IT News

Apple Watch enterprise ecosystem gains policy control

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IDC estimates 111.9 million wearable devices will be in use by 2018, so its inevitable employees will drive enterprises adoption of these things, just as they drove enterprise use of iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. 51 per cent of business leaders “identify wearables as a critical, high, or moderate priority for their organization,” says Forrester Research.

Also read: WWDC: 21 all-new Apple Watch features

To help secure these devices, Good Technology has introduced and updated secure email and collaboration app, Good Work for Apple Watch, which provides secure access to emails and meeting notes.

Productivity and security

To see the way ahead consider the enterprise significance of the latest Apple patents in which it describes a means to share Apple Watch files by shaking hands. It is inevitable these things will be used for all kinds of collaboration in unified communications or SaaS deployments. However, to support such use IT pros will want to implement complete policy control over the device – they have to, if only to satisfy data protection law.

“Enabling enterprise mobility means securing data accessed and used on all devices, whether smartphones, tablets or wearables,” said Christy Wyatt, chairman and CEO of Good Technology, “allowing greater productivity for employees while also providing complete policy controls for IT.” To enable this the company has updated the policy controls it places inside its Secure Mobility Platform for IT.

Among other features IT admins can enable/disable notifications and the Good Work watch app using a Web-based management console. Good also supports the new Apple Watch wrist detection restriction – which should enable enterprises to implement tighter MDM policy.

Intelligent agents

This is only the beginning of the emergence of Apple Watch in the enterprise – huge investments are already being made in this and there is a growing ecosystem of solutions to empower the wearable enterprise. For example, Apple and IBM have begun introducing Apple Watch support to some of their jointly developed MobileFirst for iOS apps. That is by no means the only example of enterprise class Apple Watch solutions.

Many mistake the Apple Watch as an object defined only by its existing features, but that’s a terrible error of judgement. It is important to understand that the impact of these devices is not determined by the features they offer in isolation, but what they offer when used in conjunction with back end systems, as Forrester analyst, J.P. Gownder explains, “Solving business problems depends on linking wearable devices to back-end systems. And the usability of wearables in turn depends upon intelligent agents.”

Digital transformations

These technologies will be critical to the digital transformation of everything Apple is already deeply enmeshed within.

“The market for company-provided wearables will be larger than the consumer market in the next five years,” writes Gownder. “Want proof? In 2012, in the US alone, 7.7 million people worked in healthcare positions that could benefit from wearables, while 3.2 million worked in public safety, and a whopping 13.8 million worked in sales roles. Not all of these professionals will adopt wearables, but their companies have every incentive to deploy wearable technologies and business processes that create positive financial and/or customer service results for customers.”

With iOS already the dominant mobile platform in any serious enterprise and a host of developers active in the space, Apple Watch seems set to seize its time.

Death to Faxes

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Death to faxes. There, I said it.

Nearly every medical organization in this country still uses fax machines. This vintage, 1960s technology was replaced long ago in some industries. But many practices still send dozens or even hundreds of faxes a day. It is familiar, reliable technology.

Unfortunately, the fax machine is also a major source of HIPAA breaches, particularly breaches of a single record. It is all too easy for a provider to make a simple mistake while entering a phone number, and there is a chance that the fax will connect with another machine–the wrong machine.

If you are faxing Protected Health Information (PHI), you have just breached the patient’s record. The law requires you to inform the patient by letter and report the breach to HHS, at the end of the year.

This is not some theoretical problem. A staff member at 4Medapproved has a fax machine in his home office. Last year, he came home to discover another man’s pathology report for prostate cancer waiting in his fax tray. When he called the doctor’s office to report the mistake, they did not seem to take the breach very seriously, as if they’re always faxing records to the wrong numbers.

I suspect the patient whose privacy was violated would have taken it more seriously. But it did not sound as if the practice was going to inform him, in
violation of the law.

Apart from the problem of wrong numbers, faxes are obsolete, unsecure technology. We really shouldn’t be using them at all in healthcare.

HIPAA does not require faxes to be encrypted, because there is an increasingly artificial divide in HIPAA between analog and digital technology. Faxes are considered analog even though these days they are surely traveling over digital networks. The point is that voice conversations and faxes do not have to be encrypted to be compliant. Yet, faxes could easily be intercepted and deciphered.

The risk only grows after the fax arrives. Most fax machines are set to print upon receipt, which means that anyone can access the PHI after it has printed. There is no way to authenticate access by the recipient.

Faxes are a breach waiting to happen.

Now, they can be made safer, to some extent. A colleague in IT told me recently that they had set a practice’s incoming faxes to encrypt upon arrival. The recipient has to log in to view the fax. Thus, they could control and track access.

There also are online faxing services that enable encrypted, tracked faxing. But the ones I have seen are essentially encrypted email portals. They are really fax “simulators” more than anything else.

But even if faxes could be made secure, they would still be absurd.

The patient information being sent by fax was probably in electronic form originally. The fax essentially converts that electronic data into paper form. In all likelihood, after that paper record arrives, someone will have to type the information into the EHR. By hand. Surely this is madness!

Yet every time I visit a doctor’s office, I see front office staff transcribing information from paper into the EHR.

It is already relatively easy to send encrypted email, whether through Office 365 or Google Business Apps or one of the many other HIPAA-compliant email providers. If your EHR has a 2014 certification, it can send the data as a C-CDA that machines can read as structured data.

And that’s apart from the more sophisticated forms of HIE that are now available in most states.

I know that interoperability has a long way to go. It should be easier for providers to send PHI as secure data. But I also believe that habitual faxing is making adoption slower than it need be.

Maybe it’s not quite time to take your fax machine out into a field and hit it with a baseball bat. Not yet. But I do think practices should commit to using secure communications whenever possible. The fax machine should be pushed into some corner of shame, to be used only as a last resort. The sooner fax machines go the way of the dodo, the better it will be for us all.

HIPAA Requires Access to Health Records

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Healthcare providers may not be aware that HIPAA requires access to health records, in addition to protecting data from breaches. Remember that the HIPAA Security Rule is designed to protect the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of health information. When we think of HIPAA, we usually think about confidentiality and pay little attention to access. This oversight could be costly for providers.

Unfortunately, healthcare is a perfect target for ransomware, which is designed to deny access to data. Ransomware works by secretly encrypting data, making it unreadable by the provider. To regain access to the data, the provider must pay hackers for a password to unlock the data.

It’s a bit like coming home to discover that thieves have changed all the locks on your house. The thieves taunt you from your roof: If you want the new keys, you’ve got to give them all your cash.

Of course, in the real world, you would simply call the police, or possibly throw rocks. But in the world of cybercrime, the thieves are somewhere in Ukraine or Nigeria, and instead of cash, they demand Bitcoin, which cannot be traced.

Sadly, for healthcare providers, the situation is even worse, because losing access to health records is a HIPAA violation. It does not matter that the provider was the victim of a cybercriminal. The provider has the responsibility to maintain access to those records, and federal regulations allow no excuses for failure.

So it’s like the thieves change your locks and run off with your cash, but when the police show up, they arrest you!

The bad news is that ransomware attacks are only increasing, and many new forms of ransomware are appearing. A couple of years ago, a nasty bit of ransomware called CryptoLocker made international news. Now that CryptoLocker has been tamed, new ransomware such as CryptoWall is proliferating through cyberspace.

So what can be done? The good news is that the best defense against ransomware is not sophisticated software or IT support. Rather, your best defense is HIPAA training and awareness. Ransomware usually infects computers through phishing email attacks. In other words, a staff member receives a deceptive email that tricks them into clicking on a link or attachment, and ransomware infects the network.

Basic training on data security can thwart most phishing attacks, because savvy computer users do not click on links or attachments in emails from sources they do not recognize and trust. Considering that regular training on health privacy is a core HIPAA requirement anyway, ensuring that all staff have completed training on at least an annual schedule is a no-brainer–it is important for compliance, and it protects your practice.

Good cyber-defenses also play a role. To be sure, every practice should have a robust firewall and anti-malware protection in place. These are also HIPAA requirements. Strong security software can detect and quarantine malware before it corrupts every computer on the network.

Many providers would also benefit by moving to the cloud. The cloud allows for economies of scale, so dedicated security experts that would never otherwise be available to help an individual practice can intervene when malware strikes. Moreover, cloud services can close the window on mischief by simply dumping the data of local computers that have been corrupted. And the cloud can be strict about applications, allowing only authorized programs to run, rather than trying to play catch-up after the damage has begun.

Many providers remain easy targets for ransomware attacks, and they may not realize that falling prey could expose them to the double-whammy of cybercrime and government penalties. But training and diligence can prevent disaster before it strikes.

OS X 10.11

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What We Expect

The next major update to Apple’s OS X operating system, OS X 10.11, is expected to be previewed this June, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. We have a limited amount of information on OS X 10.11, but given that OS X 10.10 Yosemite just introduced a major design change, it’s likely OS X 10.11 will continue to offer the same general design, perhaps with under-the-hood improvements and new features.

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The new design introduced with OS X YosemiteAccording to rumors, OS X 10.11 will focus heavily on bug fixes, optimization improvements, and security enhancements, much like iOS 9.

Specifically, Apple is rumored to be working on a new kernel-level security system called “rootless” that will help curb malware and protect sensitive data by preventing users from accessing protected files on their Macs.

Apple may also convert many IMAP-based applications like Notes, Reminders, and Calendar to its own iCloud Drive system, improving communication in these apps between devices and increasing security. A “Trusted Wi-Fi” feature may allow Macs and iOS devices to connect to trusted wireless routers with no additional security measures, while non-trusted routers would have a heavily encrypted wireless connection.

There will also be a few new consumer-facing features included in OS X 10.11. The Maps app may be updated with support for transit directions, and there are rumors suggesting the operating system will gain a new default font — San Francisco, the same font used for the Apple Watch. OS X 10.11 may also include a Control Center that was originally a feature rumored for OS X Yosemite. The Control Center would include music controls and other features similar to the Control Center on iOS, like access to Do Not Disturb, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Potential Name

With OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple ceased naming its operating system updates after large cats and instead announced plans to name future updates after major California landmarks.

We don’t know what Apple will choose to call its next operating system update, but the company hastrademarked a long list of possible names that could be used for upcoming OS X updates. Names cover several major landmarks in California, ranging from surfing spots and popular cities to mountains and deserts. There are even a few iconic California animal names throw in, like Condor, Grizzly, and Redtail.

The full list of names: Redwood, Mammoth, California, Big Sur, Pacific, Diablo, Miramar, Rincon, El Cap, Redtail, Condor, Grizzly, Farallon, Tiburon, Monterey, Skyline, Shasta, Sierra, Mojave, Sequoia, Ventura, and Sonoma.

Thus far, we’ve had OS X 10.9 Mavericks and OS X 10.10 Yosemite, one name focusing on a water-based location and another focused on a forest-based location. Apple may be picking names randomly, but it’s also possible the company will alternate between names that relate to water and names that relate to land.

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Photo of Monterey, California, one of the potential names for OS X 10.11 or future versions of OS XIf that’s the case, we could potentially get another one of the ocean-oriented names, like Pacific, Monterey, Farallon, or Rincon, but it’s not clear if Apple’s following a specific naming scheme. There’s also the possibility that the company has other secret trademarks or trademarks it has not applied for protection on at the current time, meaning a name not even on the list could be chosen for OS X 10.11.

We’ve polled our forum members to find the names people preferred out of Apple’s trademarked list, and OS X Redwood came in first, followed by OS X Mojave and OS X Sequoia.

Discuss OS X 10.11

We may not know what OS X 10.11 will offer, but that hasn’t stopped our forum members from listing what they’d like to see in the next operating system update.

Many of our forum members have said they’d love to see Apple focus on speed optimizations and bug fixes rather than new features, but some requests include a smarter Spotlight window, Siri integration, a better Dark Mode, and an expansion of the Continuity features first introduced with Yosemite.

Want to share what you’d like to see in OS X 10.11? Join in on the discussion.

Testing

The number of visits we see to MacRumors from Apple IP addresses running pre-release software often gives us hints as to how development is progressing on upcoming updates.

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Increasing visits to MacRumors.com from devices running OS X 10.11 from Apple’s networksVisits we’re receiving from devices running OS X 10.11 remain relatively low in the range of dozens per day, but we have seen visits picking up since the start of the new year, suggesting testing is well underway, as it should be as we head toward an initial unveiling and developer seeding in the coming months.

We expect to see the number of visits from machines running OS X 10.11 pick up as we creep closer to June. Apple will likely begin distributing the operating system internally to additional employees in the coming weeks to prepare for a preview at WWDC.

Release Date

Apple previews each new version of OS X and iOS at its Worldwide Developers Conference, so we will likely get our first look at OS X 10.11 on June 8, when the company holds its WWDC keynote event.

After the keynote introduction, developers will be given access to OS X 10.11 for testing purposes, and following an extended beta testing period, OS X 10.11 will most likely see a public release in the fall of 2015. Apple’s been providing public beta testers with new versions of OS X, so testers may receive OS X 10.11 well ahead of a public launch.

Apple to Discontinue Newsstand

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Apple is planning to do away with Newsstand, its central app that stores newspaper and magazine subscriptions for users, according to sources who spoke with Re/code. In its place, the company will introduce a new Flipboard-style aggregation experience that will showcase curated lists of articles and content for individual customers. The partners for the new app will include ESPN, The New York Times, Conde Nast and Hearst, with the new app focused on providing “samples” of content.

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Since magazines and newspapers were required to be located within the Newsstand app, many of Apple’s partners complained of buried content with the introduction of Newsstand. With the new structure in place, individual magazines and publications will sell their own app experiences within the App Store, allowing companies to push their content directly to a user’s device without having to navigate through Apple’s Newsstand app. While Apple is said to be adjusting its revenue cut for some types of subscription content, the company will reportedly continue to take its traditional 30 percent revenue cut from subscriptions within these services currently available in Newsstand.

MacRumors had previously heard Apple was meeting with publishers about the upcoming discontinuation of Newsstand, but was unable to obtain corroborating information.

Those supporting Apple’s supposed Flipboard-like app will also keep 100 percent of the advertising they each sell within the app. In exchange, Apple will help its partners sell unsold inventory and take a cut of the profit of each sale at a rate that one of its publishing partners detailed as “very favorable.” Although not stated directly, Re/code alludes to the confirmation of the Newsstand rumor happening today during the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Introducing Fresco: A new image library for Android

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Most of Facebook’s announcements at its F8 developer conference this week were iOS-centric, but today, the company also released three new open source tools for Android developers.

The first is a performance segmentation library called Year Class that is meant to help developers quickly figure out what kind of device a user is running. Thanks to this, a developer can quickly tune an app for an older device by turning on some advanced animations, for example, or enable fancier features for more modern phones. For the most part, the tools use CPU speed, as well as the number of available cores and RAM to determine the “year class” of a given device.

The second new tool, Network Connection Class, does something similar, but for network connections. Turns out, just knowing that a user is on an HSPA connection doesn’t actually tell you all that much about the actual network speed. According to Facebook, the speed of HSPA connection can vary by 5x between networks, for example.

Using this new tool, developers can get a better idea of the kind of speeds their users are getting on their networks and tune their apps accordingly. Unlike Year Class, though, this takes a little bit more coding to set up, and the tool obviously has to first gather some data before you can actually tune your app according to the actual network speeds the user is getting.

The third tool, Fresco, is a new image library for Android apps. The idea here is to ensure that apps don’t run out of memory when they load multiple images by being smarter about memory management (those GIFs can get huge, after all) and streaming images when possible.

The system also handles basic functions like displaying placeholders and image caching. You can find the technical details about how exactly this works here.

An Android keyboard for people too lazy to type

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N IT COMES to text-based communication tools, we’re experiencing a kind of Cambrian Explosion. Emoji has long gone mainstream, leading to a wave of niche Ikea emoticons and Saturday Night Live pictograms. Even this week’s New Yorker is a riff on emoji.

Amidst all this frivolous growth, it’s a welcome relief to find an app that gives you a shorthand to say what you really need to say—which, if we’re being honest, is oftentimes no more than: “kk,” or “damn.” That’s the premise of Lazyboard, an Android keyboard extension that lets you swiftly get one-tap access to all the lazy text lexicon you’re already relying on anyway.

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Lazyboard
“I realized that on an off day, I type ‘k,’ ‘kk,’ ‘hmm’ and ‘lol’ more than anything else,” says developer Prem Adithya. “I also saw that these words were used in politely turning down an annoying conversation—or a conversation that I didn’t want to have with an annoying person. So then I thought, ‘Hey, what if there was a keyboard with just the essential words required to reply to people quickly?’” That became Lazyboard, a suite of canned replies such as “no,” “yeah,” “oh,” “haha,” and “cool.” The app also has a palette of sorta-kaomojis and this guy: ツ.

Adithya’s timing is hot, and not just because we’ve grown accustomed to speaking in a pictoral slang. If wrist-worn communication devices like the Apple Watch are going to be useful smartphone substitutes, they’re going to need to supply users with an easy way to stay in touch. So far, a lot of Apple’s context-sensitive predictive text offerings haven’t gotten much better than the painfully pre-packaged “On my way!” or “Talk later?” This is effectively the uncanny valley of automated texting, and no one wants to be there.

“Kk” and “cool” may be universal, but Lazyboard will soon become even more personal: Adithya is busy working on Lazyboard Pro, which will let users customize and program their own shortcuts.

Built By A Parkinson’s Sufferer, MyHealthPal Tracks Symptoms, Creates Research Data

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The development and availability of wearables is running hand in hand with the exploding interest in the digital health space. Managing our health via apps and devices is slowly becoming the norm. And patients that need to monitor their condition day-to-day have even more to benefit from this powerful combination. Startups are of course entering this space in droves.

The latest is a startup which launches out of stealth today: MyHealthPal, an iOS app and analytics platform that enables people with long-term health conditions to manage their condition, is initially focusing on Parkinson’s Disease, but could be applied similar diseases.

It’s now secured an initial seed funding of £500,000, and launched a trial with the highly respected Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

The investors include a mix of private and institutional investors. Venture Capital firm Proxy Ventures is participating. But the lead investors are Andrew MacKay, chairman of Yapp Brothers and previously director of IG Group Holdings, and angel investor Will Armitage. They are joined by health and medical business expert Terence Bradley.

It’s often the case that the best startups are created by entrepreneurs who want to address problem they’ve encountered personally. In founder Mike Barlow’s case, it couldn’t be more personal. The tech entrepreneur founded the company after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 41, two years ago. He discovered there was no effective way to manage and measure the effectiveness of his medication, track symptoms, log mood, diet, exercise and other metrics and their impact on his quality of life.

So MyHealthPal aggregates patients’ day-to-day data points into a dashboard for the patient.

Now, the space is already well populated by mpower, Gluko and GlucoSuccess. Not to mention the launch of Apples HealthKit and ResearchKit. NEA is also a significant investor in this space, amongst others.

However, myHealthPal thinks it has a better solution because it’s been designed by an actual patient for other patients.

The clever move with this startup is that is also allows users to donate their anonimized data in return for a share of the revenues that data generates to scientific research institutions and charities supporting research and care. Boom. This is like the ‘share economy for patients’.

To achieve this, MyHealthPal says it complies with EU and US data privacy requirements and uses HIPAA certified technology.

Mary Keane-Dawson, Group CEO, MyHealthPal, says ultimately, MyHealthPal analytics platform will enable research and data scientists “to query large volumes of data, which is why MyHealthPal is such an interesting business for both investors and medical research institutions.”

The startup says it’s now in “advanced discussions” with other institutions and charities both in the UK and US.

The ‘market’ if you can call it that, is, unfortunately big. There are over 421 million people living with long-term chronic conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, Diabetes, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Irritable Bowel Disease, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s according to the World Health Organisation.

One Year In, Nadella Is Planning Microsoft’s Long And Short Game

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Golfers like to talk about their long game and their short game. Maybe it’s useful to look at Microsoft’s strategy that way too. Since Satya Nadella took over just over a year ago as CEO at Microsoft, he has started to redirect the company, looking at the short term, while perhaps beginning to formulate a plan for the next wave of computing.

Microsoft is the quintessential personal computer company. It came of age with the rise of the PC and thrived in the 1990s and early 2000s by giving us the tools to operate and be efficient on those machines. Surely, we complained about it — and made many a joke about blue screens of death — but in the end Microsoft provided the fuel for the PC revolution, making its founders rich beyond measure as a result.

 

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Short Surfaces Quick Reads To Help You Power Through Your Saved Article Queue

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A new app called Short from Enric Enrich, a developer at Todoist, and his friend Alex Muench aims to parse your endless queue of saved articles into something a little more manageable. Using popular services like Pocket or Instapaper that users are already working with to build up a list of reading material, Short sifts through saved items to bring out articles that require 10 minutes or less reading time, so a user can pick out a 2 minute read while they wait in line at Starbucks, for instance, or a 5 minute piece if they’ve got a few minutes to spare before a friend arrives at a lunch meeting.

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