The use of technology has become prevalent in many industries, specifically in healthcare. Many organizations are experiencing a growing reliance on cutting-edge technologies in order to stay up-to-date with the fast-paced digital world. Along with modernizing technology, companies are actively taking steps towards adopting new industry standards, improving their internal processes, and encouraging advanced team collaboration.
My name is Stefan Tertan and I am the Platform Lead at MySense. As a simple-to-use wellbeing analytics platform, MySense is dedicated to creating transformative technology with a human touch. Our company is committed to keeping people out of expensive care facilities, helping with at-home recovery, and using the power of data to improve quality of life.
Technology has the ability to transform, enhance, and even save lives through modern and state-of-the-art software solutions. In this episode of the DevSecTalks series, I sat down with host Ashley Ward to discuss my experience with incorporating new technologies within an organization and the processes behind shifting a team towards more modern methodologies.
What Is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices and tools that unifies Development and Operations teams throughout the entire software delivery process. This methodology is instrumental in enabling teams to identify and remediate development issues, automate software testing and deployment, and reduce time to market.
Since its rise in popularity in the early 2000s, the DevOps movement has transformed organizations around the world. In fact, 60% of developers said they are releasing code twice as fast with DevOps. With traditional processes, teams often work in silos and experience a disconnect between their departments. DevOps practices are designed to alleviate these issues and increase team productivity with new communication and collaboration standards.
Rather than batching large amounts of code for deployment all at once, DevOps encourages developers to deliver small iterations of code for continuous testing. The Development and Operations teams will also meet regularly to share feedback and clearly communicate their requests, rather than sending them back-and-forth through a tedious ticketing system.
The Shift to Modernization in Healthcare
The digital world is notorious for fast-paced growth, which is why taking the initiative to modernize technology has become a priority across almost every profession. Traditional and outdated approaches often struggle to compete with increasing demands and lack the resources needed to be successful. There are also a number of risks associated with legacy systems, including:
- Lack of scalability. Manual or repetitive tasks and outdated practices pose a number of challenges for scalability. It’s important to resolve these issues as soon as possible to allow the organization the ability to seamlessly scale, without any timely setbacks.
- Increased costs, decreased revenue. Legacy systems can be costly and lack the flexibility to keep up with new services and requests. Investing in modernized software is a strategic decision that will help the organization remain competitive in its industry.
- Cybersecurity risks. While expanding the technical landscape may seem counterintuitive to reducing cybersecurity attacks, it’s actually the older systems that are more at risk from a security aspect. Outdated hardware creates a gap in security, which provides hackers with an exposed, vulnerable, and easy-to-target environment.
When I first joined MySense, I had the opportunity to work on and learn about an array of managed services. Since then, our teams have shifted their focus on encouraging a DevOps-oriented approach. We use infrastructure as code (IaC), cloud formation, and The Serverless Framework to handle all of the resources that we deploy, which allows us to manage our infrastructure much more efficiently. When onboarding a new team member, we offer an all-encompassing induction process that covers our internal strategies, coding standards, merging strategies, and other organizational processes. Our team also utilizes online resources to make sure that everyone is up-to-date and aligned on the same level of coding standards.
We are continuing to look towards newer technologies, such as the AWS Cloud Development Kit, to make it easier to deploy the infrastructure that we need and speed up processes along the way. Our teams are always on the lookout for new tools, technologies, and practices that can help us increase and improve the quality of our work.
Security in the Software Development Life Cycle
To guarantee an optimized security process, security within an organization cannot exist in a silo. It must be embedded during every step of the software development life cycle to ensure comprehensive protection. Streamlining security also includes catching potential vulnerabilities before they reach the production environment. From the very beginning of the development life cycle, there are three key factors that your organization should be acting on. These factors include:
- Scanning the code and performing static code analysis
- Additional security tests during the CI/CD process
- Monitoring the production environment and identifying incidents or vulnerabilities
Security also plays a key role in modernization, which is an essential step to maintaining appropriate compliance across the company. It’s important to create an ecosystem that is focused on staying ahead of the game, rather than trying to build the plane on the way up.
At MySense, we place a large focus on security with everything that we do. Every piece of code that goes into production is verified and reviewed thoroughly to ensure that the deployed infrastructure aligns with our security baselines. We focus on catching potential vulnerabilities before they even have a chance to cause harm in the production environment. This security-first approach ensures that our teams are able to operate on a well-architected framework, and that our workloads are fully secured to the best of our ability.
Transforming Medical Technology with Data Analytics
The modern technological advances in healthcare have generously revolutionized the medical field. The implementation of data analytics helps organizations not only improve their understanding of new advancements, but also increase the overall efficiency of healthcare with a significant impact.
MySense is a wellbeing analytics platform that is committed to providing unparalleled insight into health conditions and indicators of wellbeing for the benefit of its customers. Visit our website to learn more about how the organization is transforming the healthcare industry and changing lives with serverless data analytics.
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