VirtualHealth Technologies Announces Secure eHealth Agreement With DRM Security

Posted on Sep 11, 2009 in Records Management News

Read more here http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS133578+10-Sep-2009+PRN20090910

A step in the right direction

…” Cifra is inte­grated with the Secure eHealth Sys­tem Tray Noti­fier™ prod­uct that has been licensed to Pri­vate Access, Inc., a provider of web-based tools that allows patients and health­care pro­fes­sion­als to con­trol both the pri­vacy and acces­si­bil­ity of con­fi­den­tial per­sonal health records.”

About Cifra Cifra is secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion soft­ware, devel­oped by DRM Secu­rity, LLC that allows cus­tomers to securely store and share any type of dig­i­tal file. Cifra accom­plishes this func­tion­al­ity using tech­nol­ogy that allows the orig­i­nat­ing user to spec­ify doc­u­ment rights (view­ing, edit­ing, copy­ing, print­ing, com­ment­ing) for the recip­i­ent within the closed net­work design, which can be revoked or changed at any time even while the recip­i­ent is view­ing the con­tent on their own screen. Using Cifra’s secure viewer allows the sender to share vir­tu­ally any file type with a recip­i­ent with­out that file ever being saved to the recipient’s com­puter. Cifra also allows users to store files encrypted on a secure server. This robust appli­ca­tion also pro­vides instant mes­sag­ing chat with other users within a highly secure environment.

To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

Crown Records Management Acquires Athema Archiving In South Africa

Posted on Sep 9, 2009 in Records Management News

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/financial-services/2009090933305.htm

Crown Records Man­age­ment, the world’s num­ber one pri­vate busi­ness infor­ma­tion stor­age com­pany, announced the acqui­si­tion of Ath­ema Archiv­ing, a South African records man­age­ment busi­ness based in Johan­nes­burg, South Africa.

With the acqui­si­tion of this com­pany and highly-developed scan­ning oper­a­tion in South Africa, Crown’s clients will enjoy a full spec­trum of ser­vices rang­ing from imag­ing, data extrac­tion, elec­tronic media stor­age, secure and con­fi­den­tial waste destruc­tion and tra­di­tional doc­u­ment stor­age services.

Estab­lished in 1983, Crown Records Man­age­ment cur­rently serves clients in 52 coun­tries and brings its vast global knowl­edge and high-technology solu­tions to the South African mar­ket­place. Inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies pro­vide clients with Web-based sys­tems to retrieve records in stor­age, gen­er­ate cus­tomized reports, and access invoices and billing infor­ma­tion. Off-site data stor­age and host­ing ser­vices enable clients to access elec­tronic files on a secure, Web-based browser.

Flamely Fourie, who was pre­vi­ously based in Dubai, UAE, in charge of Crown’s records man­age­ment divi­sion, will over­see Crown South Africa’s records busi­ness. Fourie said, “I am excited about the growth poten­tial. We will be focus­ing on addi­tional scan­ning busi­ness, as well as more media stor­age and cer­ti­fied destruc­tion services.”

Crown’s Record Man­age­ment in South Africa, head­quar­tered in Johan­nes­burg, oper­ates and serves 300 clients through­out Dur­ban, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.

Philip Briton, Crown’s group vice pres­i­dent of Records Man­age­ment added, “This acqui­si­tion strength­ens our devel­op­ment pro­gram through­out the con­ti­nent. South Africa is cur­rently in the top five fastest grow­ing economies and Crown looks for­ward to serv­ing the needs of clients in the quickly grow­ing industry.”

To read more about Crown Records Man­age­ment in South Africa, please visit our Web site at www.crownrms.com/southafrica

- End -

Crown Records Man­age­ment is a divi­sion of the Crown World­wide Group which was estab­lished in 1965. In 1983, Crown real­ized there was a pro­found need for a com­pany to help man­age the explo­sion of phys­i­cal and elec­tronic busi­ness infor­ma­tion. Using its expe­ri­ence in secure stor­age, on-time deliv­ery and track­ing tech­nol­ogy, Crown began offer­ing tra­di­tional records man­age­ment ser­vices includ­ing stor­age, index­ing and destruc­tion of records.

As the company’s list of clients grew, the Crown Records Man­age­ment team expanded its range of ser­vices and tech­nolo­gies to meet its clients’ evolv­ing needs. Today, Crown serves large and small cor­po­ra­tions around the world, pro­vid­ing ser­vices rang­ing from stor­age of hard copies and elec­tronic busi­ness infor­ma­tion to scan­ning, imag­ing, data con­ver­sion, data host­ing, escrow and destruc­tion services.

Crown Records Man­age­ment man­ages more than 20,000,000 cubic feet of busi­ness records across 50 coun­tries, oper­at­ing from over 200 Man­age­ment Cen­ters. Crown has grown to become the num­ber one pri­vate com­pany in this field.

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary

Your Self Storage Competition

Posted on Sep 8, 2009 in Records Management News

http://self-storage-guru.blogspot.com/2009/09/office-records-storage.html

Office Records Stor­age Using Self Stor­age — Self Stor­age Tips and Advice 9-8-2009

Many times in busi­ness office records stor­age is a nec­es­sary evil. Hav­ing all of your records backed up can save you in the case of lit­i­ga­tion, nat­ural dis­as­ter, or any­thing else that can be unfore­seen. But you need to make sure that you go about it the right way in order to ensure that you are pro­tected, so what should you do?

You could store your records the old fash­ioned way by load­ing up boxes of paper­work or get­ting a few file cab­i­nets, but how safe is that from the unknown? Should your office expe­ri­ence a flood for exam­ple, your records could be lost for­ever. This is in addi­tion to the extra space that the boxes and file cab­i­nets will take up. At some point in time you may have to face the fact that you need a lit­tle bit of help with your office record stor­age needs.

There are many com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ize in office records stor­age and they can help you store your records whether your records are online, on paper, or both. Here’s how many of these com­pa­nies work:

• Pro­vide an assess­ment: Most com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ize in office records stor­age will come in and asses your record keep­ing needs. They will work side by side with you and show you what you are doing that is work­ing and what you are doing that is not work­ing. This is some­times free and some­times there is a fee it just depends on who you go with. Once the com­pany sees what they are work­ing with they can accu­rately tell you what level of ser­vice you will require.

• Orga­nize: An office records stor­age com­pany will go through with you and tell you what needs to be saved, what needs to be shred­ded, and what needs to be backed up both online and on paper. Many times there are doc­u­ments that sim­ply don’t need to be kept and these com­pa­nies can help you to pin­point what is not needed so that it can be sent to the shredder.

• Store your records: Once the com­pany has deter­mined what type of stor­age you need they can then offer you a solu­tion as to how to store it. Many com­pa­nies offer a ser­vice where they will store for you your records online and they will also store any paper doc­u­ments in a secure and tem­per­a­ture con­trolled envi­ron­ment. Many times it will be nec­es­sary for the com­pany to actu­ally scan paper doc­u­ments that are then stored online as well as on paper.

• Pro­vide you access: Once all of your records are stored the only job left of the office record stor­age com­pany is to pro­vide you access to the records should you ever need it.

Some­times it is just bet­ter to hire a pro­fes­sional and there is no one more able to han­dle your office records stor­age needs than a com­pany that does it on a daily basis for many dif­fer­ent clients. If you are sick of trip­ping over the file cab­i­nets and boxes full of unor­ga­nized papers, you too may want to call in the experts.

Find cli­mate con­trolled self stor­age units nation­wide at EasyStorageSearch.com.

To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary

Cloud Computing Simplified (to a degree)

Posted on Sep 8, 2009 in Records Management News

I found this to be some­what sim­ple depic­tion of this very inter­est­ing and grow­ing phenomenon.

CLOUD COMPUTING FROM WIKIPEDIA

Cloud com­put­ing is a style of com­put­ing in which dynam­i­cally scal­able and often vir­tu­al­ized resources are pro­vided as a ser­vice over the Inter­net. Users need not have knowl­edge of, exper­tise in, or con­trol over the tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture in the “cloud” that sup­ports them.

The con­cept gen­er­ally incor­po­rates com­bi­na­tions of the fol­low­ing: * infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice * plat­form as a ser­vice * soft­ware as a service

Other recent tech­nolo­gies that rely on the Inter­net to sat­isfy the com­put­ing needs of users. Cloud com­put­ing ser­vices often pro­vide com­mon busi­ness appli­ca­tions online that are accessed from a web browser, while the soft­ware and data are stored on the servers.

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Inter­net, based on how the Inter­net is depicted in com­puter net­work dia­grams and is an abstrac­tion for the com­plex infra­struc­ture it conceals.

Char­ac­ter­is­tics

Cloud com­put­ing cus­tomers do not gen­er­ally own the phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture serv­ing as host to the soft­ware plat­form in ques­tion. Instead, they avoid cap­i­tal expen­di­ture by rent­ing usage from a third-party provider. They con­sume resources as a ser­vice and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offer­ings employ the util­ity com­put­ing model, which is anal­o­gous to how tra­di­tional util­ity ser­vices (such as elec­tric­ity) are con­sumed, while oth­ers bill on a sub­scrip­tion basis. Shar­ing “per­ish­able and intan­gi­ble” com­put­ing power among mul­ti­ple ten­ants can improve uti­liza­tion rates, as servers are not unnec­es­sar­ily left idle (which can reduce costs sig­nif­i­cantly while increas­ing the speed of appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment). A side effect of this approach is that over­all com­puter usage rises dra­mat­i­cally, as cus­tomers do not have to engi­neer for peak load limits.[15] Addi­tion­ally, “increased high-speed band­width” makes it pos­si­ble to receive the same response times from cen­tral­ized infra­struc­ture at other sites.

Eco­nom­ics

Cloud com­put­ing users can avoid cap­i­tal expen­di­ture (CapEx) on hard­ware, soft­ware, and ser­vices when they pay a provider only for what they use. Con­sump­tion is usu­ally billed on a util­ity (e.g. resources con­sumed, like elec­tric­ity) or sub­scrip­tion (e.g. time based, like a news­pa­per) basis with lit­tle or no upfront cost. A few cloud providers are now begin­ning to offer the ser­vice for a flat monthly fee as opposed to on a util­ity billing basis. Other ben­e­fits of this time shar­ing style approach are low bar­ri­ers to entry, shared infra­struc­ture and costs, low man­age­ment over­head, and imme­di­ate access to a broad range of appli­ca­tions. Users can gen­er­ally ter­mi­nate the con­tract at any time (thereby avoid­ing return on invest­ment risk and uncer­tainty) and the ser­vices are often cov­ered by ser­vice level agree­ments (SLAs) with finan­cial penalties.

Accord­ing to Nicholas Carr, the strate­gic impor­tance of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy is dimin­ish­ing as it becomes stan­dard­ized and less expen­sive. He argues that the cloud com­put­ing par­a­digm shift is sim­i­lar to the dis­place­ment of elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tors by elec­tric­ity grids early in the 20th century.[18]

Although com­pa­nies might be able to save on upfront cap­i­tal expen­di­tures, they might not save much and might actu­ally pay more for oper­at­ing expenses. In sit­u­a­tions where the cap­i­tal expense would be rel­a­tively small, or where the orga­ni­za­tion has more flex­i­bil­ity in their cap­i­tal bud­get than their oper­at­ing bud­get, the cloud model might not make great fis­cal sense. Other fac­tors impact­ing the scale of any poten­tial cost sav­ings include the effi­ciency of a company’s data cen­ter as com­pared to the cloud vendor’s, the company’s exist­ing oper­at­ing costs, the level of adop­tion of cloud com­put­ing, and the type of func­tion­al­ity being hosted in the cloud. [19][20]

Com­pa­nies

The “big four” of cloud com­put­ing ser­vices are said to be Ama­zon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Cloud com­put­ing is also being adopted by indi­vid­ual users through large enter­prise cus­tomers includ­ing Gen­eral Elec­tric, Proc­ter & Gam­ble and Valeo .

Archi­tec­ture

The major­ity of cloud com­put­ing infra­struc­ture, as of 2000 con­sists of reli­able ser­vices deliv­ered through data cen­ters and built on servers with dif­fer­ent lev­els of vir­tu­al­iza­tion tech­nolo­gies. The ser­vices are acces­si­ble any­where that pro­vides access to net­work­ing infra­struc­ture. Clouds often appear as sin­gle points of access for all con­sumers’ com­put­ing needs. Com­mer­cial offer­ings are gen­er­ally expected to meet qual­ity of ser­vice (QoS) require­ments of cus­tomers and typ­i­cally offer SLAs.[25] Open stan­dards are crit­i­cal to the growth of cloud com­put­ing, and open source soft­ware has pro­vided the foun­da­tion for many cloud com­put­ing implementations.

His­tory

The Cloud is a term that bor­rows from tele­phony. Up to the 1990s, data cir­cuits (includ­ing those that car­ried Inter­net traf­fic) were hard-wired between des­ti­na­tions. Sub­se­quently, long-haul tele­phone com­pa­nies began offer­ing Vir­tual Pri­vate Net­work (VPN) ser­vice for data com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Tele­phone com­pa­nies were able to offer VPN based ser­vices with the same guar­an­teed band­width as fixed cir­cuits at a lower cost because they could switch traf­fic to bal­ance uti­liza­tion as they saw fit, thus uti­liz­ing their over­all net­work band­width more effec­tively. As a result of this arrange­ment, it was impos­si­ble to deter­mine in advance pre­cisely which paths the traf­fic would be routed over. The term “tele­com cloud” was used to describe this type of net­work­ing, and cloud com­put­ing is con­cep­tu­ally some­what similar.

Cloud com­put­ing relies heav­ily on vir­tual machines (VMs), which are spawned on demand to meet user needs. A com­mon depic­tion in net­work dia­grams is a cloud outline.

The under­ly­ing con­cept of cloud com­put­ing dates back to 1960, when John McCarthy opined that “com­pu­ta­tion may some­day be orga­nized as a pub­lic util­ity”; indeed it shares char­ac­ter­is­tics with ser­vice bureaus that date back to the 1960s. The term cloud had already come into com­mer­cial use in the early 1990s to refer to large Asyn­chro­nous Trans­fer Mode (ATM) net­works. Ill-fated startup Gen­eral Magic launched a short-lived cloud com­put­ing prod­uct in 1995 in part­ner­ship with sev­eral telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany part­ners such as AT&T, just before the consumer-oriented Inter­net became pop­u­lar. By the turn of the 21st cen­tury, the term “cloud com­put­ing” began to appear more widely,[28] although most of the focus at that time was lim­ited to SaaS.

In 1999, Salesforce.com was estab­lished by Marc Benioff, Parker Har­ris, and their asso­ciates. They applied many tech­nolo­gies devel­oped by com­pa­nies such as Google and Yahoo! to busi­ness appli­ca­tions. They also pro­vided the con­cept of “On demand” and SaaS with their real busi­ness and suc­cess­ful cus­tomers. The key for SaaS is that it is cus­tomiz­able by cus­tomers with lim­ited tech­ni­cal sup­port required. Busi­ness users have enthu­si­as­ti­cally wel­comed the result­ing flex­i­bil­ity and speed.

In the early 2000s, Microsoft extended the con­cept of SaaS through the devel­op­ment of web ser­vices. IBM detailed these con­cepts in 2001 in the Auto­nomic Com­put­ing Man­i­festo, which described advanced automa­tion tech­niques such as self-monitoring, self-healing, self-configuring, and self-optimizing in the man­age­ment of com­plex IT sys­tems with het­ero­ge­neous stor­age, servers, appli­ca­tions, net­works, secu­rity mech­a­nisms, and other sys­tem ele­ments that can be vir­tu­al­ized across an enterprise.

Ama­zon played a key role in the devel­op­ment of cloud com­put­ing by mod­ern­iz­ing their data cen­ters after the dot-com bub­ble which, like most com­puter net­works, were using as lit­tle as 10% of their capac­ity at any one time just to leave room for occa­sional spikes. Hav­ing found that the new cloud archi­tec­ture resulted in sig­nif­i­cant inter­nal effi­ciency improve­ments whereby, small, fast-moving “two-pizza teams” could add new fea­tures faster and eas­ier, Ama­zon started pro­vid­ing access to their sys­tems through Ama­zon Web Ser­vices on a util­ity com­put­ing basis in 2005.

In 2007, Google, IBM, and a num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties embarked on a large scale cloud com­put­ing research project,[30] around the time the term started, it was a hot topic. By mid-2008, cloud com­put­ing gained pop­u­lar­ity in the main­stream press, and numer­ous related events took place. ng will result in dra­matic growth in IT prod­ucts in some areas and in sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tions in other areas.”

In 2009, Cloud Com­put­ing Solu­tions by Google, Ama­zon, Microsoft, and IBM are the most pop­u­lar among users with Sun and Ubuntu fol­low­ing them in the Cloud.

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Rsearch … To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary

Midrand fire still burning … Johannesburg

Posted on Sep 7, 2009 in Records Management News

Midrand fire still burning

2009-08-29 13:12

Johan­nes­burg — It could take up to three days to extin­guish a fire that broke out at a doc­u­ment ware­house in Midrand on Fri­day after­noon, Johan­nes­burg Emer­gency ser­vices said on Saturday.

“There’s noth­ing much we can do, save to mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion. It is a very big build­ing, the roof has caved in and there are stacks and stacks of burn­ing paper… so when paper is burn­ing like this and there’s no threat to other build­ings or lives, we will let it burn out,” spokesper­son Percy Morokane said.

He said seven fire­fight­ers were mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion, hav­ing taken over from those who worked overnight. “Pre­dic­tions are that it’ll burn for three to four days,” he said.

The fire broke out at the com­pany Docu­File — which deals with doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tems and serves sev­eral clients in the bank­ing indus­try as well as gov­ern­ment — at 17:00 on Fri­day, Morokane said.

Over 200 employ­ees were evac­u­ated from the ware­house sit­u­ated at an office park at the cor­ners of Old Pre­to­ria and Le Roux roads. “Yes­ter­day [Fri­day], I could see the flames from Rand­burg while dri­ving to the scene but the fire is now under con­trol… we are just wait­ing for it to burn out,” Morokane said.

He said, how­ever, that should weather con­di­tions change, there could be a threat to nearby buildings.

“That’s why we have fire­fight­ers mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion… in case the fire goes out of con­trol but for­tu­nately, the build­ing is in a posi­tion that no other build­ings could be affected,” he said.

- SAPA

For more infor­ma­tion click here http://www.news24.com/Content/SouthAfrica/News/1059/811b6a6085164218a3ee3ff3d232405a/29–08-2009%2001–12/Midrand_fire_still_burning

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

To Sub­scribe to the File­Man Blog click here … http://www.carymcgovern.com/feed/

Best Per­sonal Regards,

Cary