UNIX and Linux SAS^® administrators, have you ever been greeted by one of these statements as you walk into the office before you have gotten your first cup of coffee? Power outage! SAS servers are down. I cannot access my reports. Have you frantically tried to restart the SAS servers to avoid loss of productivity and missed one of the steps in the process, causing further delays while other work continues to pile up? If you have had this experience, you understand the benefit to be gained from a utility that automates the management of these multi-tiered deployments. Until recently, there was no method for automatically starting and stopping multi-tiered services in an orchestrated fashion. Instead, you had to use time-consuming manual procedures to manage SAS services. These procedures were also prone to human error, which could result in corrupted services and additional time lost, debugging and resolving issues injected by this process. To address this challenge, SAS Technical Support created the SAS Local Services Management (SAS_lsm) utility, which provides automated, orderly management of your SAS^® multi-tiered deployments. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate the deployment and usage of the SAS_lsm utility. Now, go grab a coffee, and let's see how SAS_lsm can make life less chaotic.

As the IT industry moves to further embrace cloud computing and the benefits it enables, many companies have been slow to adopt these changes due to concerns around data compliance. Compliance with state and federal law and the relevant regulations often leads decision makers to insist that systems dealing with protected health information or similarly sensitive data remain on-premises, as the risks for non-compliance are so high. In this session, we detail BNL Consulting s standard practices for transitioning solutions that are compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) from on-premises to a cloud-based environment hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). We explain that by following best practices and doing plenty of research, HIPAA compliance in a cloud environment is no more challenging than compliance in an on-premises environment. We discuss the role of best-in-practice dev-ops tools like Docker, Consul, ELK Stack, and others, which improve the reliability and the repeat-ability of your HIPAA-compliant solutions. We tie these recommendations to the use of common SAS tools and show how they can work in concert to stabilize and improve the performance of the solution over the on-premises alternatives. Although this presentation is focused on health care and HIPAA-specific examples, many of the described practices and processes apply to any sensitive-data solutions that are being considered for the cloud.

Health care has long been focused on providing reactive care for illness, injury, or chronic conditions. But the rising cost of providing health care has forced many countries, health insurance payers, and health care providers to shift approaches. A new focus on patient value includes providing financial incentives that emphasize clinical outcomes instead of treatments. This focus also means that providers and wellness programs are required to take a segmentation approach to the population under their care, targeting specific people based on their individual risks. This session discusses the benefits of a shift from thinking about health care data as a series of clinical or financial transactions, to one that is centered on patients and their respective clinical conditions. This approach allows for insights pertaining to care delivery processes and treatment patterns, including identification of potentially avoidable complications, variations in care provided, and inefficient care that contributes to waste. All of which contributes to poor clinical outcomes.