dearth of opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs who are looking to overcome challenges and create solutions to benefit not only the medicos but also researchers dealing with complex life science scenarios. >>>