By Howard Oliver, What If What Next

Howard: Tell us about BoardSuite. and your involvement with it.

Oscar:  BoardSuite is a (www.boardsuite.co), freemium on-demand board portal that allows organizations the ability to manage, organize and share their confidential corporate information in a secured environment. We confidently provide board members and advisors with access to their organization’s portal wherever they are, whenever they need it, securely and reliably.

As an on-demand, SaaS-based portal, BoardSuite is designed to protect an organization’s sensitive information at the board of directors’ level, while facilitating necessary workflow processes safely and securely, regardless of user location. The portal sends notifications and provides guidance on good governance in response to actions taken in the system by role-based permissions. As such, it is an invaluable tool for ensuring effective and transparent corporate governance.

As a board portal houses confidential data, the most valuable asset to any company, it was paramount that BoardSuite engaged a Canadian managed hosting company that could fully support our application and address the needs of companies with strict security and compliance requirements.

Howard: Why would Canadian companies and not-for-profit organizations, who are your customers and your partners, be concerned about hosting their data in Canada?

Oscar: Canadians in general are concerned where that information is – namely within our borders. Business people have additional parameters: the continuity of their business and the integrity of their Corporate Minutes Book. They are also mandated to comply with the Canadian Privacy Act. The Directors/Owners/Operators I speak to are given advice from counsel to host in Canada exclusively. Hosting out of the country makes them privy to other jurisdictions that are not as privacy friendly as in Canada. For example, in the United States SEC regulations and other legislation are much more stringent with specific rights of access to third parties as opposed to what we have in Canada.

Howard: Can you talk more about other Canada legislation on a national and provincial level?

Oscar: Most organizations go under the Canadian Privacy Act.  Our financial clients in the insurance industry and banking face stuffer rules. They are regulated by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) that requires them to make sure that Canadian corporate records are kept in the country.

Obviously, the Privacy Act here in Canada is one of the regulations that we follow from a user point of view. There are also 13 separate provincial regulations that mandate corporate data be located in Canada so as not to be under the subject of foreign law in the United States or any other country.

Howard: Can you discuss the European situation?

Oscar:  Again, we are not just managing personal information, we are managing the hosting the corporate records of an organization. There are some rules in Europe that are even more stringent than Canada has as far as privacy. Overall, Canada is considered the safest and most manageable place in the world to host corporate information. Better than most other jurisdictions. In 2011, KPMG issued an important report on the value of hosting in Canada. They made particular mention of maintenance of corporate data records in our country.

Howard: What issues are involved with finding a Canadian managed hosting company?

Oscar: The challenge we have in Canada in securing a managed hosting company is something like finding a cellular provider – the major providers can be hugely expensive and unresponsive. When we went with Tenzing the experience was rather surprising. The major supplier we were with beforehand was charging us over $10,000 dollars a month for a facility that was not certified with the promised standards we were required to have. Tenzing provided the same type of structured facility with the required certifications for 20% of the total cost. A huge benefit and savings. Since we went with them they have been highly engaged with us. We are not just a small potato for them. Importantly, everything they do is in Canada, and they can pinpoint and tell you exactly where things are. For example, they can tell you that their backup is in this province, and the service in another. This is very reassuring for our clients. This capability allowed us to be Trustee certified – a critical status for BoardSuite. We were required to pinpoint where our backup server was, and where our front-line servers were. With Tenzing it was a precise exercise.

I personally think that companies just don’t look hard enough. They think that – okay – I will go with Amazon or Google, but you will find that Canada has many excellent choices. If you go on LinkedIn you will see good discussions on this issue.

I must admit I’m a big advocate of Tenzing. Over the years we have been with them we have not only saved significant dollars in hosting but also and most importantly operate within a bank grade secure fully Canadian environment. They have found their sweet spot – serving Canadian companies and providing excellent, highly responsive service. They also have all the requisite hosting certification standards that the major players like the banks, Telus, Bell and Rogers require for managed hosting.

What is even more remarkable is they have spent the money to gain SAS 70 Type I and II (now called SSAE 16 Type II), PCI Compliant, and ISO 27001 information security certifications. In addition, Tenzing’s fully redundant infrastructure provides for complete backup and recovery of business critical information.

They have done far and beyond what is needed for SME and Large Enterprise hosting. They can handle companies of any size. A tremendous asset to us.

.

Howard: We have discussed Tenzing’s value as a partner because of their cost effectiveness, certifications, capabilities and their willingness to work with companies in Canada because they are in Canada. Any other issues that you would like to raise?

Oscar: If you are working on a consumer-based project – an app for example – it might not be critical in what country you host and importantly how close you really have to be with your managed hosting company. If on the other hand you are in the B2B space, dealing with enterprise clients as we do at BoardSuite, you must understand that the number one question you will encounter is data security. This is what is on the minds of the CEOs, CTOs and the boards they serve. And that means working with a Canadian based, highly responsive managed hosting company. The issue also comes up in the audit process. I know this to be true because I am asked these questions every day by BoardSuite customers.

Howard: Are there any other special capabilities that Tenzing has that works well for your customers?

Oscar: It is their durability – the ability to accommodate clients of any size. BoardSuite has been able to shift really quickly in our environment. It has happened on numerous occasions. They are very agile because they work with companies like us – it is their core competence. They understand what we are trying to do, and are keen to work with us. Their price points are also excellent. A Canadian solution at the right price – imagine! Frankly, it makes our solutions at BorardSuite economically viable and is helping us achieve the growth we anticipated.

By the way, our American clients have NO objection to their corporate records being hosted in Canada!

Howard: American clients?

Oscar: Yes. You have to understand that the Patriot Act in the US if far reaching in the US but not in Canada. Canada has demonstrated in recent court actions like Kim dot com, that US federal courts do not have jurisdiction in Canada when it comes to access to information in Canadian hosted information.

Howard: How can others do the same exploration your company did. Are there any useful organizations they can connect with?

Oscar: The Canada Cloud Network is a good option. The CCN has developed the world’s only Cloud industry ‘Technology Roadmap’, a framework to help businesses plan their Cloud migration. They have also organized a world-class Canadian industry cluster: CanadaCloud.net/Roadmap. They are a valuable resource worth looking into.

Howard: Okay so I think that covers it. Do you have any white papers that can expand upon our discussion?

Oscar: Yes. BoardSuite and Tenzing have released a white paper titled “Putting Trust in the Cloud: How a board of directors portal enables the secure exchange of information”. It provides full details of Cloud security processes and considerations, highlighting the distinctive needs of a board portal. The white paper is available for free download at http://www.tenzing.com/resource-center.asp or www.boardsuite.co.

Howard: Thanks for this interesting interview.

About Tenzing Managed IT Services:

Founded in 1998, Tenzing is a managed hosting company trusted by leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers and Ecommerce systems integrators to deliver business critical applications to some of the world’s largest companies and most recognizable brands. Tenzing’s mission-critical hosting infrastructure, mature IT Service Management (ITSM) practices, and comprehensive application-level Service Level Agreements (SLAs), enable the reliable, secure, and scalable delivery of complex SaaS and Ecommerce applications. Tenzing is ISO 27001 and SAS 70 Type II certified with data centres in Toronto, Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C. For more information, visit www.tenzing.com.

About BoardSuite®

BoardSuite redefined the board portal for small and medium enterprises and not-for-profit organizations by providing a freemium SaaS-based solution to manage real-time access to corporate documents, collaboration tools and a marketplace of business services. The on-demand board portal empowers directors, officers and advisors to better manage risk, liability and compliance from a single point of entry within a secure, hosted application, resulting in effective and transparent corporate governance.

BoardSuite has received notable recognition within the online industry for its achievements. In July 2009, BoardSuite was selected as one of Canada’s leading Web 2.0 pioneers by KPMG and Backbone magazine at the PICK20 Awards, the only national roundup of Canada’s up and coming Web 2.0 pioneers who are leading the 2.0 evolution of the Web. And, in August 2009, BoardSuite was named by IDC as one of Canada’s Top Cloud Computing Solutions To Watch calling it a disruptive innovation in the board portal industry.

For more information, please engage with BoardSuite through any of the following social networks:

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/boardsuite

Twitter: http://twitter.com/boardsuite

Facebook: http://facebook.com/boardsuite

Manage Governance On Demand

http://www.boardsuite.co

Contact Information

Media Contacts:
Echo Communications (for Tenzing)
Lizanne McReelis
647-438-5414
lizanne@echo-communications.com
or
What If What Next  (for BoardSuite Corp.)
Howard Oliver
905-709-8582, 416-568-5254

holiver@whatifwhatnext.com

Here are the slides from all the presenters. It was a really high quality event with a highly engaged audience, so these are all highly recommended.

My theme of ‘Bring Your Own Doctor’ focused on how the consumerization of technology is going hand in hand with the increasingly distributed nature of personal information storage, aka ‘Personal Clouds’, and how this will impact the Canadian eHealth sector.

Note:

We are holding our own follow up workshop dedicated to this topic of Bring Your Own Doctor.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Doctor) will explore the impact of ‘Personal Clouds’ on E-Healthcare, and the potential for this ongoing trend of the ‘Consumerization’ of IT for helping tackle big industry issues.

Faced with growing resource scarcity challenges in particular the baby boomer retirement ticking bomb, Canadian Healthcare has the opportunity to pioneer world-class innovations in Healthcare to address these issues simply by harnessing what it already occurring. The proliferation of smartphones combined with the ubiquity of social networks like Facebook and Linkedin means that individuals themselves have never been better equipped and able to use technology for sharing information.

BYOD will explore how these new trends and tools can be used today in Canadian Healthcare through the lens of the ideas of Eric Topol, a famous author in this field via books such as the Creative Destruction of Medicine. He describes the exploding use of smartphones for everything “Personal Cloud” in nature, i.e. ‘All information about me, on my device of choice’.

Example applications of these ‘Personal Cloud EMRs’ includes ZenVault, and other similar earlier work includes the Microsoft Healthvault service, and this presentation summarizes the key features and technical architectures of how the service is achieved.

The more personal control of personal data is as inevitable as it sounds, and when occurring hand in hand with the equally inevitable progress of online Identity systems, will see the approach also become far more streamlined and technically superior to traditional ‘offline’ approaches. Via open standards like OAuth and REST, the Cloud is becoming a smoothly integrated data sharing environment in a manner that internal corporate IT has always struggled to achieve.

When E-Health is discussed it’s often with the conclusion that a big part of the challenge is having GP’s use record systems. They’re simply too busy treating patients to be concerned with the administrative record-keeping of it and also they’re adverse to new tools.

BYOD addresses this quite fundamentally, by simply empowering the user to do it for themselves. Who better and more motivated to keep their personal data up to date?

Instead GPs can be provided access to online tools that help them too – Google Apps for email for example to submit updates to the record via email, or social networks to help build online support communities for patient groups, among just a few of an infinite range of new and novel applications of the Cloud.

In short and in conclusion, the big part of the E-Healthcare challenge isn’t whether a GP can use a shiny new EMR but whether patients have access to GPs at all, and what they can do about it if they don’t. BYOD offers one shining light simply through more user empowerment and engagement and harnessing of market forces.

My presentation is ‘BYOD – Bring Your Own Doctor’. Here are the slides:

Download; BYOD Healthcare

Related articles

• BYOD – Bring Your Own Doctor (canadacloud.net)
• The Creative Destruction of Medicine (canadacloud.net)
• New white paper: BYOD – Bring Your Own Doctor (cloudbestpractices.net)

I confess, while it was interesting the real highlight for me was attending the basketball.

Courtesy of the Arachno team I attended one of the recent Nicks defeats of the Celtics, where being the tourist I was more star struck by the fact also in attendance were celebrities like Jake Gyllenhaal for who, never mind throwing me under the bus, my wife would drive it over me for him, so that’s a giggle.

Crowdsourcing the Role of Innovation in IT

The NATAS event was particularly good, kicked off by a keynote presentation from Tsvi Gal, CTO for Morgan Stanley.

Tsvi gave a great insight into the dry nature of tackling “doing more innovation in IT” in the ultra-conservative finance sector, suggesting key pearls of wisdom such as:

• Leverage crowdsourcing and social media to cultivate more ideas
• Have a workflow for progressing and rewarding ideas, the ‘Innovation Pipeline’
• Organize this workflow via relevant business categories: Revenue Generation, Cost Saving, Core Research, etc.
• Link these to real world problems and challenges the company faces around the world
• Encourage lots of ideas including those that don’t work

Although actually my favourite innovation nugget was from Graham Hill of Citibank (see below), who said:

The key formula to unlock more innovation is to reduce the cost of innovation failure. I.e. if the personal cost to the employee (reputation etc.) and the organizational cost (cash, resources etc.) is negligible for each attempt, then more attempts will be made.

We then discussed that within a context of DevOps and other new business/IT alignment models – Then we had pie and beans.

TOSCA – Open standards for Cloud Service Brokerage

There is a short write up of the conclusion to our panel session in this Waters Technology article (subscription required), where as the author describes there is a huge unmet demand for “Cloud Service Brokerage”, but that the market isn’t there yet because of a lack of open standards.

This is a shame as there is a clear business case and need for key service features such as the ability to burst out into hybrid and fully public Cloud services, in a secure and auditable manner.

Our panel session, consisting of the Cloud architects from Citibank, Credit Suisse and Lord Abbett provided a holistic overview of a procurement framework for banking firms to achieve this, such as:

• Having a clear business goal, and map this to the Cloud service models like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – So you know what you`re buying and why

• The role of Cloud Identity and also in a more granular form for Rights Management – Technologies like Rights Management can be baked in to Cloud environments to embed granular access control models
  

• The role of open standards - Organizations like ISO are starting to produce the early projects that will ultimately document Cloud standards, but these are all new activities, there is still a lack of practical how to documentation

Addressing this last point in particular was our motivation for joining the OASIS open standards organization, where we have been contributing to Cloud related standards work through iFOSSF, a USA-based non-profit.

OASIS is leading development of a number of the missing open standards for a Cloud marketplace, most notably TOSCA for the service orchestration and portability. Very understandable to this audience, given this is simply about automating the buying and selling of market trades, but for IT resources.

Our goal there is to help build capacity around implementing these open standards via FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), and applied in real-world scenarios like Telecenters for low-income areas to help address poverty and other societal needs.

We call this the ‘Open Cloud Ecosystem’ (OCE) and we’ll be reporting more on how this will be a central backbone to our Canada Cloud Roadmap.

Download : Canada Cloud Roadmap

We will continue to add more great content from a wide range of experts, so that ultimately this document offers a powerful roadmap template for planning an enterprise migration to the Cloud.

The Roadmap is also a framework for a channel partner program, where the solution journeys like BYOD will act to organize go to market sales campaigns.

 Join in – To feature your products and services in this campaign, join in our Roadmap group on Linkedin.

UPDATE: I am also presenting on this topic at the upcoming 13th annual eHealth Summit – Read more.

Mobile Big Data Cloud Computing

This will focus on the overall best practices for Mobile Big Data Cloud Computing, in particular focusing in on Google and the Cloud suite they offered to achieve this.

We describe this scenario in more detail in this short executive briefing white paper:

Download the white paper (7 page PDF):

BYOD – Bring Your Own Doctor

For example over here at Sheepdog our goal is to build one of Canada’s premier brands for expert Cloud consulting.

Central to this is development of the ‘Cloud Readiness Assessment’, a standardized process for helping your business understand where and how it could best exploit the trends of Cloud computing.

Total Economic Impact

The framework for planning the Cloud migration business case can be defined in terms that Forrester Consulting calls ‘Total Economic Impact’ (TEI).

Recently Google commissioned Forrester Research to identify the TEI (Total Economic Impact) of moving to Google Apps, polling around 600 mid-sized firms about their collaboration plans.

Download the report here:  The Google Apps TEI Report from Forrester Research, used to to plan the ROI of moving from a legacy messaging and collaboration platform to Google Apps. They describe how organizations have enjoyed a business improvement including:

• Break even within 1.4 months
• 329% risk-adjusted ROI
• A Net Present Value of over $10m following an investment of $400k

Planning your Cloud Roadmap – Cloud Readiness Assessment

A Cloud Readiness Assessment is a consulting engagement that analyzes your organization and its business requirements, and maps these to a Cloud strategy.

An ‘economic impact’ review is a great way to frame this exercise, so you can be clear about how the ROI will b e achieved, and importantly you can test for organizational needs through testing for your ‘readiness’ for Cloud services in different areas:

• Virtualization and business continuity
• Desktop and IT operations
• Unified Communications and staff productivity
• …

The exercise can include some very specific auditing work – For example an assessment of your Microsoft Office licencing situation. In some cases customers find they are paying for versions they aren’t using, in one case yielding $2.5m in annual savings.

If this is then followed by the additional cost savings and productivity benefits that Forrester describe, it’s clear how straight forward it is to plan a successful ROI from a Cloud migration.

The objective of the Canada Cloud Roadmap is to help flesh out the detail of  a number of these journeys. Desktop office software is but one of many scenarios where the same principle and process can be repeated.

With each of these different functional areas having their own self-contained TEI, then it’s possible to cherry pick just one or a combination of them, to assemble the Roadmap that best suits your organization.

Since moving to Canada I have become fascinated and passionate about the situation of how the country faces an ongoing poor rank for innovation and economic productivity, most notably the “D for Innovation’ report series the Conference Board have been running for a while.

They have just published a new announcement but a repeat of the same old facts – Below average performance for national innovation capacities and outputs, resulting in ongoing languishing at the bottom of the heap.

I find it an exciting challenge because basically I see the Cloud as the answer to this problem – A really good insight into why is conveyed from this recent post by Mayukh Gon, founder of one of Canada’s leading Cloud startups, SmartSignin.

The Cloud CIO

It’s a relevant answer because typically this challenge has been identified as key issues like a lack of investment in new technologies by Canadian small and medium sized businesses, there is more of a resistance to adoption in Canada, and so there is an associated lack of new business innovations that exploit its potential. More e-commerce, more application development, etc.

This combines painfully with a lack of investment capital too. Since the dot com crash the Canadian tech investment market has dried up, leaving only a few big players to feed the industry. With these including folks like Nortel and now RIM, this is also a tentative foundation.

From the Report Enabling Canada’s Technology Future:

“Technology investing in Canada is in a vicious cycle. When the tech bubble burst at the turn of the 21st century, investors in technology largely fled from Canadian venture capital markets, and to a very great extent they have not returned. The amount of venture capital invested in Canada fell from a high of $5.9 billion in 2000 to just $1.1 billion in 2010.”

In short it’s bleak and so not surprisingly the local CIO community isn’t as bountiful with their IT investments as their USA counterparts, there isn’t enough local product development to fuel their appetite. Understandable but equally we can see the nature of the broader challenge it presents, as the vicious cycle also translates into softer economic performance of their own businesses and then for Canada whole.

Rather than accept this paradox our goal is to jump start the problem – Some shot-in-the-arm programs to help deliver short term results in better financing of new Cloud tech innovations, along with facilitation sessions for CIOs.

Central to this shift is the transformation of IT through the Internet and Cloud Computing, combined with a broader shift to a more networked rather than hierarchical world.

I.e. Control of information, as much as the physical location, is also changing hands.

The MacLeans article provides a great summary of the fundamental drivers of this shift, most notably the use of smartphones as medical analysis devices that consumers themselves administer.

This will combine very powerfully with the ‘Personal Cloud EMRs’ we described at our own recent Toronto workshop Disruptive Business Models for Healthcare, echoing the sentiments described by Dr. Topol in his book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine.

In short there is a shift of information and its control from centralized bureaucratic systems run by large hospitals et al, to the consumers themselves as they begin owning and hosting their own Cloud-based data through tools like ZenVault.

As they do so they will also have an expanding range of tools for how to populate that record, which notably will also generate “Big Data”. A continuous stream of medical information about you, like your heart rate, blood pressure etc. will generate giga, tera and peta bytes of data.

Critically what the MacLeans article also nails is the innovation opportunities and exciting new business models that this data makes possible as well, in particular

“Crowdsourcing Clinical Trials” - Applying the large community effect to the data to drive meaningful conclusions about new healthcare treatments.

One example they suggest is how a smartphone app enables you to take a picture of a skin mole you might be worried about, that you upload to a community of specialists who turn around an analysis quickly for $5 per picture, and within 24 hours!

The Android Will See You Now

The article explains how there are a myriad of smartphone apps that can be used for medical analysis, also highlighting the entrepreneurial opportunity this presents. Phone platforms like Android enable the quick production of useful phone-based tools.

For example an application they showcase is the BANT app developed here in Toronto, at the Global Centre for E-Health Innovation, who also kindly hosted our workshop. They describe how the app connects an iPhone to a glucometer so that diabetics can track their blood sugar.

So there is tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurial software developers to create these key apps, and also device innovation.

The article describes how you can enhance the standard smartphones with more specific medical analysis gadgets and et voila, your own mini hospital.

For the data you generate to be useful ultimately it will need uploaded to the Cloud, where powerful Big Data Apps can then sift through it all and add conclusions and insights.

Related articles

• BYOD – Bring Your Own Doctor (canadacloud.net)
• Eric Topol gives Stephen Colbert ear exam, heart attack ringtones and other Colbert highlights (medcitynews.com)
• Eric Topol on The Colbert Show (scienceroll.com)