Is Cloud an option for Canadian Healthcare healthcare and medical research organizations?

Yes, Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations are moving to the cloud. The cloud market is expected to grow in Canada significantly through 2027.

There are several reasons why Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations are moving to the cloud. 

• Reduce costs by eliminating the need to invest in and maintain on-premises infrastructure. 
• Enable the healthcare research community to drive their research more expediently to clinical outcomes
• Improve patient satisfaction by making it easier for patients to access their health information and communicate with their providers.
• Improve the quality of care by providing access to patient data and records from anywhere in the country. 

Overall, the transition to the cloud is a positive development for Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations. 

Canadian healthcare providers face many challenges before they can move to the cloud, such as addressing security and privacy concerns, data sovereignty issues, and ensuring interoperability. To help them overcome these challenges, it is important to provide Healthcare Data Custodians, Infrastructure Architects, and Research Leads with clear guidance on how the cloud can align with Canadian Healthcare Regulations. This will allow them to have a practical understanding of what is required to enhance their cloud journey and facilitate a smoother transition to the cloud.

iSecurity and MD+A Health are actively assisting Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations in comprehending the risks and exploring pathways to embrace the cloud. Through extensive research and analysis, iSecurity and MD+A Health have evaluated Google Cloud as a suitable platform for healthcare. Their diligent efforts have resulted in the production of comprehensive documents that detail their findings via a Threat Risk Assessment (TRA) and a Privacy Impact Report (PIA).

Why a Threat Risk Assessment? 

A threat risk assessment is a process of identifying and evaluating threats to an organization and then determining the likelihood and impact of those threats. The goal of a threat risk assessment is to identify the most serious threats and develop mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood and impact of those threats.

A threat risk assessment typically involves the following steps:

1. Identify threats: The first step is to identify all potential threats to the organization. This can be done by brainstorming, interviewing experts, or reviewing historical data.
2. Evaluate threats: Once the threats have been identified, they need to be evaluated in terms of their likelihood and impact. The likelihood of a threat is the probability that it will occur, while the impact of a threat is the severity of the consequences if it does occur.
3. Prioritize threats: The threats need to be prioritized based on their likelihood and impact. The most serious threats should be addressed first.
4. Develop mitigation strategies: Once the threats have been prioritized, mitigation strategies need to be developed to reduce the likelihood and impact of those threats. Mitigation strategies can include things like implementing security controls, training employees, and developing contingency plans.
5. Implement mitigation strategies: The mitigation strategies need to be implemented and tested to ensure that they are effective.
6. Monitor and review: The threat risk assessment should be monitored and reviewed regularly to ensure that it is still effective.

Why a Privacy Impact Assessment?

A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is a process that organizations use to identify and assess the privacy risks associated with a new or changed information technology (IT) system or project. The goal of a PIA is to help organizations protect the privacy of individuals whose personal information is collected, used, or disclosed by the IT system or project.

PIAs typically include the following steps:

1. Identifying the purpose of the IT system or project and the types of personal information that will be collected, used, or disclosed.
2. Identifying the privacy risks associated with the IT system or project.
3. Assessing the likelihood and severity of the risks.
4. Developing and implementing controls to mitigate the risks.
5. Monitoring the effectiveness of the controls.

PIAs are an important tool for organizations to help them follow privacy laws and regulations. They can also help organizations build trust with their patients, employees and the research community by demonstrating their commitment to protecting privacy.

The benefits of conducting a PIA:

• Helps organizations identify and assess privacy risks
• Helps organizations develop and implement controls to mitigate privacy risks
• Helps organizations comply with privacy laws and regulations
• Helps organizations build trust with customers and employees

Why Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is committed to providing Canadian healthcare organisations with an environment to expand both their clinical and research environments. Google Cloud has invested significant resources into building out a cloud environment based on best practices coming from Google’s experience running some of the world’s largest platforms.  

Some highlights include:

• Built-in security features that help protect your data and applications from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction.
• A comprehensive security management platform that helps you assess, prioritize, and address security risks across your organization.
• A team of security experts who can help you design, implement, and manage your security solutions.
• A wide range of security training and resources to help you learn about and stay up-to-date on the latest security threats and best practices.

Cloud offers a proven way to accelerate end-to-end chip design flows. In a previous blog, we demonstrated the inherent elasticity of the cloud, showcasing how front-end simulation workloads can scale with access to more compute resources. Another benefit of the cloud is access to a powerful, modern and global infrastructure. On-prem environments do a fantastic job of meeting sustained demand but Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tooling upgrades happen much more frequently (every six to nine months) than typical on-prem data center infrastructure upgrades (every three to five years). 

What this means is that your EDA tool can provide much better performance if given access to the right infrastructure. This is especially useful in certain phases of the design process.

Take for example, a physical verification workload. Physical verification is typically the last step in the chip design process. In simplified terms, the process consists of verifying design rule checks (or DRCs) against the process design kit (PDK) provided by the foundry. It ensures that the layout produced from the physical synthesis process is ready for handoff to a foundry (in-house or otherwise) for manufacturing. Physical verification workloads tend to require machines with large memories (1TB+) for advanced nodes. Having access to such compute resources enables more physical verification to run in parallel, increasing your confidence in the design that is being taped out (i.e., sent to manufacturing).

At the other end of the spectrum are functional verification workloads. Unlike the physical verification process described above, functional verification is normally performed in the early stages of design and typically requires machines with much less memory. Furthermore, functional verification (dynamic verification in particular) accounts for the most time (translating directly to the availability of compute) in the design cycle. Verifying faster, an ambition for most design teams, is often tied to availability of right-sized compute resources. 

The intermittent and varied infrastructure requirements for verification (both functional and physical) can be a problem for organizations with on-prem data centers. On-prem data centers are optimized for maximizing utilization—this does not directly address access to right-sized compute to deliver the best tool performance. Even if the IT and Computer Aided Design (CAD) departments choose to provision additional suitable hardware, the process of provisioning, acquiring and setting up new hardware on-prem typically takes months for even the most modern organizations. A “hybrid” flow that enables use of on-prem clusters most of the time, but provides seamless access to cloud resources as needed would be ideal.

Hybrid chip design in action

You can improve a typical verification workflow simply by utilizing a hybrid environment that provides instantaneous access to better compute. To illustrate, we chose a front-end simulation workflow, and designed an environment that replicates on-prem and cloud clusters. We also took a few more liberties to simplify the environment (described below). The simplified setup is provided in a GitHub repository for you to try out.

In any hybrid chip design flow, there are a few key considerations:

1. Connectivity between on-prem infrastructure and the cloud: Establishing connectivity to the cloud is one of the most foundational aspects of the flow. Over the years, this has also become a very well-understood field, and secure, high availability connectivity is a reality in most setups. 
   
   In our tutorial, we represent both on-prem and cloud clusters as two different networks in the cloud where all traffic is allowed to pass between these networks. While this is not a real-world network configuration, it is sufficient to demonstrate the basic connectivity model.
   
2. Connection to license server: Most chip design flows utilize tools from EDA vendors. Such tools are typically licensed, and you need a license server with valid licenses to operate the tool. License servers may remain on-prem in the hybrid flow, so long as latency to the license server is acceptable. You can also install license servers in the cloud on a Compute Engine VM (particularly sole-tenant nodes) for lower latency. Check with your EDA vendors to understand if you can rehost your license services in the cloud.
   
   In our tutorial, we use an open source tool (Icarus Verilog Simulator) and therefore, do not need a license server.
   
3. Identifying data sources and syncing data: There are three important aspects in running EDA jobs: the EDA tools themselves, the infrastructure where the tools run, and the data sources for the tool run. Tools don’t change much, and can be installed on cloud infrastructure. Data sources, on the other hand, are primarily created on-prem and updated regularly. These could be SystemVerilog files that describe the design, the testbenches or the layout files. It is important to sync data between on-prem and cloud to maintain parity. Furthermore, in production environments, it’s also important to maintain a high-performance syncing mechanism.
   
   In our tutorial, we create a file system hierarchy in the cloud that is similar to one you’d find on-prem. We transfer the latest input files before invoking the tool.
   
4. Workload scheduler configuration and job submission transparency: Most environments that leverage batch jobs use job schedulers to access a compute farm. An ideal environment finds the balance between cost and performance, and builds parameters in the system to enable predictive (and prescriptive) wrappers to job schedulers (see picture below).
   
   In our tutorial, we use the open-source SLURM job scheduler and an auto-scaling cluster. For simplicity, the tutorial does not include a job submission agent.

Other cloud-native batch processing environments such as Kubernetes can also provide further options for workload management.

Our on-prem network is called ‘onprem’ and the cloud cluster is called ‘burst’. Characteristics of the on-prem and burst clusters are specified below:

Once set up, we ran the OpenPiton regression for single and two-tile configurations. You can see the results below:

Regressions run on “burst” clusters were on average 30% faster than on “onprem”, delivering faster verification sign-off and physical verification turnaround times. You can find details about the commands we used in the repository. 

Hybrid solutions for faster time to market

Of course, on-prem data centers will continue to play a pivotal role in chip design. However, things have changed. Cloud-based, high performance compute has proved itself to be a viable and proven technology for extending on-prem data centers during the chip design process. Companies that successfully leverage hybrid chip design flows will be able to better address the fluctuating needs of their engineering teams. To learn more about silicon design on Google Cloud, read our whitepaper “Using Google Cloud to accelerate your chip design process”.

As I was preparing for my fireside chat with Dmitri Alperovitch, Founder and Former CTO of CrowdStrike and Executive Chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, for the Google Cloud Government Security Summit taking place on Tuesday, July 20th, I was reflecting about recent developments in cybersecurity, Zero Trust best practices – including aspects of Google’s journey – and the benefits that this approach to cybersecurity brings to the public sector. 

As Dmitri and I discussed what we wanted to share during our session at the Government Security Summit, I quickly realized how pertinent the information was to our public sector audience. For that reason, ahead of Tuesday’s event, I wanted to give you a glimpse of what is to come in our fireside chat. Read below for an exclusive preview of what we plan to discuss. If you are planning to attend on Tuesday, we encourage you to ask questions through our interactive chat function and sign up for 1:1 time with our Ask the Expert program. 

Check out my chat with Dmitri below…

Heather: What do you see as the most significant changes in both the attack surface and cybercriminal tactics in recent years? And why do these changes present unprecedented challenges for public sector? 

Dmitri: In terms of the threat landscape, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The adversaries haven’t changed that much. It’s actually striking. Not all threats are emanating from governments or state actors – either directly or by providing safe harbor to criminals – but a large portion are. That has not changed. The volume and scale of attacks have grown, however, and become massive. And now, the greatest challenge is that everyone is a target. Before, only top-end institutions and government organizations were facing nation state threats. That has changed either through targeted attacks or accidental ones, such as WannaCry. The question now is “How do we protect the most vulnerable and extend much-needed protection to smaller organizations that do not have deep security expertise or resources?”

Heather: Earlier this year, the Biden Administration released its Cybersecurity Executive Order (EO). What do you see as the most important takeaways and potential impact of the EO? 

Dmitri: The Cybersecurity EO is set to have a significant impact. The biggest change is a shift in strategy. For many decades, we all had the mentality that we have to keep attackers out of the network. That is great in theory, but we all know that it is a virtual impossibility with a network of any significant size. Adversaries will find a way in. And, we used to think it was game over once they were in the network.

Then about 10 years ago, we began to see a change. Google led the way with its BeyondCorp strategy as did Lockheed Martin with its sentinel Kill Chain framework. Now, when an adversary penetrates a network, it’s not the end of the game, but the beginning. That is the case if the organization is prepared with a network architecture built around Zero Trust principles. The adversary now has to move laterally, steal credentials, and elevate privileges to get to the resources they want. A Zero Trust architecture can slow them down and give organizations time to detect and eject adversaries from the network. The EO recognizes the power of this approach and has made Zero Trust its fundamental tenet.

Heather: Federal agencies have spent the last 60 days looking at Zero Trust and developing their plans. What do you hope to see? What is critical to accelerating implementation?

Dmitri: The EO establishes a very ambitious timeline, and the US government is not known to move rapidly due to a number of restrictions and considerations. That said, the EO recognizes the idea that logging has to be at the center of modern architecture. Agencies need full visibility into what is going on at endpoints and across the network, have to hunt continuously across networks for adversaries, and must work to rapidly eject them. That is at the core of the EO, and it is a great shift. The private sector should be watching and learning as well.

Heather: What pitfalls should the Federal government look out for in moving forward to implement the EO?

Dmitri: One of the main challenges is the limited authority of the President. Congress is the only branch with the power to change the laws. While the establishment of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) a few years ago allows for hunting across agency networks, CISA still has limited authority. It cannot manage the cybersecurity of more than 120 civilian agencies.

Some agencies are performing well when it comes to security, but we have to recognize that this is not the norm. Not all agencies have the capacity to recruit the best cybersecurity talent, but their needs may be just as great. We need to centralize capabilities and leverage the cloud, like Google, to provide all agencies with the best cyber talent and resources.

Join us at the Google Cloud Government Security Summit to hear the rest of our conversation. The event is complimentary. Register today to reserve your spot on July 20th. If you have any questions about the event, please reach out to us at cloudsummitsupport@google.com.

Environmental sustainability is a key priority for TELUS, a world-leading communications technology company. It continues to rank in the top 100 most sustainably managed companies in the world, and seeks to make a healthier planet for all by leveraging its global-leading technology, compassion to drive social change and reduce our collective carbon footprint through innovative technologies and sustainable business practices.

TELUS surpassed its sustainability objectives in 2019 and is now on a journey to procure all of its electricity from renewable or low-emitting sources by 2025. Next, it aims to achieve net carbon neutrality for its operations by 2030. TELUS has also been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 21 consecutive years, a feat unmatched by any other North American telecom or cable company. In 2021, it became the first company in Canada to release a Sustainability-linked bond (SLB) framework and complete an SLB offering, formally linking TELUS financing to its environmental performance.

“We’ve spent the last decade becoming a global leader in sustainability, helping make the planet healthier by ensuring that our operations are as environmentally responsible as possible,” said Geoff Pegg, Head of Sustainability and Environment at TELUS.

In part, TELUS’ strategy is focused on three key areas:

1. Seek the best renewable energy options available
2. Focus on migrating workloads to the cloud
3. Embrace a multiplier effect through the use of sustainable partners

Renewable energy impact

Part of this environmental responsibility involves investing heavily in renewable energy sources through power purchase agreements (PPAs) that help renewable energy providers like wind farms and solar companies develop their infrastructure. TELUS executed PPAs with four Alberta-based solar and wind facilities to provide 100 per cent of its electricity load demand in a province where one-third of the grid is powered by coal.

As a technology company, electricity represents a large portion of TELUS’ energy needs: 80 percent of the operational carbon footprint comes from the power requirements for TELUS’ network and administrative buildings, Pegg explains. While TELUS is using renewable energy sources and low-emitting energy grids to power its buildings and network, there’s also the often-forgotten part of the carbon emissions equation: the energy it takes to power data centers. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, data centers represent 1 percent of the global electricity demand and that figure is expected to keep rising as the world increases usage of data-heavy technologies.

“It’s probably no surprise that everyone, whether you’re a business or a consumer, is concerned about reducing carbon emissions,” said Chris Talbott, the Google Cloud Sustainability Lead. “A lot of us think about the carbon emissions associated with our cars or with the electricity that powers our homes, but oftentimes we forget about the carbon emissions that come from the digital services that we use or the networks required to deliver that data.”

As a leader in sustainability, how can TELUS meet the energy demands of its customers while also protecting the environment? One way is through the company’s previously announced collaboration with Google Cloud. The two companies are working together to build a more sustainable world through technology and reduce TELUS’ carbon footprint, create value along the entire supply chain, and optimize industry solutions for social impact through data analytics and machine learning.

Taking a cloud first approach — reducing carbon emissions with green cloud computing

Google became carbon neutral in 2007 and has achieved 100 per cent renewable energy matching every year since 2017. Google has invested in renewable energy to match the electricity we use across our entire operations, including Google Cloud, meaning every workload that TELUS runs on Google Cloud has been matched with renewable energy purchases.

“The operational carbon footprint of running anything on Google Cloud is zero,” Talbott said. Also, by working with Google, TELUS gets the benefit of economies of scale using less electricity. Not only is TELUS leveraging Google data centers, it’s also relying on the digital collaboration made possible by Google Workspace to reduce the amount of travel required by employees attending meetings in different offices. Collaboration tools like Google Meet can reduce the carbon footprint of in-person conferences by 94 percent.

Google compensates for the environmental footprint of any electricity used in the data center and out to the edge network. “You can feel pretty good about using Google Meet because it’s carbon-neutral,” Talbott said.

Multiplier through sustainable partnerships — green cloud computing radiates out

By supporting TELUS in its environmental sustainability efforts, Google Cloud is also enabling TELUS to do the same for its various partnerships. For example, powered by Google Cloud’s infrastructure and data analytics capabilities, TELUS is partnering with Picacity (formerly NXN Digital) and Google Cloud to deliver an ecosystem of integrated smart technologies that enable cities to improve the lives of their residents.

From dynamic traffic signaling that reduces congestion and emissions, to data analytics that create smarter, more efficient city planning, the partnership is transforming the way municipalities operate in our increasingly digital world.The partnership is built on four foundational pillars of infrastructure and environmental sustainability, intelligent transportation, public safety and security, and health. In the case of intelligent transportation, this means sensors, cameras, and other devices are built into or near roads, sidewalks, and bike paths to provide data for innovative software to improve traffic flow in real time. The data can then foster informed decisions about infrastructure, city planning, fleet optimization, and public safety.

All of these environmental measures may seem small when compared with the enormity of the problem that is climate change, but as Talbott said, “Change begins with the small decisions we make every day such as paying attention to the practices of companies that we’ve come to rely on daily in the modern world. They may seem small and in the margins, but at scale, this is how we can make a real impact.”