Securing our nation’s critical infrastructure may seem a bit “off topic” compared to the previous cybersecurity weeks posted. Involta is the critical infrastructure for clients in almost every critical sector. We provide infrastructure and services for very important vertical markets like healthcare, finance, and communications. Understanding this connection is an important insight to our role in maintaining both our client's and country's critical infrastructure. Here is how the role critical infrastructure plays in your daily routine.

The connected medical device market is booming, driven by the need to increase efficiency and accountability, lower treatment costs, and improve patient care. There are currently 3.7 million connected medical devices in use today and the number of remotely monitored medical patients will reach 50.2 million over the next four years. Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT) based medical devices patients can get out of the hospital more quickly and in some cases even skipping a stay altogether saving organizations money.

Medical devices do so much more than collect and display patient data. They can provide healthcare organizations and their patients with life-saving information in an instant. An alert from a patient’s insulin pump or heart monitor can be quickly sent to a physician or family member. For a premature baby girl, receiving and analyzing real-time data such as the potassium levels in her blood, her heart rate, and incubator temperature, the computing power of the cloud is capable of delivering medical insights that humans simply can’t.

Close the Refrigerator Door!”  OR “Were you Born in a Barn!”

Neither phrase seems to make you an IT expert and maybe you’ve heard those phrases a time or two before technology even came on the scene, from your Dad or Mom as you looked for that perfect leftover.

Now, more than ever, the healthcare industry is facing significant challenges in respect to IT infrastructure. 

Below is a brief list of what Involta's Chief Security Officer thinks should be top of mind for anyone in healthcare IT. 

Have you heard about DRaaS? It’s the first real game changing technology that has hit the market in the last 15 years. 

Below are two examples of how Involta has used DRaaS to improve both the efficiency and cost of clients’ disaster recovery plans.

The Interview: Joe Ross, Involta Sales Engineer

The Topic: Virtualization Trends

Virtualization has had a big impact on disaster recovery trends, hasn't it? Absolutely. The industry has gone from physical to virtual and now from virtual to automated virtualization. With each change came a new way of planning and opened the door for companies of different sizes to have robust DR plans for their entire IT infrastructure.

Last year was the 30^th anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. It would be easy to say that nuclear disasters wouldn’t happen near your business but the reality is this disaster was the result of human error, which occurs in all industries and businesses. Chernobyl was and remains a dramatic and impactful example of a disaster that can have long-lasting effects. However, in recent years, the diversity of incident types that can lead to disasters has changed enormously. Therefore, the need to plan, prepare, and practice has added significance.

Do you know where your cloud is?

Picking the right cloud provider is a crucial element in a company's overall infrastructure plan. Recently, some big name providers have been realigning their service offerings and doing away with cloud as a service. These realignments are leaving some companies questioning the reliability of their cloud provider. If you are planning a move to the cloud, consider the following to be the most important things to look at in a cloud service provider.

Data and technology are essential – but expensive – components of any modern enterprise.

With the proliferation of data, the complexity of privacy and security regulations, and the ever-growing number of high-profile data breaches making headlines (and giving CIOs nightmares), building a private data center may seem like a logical IT solution for your enterprise.

The advantages of a data center compared to an ad hoc facility are numerous: