Cloud computing

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Cloud computing

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Business Technology · October 2014

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Cloud computing

Opening shots Shane Richmond

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AST month IBM opened a four-million square foot “cloud resiliency centre” in North Carolina. It says the vast building will be followed by similar centres in Mumbai and Izmir, Turkey, as part of an investment in cloud services, which are expected to generate $32billion for the company in 2015.

The move is just one indication of the momentum behind cloud computing. Hardware costs for cloud providers are dropping at around 30 per cent a year, according to Google, while more businesses are moving their infrastructure to the cloud. IDC research expects firms to spend $100billion on cloud services this year and that will increase significantly over the next few years.

Those following this path see a competitive advantage in moving functions such as sales and marketing, customer services and business analytics to the cloud. The cloud is cheaper than managing these in-house, removes the problem of needing to update software and delivers data processing and storage power few companies on the planet could provide for themselves.

What puts companies off, according to research from GigaOM, are concerns about security, privacy and compliance. Security and privacy worries are linked to doubts about the ability of cloud services to withstand hacking attacks or to avoid human errors that expose confidential data.

On top of that are fears about the ability of governments to monitor cloud services, something

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Managing your own data services is the digital equivalent of keeping your money under the mattress that material leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden last year suggests is already going on.

The concerns are legitimate but for most firms the risks will be outweighed by the benefits. It won’t be long before managing your own data services is the digital equivalent of keeping your money under the mattress rather than in the bank.

Compliance is potentially a thornier problem, with regulations and laws in different territories often restricting how data can be stored and moved across international boundaries. The UK Data Protection Act, for example, prohibits the sending of personal data outside the European Economic Area “unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects”. Even if you know all of the countries and territories in which your data might be stored, many firms may prefer not to take the risk.

In the short term cloud providers are dealing Twitter: @ with these problems with hybrid cloud services shanerichmond

that allow companies to partially embrace the cloud while keeping certain functions in their own secure environments. Over the medium term, as business practices change and the benefits for customers become obvious, we are likely to see new protections for cloud customers, similar to those that protect bank customers today.

Meanwhile, a more flexible compliance structure is needed to allow for cloud computing without compromising the spirit of the regulations.

I’ve said already that the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the drawbacks but there is a bigger reason for businesses to embrace the move to the cloud: we will soon see services and business models develop that are impossible without it.

For example, a company such as Uber, the cab service, could not exist without cloud technology and mobile computing. That will become normal in the next few years, and businesses that don’t prepare themselves for that future risk being left behind.

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Cloud computing

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Cloud delivers €160bn boost to EU economy Expert: firms must keep track of data transactions

By Joanne Frearson C LOU D COM PU T I NG i s expected to add around €160billion to the EU’s GDP in 2020. By the end of 2015 around 70 per cent of all businesses will use cloud computing, while some 925,500 direct and indirect jobs will be created by the adoption of public and private cloud by 2016.

The cloud is giving private users, businesses, organisations and the public sector access to highly sophisticated IT systems and applications that would otherwise be out of reach to them. Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, tells Business Technology: “The cloud is enabling a wave of new business creation – particularly relevant in the SMB market.

“The most recent estimates indicate that, in 2016, the availability and adoption of cloud-based computing will result in the creation of 180,000 new businesses and this figure will likely grow to close to 303,000 in 2020 across the EU.” The cloud is helping SMBs because it can be quite difficult for them to finance in-house ICT infrastructure. Kroes says: “Cloud-based services give SMBs a chance to overcome this barrier by offering ondemand access to almost unlimited computing resources that are flexible – businesses pay only for what they need – and cost-effective – no substantial upfront investment is necessary.”

But there is still some work to do for Europe in the cloud space for it to really take off.

Kroes says: “In order for Europe to truly benefit, the adoption of cloud computing through all sectors of the European

Europe needs to keep investing in cloud technology to truly benefit, says the EC’s Neelie Kroes (inset)

economy has to pick up – especially in sectors where Europe has a major interest and leadership, such as health, manufacturing and the financial sector. We also need to look further, towards a single market for cloud computing within Europe and beyond. I’m convinced cloud computing is a global development that doesn’t benefit from national solutions.”

K r oes bel ieves c loud computing requires sufficient scale and data needs to be able to flow freely across borders, while preserving important

public values, such as relating to data protection. Earlier this year, the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board released a Trusted Cloud Europe report, where it recommended that industry, EU member states and the European Commission work towards a common understanding of cloud computing best practice in Europe – for example, on security and data protection.

Kroes says: “Such a common understanding will raise confidence and create trust that is necessary for cloud computing adopt ion by c ustomer s, businesses and public sector organisations, throughout all sectors of the economy.

“A common understanding of what trusted cloud computing means in Europe can also bring a competitive advantage for the European cloud computing industry, building upon our tradition of strong security and high standards of data protection.”

Kroes believes the risks in cloud computing are mostly similar to the threats other internet-related technologies face, and can usually be m it igated w it h su itable measures – for example, by choosing and managing stronger passwords and using proper encryption techniques.

“The use of appropriate risk-management approaches and security controls by both users and cloud service providers is indispensable and should not be neglected,” Kroes says. “Security incidents can have a serious impact on businesses and also on our society, especially when critical infrastructures are affected, such as relating to the energy, transport, communications or the financial sector.

“Due to the scale of their operations, cloud service providers often have more expertise and have better capabilities to address IT security risks.”

CIOs come to the fore amid cloud revolution A NEW kind of CIO leadership is emerging as a result of companies adopting the cloud for their IT systems, according to Ingrid-Helen Arnold, CIO of SAP. “In the early days of the cloud everyone thought this was a way of reducing costs, but customers are

moving to the cloud now for completely different reasons,” Arnold says. “It is really about innovation, agility and this is what is determining the winners and the losers.”

She explains the cloud is about confidence and trust – businesses are looking for a CIO who can guide

them through all the complexity of it and how this innovation can benefit them.

“The cloud is changing the face of IT,” says Arnold. “There is a new CIO leadership that is emerging” and looking towards the cloud to help overcome challenges in their organisation.

In Febr ua r y 2014 t he Commission’s Cloud Computing Com mu n icat ion a nd t he European Union Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published a list of existing cloud computing security certification schemes t hat w i l l help potent ia l customers to better compare cloud computing offerings from a security point of view.

IT IS important for companies to have visibility over their data in the cloud to reduce the threat of hacking.

Rashmi Knowles (above), chief security architect of EMEA at RSA, says: “There have been incidences where hackers are saying, we have got your data, and unless you pay us $10million we will delete it. We will see more of that kind of activity, where hackers actually get into a large cloud service provider.”

Knowles recommends companies should be “looking at the who, what, when, where and why” with regards to every data transaction. If somebody is accessing data it is important to know the identity of that person and make sure they fit within company policy.

If any other activities are being observed outside that policy, that is something the company needs to do something about.

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Cloud computing

IndustryVIEW

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Firms offering specialised services show how it’s done C loud services are becoming more open and transparent and companies which can define to their clients how their capabilities can help businesses are emerging as the key industry players.

David Burns, strategy and portfolio director at Capita IT Services says: “About five years ago, there were roughly 76 definitions of the cloud within the market and a lot of ambiguity. Over subsequent years there has been a self-righting mechanism and IT service providers have started to define the boundaries of what

cloud services really are. To help businesses Capita has published documentation to specifically define how cloud services can truly enable organisations, the difference it makes, and the value it brings.”

What is important is that those who will thrive here are those who can apply the process, security, and service management around the actual cloud service as this is vital to a strong delivery and furthermore can be a powerful differentiator among providers.

Another differentiator is “client engagement”. Burns

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says: “Those that are able to offer this broader range of services from the consultative angle as well as the technological and are able to advise their clients in the right way will deliver that real added value. The ability to show compliance to regulations, standards and best practice will give clients confidence, so the above ‘service wrap’ will become even more important.”

Increasing concerns among businesses over whether or not their data is secure have prompted many fears about cloud services. The Edward Snowden revelations about global government surveillance programmes have sent alarm bells ringing. Cloud services can step up to the data security challenge and Capita has addressed this by combining best practices and innovative technology, showing businesses they can keep their data safe through additional, and higher levels of security.

“Then there is a bigger data sovereignty issue where data is going outside the UK national boundaries.

This causes a lot of concern when I speak to clients, when I go to various different forums and speak to CTOs and CIOs. They are concerned about other government organisations outside the UK being able to reach into their storage and effectively get their hands on their data,” says Burns.

“This real challenge is one which Capita IT Services addresses by using UK-based data centres, coupled with the most stringent security that meets government and financial services requirements.”

As the cloud evolves, cloud brokers will also become more popular, where third parties will be used to purchase and combine cloud services in the most effective way for the client. This is one area Capita is driving towards and investing a lot of time in understanding. As cloud brokerage matures, businesses that are willing to be early adopters could potentially become more efficient and realise better operating costs.

ITS@capita.co.uk www.Capita-ITS.co.uk/Cloud

A clear advantage: open source opens up the possibilities of the cloud G iving businesses choice when it comes to the cloud by using open-source software can help them become more flexible and allow them to use the applications they wish to use to deliver services to their customers.

When it comes to cloud computing, OpenStack and Linux are key strategic imperatives for companies because of the flexibility in solution choice they both provide. While cloud computing is on the agendas of business and IT leaders for its ability to increase business agility, a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t exist. Regardless of the approach taken by companies, the starting point is the choice of public cloud, private cloud, or both.

Brian Green, managing director at SUSE UK & Ireland, says: “Enterprises today want as much choice as possible and Linux helps them achieve that in the public cloud. By embracing Linux, companies can reduce vendor lock-in and achieve the freedom to run workloads on their preferred public cloud.”

The public cloud provides companies with payas-you-go pricing and on-demand usage by renting and deploying solutions by the hour on third-party infrastructure. This model of computing not only provides near-instant access to required resources and solutions, but also lowers overall costs by shifting server procurement from a capital to an operational expense.

However, the public cloud is not without negatives.

Many IT leaders fear losing control over their businesses’ data and are worried about potential security and compliance risk associated with deploying critical workloads in the public cloud.

Pete Chadwick, senior product manager, cloud

solutions at SUSE, stated: “Companies can easily take advantage of the public cloud for use cases that are not core to the business – where compliance and control over data is less important.”

Conversely, private clouds enable organisations to keep data behind the corporate firewall and use traditional enterprise security and compliance methods. Although IT organisations continue to manage the infrastructure, the automation and self-service capabilities of a private cloud enable them to improve business agility while lowering costs through improved resource use.

Chadwick says: “What is driving enterprise interest in private cloud solutions is that customers can take advantage of a lot of the same benefits provided by the public cloud model, without the loss of IT control.”

With open-source cloud software such as OpenStack, which has a vendor ecosystem over 400 strong, companies can reduce vendor lock-in and maximise their options for building a private cloud. With SUSE Cloud this is especially true. SUSE Cloud is an enterprise OpenStack distribution that supports mixed KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware vSphere environments. This enables customers to expand their hypervisor choices and allow them to optimise workload performance, while minimizing licensing costs. Additionally, SUSE works with the OpenStack ecosystem to support and integrate its solutions with SUSE Cloud through standard open APIs. This modular approach helps ease installation and management of complete enterprise-ready private cloud solutions today, while providing IT organisations with future flexibility.

Said Green: “SUSE’s open-source solutions make

it easy to adopt cloud. Whether running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Amazon EC2, deploying an OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud private cloud, or using a combination of SUSE and partner solutions to build a hybrid cloud, our customers can deliver the right solution to address their business objectives.”

For more information on cloud please visit www.suse.com/opensourcecloud

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After the celebrity photo scandal, can you trust the cloud?

By Joanne Frearson

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HE RECENT thefts of celebrity photos from their smartphones have left many concerned over whether the cloud is safe.

British actress Emma Watson has been one of the latest celebrities targeted.

After her gender equality speech for the United Nations HeForShe campaign, there was a threat by internet trolls to release nude photos of the actress.

Although the threat has since been revealed as a hoax, Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence had nude photos stolen from her iPhone leaked, prompting Apple to launch an investigation over the security of the iCloud and Find my iPhone.

After more than 40 hours of investigation, Apple discovered none of the cases was the result of any breaches to the iCloud or Find my iPhone. The company said that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a targeted attack on usernames, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become common on the internet.

Oliver Crofton, mobile and digital security specialist at SELECT Mobile Network, says: “When there is a high-profile hacking case like the leak photos on the iCloud, people start to worry about it, but in almost all of those breaches that involve a high-profile celebrity, it revolves around how the device authenticates to the cloud environment.

“They will be looking at weak passwords, weak security questions, easily guessable credentials that are used to log into it, whereas the corporate environment tends to have twofactor identification – you normally use a randomly generated code to access it.

“There is software out that can guess your passwords in minutes on devices used to connect to the cloud. It is important to put anti-virus security on your password.”

Hollywood stars are not the only people who are potentially vulnerable, however – big businessmen can also be targets.

“CEOs have celebrity status and they have background which is published on them,” says Crofton. “People know what their mother’s maiden name is and can fill in the answers to the security questions. Using a publically available cloud is a no-go measure where you have no idea where the server is and what jurisdiction it is in.”

Although there are also benefits for a business to use the cloud, Crofton suggests no

sensitive information should be put into the public cloud, and that people should be mindful about where it could end up.

There are also many things companies need to be wary about before choosing a provider, he says.

Crofton explains that it can be an attractive method for an IT environment, as the updates for the cloud environment are often taken care of by a provider, meaning businesses do not have to have a team running software patches every month or running updates on the equipment. It is a costeffective way of doing business.

“But that also means you are reliant on the cloud provider to be doing those updates on your behalf for all your clients, which is risky,” Crofton says. “There are a number of incidents where people have fallen down in this scenario, or have jumped in too soon using the cloud without thinking it through.”

Crofton recommends using a private cloud, but has a stark warning to visit the data centre where the data is being held to ensure it has adequate security in place. “You do not want your data to be stuck in some back corner of a data centre, where someone can potentially pop a memory stick in and steal information.”

According to Crofton, this includes looking at the steps the data centre has taken to make sure their equipment is up to date and patched, and the accolades of the cloud provider should also be examined.

Another issue Crofton identifies is people not fully understanding the terms and conditions of the contract of their cloud provider or what they are committing to. He believes that often the biggest threat to the cloud is the people using it themselves.

He says: “An IT director may be sitting down and saying, I need to do this, I’m getting pressure from the board – they are running servers that are six years old, they need to get everything moved. They are not taking the time to go back and say, we need to get legal involved to read the terms and conditions of what we are actually signing up to.”

Cloud security is certainly a concern, especially in the light of celebrity phones being hacked.

But if businesses take steps to protect themselves and ensure sensitive information is safe, it represents a real opportunity to boost cost-savings and efficiency.

Cloud computing

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HACKED: Actress Emma Watson was the latest celebrity exposed to the phonehacking scandal; inset: Oliver Crofton

Deloitte: cloud boost for SMBs O N AV ER AG E, small and medium businesses (SMBs) using cloud technology to ove rco m e th e ir g row th challenges grow 26 per cent faster and deliver 21 per cent higher gross profits, according to research by Deloitte.

Sp eak ing at G oogle’s Atmosphere London, Matthew Guest, head of digital strategy, EMEA, at Deloitte, said: “Small and medium businesses make up half the economy in GDP terms – they employ about 60 per cent of people in the UK and most economies similar to the UK.” But in order for SMBs to continue to develop in the economy, they faced key challenges in the different phases of growth from start-up to becoming mature.

Guest says: “Key challenges to small business are access to capital and marketing. How do I participate in a global economy?

How do I scale my business efficiently, and under controls which I can take advantage of?

“The most successful startups use cloud technologies to help them overcome their most severe challenges, which are access to capital and skills.

When growth slows and a business reaches maturity, the cloud offers leaders an opportunity to simplify and streamline operations to unlock more capital to invest in new phases of growth.”

The research showed more than 80 per cent of SMBs believed it enabled them to scale and grow faster than would have otherwise been possible, with two thirds saying it allowed them to beat their competitors.

To optimise technology and business practices, Deloitte recommends SMBs move tools and applications to the cloud that are not core to the customer proposition to free up time, capital and resources.

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Chic and cheerful Rackspace’s Nigel Beighton is excited about the cloud – and not just because it will mean his socks will be easier to wash…

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IGEL BEIGHTON, UK CTO of Rackspace, is comparing cloud computing to a brand of perfume – specifically, one called Cheap & Chic Light Clouds by Moschino.

It’s an unusual comparison, admittedly.

But “cheap” and “chic” are two terms Beighton feels are appropriate when it comes to describing the cloud – it is cost effective, and it has the capacity to serve millions or billions of people very quickly, then change equally quickly.

Beighton certainly knows a lot about the cloud, and has a varied background when it comes to technology, becoming part of the government’s programme to switch off analogue television and move over to digital after a spell as CTO of lastminute.com.

One area where he believes cloud computing is chic is in the internet of things (IoT). In order for the IoT to work, he says, devices need to be able to talk to each other.

Classifications have to be agreed upon as to how to define these devices, which in turn needs to be put into context as to how they are being used. Which brings us to Beighton’s next unexpected comparison: socks. If a sock has an IoT

device in it, he explains, it can tell the washing machine what cycle to run. The sock can also explain to the machine what it is made out of and what colour it is to avoid any potential mix-ups between whites and browns.

A trivial example, perhaps – but expanded to the wider scale of companies and governments, the potential pitfalls of differening opinions as to how to define products and what context they are used in become clearer. “You have to get people to agree classifications of what things are,” says Beighton.

“That does not happen easily at all in either retail worlds or technology worlds.”

B e i g hton b e l ieve s a huge amount of the technological answer to this problem lies in the cloud. One way in which it can help is through the use

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of big data, as it can handle large and hugely variable data types. “The cloud has to be the catalyst to enable all of this,” he says. “It is the only platform where you have consistency worldwide for billions of users. The IoT would have never happened if it had not been for the cloud revolution to give people that scale.”

People are not likely buy all their products from the same shop where they might have the same types of classifications, Beighton points out. They will buy things from different shops, all over the world. “How they all communicate, the cloud can deliver that now,” Beighton says. “It knows how to do global replication.

The technology has been very cleverly worked out – how it can replicate information on a global basis, how it can serve it fast. If you look at the information we get on our mobile phone and apps quickly, it has worked out how to do that scale. And that is a very good thing.”

Tech entrepreneurs can now build an application and have it running in a matter of seconds through the cloud, says Beighton. And if it is popular, they have the potential to scale it to billions of people very quickly. He says: “Look at things like the Angry Birds game that came out of nowhere – suddenly it was on everyone’s phone.

That is a great achievement that cloud has enabled. The cloud is a catalyst for huge change because it is allowing people to have access to markets they would not have before and allowing people to scale like they could never do before.”

And although Beighton does not think we are quite there yet with getting all our devices talking to each other, he is “looking forward to the idea that all of my clothes are able to talk to my washing machine so when I put it in there it knows the correct wash!”

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Cloud computing

The inner geek

Moz & Bradders

Blink and you’ll miss it xxxxxxx

Outsourcing to the cloud can both save money and improve efficiency, as film streaming service Blinkbox found out. By Joanne Frearson

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HE NEXT time you are watching online movie service Blinkbox, you may be unaware it uses a cloud environment to be able to provide films to your SmartTV or devices efficiently.

Consumers want new releases right away.

They want to watch Zac Efron in Bad Neighbours or Angelina Jolie in Maleficent on their favourite consumer devices, with impeccable video and audio quality and reliability.

But piracy concerns mean that content providers often supply a movie just one day before Blinkbox is due to make it available. This leaves less than 24 hours to perform quality checks, encode the film in multiple formats and prepare it for streaming.

Such a tight turnaround requires lots of storage, high infrastructure demands at data centres and the ability to scale things very quickly.

The service has to deliver an experience that is consistent, and the movies have to look great regardless of what format they are being played in.

The technical infrastructure required to meet the challenge is often beyond the resources of even large firms. In Blinkbox’s case, the network uses Microsoft Azure’s cloud system to meet demand.

It was only in August 2013 that Blinkbox decided to move to this system. Previously, the company’s own data centre was running out of the computing power necessary to encode and catalogue its movies quickly enough to get them to work on multiple devices and screen sizes. A backlog was

building up – and if Blinkbox had to add new support for a new tablet or game console, it had to scale up its data centre infrastructure months in advance.

“We had aggressive growth goals, but we needed to break through the encoding bottleneck,” says Jon Robinson, group head of IT for Blinkbox. “We also needed greater resilience beyond our London data centre in the event of a natural disaster or a utility worker chopping through a cable. The more successful we became, the less we could tolerate a service interruption of any length of time.”

Through using this cloud service it has cut down the encoding time from weeks to just days or hours. Blinkbox can also now scale up its infrastructure the day before a promotion launches, to help with the extra traffic, then scale it back when traffic slows.

The company runs its application in two European Microsoft Azure data centres, and customers are served by the data centre nearest them. By using these centres Blinkbox now saves millions of dollars through the elimination of racks of high-performance servers and storage.

In addition to removing costs, Blinkbox also reaps

Previously relying on its own less efficient systems to stream video content, after switching to the cloud Blinkbox hasn’t looked back

operational savings by making far better use of its engineering staff. “We’re a small company that is growing rapidly, and we’re an engineering company at heart,” Robinson says.

“No one wants to do boring work. By removing mundane data centre tasks from our engineers’ days, they can do smarter things like making our platform more reliable, do better monitoring, and improve our auto-scaling.”

As new video formats come out, Blinkbox will continue to use cloud computing to help it expand with changes in technology.

“Video content is getting ever richer, being stored in ever-larger formats, and needs to be streamed faster,” Robinson says. “Plus, the number of devices and formats that we need to support is growing. All this leads to the need for lots and lots of storage.

“New devices are coming out all the time – some manufacturers give us lead time, others don’t. We no longer worry about how much lead time we have. We have encoding resources available on demand.”

If not for cloud computing, watching the latest blockbuster via an online movie streaming provider might be near impossible. And as technology changes and develops, cloud computing will be able to provide the necessary backup to power these increasingly popular services.

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The Big Interview Ben Fried

Joanne Frearson

I

T’S 9.30am in New York, where Ben Fried, CIO of Google, is based, and he’s already telling me it’s a bit too early to make jokes about the weather and the clouds.

Fried is in charge of one of the biggest cloud operations the world has seen – and for a man of such responsibility he has a great sense of humour, and is clearly excited and passionate about technology.

It’s certainly in line with the famously informal, enthusiastic work ethic that fuels Google. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, the tech giant’s remit has grown from search-engine algorithms to busying itself with organising and making accessible the world’s information.

Fried explains how the world has become technologically savvy, in a way that it has never been before. Over the past 10 years, the number one dominant force in the industry has been the rise of the consumer internet and the ever-growing number of devices we can plug into it. Increasingly, companies are seeing the value of marketing their products through it.

“Companies’ entire dialogues are being framed by the rise of these consumer internet technologies,” he says. “The industry keeps on finding new ways of benefiting from all of the investment, all of the innovation and all of the economies of scale that have taken place in the consumer internet.

“I talk to CIOs fairly frequently and the dialogue has gone rapidly – say from thinking about the cloud as a way of dealing with your email to people talking about doing document collaboration and shared storage. I see more and more people talking about using real-time collaboration, whether it is messaging or video chat or IP voice communications.

“The adoption of the cloud is not just small businesses or Silicon Valley start-ups.

Every CIO I talk to, from companies large and small, talk about the cloud as a matter of when, not if. I see more and more traditional

My mission: to unite work and personal lives enterprise technology arenas falling into the cloud. Salesforce has been doing this quite successfully for some time. If you look at the cloud’s business systems providers, the customer lists include very big companies. “[In terms of] Google’s own business we have BBVA, a financial services firm with something like 100,000 people using it, and highly regulated companies such as Roche pharmaceuticals, for example. These are big companies – you would have thought, based on the business, that they would have been slow to adopt, but they are not.”

There are around five million businesses around the world that presently use Google for Work products, including around 64 per cent of the of the Fortune 500 companies.

Each month 100 billion search queries are handled and every minute 100 hours of new video are uploaded on YouTube.

“I don’t think the cloud has to prove itself anymore. I think as an industry it has to engage with its customers,” Fried says.

“What the cloud is doing is making it easier for organisations and their technology departments to focus on the problems that are uniquely theirs. The problems no one

else can really solve for them.” That, Fried believes, is one of the highest callings of a CIO or CTO – being able to use technology to help understand their business.

“By using the cloud as you are doing less, you can change faster,” Fried says.

“If you take software company Workday, for example, they do a major upgrade twice a year. You spend almost no time as an organisation worried about silly things like upgrades – which are absolutely necessary for security reasons, feature enhancements and so on.”

A

CCORDING to Fried, the benefits to businesses taking advantage of the cloud are not just about being efficient but also very important to the “psychic health” of its users, and can help to unite work and personal lives in a way

that is less arbitrary. “The more enterprise technologies we use and reuse, and the more consumer technologies take part in our daily lives, the more we reduce the cognitive burdens on our workforce,” he says. “That is an incredibly important aspect of the cloud.

“The great benefit to CIOs and CTOs is that we get to do fewer, more important things, and thus we get to make a bigger difference in our organisation.”

But there are a number of things CIOs and CTOs need to understand about the cloud to make sure they have a service that runs effectively – in particular, they need to be aware that data effectively lasts for ever.

“So much of the value of any enterprise or any organisation comes from the data it creates about itself and its business,” he says. “People think about the next app or the next little bit of technology to solve the next

“Understand your data, how it flows, and how your cloud providers interact with it. I have said this a million times – data is incredibly important” – Ben Fried

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Cloud computing

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Why it’s time to make global solutions permanent Keil Hubert

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problem, but really the long-term benefits come from thinking about the importance of data, securing it, sharing it and governing it.

“Understand your data, how it flows and how your different cloud providers interact with it, and how you will still be in control of your data. I have said this a million times – data is incredibly important.”

Google is certainly putting its money where its mouth is. The company has more than 450 engineers whose full-time job is looking after the security of its users’ data – a level of protection that would be very difficult for most single enterprises to replicate.

But this is something other companies can, and should, take advantage of. “For CIOs and CTOs it is about understanding,” Fried says. “There are levels of expertise that one can tap into that are inherently going to take place outside of their four walls.”

Businesses should not only look at how the services that they contract to or purchase protect their data, Fried explains, but also how their employees protect their data, and how they structure and share it within the organisation.

Above: Google CIO Ben Fried believes it’s only a matter of time before the cloud becomes an integral part of modern business – and life in general

As technology continues to develop, the notions of consumer and enterprise technology will become much more blurred.

Fried believes businesses will use more and more consumer technology in the workforce as the cloud develops.

Fried says: “I really like the idea that, as users of technology, we do not have to have this complete schizophrenia between our work technologies and our personal technologies. It is going to make for far better workforces, and I think that the cloud is our future.

“It is only a matter of time before the cloud is the primary delivery vehicle and technology mechanism for enterprise.

IT organisations need to think about data, internet connectivity as well as important consumer trends to watch and engage in.”

It seems the question for businesses is not a matter of whether they will start using the cloud but one of when – and by extension how they are going to prepare for it. It’s not clear if the weather in New York was cloudy or otherwise, but Fried seems certain that the cloud is here to stay and soon to become a dominant force in the business world.

Y NOW, we’ve all become accustomed to the tremendous business advantages gained from virtualisation in the data centre: lower power consumption, less heat to manage, better resource allocation, disaster recovery capability and easy management.

Virtualisation gets more exciting when we implement full-on cloud computing environments, where we seamlessly migrate our virtual servers from one data centre to another in order to maximise efficiency. None of this is new to the IT crowd.

At the same time, we’ve made great strides in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Now, you can deploy hundreds or thousands of virtual PCs, using your old desktop hardware as inexpensive client terminals. If you haven’t tried VDI yet, now’s the time: liberating the end-user experience from hardware brings with it a huge potential wealth of security and stability improvements.

That said, I want the next logical step in cloud technology: I want my PC to follow me wherever I go. I don’t want to reach back to my data on a file server with a borrowed web browser – I want my workstation, with all of its applications, open files, custom settings, file shares, and browser tabs. I want to be able to pull up my computer from anywhere on the planet.

For many years, the only way to achieve this goal was to travel with a laptop. All of your apps, data and so on. were stored on a hard drive. You could use your machine anywhere you liked – so long as you carried it there. We’ll no doubt continue to support this model for years.

The problem as I see it now is that it’s getting dangerous to carry a physical PC with you when you’re crossing national borders. It used to be that you were always vulnerable to theft (which is why I carried my laptop everywhere; I’d never leave it in my hotel) or a mugging. Now, we’re starting to see a new (and disturbing) trend: government

agencies seizing computers at border crossing points and taking forensic images of them.

This is a deeply troubling trend.

It runs afoul of many countries’ laws regarding personal privacy and due process. None the less, it is happening, and it’s becoming more common in the post-Snowden revelations era. I understand the drive that spy agencies and law enforcers have to try to collect all the data in the world just in case it becomes useful someday. I don’t agree with having my personal and business files copied by a stranger with no recourse over who gets to do what with them.

That’s why I want to move to a

I want the next logical step in cloud technology: I want my PC to follow me wherever I go computer-less future. I want to build a couple of virtual desktop PCs (say, one for work, and a separate one for family business) and host them at a secure cloud provider. Give me a security token that ensures that I’m the only person on earth who can access my machines. Let me sit down at any PC in the world and securely reach back to my cloud provider to use my virtual machine via a simple VM player application.

Let’s turn desktops into simple utility processors; bare-metal VM hosts with network connections.

Nothing more.

If implemented correctly, all we’ll have at the point of use is input and output; no content will get written to the local host. All of our data will stay (relatively) secure, no matter where we are when we access it.

Keep our data secure and allow us the freedom to work anywhere.

We have all of the technology that we need to make this happen.

Why haven’t we? keil.hubert@gmail.com

Business Technology · October 2014

Cloud computing

IndustryVIEW

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loud adoption has moved beyond the tipping point, and enterprises are driving the trend. By 2017, enterprises will spend £142billion globally on infrastructure and cloud-related services, predicts market research firm IHS. According to a Frost and Sullivan survey of CIOs, a cloud-ready network is the biggest infrastructure element needed for further deployment of cloud-based services.

A fundamental requirement for realising the benefits of cloud computing is high performance network connectivity. CIOs should consider three key elements when evaluating potential network-connectivity solutions and partners.

Privacy, security, and reliability equals performance The default to access cloud applications and services is the public internet. While this may be adequate for consumer applications, enterprises should not rely on a besteffort network to support their mission-critical business operations. The internet has variable performance characteristics, lacks an endto-end service-level agreement and can be detrimental to the end-user experience of

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Three top tips to future-proof the cloud and the network cloud-based services. It is not engineered to meet the imperatives for business applications – guaranteed data delivery, quality of service or service prioritisation.

Enterprises should consider a private-network approach, one specifically designed to deliver cost-effective reliability, security and performance. A privatenetwork solution comprised of

ethernet and/or MPLS based IP-VPNs and backed by strong SLAs, delivers carrier-grade performance in support of mission-critical enterprise applications and services.

Global reach and capacity Just as all enterprises are not alike, neither are all networks the same, meaning a cloud

Remote Locations

Headquarters

Consumer Cloud Applications

Public Internet EtherCloud

®

Data Center

Mission-Critical Enterprise Applications

Easy access to cloud IT applications and services

applications from anywhere, anytime, from any device.

These cloud services are generally hosted in the major data centres of the world.

To maximise their cloud investment, enterprises should seek network partners with global reach and connectivity to these same major data centres.

The combination of high-performance network connectivity and close proximity to cloud-based applications makes an enterprise’s cloud investment even more valuable.

While maintaining control over their network configurations, it will have direct access to the best-of-breed applications, effectively making them part of the corporate network, thus offering a better user experience.

Cloud computing success requires the right network partner. GTT provides enterprises with a complete cloud architecture solution built on its ubiquitous global network infrastructure. GTT operates more than 200 PoPs in 54 of the world’s major metropolitan centres, providing direct connectivity to any location on the planet and any application in the cloud.

The advent of cloud services and capabilities means enterprises can get bestof-breed services and

Andy Johnson is MD, EMEA/ APAC, GTT www.gtt.net

solution is only as good as the network supporting it.

As today’s enterprises do business around the globe, they need a ubiquitous network able to reach any location worldwide, whether offices are around the corner or across the globe. Private, secure access to corporate resources is a must.

CIOs should also consider whether a private network has the flexibility to scale bandwidth whenever necessary. An ondemand, burstable bandwidth model gives enterprises the confidence of having the necessary bandwidth at all times, without the financial burden of paying for idle capacity.

Unlocking the potential of cloud: consolidate, integrate and innovate W e are rapidly moving to a situation where almost all of the most significant customer interactions we conduct are digital. The innovation unleashed by the App Store model has revolutionised many aspects of both our daily and business lives.

Business stakeholders within your organisation will want to take advantage of this trend, and will look to the CIO and IT organisation to help redefine those digital relationships.

It is now generally accepted that cloud computing (or the “third platform”, a term coined by market research firm IDC) can deliver agility, flexibility and cost savings and free organisations to focus on areas of IT that add greater business value. But how do you build a cloud infrastructure that continues to deliver this value? Converged infrastructure offers a transformational approach, and is widely recognised as one of the simplest solutions, and its implementation has benefits that extend beyond the pre-integrated hardware and software stack that it represents.

In order to fully understand the advantages that converged infrastructure can bring, market-leading firm VCE advocates adopting a three-step plan which can be measured against five

metrics: revenue generation, employee productivity, business agility, customer satisfaction and cost savings.

Consolidate to bring cost saving and reduce complexity The first thing to identify is that many organisations crave the flexibility the cloud can offer, but live in a world constrained by previous generations of infrastructure and applications.

Increasing the amount of virtualisation is the first step in building out cloudcapable infrastructures, and converged infrastructure provides an optimum platform for creating these environments.

Legacy applications can be replatformed, workloads that previously ran on disparate infrastructure can be centralised, licensing and enterprise licence agreements can be re-evaluated and overall costs can be reduced.

Integrate for productivity The most important step here is linking business process to intelligent, cloud infrastructure. How can customers’ everyday business processes be made more effective? What can be done to simplify the methodologies customers use and how can a cloud-based

infrastructure help drive that? IT needs to remove the friction.

The effectiveness of this step can be seen in top-line revenue growth, with tighter integration of the business and the infrastructure potentially driving new revenue streams to the business.

When revenue is impacted positively and employees are more productive, the business is more agile and delivers greater customer satisfaction.

Innovate to drive massive agility and change

• Social integration • Big Data & analytics • Transforming experiences

process and driven new tools and applications for the users to employ in the previous steps, it is vital that we maximise the potential of it all.

Customers of VCE are already demonstrating how it positively affects the measurable metrics: a more agile business, with more productive employees, a reimagined customer experience and top-line revenue growth being delivered from new sources.

Having built a baseline of technology that is tightly coupled with the business

www.vce.com/about/company/ our-customers

The final piece of the puzzle is innovation. There are three critical areas that affect the way an innovative enterprise communicates and delivers customer service to its customers – both inside and out of the organisation.

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Cloud computing

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Christmas is around the corner and Inspector Dogberry is putting a wish list together so his colleagues know what to buy him for this year’s Secret Santa.

Being an enthusiastic tweeter, the Inspector was delighted to discover that cloud giant Amazon is introducing a hashtag which allows customers to add items to their Amazon Wish List directly from Twitter.

Customers who discover a Tweet from their favourite artist, expert, brand or

Inspector Dogberry

friend with an Amazon.com product link, can simply add “#AmazonWishList” to the reply on Twitter and the product is added to their Amazon Wish List.

Pictures of things you would like people to buy for you can also be saved to the Amazon Wish List or notes to give people inspiration.

And for those not wanting to have a potential surprise gift spoiled, there is a feature that does not reveal to the Wish List creator which items have been purchased.

IndustryVIEW

The next time you’re flying through the clouds on Virgin Atlantic you will be able to enjoy high-speed internet connectivity via a new partnership deal with aero-communications provider Gogo. Reuben Arnold, brand and customer engagement director at Virgin Atlantic says: “We’re always looking at ways to enhance the onboard experience for our customers.”

Gogo’s 2Ku technology will be able to deliver peak speeds of more than 70mbps, although it will only be available to use from mid-2015.

Although be warned – once an item is purchased from an Amazon Wish List, other shoppers will see only what remains on the Wish List – avoiding duplicate gifts.

Last year 50 items – which included seven books and five toys – were added to the Amazon Wish Lists every second.

The vast majority of European IT departments still require a great deal of transformation and need to invest further in people, processes, and technology to mature their cloud architecture.

A survey by International Data Corporation showed 56 per cent of European IT departments cannot find qualified staff to effectively support cloud projects.

There were 61 per cent of respondents who said they were struggling to upskill their employees to effectively evaluate, negotiate contracts with and manage relationships with cloud service providers.

The research surveyed employees from the UK, France and Germany.

Elementary cuisine IBM’s Watson – the victorious computer in US game show Jeopardy – has turned its hand to cooking.

By using IBM’s cloud-based cognitive cooking system, Watson can understand why thousands of

different recipes are appealing, what tastes people prefer and how the chemistry of different ingredients interact.

It is part of IBM’s latest efforts to expand the scope of cognitive computing systems by exploring if a machine can be creative. IBM has even taking Watson’s recipes on the road and has been giving crowds in Zurich a culinary delight with recipes for Belgian Bacon Pudding and Austrian Chocolate Burrito…

future might hold for technology, and analysis of the latest developments in the industry.

Cloud of Data

By Matt Smith, web editor

cloudofdata.com/blog

All Things Distributed

Consultancy Cloud of Data’s blog takes a look at the issues surrounding cloud adoption and inventive ways of using data. An interesting recent post explores the ways in which better data analysis could have improved customer experience when flying to America.

The site also has its own podcast.

www.allthingsdistributed.com This blog provides a fascinating insight into the mind of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Among his recent posts is an argument as to why cloud computing should give consumers more power, and there are also interesting articles on the thinking behind different aspects of Amazon Web Services.

CloudPundit cloudpundit.com CloudPundit is the personal blog of Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, examining cloud computing, hosting, co-location, and more.

The site features in-depth posts on recent news, thoughts on what the

Cloud Comedy, Cloud Tragedy stage.vambenepe.com This site is run by William Vambenepe, lead product manager for big data on Google Cloud Platform, who offers interesting views on the tech giant’s platform and the industry. Also includes quotes from industry leaders and a thought-provoking pyramid of needs for cloud management.

G Cloud Backup (FREE – Android)

This highly-rated app enables you to back up your Android phone’s call logs, messages, photos, music, photos, videos and more to the cloud.

CloudClipboard (£2.49 – iOS)

Copy and paste content between your iPhone, iPad and Mac with this app, which uses Apple’s iCloud technology.

Catch a glimpse of tomorrow at Future Decoded I

t doesn’t take a genius to figure out that our world is dramatically changing.

Almost every single aspect of our world is being radically transformed by a range of geographical, economic, political and societal changes, many of which are being accelerated by the ever-increasing power of technology.

But how can business leaders prepare for what is essentially an uncertain, ambiguous future?

How can they plan not just to survive but thrive?

Of course, there is no way of accurately predicting the future, but there is a way of anticipating it. Understanding the various changes and their potential impact can go a long way to helping both individuals and organisations prepare for, and make the most of, what lies ahead.

At Microsoft’s Future Decoded event, at the ExCeL centre in London on November 10, we are offering to take you on a journey into the future, to set out both the challenges and opportunities that future will present in a number of key areas.

The day will feature an intimate, interactive conversation with our CEO, Satya Nadella, which will probe and explore how Microsoft is working to provide the next generation of technology innovation to help you transform and reinvent your business in order to endure, succeed and thrive in whatever environment the future provides.

Satya’s keynote will be complemented by a backdrop of insights, opinions and provocations from globally recognised thought leaders:

• Sir Bob Geldof will open our eyes to a different perspective on education in the 21st century.

• Jeremy Paxman will explore and discuss the crucial changes that are currently underway in our society and how they will influence our future.

• Dame Stella Rimington will share her unique views on leadership in chaotic times.

• Sara Murray OBE will talk of the new role for innovation at the heart of our people, not just our business.

• Sir Martin Sorrell will take us through his vision for what all this change will mean for business and creativity.

• Ronan Dunne, CEO Telefonica UK, will explore how technology can enable business success and growth.

Each session will paint a broad picture of how radically different our future will be from how we live, work and play today, which will help to set the context for what you will need to do to prepare for your future success. Visit www. futuredecoded.com for more details and to register.

01252 771460 futuredecoded.com

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IndustryVIEW

12 · Business Reporter · October 2014

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INSIDE TRACK Join the cloud computing evolution

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The speedy solution: A bullet train to real-time modelling D

oing business in the cloud is an easy decision for many sectors, but what about highly regulated industries like insurance?

Many insurance companies are still working on legacy systems that are siloed, rigid and slow to respond to real-time events – the inter-city train of the data railway. However, the recent shift in the scale of extreme events has shown that the insurance industry must prepare for new, ever-evolving threats. Companies relying on legacy systems will be left at the station.

Real-time risk analysis is a must-have in today’s insurance industry.

Unfortunately for many companies, access to tools capable of handling massive risk modelling datasets remains

unattainable. Off-the-shelf cloud services are costly and not designed for highly regulated industries like the insurance industry, for which data privacy is a key concern. For most companies, building their own private cloud platform is an unrealistic proposition.

Recognising the need for insurance-specific cloud solutions, RMS developed the RMS Cloud to power its new risk-management platform, which it designed specifically to enable companies to efficiently model, interpret and communicate risk.

The RMS Cloud is far from a generic, public cloud architecture. The company built a dedicated set of rails for a risk-modelling bullet train. It is a purpose-built cloud, designed to do one thing only – deliver results extremely fast. The elastic capacity presented by the RMS Cloud offers compute cores on demand, to perform calculations at a speed once unimaginable.

What’s more, the RMS Cloud will give clients immediate access to scale in a safe environment, with the latest

innovations in big-data technology. Risk modelling is no longer limited to the resources available on each company’s own servers. Using a purpose-built cloud frees companies from the limitations of in-house IT procurement, allowing for focus on innovation in the core business.

A cloud-based system also enables more extensive information sharing between partners and clients. The RMS Cloud is fully encrypted, with 24-hour uptime and disaster recovery supported across strategic locations around the world. Looking to the future, the RMS platform will incubate innovation in the risk-modelling industry as an open API for developers and entrepreneurs.

Uncertainty and risk is growing daily. Tomorrow’s insurance company understands this challenge, and is jumping on the bullet train to real-time, flexible modelling.

Paris Georgallis (left) is senior VP of cloud platform operations, RMS 020 7444 7600 sales@rms.com

uch has been written about the cloud computing revolution. But, for most companies, cloud is more evolution than revolution.

Consider backup and disaster recovery (BDR).

According to the Aberdeen Group, downtime costs the average business £100,000 per hour, so remaining always-on is essential. To ensure applications and data are available even if a natural disaster, power outage, equipment failure or other calamity takes out all or part of their data centres, organisations make significant investments in BDR. But how well protected are these companies? And are they spending more money and effort than necessary?

Without cloud in their BDR infrastructure, they might well be. That’s because cloud provides a new, more affordable and convenient way to address two fundamentals of BDR: physical separation and resources on demand.

Local backups are ideal for recovery from everyday disasters such as employees accidentally deleting data.

But for larger scale disasters, offsite backups are needed.

Historically, this meant daily transport of physical tapes or removable drives.

However, many companies now send their backups to the cloud, often several times a day.

Online access to backups and more frequent restore points mean less downtime and data loss – and less impact on customers, partners and employees – when disaster strikes.

In terms of DR planning, cloud enables even budgetconscious organisations to move from “hope for the best” to “prepared for the worst”. So the business stays in business, and everyone gets to keep their job.

Unless a company has an ageing BDR system, cloud is rarely a “rip-and-replace” proposition. Instead, cloud can be integrated into existing BDR infrastructure or used alongside it. For example, traditional disk-based and cloud repositories are used together for “D2D2C” (diskto-disk-to-cloud) backup. Or backup remains unchanged, and standby virtual machines in the cloud are introduced for added protection.

It’s time to join the cloud computing evolution, and BDR is a smart place to start.

For a free 30-day trial of cloud-enabled backup and disaster recovery, visit www.veeam.com/evolution

Business Reporter · October 2014 · 13

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My view Why hybrid may be the best option MY VIEW on cloud begins by discrediting one of its biggest myths. Enterprises are led to think all types of cloud are a cheaper alternative to hosting their data on-premises.

While this is often the case, there are many instances when a dedicated environment provides the lowest cost solution. Certainly, you can buy cloud storage cheaply from a host (pardon the pun) of providers, but businesses need to check the small print.

A mix of private and public cloud often provides the ideal solution, enabling enterprises to optimise their agility from a performance, security and cost perspective.

Businesses evolve, and cloud services should be fluid and move with an organisation to meet its ever-changing needs. They should be able to select the right type of cloud for their applications or needs, balancing cost savings, performance, security and compliance. They

should be able to choose where data is stored and where it is supported. And they should receive a service from qualified engineers, not an automated service, but real people who speak their language and understand their business. At Easynet we call this hybrid by design – the ultimate in pick’n’mix cloud.

0808 278 8480 www.easynet.com/cloud

IndustryVIEW

Phil Grannum MD, hosting, UC and cloud, Easynet

The dream ticket: security and scalability

A

Cloudy with a chance of naked celebs – keep it private!

T

he cloud is something of a hot topic at the moment, given the recent leaking of certain celebrity material online – and it’s raised some interesting questions around cloud technologies. Do users have control over it? How can security concerns be addressed? Will users ever stop using “Password123” as their password?

Cloud computing has transformed the way business organisations use IT. In spite of the economic benefits offered by public cloud services, organisations are reluctant to move their infrastructure outside their premises. However, they also want to apply the lessons learned from public clouds to optimise the resource usage in their infrastructure.

Enter private cloud! Private clouds offer an easy solution to help businesses take advantage of some of the benefits of cloud computing, without having to compromise on security and control.

So what is private cloud?

Simply put, private clouds are cloud infrastructure based on dedicated hardware under the control of the organisation, offering services on demand through a self-service portal.

Private clouds provide elasticity that was previously unavailable in the traditional computing models, including rapid computer resource provisioning with services billed back to individual

business units.

There have been a number of surveys conducted around cloud technologies, and the concerns and barriers to wider adoption all seem to align around: • Performance and reliability of cloud services • Complexity to deploy • Compliance and security • Lack of transparency about data centre facilities, hardware, and disaster recovery by public cloud providers Private cloud solutions can address many of these concerns, and can potentially be rolled out as part of the hybrid cloud model for business. Keep tight control over your private cloud and then potentially leverage public cloud for additional needs.

To address the concerns above, Boston has worked with a number of leading technology partners to bring private cloud solutions to market. In partnership with hardware vendors such as Mellanox, Supermicro and working with software technologies like Openstack and VMware, private cloud deployment is no longer the daunting task it once was.

Performance is critical for cloud adoption. Users need predictable and repeatable high levels of performance running their applications in the cloud.

To guarantee this performance, Boston

has teamed up with Mellanox to support its CloudX™ reference architecture.

CloudX incorporates virtualisation with the fastest bandwidth and lowest latency interconnect solutions. Built around the fastest interconnect technology of 40/56Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet, CloudX provides the fastest data transfer and most effective use of compute, storage and Flash SSD components.

In addition, Boston is also rolling out solutions powered by VMware EVO:RAIL, fully integrated and validated on Supermicro hardware. EVO:RAIL is a complete, hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. It combines compute, networking and storage resources into a single 2U, four-node form factor to create a simple, easy-todeploy building block for the softwaredefined data centre and private cloud.

This dramatically reduces the need for in-house resources through its easy-to-manage install and operation dashboard. Our customers can deploy and set up an entire private cloud in a few simple clicks and scale up capacity (Both in terms of compute, storage and networking) with a simple, scalable building block.

David Power is head of HPC at Boston Limited 01727 876 100 www.boston.co.uk

t the end of last year, IT industry analyst house Gartner claimed that half of large enterprises will be using hybrid cloud computing – a combination of external cloud computing and in-house management – by 2017.

Enterprises are looking for the combination of public cloud scalability allied to the security conferred by running a private data centre.

Customers want the benefits of externallyprovided cloud computing, such as increased scalability and reduced costs, without compromising on security.

The fear of handing over mission-critical data and applications to a third party is still present, and is also totally understandable.

What is important is that the public part of your cloud – whoever it is provided by – is fully integrated with your private cloud.

Integration means traffic can be dynamically routed to a public cloud if demand on a private cloud is too high. It should be seamless to users. It is also vital to ensure that

management of both your clouds is consistent.

With data and applications moving from device to device and from a private cloud to a public one, it is vital that policies, particularly security policies, are enforced across the entire business.

Access control can and should be consolidated at the application delivery tier. This means policies covering the location of the user, what device they’re using and what data they’re accessing are uniform across the business and in both private and public cloud environments.

Ultimately, hybrid cloud computing presents the best of both worlds: the scalability and cost-effectiveness of a public cloud coupled with the security of a private cloud deployment.

To get the best out of a hybrid environment it is vital to ensure that your public cloud is managed in just the same way as your private cloud.

Gary Newe is technical director at F5 +44 1932 582 000 www.f5.com

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The future

Marc Benioff If someone asks me what cloud computing is I tell them that, simply put, it’s a better way to run your business

IndustryVIEW

Business Zone

“

Mind reading made easy: tapping into the gold mine F or years, businesses have been trying to anticipate customer needs and identify buying habits in order to get and stay ahead of the competition; not an easy task. But what if you could read the minds of your customers, or better still, knew what they were thinking before they even thought it?

Well, cloud-based business intelligence (BI) software makes that a possibility, and it’s exactly why sales-i was created.

Driven by the demand for more efficient and successful ways of selling, sales-i helps businesses of all shapes and sizes make sense of the huge amounts of customer data, which, prior to sales-i, they were storing, but not using productively, if at all. With the right tools to make sense of it, however, this data becomes an absolute goldmine of new opportunities.

Simply put, a BI system proactively analyses customers’ buying behaviour, alerting salespeople to upcoming selling opportunities. It will tell the salesperson when a customer’s monthly spend is down, or notify them if a customer is not buying something that they should be, so they know when to pick up the phone and, more importantly, exactly how to direct the conversation.

The beauty of sales-i is that, thanks to the flexibility of the cloud, businesses can access their data anywhere, at anytime, and even store and backup documents within the system, accessible to anyone with a username, password and internet connection.

Most salespeople aren’t chained to their desks; they are out in the field meeting and greeting customers and prospects.

So a cloud-based system was the only viable option for sales-i, enabling users

to access timely information remotely, from smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Leading UK automotive tool supplier, Sykes-Pickavant has been using sales-i since 2008 to reinforce its outstanding reputation for quality and service.

Managing director Paul Archer says: “sales-i keeps us fully abreast of our customer buying patterns, any changes in their buying behaviour and any areas

where improvements can be made.

“This can all be done from the comfort of the customer’s office, workshop or showroom floor, without any disruption to their business thanks to the cloud-based nature of sales-i.”

Paul Black is CEO of sales-i 0800 0124 669 www.sales-i.com

In focus: Why you should care about business cloud

W

hat is a hybrid cloud? The concept, touted by many vendors and service providers as the next big thing, enables IT to use both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure seamlessly for significant cost reduction, IT load balancing during peak times, disaster recovery and other use cases.

But does your company need or want it? Here are two cases for hybrid cloud that can help create efficiencies in your company’s datacenter: Disaster Recovery as a Service IDC research indicates that more than 70 per cent of companies surveyed

experienced up to 10 hours of unplanned downtime over the past 12 months.

With disaster recovery in the cloud, companies can replace costly investments in a secondary data centre while ensuring higher

performance and reliability.

Cloud Fabric At Zerto we recommend leveraging a cloud fabric strategy to easily migrate in and out of clouds.

The optimal foundation for today’s data centre, cloud fabric

enables data to move freely from on-premise data centres to public cloud and back.

Businesses large and small have been at times both seduced and confused by the grand promise of the cloud.

But when they talk about “hybrid cloud,” they are really just seeking the flexibility to use it as an extension of their own data centre. The ability to extend on-premises data centres into the cloud for disaster recovery and data migration takes data centre flexibility to new levels of efficiency and cost savings. +44 (0)118 949 7212 www.zerto.com

Meeting the demands of the modern workforce The portfolio career has arrived. Globally, skilled workers are choosing to work for multiple companies at once – the notion of a career for life has long gone.

These kinds of shifts are creating opportunities for progressive organisations to redesign HR to cope with the realities of the modern workforce, and they are turning to the cloud.

According to recent PwC research*, many HR professionals don’t believe they’re prepared for meeting the needs of a workforce that demands more freedom and flexibility, a view shared by many CEOs. Often, part of the underlying problem is that their people management systems are simply not up to the job of supporting change.

Many HR systems are pre-cloud, on-premises, and only automate parts of the workflows necessary to manage modern work styles. Consequently, HR teams are overwhelmed by low value, boring, manual tasks, using email and attachments to patch up processes, and spreadsheets to aggregate information in an attempt to produce the information necessary for management. HR leaders are frequently trapped overseeing this work, rather than using real-time workforce information to participate in strategic decision making.

Now, however, there is a new breed of cloudbased software that can help transform the workforce experience, from acquiring and onboarding, to engaging, managing, developing and at some point, off-boarding people. This end-to-end set of global services is accessible from any device, and implemented in a matter of weeks (not months).

Delivering an ROI almost immediately, HR leaders now have the means to focus on more strategic, 21st-century workforce matters that drive growth, scale business and gain a seat in the C-suite. *PwC 17th Annual Global CEO Survey

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Business Reporter · October 2014 · 15

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The debate How can the cloud benefit your business?

Andy Johnson

Simon Hansford

Managing director GTT

CTO Skyscape Cloud Services

Cloud is a hot topic today, for several good reasons. Buying services as utilities offers enormous benefits to enterprises in terms of productivity and operating efficiency. Cloudbased applications and services are more cost efficient, scale more easily and deploy faster than traditional product or in-house solutions.

It’s easy to adopt the cloud gradually. Individual applications or entire work-streams can be outsourced to the cloud piece by piece, to see which ones perform best and gain a good understanding of performance characteristics.

Infrastructure resources are available 24/7. Managed cloud providers assume hardware and software responsibilities for the service, so valuable enterprise IT employees have more time to focus on other business priorities.

Cloud applications are accessible anywhere, any time and from any device, which means employees can be productive inside and outside the office.

More and more businesses now recognise that adopting cloud solutions is not an option – it’s a competitive necessity.

For businesses across the board – whether in the public or private sector – the many benefits of the cloud are significant, enabling rapid and flexible deployment of solutions, little or no upfront investment in infrastructure, and lower costs where the consumer only pays for what they need when they need it.

The benefits can be realised without the consumer needing to be tied into lengthy and inflexible contracts.

This level of flexibility means that business consumers can respond rapidly to the needs of their customers, and to changes in their markets. In the UK we therefore expect cloud to underpin the growth in the UK’s digital economy, where the UK has aspirations to be a world leader.

Security and data privacy are understandably a top priority for businesses today, and reputable cloud suppliers will be assessed against rigorous accreditation frameworks, providing customers with confidence that a move to the cloud can be achieved without compromising on data security.

+44 (0) 20 7489 7200 Andy.johnson@gtt.net

01252 303300 www.skyscapecloud.com

I

n the case of the public sector – where squeezed budgets and the use of legacy technology are common challenges – the cloud presents an unmissable opportunity to deliver streamlined services far more efficiently and costeffectively online, ultimately benefiting each and every UK citizen and tax payer.

A key example of this in action is GOV.UK, which was launched to provide one central place for citizens to find government services and information simply, clearly and quickly, while drastically reducing costs for the Government Digital Service (GDS).

Another example of the cost savings that can be achieved by moving to digital is the DVLA’s new “View driving record” platform, which provides secure online access to driving records for up to 40 million drivers and the insurance industry.

By hosting the platform using cloud computing, DVLA has managed to save 66 per cent against its original cost estimate.

The public sector’s digital transformation has been supported by government policies including “Cloud First” and by

Nigel Moulton EMEA CTO VCE

Cloud computing can be a significant benefit to your business as it has the potential to lower your overall IT costs while, at the same time, delivering increased agility, customer satisfaction and new revenue opportunities.

Sound too good to be true? Well read on. Deploying your business applications in the cloud means you spend considerably less time focused on traditional IT tasks such as maintaining infrastructure, upgrades and so on. This provides an opportunity to focus valuable resources on important tasks which directly benefit your relationships with your customers.

This can lead to new revenue streams, increased levels of customer satisfaction and the ability to more proactively engage in changing market dynamics that can have a significant, positive effect on your business.

www.vce.com

Pravin Kothari

Anthony Foy

In the past five years, the cloud has transformed into the preferred delivery model of how enterprises and consumers access and share information. This shift produced many innovations that have made businesses more competitive and people more connected. The cloud has also expanded the attack surface by connecting millions more devices and platforms to the vast stores of data now available online.

Certainly, the record-breaking breaches and surveillance leaks of the past year highlight the security and privacy risks to sensitive data. But just as the cloud has fostered innovations for productivity, entertainment and cyber-crime, it has also inspired new ways to protect information.

Security innovations such as extending data-level protection and visibility into cloud applications complement network and device security tools. Extending this approach to the cloud protects information from hacks, breaches and accidental exposure. Just as importantly, cloud information protection also enables organisations to comply with data privacy and residency regulations.

The cloud is dramatically impacting the way people work, allowing them to be more productive anywhere, on any device. With technology analysts such as Gartner predicting that, by the end of 2017, nearly half of large enterprises will have cloud deployments, for businesses that want to stay competitive in a mobile workplace, moving to the cloud is a necessity.

Cloud collaboration applications for the enterprise make working with multiple parties easy. We’re seeing businesses turn towards applications that offer more than the usual file synchronisation and sharing capabilities, to those that offer valuable productivity features.

These include being able to compare multiple document versions from a mobile device to instantly see what’s changed, or being able to strip sensitive information from a document before it’s shared.

By allowing secure access to content at any time, businesses benefit from an empowered workforce that is no longer confined to the walls of the office.

+44 (0)1628 421775 sales_emea@ciphercloud.com

+44 (0)20 7426 0000 www.workshare.com

Founder and CEO CipherCloud

Spotlight: How the cloud is enabling digital transformation

CEO Workshare

procurement frameworks such as G-Cloud.

The G-Cloud programme was launched two years ago in order to facilitate a muchneeded change in the use and procurement of IT services in the public sector.

Since then, the framework has gone from strength to strength, succeeding in creating greater transparency, opening the market to SMEs, and boosting competition in what was previously a stagnant marketplace, dominated by large incumbent suppliers.

Thanks to the tremendous success of initiatives such as G-Cloud, the public sector is fast becoming a vibrant, varied marketplace that is delivering true innovation.

The momentum of this digital revolution will continue regardless of the outcome of next year’s general election, as citizens continue to expect a better online experience and as buyers respond to this by demanding higher quality and more cost-effective services from suppliers.

01252 303300 www.skyscapecloud.com