There are many cool iPad/iPhone apps, but I recently found one that is simple and elegant - Photosynth
Using your mobile device, you can snap photos of the world around you and Photosynth reassembles the images into a 3D panorama. I was amazed by the speed and accuracy of the photo stitching in the application.
Here are a few examples
Yosemite Valley
Tuolumne Meadows
Boulder Colorado
Photographing the world around you and creating an instant panorama on your mobile device.
That's cool!
The SCOTUS Healthcare Reform Decision
Healthcare reform requires a foundation of healthcare IT in order to be successful including:
*Universal adoption of EHRs
*Frictionless exchange of healthcare information with patient consent
*Widespread use of Personal Health Records
*Analytics to support quality and cost measurement
*Decision Support to deliver the right care at the right time
The SCOTUS decision to uphold the healthcare reform law ensures that these foundational components will still have urgency, since every provider organization will be motivated to implement them in order thrive in the healthcare marketplace of the future.
*Universal adoption of EHRs
*Frictionless exchange of healthcare information with patient consent
*Widespread use of Personal Health Records
*Analytics to support quality and cost measurement
*Decision Support to deliver the right care at the right time
The SCOTUS decision to uphold the healthcare reform law ensures that these foundational components will still have urgency, since every provider organization will be motivated to implement them in order thrive in the healthcare marketplace of the future.
Our Cancer Journey Week 27
We still get up at 5am each day to care for the chickens/guinea fowl, turn the compost, refill water/food, manage the woodlot, and ready our property for the llama (our new guard llama is pictured above) and alpacas which are arriving in a month.
Kathy generally keeps my schedule and is on the go 20 hours a day. Now that she's in the third week of radiation therapy, she's ready for sleep by 8:30pm.
She has no pain, swelling or discomfort (other than continued numbness in her feet which impacts her ability to stand for long periods), but the home stretch in our cancer journey is like the last few miles of a marathon. The joy of completion is offset by dwindling energy reserves and a desire for it to be over.
By July 31, the treatment phase of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation will be done. We hope that the miracle of remission will continue for many years to come. However, it is clear that as the journey ends, the celebratory dancing will have to wait until the fatigue, the emotional drain, and residual numbness resolve with time.
Radiation therapy is far more benign than chemotherapy, but daily dosing feels unrelenting. All will be well and the exhaustion will be replaced by endless energy as our barnyard expands with the animals and plants we've envisioned.
The Compliance Consensus
Per my previous blogs about the Summer of Compliance, we completed our multi-week joint IS/Compliance planning effort today.
To recap, first we listed regulatory and compliance risks and the policies/technologies needed to mitigate them. We then assigned these projects to 3 work teams to prioritize, estimate level of effort, and assign risk scores.
We then examined the total costs necessary to complete the prioritized projects.
The end result was that we identified 55 projects with $7.8 million dollars in capital costs. Our FY13 capital budget for security/compliance related projects is $4.2 million so we had to reduce the list of projects by $3.6 million.
The end result is that we identified malware controls as the highest priority, followed by mobile device encryption. All projects related to these general categories will be done first.
Other key items are data loss prevention for emails sent to commercial email providers, blocking of cloud storage services, restriction on outbound internet traffic (machines sending data to unauthorized organizations), and adaptive authentication.
Items to consider deferring due to capital expense include additional e-discovery infrastructure, network access control technologies, and enterprise mobile device management applications. These are desirable and likely will be done next year.
The end result of this exercise - a jointly agreed upon list of priorities, budgets, and timelines for compliance work over the next year.
With a mutual understanding of the time, scope, and resources, we can triage any new requests with the perspective of the work we've already agreed to do. Given that time and resources are known, adding scope means taking something off the list.
I look forward to the year ahead and policy/technology work needed to ensure we not only follow standard practices, but best practices.
To recap, first we listed regulatory and compliance risks and the policies/technologies needed to mitigate them. We then assigned these projects to 3 work teams to prioritize, estimate level of effort, and assign risk scores.
We then examined the total costs necessary to complete the prioritized projects.
The end result was that we identified 55 projects with $7.8 million dollars in capital costs. Our FY13 capital budget for security/compliance related projects is $4.2 million so we had to reduce the list of projects by $3.6 million.
The end result is that we identified malware controls as the highest priority, followed by mobile device encryption. All projects related to these general categories will be done first.
Other key items are data loss prevention for emails sent to commercial email providers, blocking of cloud storage services, restriction on outbound internet traffic (machines sending data to unauthorized organizations), and adaptive authentication.
Items to consider deferring due to capital expense include additional e-discovery infrastructure, network access control technologies, and enterprise mobile device management applications. These are desirable and likely will be done next year.
The end result of this exercise - a jointly agreed upon list of priorities, budgets, and timelines for compliance work over the next year.
With a mutual understanding of the time, scope, and resources, we can triage any new requests with the perspective of the work we've already agreed to do. Given that time and resources are known, adding scope means taking something off the list.
I look forward to the year ahead and policy/technology work needed to ensure we not only follow standard practices, but best practices.
Outbound Spam Blocking
Here's a new twist on the Spam problem.
What if one of your users falls prey to a phishing scam and enters their username/password into a hacker's website?
The hacker then logs into that user's email account and sends spam with your corporate return address.
AOL, Yahoo, Comcast and other commercial email providers blacklist your domain so no email flows to commercial addresses.
In our case, this happened briefly.
We first contacted all the major commercial email providers to inform them that we are a legitimate business and not a spammer.
We checked blacklist sites to ensure we were not flagged as a spammer (or contacted those services/companies which had marked us as such)
To prevent the problem from recurring, we enhanced our Proofpoint email appliance as follows:
If a message is sent that has a spam score of 100 and has more than 25 recipients take the following actions, we
1. Quarantine the message
2. Send an alert to the user to contact the IS Support center to make sure there account has not been compromised
3. Alert the messaging team of the quarantined message for remediation
Who would have thought that a single user, falling prey to phishing scheme, could result in the blocking of commercial email flow?
The internet can be a swamp of malware and malcontents!
What if one of your users falls prey to a phishing scam and enters their username/password into a hacker's website?
The hacker then logs into that user's email account and sends spam with your corporate return address.
AOL, Yahoo, Comcast and other commercial email providers blacklist your domain so no email flows to commercial addresses.
In our case, this happened briefly.
We first contacted all the major commercial email providers to inform them that we are a legitimate business and not a spammer.
We checked blacklist sites to ensure we were not flagged as a spammer (or contacted those services/companies which had marked us as such)
To prevent the problem from recurring, we enhanced our Proofpoint email appliance as follows:
If a message is sent that has a spam score of 100 and has more than 25 recipients take the following actions, we
1. Quarantine the message
2. Send an alert to the user to contact the IS Support center to make sure there account has not been compromised
3. Alert the messaging team of the quarantined message for remediation
Who would have thought that a single user, falling prey to phishing scheme, could result in the blocking of commercial email flow?
The internet can be a swamp of malware and malcontents!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)