Proximus ICT Solutions • March 2015

ictsolutions number 12 - March 2015

ict advice for managers

Power outage, fire or IT crash

What threats does your company face?

Prevention is better than cure

Discover

And also:

• A roadmap to help you realise true business continuity

The new Windows 10

• A long-term vision as a guideline for your real time activities

Why multitasking doesn’t work

Will a robot take your job?

• A simple solution for moving your SMB to the cloud

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Launch your business in the cloud With Microsoft Office 365 you have anywhere access to the following, from all your devices: • the full Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) with the Business Premium version (€10/month/user) • an e-mail address of the business • an application to create your website • tools to communicate and organize meetings online New

unlimited space through One Drive for Business to store and share your documents

Powered by Proximus

More info: www.proximuscloudpro.be

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EDITO

In this issue 03 Editorial 04 Report: Business Continuity What dangers lurk for your company?

Outages, fire, power failures or hacking. These are only a few examples of the problems you may have to face.

Even though you may think such situations highly unlikely, your company is at much greater risk than you believe.

09 Report: Business Continuity Prevention is better than cure There is no such thing as a risk-free corporate environment. You therefore need to be aware of the pitfalls and how to deal with them. We show you a few how-to’s.

13 Explained Why your homepage is losing its importance 14 Tested Windows 10 What is the difference between Windows 10 and its current incarnation?

14 Tested Laptops light Classic laptops makes way for hybrid devices.

15 Column The digital business moment 16 Trend Will a robot steal our jobs?

Computers and robots look set to make one in three jobs redundant. Will this affect you or your line of business?

17 Solution Your SMB in the cloud All data and applications become accessible from any device through a virtual desktop.

18 Tested Smartphones: bigger is better Smartphones are literally growing out of hand.

18 Digitip Nest Nest, Google’s intelligent thermostat, is warming up Belgium.

19 Book ‘When digital becomes human’ 19 Digitip Multitasking doesn’t exist. Neither in your car, nor on your computer.

Business continuity: a risk-weighted approach

I

n the digital economy, computers are everything. IT has become irreplaceable: at the gas station, at the checkout in a store, at the office, in the train station and the hospital, etc. IT is of vital importance to any company. Try to imagine how we would have to live and work without computers – the consequences are horrible.

But there’s a way out: a risk-weighted approach. In this issue, we present a straightforward seven-step plan to help you determine risks and create a decent continuity plan, from the first assessment to the final testing rounds. We also propose a solution: your SMB in the cloud. This solution allows you to quickly build a work environment that guarantees continuity and has a clear price per user, without causing headaches and unnecessary complications.

Technology, together with services, are the cornerstones in securing your IT and your business continuity. Cutting-edge technologies are nothing without knowhow. And knowhow is what we offer with this plan of action – as a starting point, because our IT partners and consultants can help you configure the perfect combination for your company.

You will sleep soundly from now on.

Stefan Bovy Director Medium Enterprise Market Enterprise Business Unit, Proximus

Any questions?

For questions about specific ICT solutions, please contact our account managers or our network of Proximus ICT Experts (www.proximus-ict-experts.be).

A publication of the Belgacom Group | Number 12, March 2015 | Editor: Bart Van Den Meersche, Koning Albert II-laan 27, 1030 Brussels | Contact: Charline Briot charline.briot@proximus.com | Design and production: Minoc Media Services bvba, Steenweg op Antwerpen 26, 2300 Turnhout | www.minoc.com March 2015 • 3

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REPORT

Report: Business continuity - dangers

What dangers lurk for your company?

A fire, breakdown, power outage, or hacking – these are only a few examples of the calamities that your company could encounter. It might seem like there’s only a slim chance that these things will happen to you – but your business might be in graver danger than you realise. We talked to a number of businesses about their preparations and the day disaster struck.

“I

remember standing in line at the baker’s that Saturday, when I received a call from one of our shareholders. He informed me that our headquarters were on fire, and expressed his faith that we at the IT department had a plan prepared for this kind of disaster.

Which of course made it very clear that he himself had nothing of the sort.” Johan De Witte, IT manager at fashion brand Veritas, well-known for its many Belgian shops, recalls this unpleasant moment in vivid detail.

When De Witte got this phone call, the entire Veritas building was ablaze. Luckily, the firm had a crisis backup plan for situations such as these. “In the end, however, there are always things you’ve missed – and these things aren’t necessarily trivial! For example, we didn’t take into account that our employees required some basic equipment to get started again – even the simplest things like desks and laptops take some time to order and arrive.”

Veritas had moved its IT infrastructure to an external data center prior to the fire, a decision that safeguarded most data and applications from the flames.

Disaster Statistics teach us that approximately 10.000 fires occur in Belgium every year – about 25 to 30 each day. And there are other natural phenomena that you’d be wise to prepare for. “A few years ago, a severe thunderstorm passed over our industrial park where our activities were located, and if the water had reached a few meters further, our servers would’ve been flooded. Had this happe-

ned, we would’ve shut down for weeks, maybe months. It would have been a catastrophe, plain and simpel,” relates Kris Maelbrancke, IT manager at Ceratec, an industrial technology firm with 400 employees. Ceratec makes use of three in-house datacenters, one of which is reserved wholly for backups. “At the time we were already working on a plan to map the greatest risks and counter them as much as possible, a so-called business continuity plan.

But this near miss definitely sped up the process,” he says.

“Everyone suddenly became acutely aware of the risks.

Accidents happen – and so do rainstorms.”

Who flipped the switch?

Businesses must be aware of potential danger, and prepare for them if possible. “At a certain point, we realised that the datacenter that we had constructed was located in a kind of flood area,” says Luc Verbist, CIO of De Persgroep.

The water missed our servers by mere meters – and if they had been damaged, we would have been out of business for weeks, maybe months.

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REPORT

“We had to elevate it – almost literally lift the entire structure.” And it’s not only Mother Nature’s whims that are on companies’ minds. Many businesses were worried about the imminent lack of power in our country, this past winter. When the previous government presented their so-called “disconnection plan”, it was made crystal clear that both families and companies in certain areas would stop receiving power in case of a shortage. This preventive measure keeps and kept many Belgian managers up at night, Verbist states. In the fall of 2014, he predicted: “Unless the winter will turn out to be very mild, we’ll be facing some serious consequences. Preparation, therefore, is key.”

Risks Many of the potential disaster scenarios for businesses will cause their IT services to black out and become unavailable – and that, of course, is also the biggest point of impact. Never before were the consequences of key IT systems as high as they are today. Companies tend to underestimate these scenarios, but the cost of the outage of a business application easily reaches 5000 to 8000 euro per minute, and sometimes more.

Additionally, it places an enormous strain on the continued existence of your company and on the market share it holds. Studies show that the market share that is lost in eight hours of downtime takes at least three years to regain.

The weakest link: your people A constant in the study of professional disasters is the prevalence of human errors. These errors range from a systems manager accidentally deleting data to the clichéd example of the cleaning lady shutting down a computer with the vacuum cleaner. There’s little to be done to prevent these mistakes from happening, but you can prepare yourself for the worse – and that, too, had been proven to be genuinely effective. “We were very happy that we had a plan when we had to deal with the fact that our entire HQ had suddenly gone up in flames,” says Veritas’ Johan De Witte. “That plan was far from perfect, as it turned out.

But we had at least considered the possibility and impact of such a disaster in advance, and that is the first and most important step.”

Dangers and risks in ten numbers 1 10.000 fires in Belgian each year

2 20 percent of companies once experienced a

serious IT problem that led to significant data loss.

3 50 percent of data is kept locally and therefore escapes the backup process.

4 93 percent of companies that experienced

significant data loss, disappeared within the next 5 years.

5 The market share lost per 8 hours of downtime takes at least 3 years to regain.

6 6 hours of downtime will cause damage to the company the effects of which will last for a year.

RIP

6 hours downtime

7 After cars, computers are the items most often

reported stolen.

8 Eight percent of hard drives breaks down in the

first two years.

9 Every year, 85.000 burglaries take place in

Belgium.

10

One fifth of all internet users has been the

victim of some form of cyber crime.

Sources: Gartner, Infosecurity, Ricoh, Beltug

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REPORT

Prevention is better than cure

Business Continuity

Your company has to navigate all kinds of danger. Handling each situation correctly is key. When you prepare yourself, you move from unknowingly being at risk to taking calculated risks yourself. We created an action plan.

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I

n business jargon, we often use the term business continuity. As a concept, it’s easy enough to translate: making sure that your business keeps going as usual (as far as possible) in case of disaster. This philosophy isn’t new, but in recent years, it’s been a point of renewed attention.

Business continuity encompasses all activities that are performed on a daily basis to guarantee the provision of services, the consistency and the resilience of your organisation, as much as possible. This, of course, is easier said than done. These steps can serve as guidelines in this endeavour.

1

Focus on preventing risk When Leon Jorissen, IT Manager at plumbing supplies merchant Lambrechts, was brought into the company to restructure the entire IT department, he found the server, then called an AS/400, surrounded by some junk and a chain paper printer, in a small back room. The answer to his first question concerning business continuity – What if this room were to burn down? – was a reassuring “We have insurance!”.

Keep your company going: important distinctions

1

What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?

In disaster recovery, the key point is to get all infrastructure up and running again, as fast as possible, after a catastrophe. Business continuity centers around the question: how do I make sure my company remains functional, even during a disaster?

2

What is the difference between backup and storage?

The terms backup and storage are often used interchangeably, but they’re inherently different. A backup is an extra copy of a file, program, hard drive, or complete system, created to fall back on when the original files have been damaged or were lost. Storage is the term describing the part of the IT infrastructure were data are kept, both the original files and the backups.

The very first step is a good understanding of what business continuity is, exactly. It’s the realisation within an organisation that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. That may seem obvious, but this little anecdote proves that isn’t necessarily the case.

Lambrechts has come a long way since then, Jorissen is glad to say. “We’re making sure all data is stored both on the server in our headquarters, and on a remote server in an external data center, where everything is constantly backed up. If our internal server were to fail, we’d barely lose a thing.” The investment in business continuity in the first four years reached a total of between 120.000 and 130.000 euro, including software, hardware, and external services. “But everyone knows what could’ve happened if we hadn’t made that investment: 54 people in the logistics department unable to continue with their work. The way everything is organised today, recreating all data takes no more than a few seconds, which means we can rely on the external server rather fast if an outage occurs.

This story illustrates two fundamental characteristics of business continuity. Firstly, without an investment in infrastructure – an external datacenter, back ups, or emergency power and airconditioning for the internal datacenter – you don’t have a functioning business continuity plan. Secondly: the goal is to keep all activities running in all circumstances, not just to keep your infrastructure going. True business continuity implies that your employees can access the applications they need from any location and any device (discover how on page 17).

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CASE REPORT

Business continuity through the cloud Sheltered workshop BW Pajottenland vzw offers jobs to people who get few chances in the regular business world.

“We are a serious business, though, not a charity,” explains director Jan De Kegel. BW Pajottenland vzw’s 125 employees are responsible for the conditioning, packaging and repackaging of goods for several retail companies, such as Colruyt, Delhaize and L’Oréal.

Professionalisation IT plays an important supporting role at BW Pajottenland.

The administrative team of the sheltered workshop can’t function without access to documents and applications, such as email and the bookkeeping software and files.

Until recently, the company used a local IT environment, built together with a local freelancer. “This offered too little security and business continuity. It wasn’t clear how quickly we’d get help should an incident occur,” says De Kegel.

BW Pajottenland turned to Proximus’ partner Comcon iXL-iT to professionalise their IT environment. “We prefer to work with a single partner for all our hardware, software and telco needs.”

Always available Comcon iXL-iT proposed that BW Pajottenland make the move towards a cloud-based solution. De Kegel: “This way, we can always rely on the availability of our applications and data, so that we can focus on our core activities.”

BW Pajottenland uses the vContainter solution offered

by Proximus. The company’s applications and data are all stored in one of Proximus’ datacenters. For email and calendar, BW Pajottenland opted for Microsoft’s Office 365.

“We no longer have to invest in servers, security, maintenance, backups, etc. We pay for what we use, which makes our IT costs predictable and transparent.”

The cloud ensures that our data and applications remain available at all times For the sheltered workplace, a cloud solution offered some much-appreciated security and peace of mind. “Our applications and data are safely stored with Proximus,” says Jan De Kegel. “We’re certain we can’t lose any data.

If something is wrong with one of the machines, Proximus solves it, and our employees never even notice.” The cloud also ensures that no one is bound to a specific location. “Email and other applications are available remotely and via tablets and smartphones.”

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REPORT

Without investing in infrastructure, there can be no functional business continuity plan

2

Understand your company The most elementary way of keeping business continuity affordable is by making a correct assessment of your company and its activities and processes. If you can simply make an honest judgement of how important each aspect really is, you can save a substantial amount already. If, however, you consider every process to be critical, you will have to invest rather heavily in order to keep everything running through a disaster.

When a company like Koramic, a manufacturer of building materials, took a closer look at its processes, it quickly became apparent that the production system itself was critical, not the supporting services. All attempts at business continuity had to concentrate on those people working the ovens, where the tiles and bricks were actually produced; they turned out to be the only ones who had to keep going.

When determining which are the critical processes and activities – usually described as a business impact analysis or BIA for short – it’s best to keep a few less than obvious questions in mind: how critical are your employees (usually more so in a service company than at a production plant), what happens when the phone lines go dead?

This is the ideal moment to determine your RTOs and RPOs, as well. The RTO is the recovery time objective: the speed with which you need to get a product or service back up, in order to experience minimal impact on the workings of your companies. The RPO is the recovery point objective. This is the indication of the amount of time there can be between the incident and the last backup.

3

Understand the risks Without a substantial investment in infrastructure, you cannot build a strong business continu-

ity plan.

This step is a logical result of the previous one: once you know which are the most critical processes and activities, you understand the problems that would arise if they were to drop out. “This is the point were unknowingly being at risk becomes taking calculated risks,” says Alex Vanzegbroek of Beltug, the association of Belgian IT users.

The cost of a computer system failure Application

Typical Downtime Cost

Financial/Trading

€40,000 / minute

Supply Chain

€10,000 / minute

ERP

€10,000 / minute

CRM

€8,000 / minute

E-Commerce

€8,000 / minute

E-Business

€8,000 / minute

Business-applications

€5,000 / minute

Database

€5,000 / minute

Messaging

€1,000 / minute

Infrastructure

€700 / minute

Source: DRJ; Winter 2003 Issue; How Much Is Enough

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REPORT

Does your company have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan in place?

I don’t know

Yes

15% No, and not on the roadmap

52%

24%

9%

Understanding your business processes is imperative in making a correct risk assessment

No, but it’s on the roadmap Source: Smart Business, ZDNet.be, 2014

This exercise isn’t quite as straightforward as you might 20% think. Some processes aren’t crucial for the continued existence of your business, but are required by law to be heavily guarded. Other processes that don’t seem to 40% be essential in and of themselves can cause very critical processes to drop out, making them a big risk factor.

You need a thorough understanding of your business processes to make a correct risk assesment. 40% It’s therefore crucial that you gain insights in the myriad ways your business processes are interconnected in order to make a correct risk assessment. Companies often use a kind of scale to determine risk: how big is the potential impact of a certain event on your operations or reputation, and what is the likelihood of this event actually happening to your company? A simple example: companies with headquarters in Zaventem have a larger chance of having to deal with an airplane falling on their buildings 10% than businesses in Namur do.

4

13% continuity plan Draw up the business As soon as all possible risks have been identified, you need to design a fitting reaction to each risk. What that reaction is, will depend both on the 10%

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severity of the risk and on the likelihood of the event. For instance, a company might state that there’s only a very small chance that their building will be destroyed entirely, but were it to happen, it would be a top-level crisis. The combination of a small likelihood and an extreme impact means that this risk should be considered of average importance. Subsequently, a fitting reaction can be designed.

All of this will result in a complete business continuity plan, describing a scenario for each possible risk, while respecting the priorities you determined in the business impact analysis. You’ll create a procedure detailing how and to whom an incident needs to be reported, how it must be treated by the crisis management team and which staff members will make out that team, how people will communicate with the crisis manager, where employees need to go when their building is unavailable, etc.

An interesting note here is that the exact priorities can vary depending on the moment the incident occurs.

When the software used to calculate wages, for instance, is down, the priority of this incident will be higher at the end of the month than at the beginning.

65%

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REPORT

15% 15% 24%

52%

24%

52% 9%

Causes of downtime 9%

5

Document and communicate your plan When the complete business continuity plan has been drawn up, you need to make sure it’s visible, by providing each employee with the necessary documentation. Some companies use a manual for crisis management, spread throughout the company in different shapes: a poster for each manager, always within reach; a copy that is kept off-site (in case that site would be destroyed entirely); and copies on each floor or in each department.

Not scheduled & unexpected

20% Application failure

20%

40% 40%

6

Test the business continuity plan Once the manuals have been placed in key locations and the infrastructure has been prepared in order to kickstart an acceptable recovery scenario for each possible risk, you’ve reached the last phase: testing your plans.

The test phase is the most underestimated, debated, and neglected part of the entire business continuity pipeline. Nonetheless, a test can yield valuable intelligence, sometimes in unexpected places. “Tests always teach you something – unexpected things happen all the time,” Alex Vanzegbroek concludes.

The test phase is the most undervalued part of the entire business continuity pipeline.

The test phase is the most underestimated, debated, and neglected part of the entire business continuity pipeline.

Environmental factors, hardware, operating systems, power, disasters

40% 40%

Operator errors

Scheduled & expected Batch application processing Hardware, networks, operating systems, system software 13%

10% 10%

13% Backup/ recovery

10% 10% 2% 2%

Physical plant / environment 2%

65% 65%

Application and database

Source: Gartner

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CASE

Business continuity at the company Belgian company Haystack specialises in market research, with a focus on sensory research.

Sensory research is all about consumer behaviour, more specifically in everything related to smelling, tasting, and sensing. The company’s portfolio contains several large multinationals dealing in fast-moving consumer goods, such as Nestlé, Alpro and AB Inbev. Haystack employs 45 people, and has offices in the Netherlands and Dubai.

Data is key in this company, as is the certainty that all systems remain operational. For its business continuity infrastructure, Haystack began with an internal arrangement. “We were expanding on infrastructure we already had. We didn’t have anything against the cloud, specifically, but we simply preferred keeping our data, servers and storage close,” recounts Steven De Backer, research analyst at Haystack.

Today, Haystack utilises two identical servers, in a failover configuration. “This means that if one of them were to fail, the other one can keep everything afloat, without downtime,” says De Backer. The original server was moved to a different location in the office building. “It’s placed close to the entrance. In case of a fire, we can still get to it,” he explains.

These two server systems are not the only storage Haystack employs: the company also relies on tape. “Those tapes serve as backups, and are moved to an offsite location, far away from our building, every week”. The main server, then, is backed up both to these tapes and to the other server.

Proximus was responsible for the implementation of this solution, which is based on HP’s servers and storage infrastructure and Microsofts HyperV for server virtualisation.

“We let the specialists at Proximus make this decision,” concludes De Backer.

Tests are also crucial to determine the feasibility of a business continuity plan. Such a plan is usually drawn up by a team of two or three people, and therefore can’t usually take into account every practical aspect that could hinder its proper execution.

A frequently encountered example: a restore, the retrieval of previously saved data, often takes much longer than expected. The test runs of the necessary hardware and the transit to the backup system usually go rather smoothly, but the tests of the procedures during an incident often go wrong.

7

Start over Every once in a while, and every time the company goes through radical changes, the business impact analysis must be repeated, and the business continuity plan must be redesigned and altered where necessary.

Ontex, a company that produces personal hygiene products, has a business continuity steering committee that gathers every few weeks (or, when the need arises, more often) to see if the plans or infrastructure need to be changed, “even though we started out as a small company with a single building in Buggenhout,” stresses Patrick Pittoors, IT manager at Ontex.

Ontex is an excellent example for big and small companies, because their concern with business continuity grew gradually as the company did. “Not just because of our first experience with downtime, but also because of the company’s growth,” says Pittoors, “which in turn exponentially magnifies the consequences of downtime.”

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EXPLAINED

Why your homepage is losing its importance The homepage as we know it is losing its lustre, as more and more surfers enter websites via the backdoor.

C

urrently, only one in three visitors to the The New York Times’s website, an American newspaper, land on the site’s homepage. That percentage is said to be falling as we speak. In 2011, half the site’s visitors still entered the site via its homepage.

This was revealed in an internal report drafted by the American newspaper, which was recently leaked to the press.

According to that report, “those entering our website via the homepage spend increasingly less time there.”

Explanation The New York Times is no exception.

Other sites witness the same drop in visits to their homepage. For quite a few websites, the trend is even markedly lower, with 5 to 15% landing on the homepage being the norm rather than an exception for your

average website. To put it differently: the bulk of visitors to your website never even so much as see your homepage.

where deep down a website’s hierarchical ladder. As a rule, visitors to such pages leave the site immediately afterwards.

Explanations for your homepage’s waning importance are quite simple. First, there is the rising importance of search engines, like Google, which usually reference individual pages. “In a way, Google has become our new homepage,” states the famous web expert Gerry McGovern in the wake of the New York Times’s report. “Each page we post is likely to become somebody’s homepage,” he explains.

Not quite what you think Gerry McGovern believes most companies are as yet unaware of this trend. They still consider their homepage the main entrance to their internet offering, while any webstore currently has countless sideand backdoors.

Then, there are social media, like Facebook and Twitter. They are frequently used to share webpages or articles located some-

Poviding one’s website with a clear-cut structure may have been of prime importance in the past nowadays a network of links to the various pages is what really counts.

McGovern therefore believes that linking to content on other websites and proper SEO are far more important than creating the content proper. Providing one’s website with a clear-cut structure may have been of prime importance in the past— nowadays a network of links to the various pages is what really counts.

More often than not, the creation of information and messages, on the one hand, and their dissemination (sharing and linking to such content), on the other, are handled by different departments. “These two activities need to converge and should ideally be handled by one and the same department.”

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TESTED

Windows 8 followed

by Windows 10 The heir to Windows 8 did not turn out to be the expected Windows 9; instead, Microsoft went straight to Windows 10. What are the differences between Windows 10 and its predecessor?

T

he official launch of Windows 10 won’t take place until the end of this year – some patience is still in order. Windows 10 is the first step towards a new generation of Windows, according to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. Microsoft’s chief considers the new OS an integral part of the Internet of Things, connecting ever more objects. Windows 10 consequently doesn’t only need to be able to communicate with other pc’s; the myriad aspects of the internet of things, such as sensors and mechanical systems, need to be supported as well. Management and

security will improve as well, to accommodate this expanding scope.

That is the broader strategy behind Windows 10. Thanks to the preview build, we could also gage the practical changes on the software level. As expected, there is the reintroduction of the Start menu, which makes Windows 10 look and feel like a blend of old and new elements.

One of the more daring improvements is without a doubt the ability to create several virtual desktops, as if you were working with several monitors. That, of course, is the core of Windows 10: an operating system that can be used across different devices.

Laptops light In 2014, the transformation from classic laptop to hybrid device (with moveable touch screen) gained a lot of momentum.

A

number of decent devices, such as the HP Pro x2, demonstrated the usefulness of such laptops, but with Intel’s new lineup of processors, producers only now received the tools to build truly amazing hybrid devices. The tiny Core M chip can generate the same computing power as a sturdy Core i laptop, without producing as much heat. The result: a powerful laptop that does not need a bulky fan and therefore can become much, much thinner. The end of 2014 brought a number of examples of these devices of the future, such as Lenovo’s gorgeous Yoga 3 Pro. Mature If 2014 was the year in which hybrid laptops conquered the minds and hearts of the audience, 2015 will be the year of their

true maturation. For the first time in a long while a new laptop is an attractive prospect again. Not necessarily because of their specifications – most devices are already powerful enough for the needs of most users – but because of their design: flexible, paper-thin devices with both laptop and tablet DNA are the future.

Cheap Apart from these skinny (and often relatively expensive) hybrids, the netbook has been given a second chance as well.

Chromebooks have been slowly gaining traction in our part of the world as wel as the US, and Microsoft is determined to stop them in their tracks. This result of this strategy is an assortment of laptops

priced 300 euro or less, with the lookand-feel of Chromebooks but running a full-fledged version of Windows. New developments are appearing on both ends of the spectrum, and we can still find classic, no-frills laptops in between – even though that category seems to be slowly shrinking.

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COLUMN

The digital business moment T

he business moment is considered the moment in time when a customer wants to be served. It is the moment of truth, so to speak, the time when a supplier has the opportunity to serve a customer.

It is the only time when the person in need of something interacts with the person likely to supply what they need. The client may be a customer in a brick-and-mortar shop or a citizen at the town hall.

As humans, we still prefer one-on-one business moments, because we want to buy from a person rather than a machine. The first and last questions are asked and (hopefully) answered during such a moment of communication. Depending on the situation (the subject and the available time window), such business moments may last a few minutes or several hours.

Whereas a loaf of bread is bought within a minute, buying a car typically takes more than an hour.

With the advent of intelligent things and big data, business moments have shrunk to a few seconds at best. Here are some examples. A car driving in a street will be able to switch the streetlights on and off, depending on its position (intelligent LED lights). The car may even be able to control traffic lights. When a river’s water level starts rising to a point where the danger of a flood becomes imminent, local residents and emergency services need to be alerted. When a pedestrian walks past a shop, the shopkeeper may want to send him an ad to lure him to his shop. If patients forget to take their medication, the nursing organisation needs to remind them of doing so. If a video goes viral on social channels, an e-shop will want to post an online ad to attract customers. And wouldn’t it be great if your car or washing machine could arrange for maintenance without your having to think of it?

Future business moments will be rather short, as will their detection time (think of the car driving in a dark street). We are talking seconds, or minutes at best. The response time, for its part, will need to be instant: the streetlights need to go on while the car is driving past—not too early, and certainly not after the fact. The same applies to having a car or machine serviced: the appointment needs to be made as soon as maintenance becomes necessary.

All of the situations described so far share a common denominator: the absence of human interaction. Everything is arranged at the speed of computers, which are somehow connected to one another. In the future, nobody will be able to afford missed digital business moments for fear of losing the business to a competitor or arousing the customer’s suspicion.

And that, in short, is why business continuity will become evermore crucial.

Jean-Marie Stas, Marketing Manager at Proximus March 2015 • 15

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TREND

Robots

Will a robot steal our jobs?

Computers and robots are expected to replace one in three currently existing jobs over the course of the next twenty years – maybe even more. What about your job and industry?

T

he bottom line of a study executed by consultancy firm Deloitte and the University of Oxford caused quite the upheaval: it stated that the rise of computers and robots would cause one in three currently human-held jobs to be superfluous in twenty years.

Danger zone?

Of course, this is a British study, but there can be little doubt that our country will evolve in much the same way. An American report from early 2014 even claimed that as much as 47 percent of human-held jobs would eventually be replaced by automised processes.

According to the British study, administrative workers and accountants are most at risk, together with people working in retail, construction, and transport. Employees currently earning less than 30.000 pounds per year are five times more likely to become victims of the automation process than those who earn 100.000 pounds or more.

“Those employees with skills that are hard to replace will survive” as technicians and scientists, but also certain professions in services and the medical world. “Blue-collar workers needn’t panic, either; robots and other machines still require maintenance and operators.”

pharma, and machine production, together with several traditional fields: food, chemistry, and services companies with a focus on technology also have a role to play.

Decock also points to new, creative industries, like apps, 3D printing, and web services. “Many of these companies will stay out of sight – they will create large amounts of added value and prosperity behind the scenes.”

Which industries will thrive?

The industries that will drive the increase demand for these profiles are the high-tech industries, such as IT, biotech,

Which jobs survive?

This prognosis may seem bleak, but as always, other doors open – and there are opportunities to be found for Belgian companies, as well. “New technology can help us stay productive and competitive”, says Stijn Decock, chief economist for employers’ association Voka. Our country, he explains, has several advantages: our central location within Europe and excellent education come to mind. “Belgian companies are also well-known for being flexible when meeting their clients’ demands.”

Decock is convinced that the employees who’ll survive will be those with qualities that are hard to replace or emulate, such 16 www.ictnews.be

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SOLUTION

Your SMB in the cloud The ultimate form of cloud computing! All your data and applications made available on every device and every location via a virtual desktop. Especially when discussing business continuity, this concept has interesting merits.

What is it?

In a virtual desktop environment, applications aren’t located on the device itself. They are kept in the datacenter, and offered to their users via the cloud. The user experience is the same as you’d get with locally running applications. Users can access their own environment from a computer or mobile device. Whenever you log in, your desktop is waiting just like you left it, no matter which device you’re using.

Every user can make his or her own virtual desktop, with their own icon organisation and background image.

What are the benefits?

Flexibility, of course, is key here. Users can always pick up where they left off and continue their work, no matter their location or the device they’re using. The platform grows according to your needs.

You can use the expertise offered by your

service supplier, such as Proximus – the technical infrastructure and any alterations to it are not your responsibility.

“Another advantage is the security of this system. In case a problem arises (theft, device crash, fire, etc.), your employee can almost immediately get back to work on any other device; your data are never lost,” asserts Bernard Philipe, Product Manager Cloud at Proximus.

When it comes to matters of business continuity, the merits of a virtual desktop formula are manyfold. “All data and applications are kept safely at one external datacenter; backups are kept at another. This way, companies can count on a so-called end to end solution,” Philippe continues,”because they can place their entire IT environment in a professional datacenter, thus guaranteeing continuity. That’s usually preferable to doing everything in house.”

Data and applications in an external datacenter

The virtual desktop concept is a total package. It entails not only the physical server infrastructure, but also all software licences. You’ll never have to worry about application licences anymore; they’re included in the fee. This way, the price per user is completely transparent.

That price usually also encompasses the

necessary server capacity and a 24/7 service guaranteeing that your applications and data are available at all times. All the user now needs, are relatively ‘light’ – and inexpensive – devices.

Why take the step?

“We notice several motives within organisations,” Bernard Philipe confirms. In the past, companies were only concerned with continuity and the safety of their information. Today, the employees’ point of view is often an important part of the equation.

There might be a lot of mobile users within the company, or employees that regularly use multiple devices to do their jobs, while the company lacks the opportunity of developing its business application for the web or for mobile devices. Maybe the company simply wishes to make sure all data is kept in one centralised location, or maybe it simply doesn’t have in-house IT specialists.

Whatever the reasons, a desktop solution is quick to build. Proximus can provide an entirely modular solution with a virtual desktop, servers, data backup, solid security measures and integration with phones and videoconferencing systems.

This way, your entire infrastructure is heading for the cloud.

More info For further informations or an in-depth analysis of your situation, please write to ictchannels@proximus.com

March 2015 • 17

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TESTED

Bigger is better Do bigger screens make better smartphones?

I

t seems like our smartphones are continuously getting bigger. Last year a 5 inch model would’ve been considered big; today, 6 inches is almost considered standard. Samsung’s Note 4 and Google’s Nexus 6, which turned out to be radically different from the terminated Nexus 5, are a few good examples. Even Apple, who’s designers weren’t traditionally keen on building bigger phones, jumped on the bandwagon in 2014.

Apple sizes up The iPhone 6 Plus is a pretty huge smartphone that can go toe to toe with the Android phablet family. Because of these devices that sport a diagonal screen size

“Bigger or smaller – but definitely better.” of five or more inches, the divide between smartphone and tablet is fading away – not in the least because seven inch tablets are becoming a regular occurrence as well.

That leaves a margin of an inch between smartphone or tablet – we can wonder when the 6,5 smartphones or tablet will hit the shelves.

Fashionable phones Apart from the physical size of today’s phones, it’s also clear that the build quality and finish of our devices is becoming ever more important. Even Samsung is abandoning its signature painted plastic for a premium metal finish, an approach first demonstrated with the Galaxy Alpha. This handsome device is rather modest in size, with its 4,7 inch screen, giving the smartphone a refined look. The Galaxy Alpha is clearly not just meant to be a phone; it’s a fashion article. This is a smart approach: the market has been flooded with virtually identical devices in the past year. A memorable exterior is more important than ever for brands looking to set their devices apart.

DIGITIP

Nest: 21st century thermostat Nest, Google’s smart thermostat, is popping up in homes throughout the country. The device is clever, can be controlled via the internet, and learns fast. Would it be a good fit for your home or office?

T

he smart thermostat caught the public eye with its fresh design. A thermostat is usually an ugly console in your office or living room, but Nest will please design-minded users.

The biggest advantage of Nest is that you needn’t configure anything: this thermostat learns independently, while you live your life as usual. The movement sensor knows when you’re home, and learns how long it takes for your home to heat up.

At first sight, it seems Nest couldn’t possibly be a bad fit for your house or office;

after all, the smart thermostat can help you save about 20 percent on your energy bill. Those numbers are correct, but only for classic oil and gas burners. New heating systems and their accompanying thermostats aren’t as dumb as they were ten years ago, and as a result, installing a Nest with these systems doesn’t have as big an impact.

Smartphone A smart thermostat isn’t smart unless it can connect to your smartphone via an

app. You can easily connect your Nest to your smartphone, in order to control the heating remotely.

What makes Nest especially noticeable is its large ecosystem. Nest is currently cooperating actively with more than five hundred partners, in order to make its system even smarter. A good example of these cooperations is the Jawbone Up24, the electronic wristband. When you wake up wearing your Up24, it notifies the thermostat, which can then proceed to turn up the heating.

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BOOK

The human side of customer relationships Many new books discuss the growing intellect of our computers, but in his latest book ‘When digital becomes human’, marketer Steven Van Belleghem takes a step back to focus on our human capital.

I

t’s evident that many jobs will be automated out eventually. The hype around digital transformation, however, is causing the value that companies can create with their people to be pushed to the background.

‘When digital becomes human’ points to your relationship with your customers.

“Two out of three consumers think that the personal touch in business is extremely important. No one thinks it doesn’t matter at all,” Van Belleghem writes.

“However, this specific aspect is often

undervalued.”

The author is convinced that companies should invest in defining not only their digital interfaces, but also their human visage. “Our left brains are blown out of the water by the power of computers, but those same machines can’t hold a candle to the abilities of our right brains,” Van Belleghem states. There are three crucial areas where humans outmatch the capabilities of a computer: passion, creativity, and empathy. Customers will value these typically human values.

Unlike Van Belleghem’s previous books (‘The Conversation Manager’ and ‘The Conversation Company’), this tome isn’t an action plan or specific approach. It’s a more strategic and reflexive, and in a sense noble book.

Steven Van Belleghem, ‘When digital becomes human’, Lannoo, ISBN: 9789082033762, 288 pages.

Multitasking doesn’t exist

DIGITIP

Multitasking doesn’t work. Not in your car, and not at your pc.

P

rominent companies such as Shell and DuPont recently prohibited their employees from making phone calls while driving; not even when they were using a handsfree system. They noticed the diminished quality of these calls, caused by the simple fact that the caller could not focus entirely on the conversation. “It’s not about your hands, it’s about your mind,” Theo Compernolle, neuropsychiatrist and consultant, points out. Of course, there is the matter of safety: handsfree phone calls in your car aren’t illegal, but they multiply the odds that you’ll encounter an accident by four to eight times. “And Texting in the car is nothing short of criminally irresponsible: when you text, you take your eyes off the road for an average of five seconds. That equals crossing a soccer field by car while blindfolded.”

Email In a car, there are risks, but even in the safety of your office building, multitasking

simply doesn’t work. You’re only alternating rapidly between different tasks: you’re drawing up an invoice, answering a phone call or email, while a colleague is standing by your desk. “This situation is killing your productivity,” Compernolle thinks. “It takes you two to four times as long to finish the task you initially set out to perform.”

Steve Jobs would have never managed to invent the iPhone if he had been watching his iPhone all the time He points the finger to the dominant smartphone culture, which has us all constantly checking our emails and receiving distractions at our fingertips. “Steve Jobs would have never managed to invent the iPhone if he had been watching his iPhone all the time.”

Does multitasking never yield results? “It

might work somewhat with tasks that are extremely repetitive,” Compernolle admits.

“But it should be out of the question with every task that has repercussions on people’s safety. I wouldn’t want the mechanic fixing my car looking at his smartphone the entire time.”

March 2015 • 19

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