“Hybrid,” is the answer. I’m talking about “on-prem vs cloud,” the bugaboo trick question that has plagued us for nearly a decade. What I mean by reframing the question like this is that – absent other details – the location and ownership of servers is…
It’s summertime – season of thunderstorms. Most days are punctuated with ominous clouds and distant thunder. Actual rain, however, is rare. The forecast is consistent – temperatures may spike up to uncomfortably hot in the afternoon, and there are low odds of a thunderstorm. I…
Earlier this month, an information security firm found a multi-terabyte dataset of personal information on at least 198 million American voters unsecured, in a world readable S3 bucket. They did the responsible thing and notified the owners, and then wrote a very accessible description of…
A very smart and well informed colleague recently shared a thought that disturbed me. I’m writing it here mostly to get it out of my head, and also in the hopes that the eminently quotable Admiral Rickover will once again be proved right: “Weaknesses overlooked…
The blockchain data structure (which is a part of, but distinct from the larger Blockchain ecosystem) consists, perhaps unsurprisingly, of an ordered series of “blocks.” In addition to a payload of data and a few other housekeeping values, each block (except the first one, the…
The blockchain technology ecosystem brings together a diverse set of codes and algorithms that have been developed over the past 50-ish years. It includes decades old cryptographic techniques like hashing and symmetric/asymmetric key encryption, and also includes relatively recent innovations related to distributed consensus. The…
In biotech these days, I hear a lot of talk about “unicorns.” Sometimes they are rare fancy unicorns … purple, or glittery. At Bio IT World, I found myself moderating a conversation that involved herds and farms of these imaginary animals. Of course, we were…
In my talk at Bio-IT World this year, I made some comments about “cloud” technologies that I think bear repeating. 2017 is somewhere in the middle of the second decade of the cloud. Of course, when I say “cloud,” I mean much more than mere…
Over the summer, I have the opportunity to think deeply about the ecosystem of technologies that go by the name “Blockchain.” I’m focusing particularly on how these might apply in a couple of different scientific and healthcare contexts. I plan to post snippets here from…
Last week, one of my favorite conferences celebrated its 15th year: Bio-IT World. This is one of only a few forums where my particular professional community comes together to share our experiences, re-connect, and to try to catch a glimpse of what the future might…