Cloud / Internet of Things

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supplement

CLOUD 2-11

Up in the cloud

British snowboarder Zoe Gillings-Brier on how technology keeps her on top of her game

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Double top!

Anton Emdin adds to our trophy cabinet Cartoonist makes it a second global award for the best team in the business

FOCUS ON INTERNET OF THINGS 12-15 If the IoT is to progress its technology must become more uniform

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

Opening shots Shane Richmond

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“

here is no cloud. It’s just somebody else’s computer.” So goes the slogan that I’ve seen several times recently on social networks. It’s an insight that is usually shared with the unspoken assumption that cloud computing should be avoided because trusting your data to somebody else’s computer is a foolish thing to do.

People are unlikely to be deterred from cloud services by such observations. Saying that cloud storage is just someone else’s computer is unhelpful in the same way that it is unhelpful to say: “There is no haulage industry. There are only other people’s lorries.” Both are true but neither tells the business how to better manage such suppliers.

The difference is that most companies that use haulage firms have been doing so for decades and the risks are well understood and catered for in contracts. In contrast, cloud storage is still new for most businesses and the downsides are not well understood. That’s where keeping in mind the fact that you are storing your data on someone else’s computer can – and should – focus the mind.

It has clear implications. How will they look after it? How protected am I if their business runs into trouble? What process is in place for when the contract ends – does my data get returned or

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THE ESSENTIALS

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Why it’s time to make ourselves comfortable in the cloud destroyed? And so on. Asking these questions seems obvious but companies often don’t do it, in part because they think of the cloud as a magical solution instead of just somebody else’s computer.

There can be other unexpected consequences of moving to the cloud, too. In July, the city of Chicago began taxing cloud firms, specifically those providing “electronically delivered amusements” – Netflix, for example – and those offering “nonpossessory computer leases” – such as the Amazon Web Services platform used by businesses of all sizes.

The idea is to replace city revenue lost with the demise of local firms who would once have offered these services. Netflix, for example, replaces the local DVD shop and therefore the city loses the taxes the shop would have paid. However, the move has already attracted the interest of lawyers, who claim that the tax unfairly discriminates against services delivered online.

That is an extreme example of how cloud deployments can end up costing more than Twitter: @ expected, but it isn’t that unusual. Other shanerichmond

unforeseen costs can include upgrading your own systems to work with your cloud deployment, spending more on internal maintenance and hiring extra staff to manage the new system.

And the problem is complicated because technology is always advancing. If your haulage firm suddenly switches to electric lorries then you would happily put your company’s products in the new trucks and enjoy the savings of cheaper shipping. But technology can often mean the equivalent of new lorries that aren’t compatible with the roads or which can’t handle the kind of containers your firm uses. The desire to avoid using technology that will soon need replacing can often be paralysing.

But the risk of being left behind by competitors is greater than the risk of moving to the cloud, which is why so many firms have already made the move. The best way to avoid the pitfalls is to acknowledge that you are putting your data on somebody else’s computer and ask yourself this: “What are the responsible things to do to make ourselves comfortable about that?”

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

The CEOs taking a back seat when it comes to the cloud

By Joanne Frearson

ALTHOUGH THE adoption of cloud services is booming, CEOs and boards are not getting involved in the decision-making process, which could leave companies not getting the most out of their cloud systems.

Research by cloud-hosting provider Cobweb Solutions and the Cloud Industry Forum has shown that final decisionmaking falls to the head of IT/ CIO in almost three fifths (59 per cent) of organisations.

Julian Dyer, CIO of Cobweb, says: “Cloud is an IT solution to a business challenge, and while it makes sense for the CIO to drive the decision, we hope that the whole board will be involved in cloud projects.

“Properly implemented, cloud touches all of the C-suite from IT in delivery, the CEO and COO in business operations, and the CFO, as with all new fi nancial models. If all aren’t behind the project the business as a whole will certainly miss out on a holistic solution that can benefit the business much more than a mere new software solution on its own.”

The research, which polled 250 senior IT and business decision makers from small, medium and large businesses, as well as the public sector, showed UK cloud penetration has reached a high of 84 per cent as more businesses turn to it as an off-the-peg IT solution.

The research also noted that 70 per cent of those who already use the cloud expect their adoption to increase over the next 12 months, and 12 per cent of those who do not use the cloud expect to do so within the next year.

The applications most likely to be cloud-based were web hosting, collaboration ser vices, e-commerce platforms, advertising and online marketing services, and email. The areas set to show the largest increases in adoption were CRM, data backup/ disaster recovery services, and data storage.

Ash Patel, director of business t ra nsfor mat ion at Cobweb, says: “Using a cloud computing solution can fundamentally enhance the way an organisation does business, from the back-office

business soft ware to how sales teams and customer service personnel do their jobs in the field or on their premises.

“Most excitingly, it offers the liberating ability to build entirely new services that customers and partners can easily access and make part of their daily lives. Making best use of this liberating technology is a question not solely for the IT team, but for the whole board of directors, who can use the cloud to shape a new and more effective way of doing business.”

For companies that were slower to adopt a cloud system, 70 per cent cited concerns about data security and 61 per cent about data privacy when moving to the cloud, and security concerns are preventing certain applications from being migrated. The applications companies were least likely to adopt were active directory/ credentials, and file and print management.

Research from the Cloud Industry Forum has also shown businesses are increasingly worried about losing control and manageability of their IT systems, with 40 per cent citing

this as a concern compared with 24 per cent in 2014.

Alex Hilton, CEO of the Cloud Industry Forum, says: “Hybrid will be the modus operandi for the majority of organisations for the foreseeable future, being either not yet ready to move everything to the cloud, or unwilling to.

“There are a number of contributing factors here: fear of losing control of IT systems, security and privacy concerns,

Research suggests 47 per cent of EU firms say they prefer private cloud services A CONSIDERABLE proportion of European organisations, 47 per cent, are using the private cloud as their main approach to cloud computing, according to a survey commissioned by global managed services provider Easynet.

The research found on-premises hosting to be the second most popular approach, at 26 per cent, while hybrid cloud – the combination of using private and public cloud – was shown to be a significant alternative form of the technology with almost one in five, 17 per cent, of companies now using it as their main form of cloud computing.

The least popular form of cloud computing was found to be public cloud.

Only about one in ten companies, 11 per cent, across Europe were found to be using this as their main approach, although this figure was higher in Belgium where 17 per cent of companies predominantly use public cloud.

Belgian enterprises, together with UK companies, were also the keenest users of hybrid cloud, with 30 per cent and 22 per cent of fi rms respectively using this as their main approach.

Across Europe, 30 per cent of enterprises in the business and consumer services, and 21 per cent of IT and computer services had adopted a hybrid cloud approach, while utilities companies were found to be the least

inclined to opt for hybrid, with only 3 per cent in this sector doing so.

Banking and fi nancial services, together with utilities were found to favour private cloud (52 per cent and 59 per cent of them chose this solution respectively), whereas government was the sector most reluctant to move to the cloud, opting primarily for on-premises hosting at 52 per cent.

Adrian Thirkill, UK managing director for Enterprise at Easynet, says: “As volumes of corporate data continue to grow, European enterprises are acknowledging the importance of cloud computing for storing and managing data.”

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CL 2- OU 11 D

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and lack of budget currently stand in the way of greater adoption of cloud by businesses.

“The primary issue relates to trust: trust that cloud-based data will be appropriately secured, that it won’t be compromised or inadvertently accessed, and that businesses will be able to

retrieve and migrate their data when a contract terminates. “ To a c c e l e r a t e t h e confidence of cloud services, pr ov ide r s shou ld of fe r this reassurance, through appropriate certification or codes of conduct, such as the CIF Code of Practice.”

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

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loud computing has grown at a phenomenal rate in the last few years, and that will only accelerate as more and more enterprises move some or all of their application portfolios into the cloud. However, as companies continue to take advantage of the cloud’s welldocumented economic and efficiency benefits, IT executives often overlook the need to deploy high-quality access mechanisms to cloud services. Given that cloud services are, by definition, remote from corporate real estate, the way enterprises choose to communicate with and between these services directly affects service performance.

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A better way to reach the cloud

The public internet is a risky path to the cloud

Direct access is the best access

The default choice for many enterprises is the public internet, which generally is acceptable for consumer applications but cannot reliably and securely support mission-critical business operations.

This best-effort network offers no guarantee of data delivery, quality of service or service priorities, nor are any strong service-level agreements (SLAs) available. As a result, application performance can suffer, causing business operations to slow down and making the task of protecting sensitive corporate information as it moves across the internet a huge challenge. In short, enterprises that rely on the public internet to connect to the cloud risk falling short of their cloud-computing goals.

A better way to reach the cloud is via direct access, plugging straight into the cloud services across private connections that are backed by the security and reliability of industry-leading SLAs. By partnering with a solutions provider that can build these connections across its private backbone network, enterprises get direct, secure access to the cloud, which enables them to get better performance from their applications. Simply put, the cloud becomes part of the corporate network and, with the enterprise back in control, enterprise users can reach any application on the cloud from anywhere, at any time and on any device.

In addition, by moving their enterprise-tocloud traffic off the public internet and onto

the solution provider’s private backbone network, IT executives no longer have to worry about the security of the enterprise’s sensitive data, regardless of the device or location. With the solution provider now handling cloud access and security tasks, IT executives can focus on the core business of the organisation.

Direct access drives success of your hybrid cloud As more enterprises adopt the cloud, hybrid cloud – a mix of different cloud services, private, public or both – will become the norm. A cloud tailored to individual enterprise requirements will necessitate connectivity to multiple providers in multiple geographic locations, both short and long term, and for

high- and low-volume transactions.

Direct, on-demand connections across a single network fabric which has a global reach can help enterprises build that hybrid cloud.

Simply by changing paths on the network, an enterprise can shift between cloud service providers or move corporate data between data centres (and vendors) in short, bursty traffic flows across a single network backbone.

By partnering with GTT, enterprises can get direct, reliable and secure access to the cloud, ensure the performance of their applications and thereby maximise the return on their cloud-computing investments.

Andy Johnson is managing director, GTT +44 (0)20 7029 4873 www.gtt.net

Moving towards the intelligent business cloud

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ompanies are increasingly using the cloud to get more value from every customer experience and business interaction. Talk to Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder of Airbnb, and he’ll be unequivocal about the seven-year-old company’s reliance on cloud. Through cloud, Airbnb has created the agile, responsive infrastructure it needs to connect everlarger communities of property owners and travellers with each other in renting vacation spaces around the world.

Such enthusiasm isn’t limited to internet start-ups. Senior leaders at John Deere say their company is no longer just a manufacturer of equipment for working the land, but a pioneer of precision solutions to promote big gains in agricultural productivity worldwide. The cloud is central to Deere’s vision and expanding capabilities.

Companies are realising that they need many different types of cloud services in order to meet a variety of customer needs.

The hybrid cloud – an environment that employs both private and public cloud services – is of growing importance, as it is transforming the way businesses are able to take advantage of technology to innovate. Economics and speed are the two greatest issues driving this market change.

Pioneering organisations – from start-ups to corporate giants – are hard at work on what we call the intelligent business cloud, the connective tissue of the intelligent digital business that links all of the capabilities required to deliver “everything as a service” and outperform in a digital world. The intelligent business cloud

is a cohesive cloud platform that spans and manages multiple clouds from multiple technology providers, all from a central control dashboard that provides a single view of all cloud services across the organisation, regardless of whose credit card was used.

The vision of the intelligent business cloud is an attractive one, but it is not always easy for companies to see how to get there from here. Four points jump out right away…

Get cloud religion This means not thinking of cloud computing as another technology to be layered on top of legacy systems, but seeing it as the basis for the company’s intelligent digital business framework going forward.

Design and/or re-architect applications with a “cloud first” mindset Thinking “cloud first” means that new applications are designed for the cloud. Ride-sharing companies such as Über and Lyft, for example, do not have to create their own GPS mapping, payment and other applications – they use application programming interfaces (APIs) to leverage applications built for, and housed in, the cloud.

Keep business outcomes in mind when investing in cloud Those investing in the cloud should focus on value generated for customers and on the competitive advantage delivered to customers. Cloud spending should be tied directly and measurably to business results.

“Skill up” for the intelligent business cloud The most valuable

talent in the intelligent business cloud world will be the architect who understands the functions and roles of all the pieces and who knows how they all work together. Companies that see cloud as a means of opening up new competitive possibilities will have an advantage over those who focus on more tactical matters such as using cloud to reduce operating costs.

The next iteration of hybrid cloud – the intelligent business cloud – is well on its way to helping companies attain these bigger goals. www.accenture.com

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

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Worldwide cloud spend increases in 2015

The inner geek

Moz & Bradders

Box clever: how file-sharing is bringing the cloud to everyone

By Joanne Frearson

DROPBOX HAS achieved staggering growth since it was founded by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007. The idea first came to Houston when he forgot his USB stick while travelling from New York to Boston, and was unproductive for three hours – it is now valued at between $5billion and $10billion.

Globally, the file-sharing service now has 400 million users, with people saving 1.2 billion files to it every 24 hours. More than 100,000 new share folders and links are created every hour, while on the corporate side business usage has grown from four to eight million in the past 18 months.

Headquartered in San Francisco, the company now has 10 offices around the world, with the latest opening in London in January this year. Growth has been strong in the UK. Mark van der Linden (inset), managing director for Dropbox UK, Ireland and Benelux, says: “In terms of cloud adoption, we feel we are on a verge of revolution. What we have seen has been amazing. At the beginning of the year, we had one in four UK internet users using Dropbox and now not even six months later it is one in three people using it.”

Business is also booming on the corporate side in the UK. Companies are using it to transport large files, documents, videos and photos easily and allow people to share things easily no matter where they are. In January Dropbox estimated that five million UK companies will be using at least one cloud service by the start of 2016.

Van der Linden says: “Companies are realising you need to bring tools into the workplace that are easy. Tools that people love. It is about collaboration,

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Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston of Dropbox at the Annual Crunchies awards

sharing, releasing creativity and trying to spark innovation. Video is a big use case. We see a large usage in the creative industries because large files are handled so efficiently. We can break up large files into four-megabyte blocks and encrypt them separately. Very large files can be transported up to 20 times faster than by normal means.

“We see companies where there is a wall-to-wall adoption for Dropbox as a collaboration tool. We also see that in a lot of large companies there are specific teams using Dropbox. We see media departments using it, we see HR learning and development using it to store onboarding videos for new employees.

There are also maintenance and construction departments.

He explains usage grows t h r ou g h b u s i ne s s e s or people needing to collaborate with others externally, such as agencies of sub-contractors to exchange large files.

This generates a network

effect. “This creates viral growth,” says van der Linden. “More and more work is being done across company parameters and boundaries. Growth comes from people inviting other people – one in three of our users joined because our current users are sharing something with them.”

Van der Linden tells me Dropbox is putting a lot of investment into making it easier for people and businesses to transfer files between each other and collaborate. The company has recently formed a partnership with Microsoft Office Online, to help users do more on phones, tablets and the web.

Dropbox is home to more than 35 billion Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and users can now edit these through their web browser as well as access Dropbox files through the Office app. They can also share new or edited files from within the Office apps using t he Dropbox sharing functionality.

Dropbox has also been putting lots of investment into making sure their cloud service is secure. It has been one of the first major cloud service providers to achieve certification with ISO 27018 which was developed as a global standard for privacy and data protection in the cloud. The standard specifically lays out requirements how firms will and will not use your information.

Van der Linden says: “Specifically, we guarantee that we are transparent about what we do with the data and that it is safe and secure. The standard also allows our customers to verify our practices.”

In the UK, cloud services growth is only expected to continue. As files get larger and businesses collaborate more and more, the cloud looks like the most obvious choice to share files efficiently.

The idea which initially started as a way people could bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments is now an everyday part of business life.

CLOUD IT infrastructure spending has climbed to nearly 30 per cent of overall IT infrastructure spending in the first quarter of 2015, up from 26.4 per cent a year ago, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker.

Revenue from infrastructure sales for private cloud grew 24.4 per cent year over year to $2.4billion while sales for public cloud grew 25.5 per cent to $3.9billion.

Kuba Stolarski, research manager of server, virtualisation and workload research at IDC, says: “Cloud IT infrastructure growth continues to outpace the growth of the overall IT infrastructure market, driven by the transition of workloads onto cloud-based platforms.

“Both private and public cloud infrastructures have been growing at a similar pace, suggesting that customers are open to a broad array of hybrid deployment scenarios as they modernise their IT for the third platform, begin to deploy next-generation software solutions, and embrace modern management processes that enable agile, flexible, and extensible cloud platforms.”

At the regional level, vendor revenues from cloud IT infrastructure sales declined only in Central and Eastern Europe, which is experiencing political and economic turmoil that impacts overall IT spending. In all other regions year-over-year growth in IT infrastructure sales for public and private cloud remained strong and even accelerated compared with growth rates in the previous quarter.

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

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Double delight!

Aussie cartoonist Anton makes it a second global award for Lyonsdown IN ANOTHER triumph for Business Reporter and Business Technology, Anton Emdin, the brilliant Australian cartoonist, has won a prestigious global award for his work.

Anton took top prize for Newspaper Illustration at the 69th annual Reuben Awards held in Washington, DC. Run by the National Cartoonists Society, the awards are regarded as the Oscars of the cartoon world.

Anton, who works out of Sydney, was delighted with his award. “It truly is an honour,” he said. “Good illustration stems from not only the artist, but also the art direction and editorial approach of the publication.

Working with Business Reporter and Business Technology I feel I can really let loose and have fun – and I think it shows in the work.”

Daniel Evans, editor of Business Reporter and Business Technology, said: “We are absolutely thrilled that Anton’s work has been recognised by such an important institution and with such an impressive award. His work is always engaging, lively and thought-provoking. Anton manages to bring what might be dry business and technology stories to life every time. He is simply the best in the business.”

Anton’s award goes into the Business Reporter/Business Technology trophy cabinet hot on the heels of the inaugural Risk Management Journalism award presented to Business Reporter at the Institute of Risk Management’s Global Risk Awards 2014.

High five: Anton’s awardwinning front pages for Business Reporter and Business Technology

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

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Rise in ‘shadow IT’ an increased security risk, suggests report ALTHOUGH THE number of

By Joanne Frearson

cloud services used by European enterprises is rising, a large proportion of these are being added without the approval of their IT departments, creating security risks for the company, according to a report

by Skyhigh Networks.

The Cloud Adoption and Risk Repor t showed t he second quarter of 2015 seeing an average number of cloud services which European enterprises use increasing by 61 per cent, compared with the same period a year ago.

The survey, based on data from 2.5 million European employees across 12,000 cloud services, found the average European enterprise is adding more than one new cloud service per day, with more than 10 per cent of cloud activity taking place on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays represented 6.8 per cent and 7.8 per cent of weekly cloud usage respectively.

Overa l l t he average organisation used 226 cloud services for collaboration, wh ile 54 c loud ser v ices were being used for content sharing, 21 were being used for business intelligence and 49 used for social media.

How each customer used these

services was difficult to predict.

But, despite this rise in cloud adoption, the report showed cause for concern. Many services were being added by employees without the knowledge or approval of the IT department, creating a security risk for the organisation.

Skyhigh Networks data showed that IT is generally aware of less than 10 per cent of the services in use inside their organisation.

T he repor t found just 7 per cent of the 12,000 c loud ser v ices a na lysed met enterprise security and compliance requirements, only 15.4 per cent supported multi-factor authentication, 2.8 per cent had ISO 27001 certification and 9.4 per cent had encrypted data stored at rest. Skyhigh also discovered that 72.1 per cent of European organisations have exposure to compromised credentials and 8.5 per cent of employees at European companies have at least one compromised credential for sale on the darknet.

Furthermore, there was a danger they were using cloud services that did not meet EU data residency requirements.

Nigel Hawthorn, European

spokesperson for Skyhigh Networks, says: “European business use of cloud is at an all-time high. Companies are adding a new cloud service to their network each day and it won’t be long until the average organisation is using well over 1,000 distinct services.

While cloud services offer clear agility gains for the enterprise, the situation is by no means perfect.

“While security measures a r e i nc r ea s i n g ly b e i n g introduced by cyber-security practitioners’, our findings that no user is the same, combined with the fact that each enterprise is using an additional cloud service each day, demonstrates the sheer complexity of the issue.

“IT departments need to get their heads out of the clouds - or perhaps in it - and take an active role in ensuring their enterprise isn’t weighed down by risks, poorly thought out cloud usage policies, and blanket bans. In a nutshell, the potential rewards of a cloud-enabled business are just too good for an apathetic approach to cloud.”

How hybrid cloud can help in-demand IT departments thrive

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T departments are now operating in a world in which employees are more mobile, connected, interactive, immediate and fluid than the workforces that preceded them. That means they are in more demand than ever. And it’s being led from the top – the C-Suite has high requirements for IT, whether that’s enabling new product or service lines, evolving and automating the supply chain to drive efficiency, supporting modern working practices or transforming the customer service or go-to-market model for the business.

So what can be done by IT to keep pace and manage all of these requests coming in at once? Ultimately, IT needs to find a solution that can make the underlying business infrastructure as agile and responsive as possible – and this is where the hybrid cloud comes in.

A truly hybrid approach – not just a combination of a private and public cloud – can create an environment where IT workloads can be shifted about at will, totally seamlessly, using exactly the same tools IT teams are already familiar with. Critical applications can deliver the performance they need, while resources can be allocated and provisioned where required. This makes IT more responsive to business requests by instantly providing new infrastructure to cope with new projects, set up virtual servers to handle a new system across departments such as HR and marketing, and more. And, of course, scale back just as easily

when needed, given one of the key reasons hybrid hasn’t yet gained enough traction is the difficulty – often impossibility – of taking workloads back out of the public cloud.

Some companies are already making the most of a true hybrid cloud – one is Carisbrooke Shipping, a privately owned shipping organisation based in the Isle of Wight. Although it had successfully virtualised parts of its infrastructure, the company still had some physical hardware across three of its five offices in the UK, Germany and Holland. It wanted one dedicated team running and managing the entire estate from one central location in the UK while reducing the intrinsic cost involved in terms of running physical hardware.

Thanks to its hybrid cloud, Carisbrooke now has a unified IT estate. The UK team manages everything across its international offices through one VPN connection.

Provisioning new infrastructure has become a much simpler process – if it needs to spin up any additional IT resource, it can do this at the push of a button, rather than needing to purchase, and then get the licensing for physical servers as required, which could take a couple of days.

As IT departments continue to face pressures from all quarters to deliver a better, cheaper, faster, more secure, more agile and fully compliant, service, I’m confident we’ll see more companies opt for the hybrid approach to keep up with the fast-moving, IT-led, business landscape.

Richard Munro is chief technologist, vCloud Air, VMware Twitter: @RikMunro http://vcloud.vmware.com/uk

Business Technology · July 2015

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Cloud

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Choosing a cloud vendor: their origins and your business needs services. Can their support teams effectively troubleshoot if you have questions or do they offer an appropriate service wrap? If you have been used to outsourcing much of your IT for some time you will inevitably have reduced in-house skills and could require managed services. Combining your in house skills with on-demand professional services might make the most economic sense.

Whether you create your own strategy or ask a vendor with more cloud experience to do this for you, you need a plan that encompasses all of your business goals to match to a provider. This doesn’t have to be as difficult as it sounds, just make sure you have thought about the key points.

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he more information you have about any given subject, the easier it is to make a good decision. It’s the same with the cloud. Everyone knows that there are many things to consider when choosing a provider but a key factor is often left out of the decision making process – the background of cloud providers and the relevance of their past experience. By understanding the origins of cloud vendors it’s easier to understand the services they offer, ensuring they are right for you.

Cloud providers have typically evolved from three distinct areas; these are value-add resellers (VARs), internet service providers and mass hosters. Each type of provider has brought with them vast but widely different experience as they have moved into the cloud market. For companies considering the move to the cloud there are a huge number of cloud services to choose from. Selecting the ideal product with the required features and backed by relevant experience is a sometimes overwhelming task – to which the success of your business is linked.

Define your business needs It’s helpful to know the role you need a vendor to play before speaking to them. Try to identify which applications you use in their standard form and which are customised, where staff will work and how future success could change your IT needs.

Do you have the skills and time to get to where you want to be, as fast as you want to get there?

Value-added resellers (VARs) A VAR is a company which primarily exists to help other companies buy and implement IT, usually on a consultative basis. The growing trend for cloud-based IT, rather than traditional on-premises hardware, threatened the profitability of traditional VARs. To keep up with advancing technology many evolved into a cloud provider by partnering with a hosting infrastructure provider and offering customers a full suite of bespoke cloud services. By encompassing infrastructure and applications, a comprehensive portfolio can create a very appealing proposition. However, customised infrastructure requires a lot of manpower and comes with a higher price tag with two main results – the VAR can become overstretched so they don’t actually achieve efficiency or stability and pricing can move out of reach of SME budgets.

VARs can be a good way of ensuring consistently high standards for your business without requiring you to be hands-on yourself.

They’re also fitting if you have limited technical expertise available to you, whether through resource or knowledge barriers.

Internet service providers (ISPs) In its most basic form, an ISP is an internet company that usually has existing large facilities and an extensive networking infrastructure. Due to pricing and competition pressures many established companies were forced to diversify into other markets – predominantly co-location (CoLo). This is the term for hosting when multiple customers rent multiple units of, or rows of, server racks in a data centre. Evolving ISPs also added managed

Even if you’re confident you do, you will benefit from leveraging outside expertise where it’s available and affordable. When transitioning to the cloud some providers charge a one-off set up and implementation fee while others make a high margin from ongoing service costs.

Would you benefit from flexible pricing and technology?

services to their networking products and, as with VARs, the trend is for cloud-pushed ISPs to combine cloud services with this.

ISPs have been able to invest in and acquire cloud technology at a rapid pace – however, achieving automation and efficiency is very challenging when a company is adopting new technology and changing its business model.

In addition to this, ISPs face challenges delivering ever-changing levels of industryaccepted, high-speed connectivity and infrastructure while keeping costs affordable because of the amount of investment required. This can mean that investing in cloud services isn’t always the priority and cloud customers could suffer.

Mass hosters A mass hoster is a company whose knowledge and skills originate from the shared web hosting market.

Vendors in this industry host

multiple customers’ websites per server and often hundreds of thousands of websites across many servers. To meet changing customer needs these companies have invested heavily in infrastructure, not just enabling automation, resource management and fast provisioning but considering them central to their solutions. As the typical mass hoster’s services are aimed at companies with smaller budgets and staffing levels, the shared hosting space has always and continues to concentrate on agility, price and features.

Cautious customers should consider how the technology has been acquired; is it from an established and respected technology brand that will remain profitable in a fluid marketplace? Other things to consider are the hoster’s experience of application and system-level managed

Some businesses need a solution that can cater for high and low periods of demand. Examples of this could be a payroll system on a Friday or your eCommerce website at Christmas. If you ask for details upfront about how much you can scale up or down your service as your needs change, you won’t get caught out with unexpected limits or costs.

Understanding the origin of cloud providers and the role their historical experience plays in supporting your business’s goals is the key to a successful cloud strategy.

There are of course other aspects to consider such as your budget, the providers approach to security and levels of guaranteed uptime but most importantly look for a cloud provider that is technically competent, maintains strategic partnerships and delivers a service that is cutting edge, innovative and plans for continual evolvement that will drive real efficiencies in your business.

Simon Yeoman (left) is general manager at Fasthosts. Fasthosts’ team can help guide you through the options for your business 0333 0142 715 www.fasthosts.co.uk/cloud-servers

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Avoiding potholes… the connected tech way JAGUAR Land Rover is pioneering a “Pothole Alert” in its new connected car technology, which will use the cloud to share data about their severity with drivers and road authorities.

The new connected car technology will allow a vehicle to identify the location and severity of potholes, broken drains and manhole covers and then share this data in real time via the cloud with other vehicles and road authorities to help them prioritise repairs.

Dr Mike Bell, global connected car director at Jaguar Land Rover, says: “Our MagneRide equipped Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport vehicles feature sophisticated sensors that allow the vehicle to profile the road surface under the wheels and identify potholes, raised manholes and broken drain covers.

“By monitoring the motion of the vehicle and changes in the height of the suspension, the car is able to continuously adjust the vehicle’s suspension characteristics, giving passengers a more comfortable ride over uneven and damaged road surfaces.

“While this gives our customers a more comfortable ride, we think there is a huge opportunity to turn the information from these vehicle sensors into “big data” and share it for the benefit of other road users. This could help prevent billions of pounds of vehicle damage and make road repairs

more effective.”

The next stage of the project at Jaguar Land Rover’s Advanced Research Centre in the UK is to install new road surface sensing technology in the Range Rover Evoque research vehicle, including an advanced forward-facing stereo digital camera.

“At the moment the most accurate data comes from when the car has driven over the pothole or manhole”, says Bell. “So we are also researching how we could improve the measurement and accuracy of pothole detection by scanning the road ahead, so the car could predict how severe they are before the vehicle gets near them.

“Ultimately, sensing the road ahead and assessing hazards is a key building block on our journey to the autonomous car. In the future, we are looking to develop systems that could automatically guide a car around potholes without the car leaving its lane and causing

Connected vehicles such as Land Rover’s new Evoque can help road maintenance by sending pothole data to the cloud

a danger to other drivers. If the pothole hazard was significant enough, safety systems could slow or even stop the car to minimise the impact. This could all help make future autonomous driving a safe and enjoyable reality.”

Jaguar Land Rover’s research team will also be working with innovation partner Coventry City Council to understand how road profile information could be shared with road authorities, and exactly what data would be most useful for their roads maintenance teams to identify and prioritise repairs.

Councillor Rachel Lancaster, cabinet member for public services at Coventry City Council, says: “We already collect lots of data which we monitor very carefully ourselves, but having this kind of extra information might allow us to further improve our maintenance programmes which would save the taxpayer money.”

Using servers to heat buildings is the next hot idea DUTCH company Nerdalize has teamed up with Eneco to field test an eRadiator which heats homes through a cloud computing server.

Computer servers generate a lot of heat through performing calculations.

By installing these servers in people’s homes instead of centralised large data centres, the generated heat can be used to heat these homes at no cost. The purpose of the test is to collect information on customer experience and to identify possible areas of improvement of the eRadiator.

The servers hold the data and perform complex calculations for a variety of companies

and knowledge institutes, such as new medicine-related research for Leiden University Medical Centre.

A study carried out in cooperation with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computing Science showed that companies and institutions that require a lot of processing power could reduce their costs in the area of accommodation and cooling of data centres by 30 to 55 per cent through using this concept.

There are also environmental benefits, because the same energy is used for two different purposes – computation and heating.

The field tests are expected to run to the end of the year. Eneco and Nerdalize will use the results to determine if and how the eRadiators can be made available to a large number of customers.

Why enterprises should embrace the benefits of the hybrid cloud

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ata is the underlying asset of any enterprise and it is increasing exponentially in quality, quantity and value. Through data, enterprises have the opportunity to truly innovate and react in new ways. This growing mass of data is also causing IT decision-makers to reassess their storage infrastructure.

For some organisations, it can make sense to host a data centre on premises, especially when they have to adhere to industry regulation or have business-critical data that needs to be easily accessible. At the same time, the vast majority of companies store and manage their data in the cloud, as this is generally more cost-effective. This means that, for a lot of

enterprises, a hybrid cloud solution will give them the flexibility to retain business-critical data securely on-premises, while storing “broader” data in the public cloud at a cheaper cost. This “pay as you go” model is akin to flicking a switch on and off – in accordance with data requirements.

Such a hybrid storage solution needs to be properly managed, an issue that will be increasingly important when the proposed changes to EU data protection law take effect. Through a datamanagement platform, which acts as a data fabric across the entire IT landscape, businesses can ensure that data transportation is optimised to maximise operational efficiency. This reduces costs and ultimately improves business output, while remaining

compliant with regulation.

Data should not be seen as an obstacle and drain on IT infrastructure. Instead, by creating a data fabric, business can find ways to inform their decisionmaking by mining data to their advantage. And the more “good” data they manage and mine, the more efficiently they can innovate and maintain their competitive strength.

Dave Allen (left) is VP, NetApp Northern EMEA 08000 718191 www.netapp.com/uk

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Moving your data centre to the cloud What are the risks?

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ccording to the hype, the cloud promises some major benefits, but probe a little deeper and some big questions become apparent.

What is really meant by “cloud services”?

Every supplier seems to use the term, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. We use the model illustrated in the diagram below – these are the key characteristics that differentiate each type of cloud (please contact us for the complete version of the table, which fully describes the characteristics for each type). When determining which option is best, the key is to understand what your needs are, and therefore what commercial, technology and service characteristics really matter.

We were initially sceptical that both cost savings and service improvements could be achieved but, for a well-implemented cloud service, the economies of scale mean that it should be able to offer a better service for a lower cost. We have delivered two major data centre transformations for FTSE250 companies, and the transition to cloud is targeted to achieve improvements in service levels, flexibility, responsiveness and security (yes, even security) as well as total operational cost savings (on a cash basis) in excess of 40 per cent.

• Picking the right suppliers – suppliers fall into three groups: consulting systems integration, hardware/IT services and network services. It may be useful to involve a range of those in any RFI/RFP process.

Whether to opt for a multisupplier or a “one throat to choke” approach also needs thought • Service levels, SLAs and service credits – it can be tricky to negotiate bespoke arrangements that suit you, rather than the off-the-peg offer • Contractuals, pricing and software licensing • Technology considerations • The transition/transformation project to migrate to the cloud • Internal implications on your IT team once the transition is complete Overall, is it ready for the big time? Our view is an unequivocal “yes”. There are now enough examples where this has been done at large scale, for major global companies, and for their most mission-critical transactional applications. If CIOs are not exploring this already, then they should be – and will be soon.

Jon Bradbury is a partner at The Berkeley Partnership www.berkeleypartnership. com

Cheaper, more flexible, faster, less autonomous control Cost increases, provisioning times longer, more autonomous control

Public cloud

Virtual private cloud

Private cloud

Traditional hosting

Types of cloud service and the key characteristics that differentiate them Location Hardware owner Payment model Contract length Tenancy Provisioning Scalability

Security Terms and conditions flex Data sovereignty App migration effort “Evergreen” Break/Fix approach

Please contact us for the full version of this table which describes each characteristic for each type

E

VERY MORNING when Olympic snowboard athlete Zoe Gillings-Brier wakes up, she checks her hear t rate.

T he resu lts a re i mmediately uploaded to her cloud storage device, the Transporter 15, and shared with her coaches.

Dramatic changes in heart rates can signify the first sign of sickness or overtraining. If there are any abnormalities, her coaches will be able to instantly tell through the data and co-ordinate an action plan to get her back to peak physical fitness.

Snowboarding since she was 10, Gillings-Brier is now the UK’s most successful SBX athlete of all time.

At only 29 years of age she has seven World Cup podium finishes, and has taken part in three Winter Olympic games. In May this year she won gold at the European Cup. Speaking from her parents’ house in the Isle of Man, she tells me the cloud is an integral part of her training regime. She uses it to share large data files such as videos and photos with her coaches, which would be difficult for a normal computer to upload.

“I have a snow coach, a fitness coach and a nutritionist,” Gillings-Brier says. “My snow coach lives in Canada. If I am on the snow and my coach

is not there, I can get a video of the technique I am working on and put it up on Transporter.

He can comment on it and say, ‘bend your legs a bit more at this point’ [for example].

“In the gym I only get to see my fitness coach every now and then when I am training. I can send him videos and he can comment on things.

There are things which are hard to describe or put into words. He can show me over a video or a photo he uploads.

“I was in the gym recently and was doing a fairly new exercise, which I was not quite sure about.

I got someone to take a quick video of me 10 seconds long, stuck it up straight away from my phone, and then gave my fitness coach a call to ask him if I was doing it right.

“It was an exercise where you hold a weight in each hand and step up onto a box. I was just stepping up and stepping down again. He said that what I needed to do was to step up with as much speed as I could, as that promotes fast muscle growth. By doing it slowly you get stronger, but you will not be able to create as much power.

“I fixed my technique so from that moment on I was doing it correctly. If I had not had the ability to take a video and upload it to the cloud, I could have been doing it wrong for weeks.”

In her training for the European Cup, video

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British snowboarding ace Zoe Gillings-Brier talks to Joanne Frearson about how cloud technology lets her keep ahead of the pack

Why you must beware wolves masquerading as gerbils Keil Hubert

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feedback from her coaches played a big role in her preparation. Gillings-Brier was training in Italy to work on her freestyle technique while the rest of the snowboard team and her coach were in Austria.

By uploading footage of herself training, her coach could look at her technique in Austria and give her feedback. It was a huge benefit for her and she ended up winning four podiums out of six, which included a gold at the European Cup. She credits the Transporter with helping her receive the feedback she could not get when she trained by herself and her coach was in Canada.

“It would not work as well,” she says. “I was not getting the feedback I needed. It works a lot more smoothly. I get feedback a lot better now. It is a bit like mobile phones – it’s hard to imagine how life ever worked without them.

And it is hard to imagine how life would work without cloud storage for me.”

Gillings-Brier has always been an early adopter of technology when it comes to training. She was the first athlete on the Snowboard World Cup circuit to start using a camera on her helmet in competitions going down the track.

“You only get a small amount of training on the course before you race, only about two hours or so,” she says.

“I thought, if I take a video of it that night I can watch it on a screen. I can project the video onto the wall and then I can stand in front of it and look at what I could not see

when I was out there on the course. Then I will do all the movements – I will move up and down, move side to side and go around the corners. I get extra training in effect.”

Soon after she started doing using this technology, explains Gillings-Brier, other snowboarders in the competition began to realise the benefit – within a couple of weeks everyone was using cameras on their helmets. She also uses a quadcopter to get video of her snowboarding at all different angles.

Sometimes the video footage she collects of herself in competitions is used by TV stations such as the BBC and Channel 4 for race coverage. The Transporter is also helping her in her online razor delivery business, the Pound Shave Club, which she set up to help fund her snowboarding activities, when it comes to sharing documents with her colleagues that work around the UK. But Gillings-Brier has strict limits of who sees what on the Transporter. The device has a privacy option which allows her to control who sees what. “I have my entire life on there,” she says. “I do not have to share all that with everyone. I decide the bits I want to share with people.”

The Transporter is a vital part of Gillings-Brier’s training programme. At the moment she is training for the next World Cup, where she will be using the Transporter every day to gain valuable feedback from her coaches – whether it is uploading her heart rate or a video for them to see.

With any luck, it will help her win gold again.

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SALESPERSON tried to sell I’ve consulted to a bunch of me an internet-enabled TV US-based small businesses that for my office the other day. understood the need for security, I asked if he was bundling a security but couldn’t justify stretching the event and incident management payroll. In 88 per cent of the SOHO appliance or a unified security environments with 20 or fewer users management server along with his I inspected between 2001 and 2014, television so that his device didn’t the single most common network compromise my network. The salesdefence capability I found was a person asked me what I meant... so I home-grade broadband router with hung up on him. No thanks. a built-in firewall – usually with no Network-aware appliances – the one monitoring it. I understand why lion’s share of devices that make – when margins are razor thin, the up the internet of things – sound resources just aren’t there to procure modern and safe. In reality, these or to operate enterprise-grade tools. non-PC devices (like a refrigerator That’s why the IoT should be a that e-mails you when you run low slow sell for small businesses over on bacon) are poxy little saboteurs. the next few years: every new They’re extremely simple PCs that addressable device introduced to an wait cheerfully to give some clever office network is another potential baddie a safe haven from which to pivot point for an attacker. An IoT pursue greater mischief. device may seem like a simple TV set My argument is that IoT nodes or refrigerator, but an attacker views introduce vulnerabilities to the those nodes as weak, unmonitored, network they’re LSDH installed AKJHDS on because KASJD easy-to-compromise targets. Busithey’re inherently askjdh insecure. aksjdh Theaksdjh OS askdjh ness owners must realise they’re not on most non-PC askdjh devices askdjh are bareaskdjha sdkjahs positioned to accept the risk until bones affairs,dkajshd designed for minimum they start investing in infosec. functionality, often with no thought Unfortunately, the glamour to integrating into a managed and allure of IoT toys will likely network. Unlike a complex PC, prove captivating to people who phone, or tablet, IoT devices usually don’t realise they’re buying wolves aren’t engineered with hardening masquerading as gerbils. We’ll see and monitoring in mind. That’s why a spate of network compromises I argue that the market conditions make the news before the network aren’t right – yet – to introduce IoT security sector players realise that into businesses too small to feature they have a golden opportunity a dedicated infosec department. (and a compelling need) to take their A business that is large enough enterprise toys down-market. has both the resources and the By 2018, I think we’ll start to see remit to integrate IoT components the top security vendors roll out into the network under controlled simpler, significantly less expensive conditions. Larger companies feature devices to the SOHO community, defensive tools like centralised the same way they brought us anti-virus management, patch reasonably effective router/firewall management servers, and intrusion capability in £100 appliances back detection systems. They also employ in the early 2000s. Then – and only trained operators to monitor their then – will it start being safe for network traffic. These professionals small businesses to start connecting know how to recognise suspicious internet-enabled TV sets and bidets behaviour, and have the authority to their networks. Until then, their to swiftly shut down any device that best choice is to either to do without, starts acting squiffy. or hire full-time infosec boffins.

A

Business Technology · July 2015

Internet of things

Empowering businesses to realise the full potential of IoT

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I OFNTE 12 T RN -15 H E IN T GS

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here is both an infectious excitement and highly publicised expectation that IoT will be the next evolution of the internet, mobile and IT. Where these worlds converge, growth follows.

Our experience shows that companies want one company for their connectivity, whether their devices and applications are deployed locally or across the globe. They want to have one invoice, one contact point for support 24/7/365 and have a management platform that gives them visibility and control over their devices.

More companies are requesting APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that enable them to take the data from the device and feed it into the back-office systems, such as SAP, thus turning data into valuable information for the business, and delivering in real-time business information for enterprise users. This can result in better decision making in the areas of maintenance and inventory control.

An important aspect of the IoT industry that is often overlooked is data security, whether this is patient records, credit card details or personal driving behaviour.

We realise companies are looking for a private managed network or virtual private network (VPN) for connecting their devices in the field to their servers and ensuring data security.

Another aspect of security that is equally important in terms of cost and potential revenue loss is ensuring the network is robust and resilient and has minimal, if any, downtime.

Our products and services enable customers and partners alike to achieve their goals and remain at the cutting-edge of this rapidly growing and innovative industry. marketing@wyless.com

The coming of the internet of Joanne Frearson

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EVICES WITH sensors are smart. They can talk to each other. They can tell you if you are being energy efficient if your fridge is running low on certain foods or whether there are potential traffic problems ahead. The Internet of Things (IoT) is making the world a more connected place.

According to Cisco, by 2020 there will be 50 billion devices and objects connected to the internet.

By 2025, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates, the potential economic impact of IoT will be between $2.7billion and $6.2trillion.

However, communication isn’t always so easy between these devices. Sometimes it can be downright difficult. Although there has been a proliferation of devices which have the potential to connect, they are not being built under the same standards making it near impossible for them to communicate as one.

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), and Gavin Starks, its CEO, tell me that although the IoT has been around

for years, there are still difficulties when it comes to companies making the data that these smart devices produce open to all.

“There are an increasing number of devices, with an increasing numbers of standards that have different ways of communicating to each other,” says Sir Nigel.

“One thing that has been very interesting is the extent to which manufacturers of these devices are keen to promote their standards and particular methods for communication. What is needed is a universally agreed, simple set of standards for communication that allows documents to be shared universally.

“As chairman of the ODI one of the themes we are arguing for very strongly is the need for open standards so you can build infrastructure that is potentially going to work between itself, different device types and different sectors,” he continues. “That is quite important. A common infrastructure would allow us to exchange information about how cities operate – from transport and energy, through to logistics and emergency services.

“The IoT isn’t just a set of sensors that make something magic happen. It is the network effect of having all of these phones and devices connected, allowing something to happen that could not before.”

Sir Nigel believes it is difficult to predict when interoperability between devices will be achieved, but

explains that at some point it will become so tedious in trying to communicate in different ways with all our devices that people will look for something that unifies them.

“It is hard to say whether it will be a few years or a matter of months, but it is coming down the track,” he says. “We are hearing one or two influential voices, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, talking about this concept. Then there is the question of what will make the biggest impact?

“People use to laugh at the idea of instruments in your fridge until people thought about the opportunity of elderly care and assisted living. It is quite important to know if your mum is making three cups of tea a day.

“Why wouldn’t you cover a place in sensors to do traffic management? Everything from cars through to the items we buy in retail will start to be equipped with sensors or emitters of various types, and that starts to build a very rich picture.”

The ODI has been working in this area to help companies build a strategy to understand how they can use this data that these smart devices provide and look at IoT as producing data into a broader set of infrastructure.

Starks adds: “We really see data as infrastructure.

The important question is, what data is coming. How it can be linked with other information? What impact will

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Whose game?

IEEE updates rules of patent policy to encourage innovation

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age for things it create? Where do the efficiencies become revealed in this data?”

One of the star t-ups at the ODI, called Thingful.net, is a search engine for IoT which enables people to find devices, datasets and real-time data sources using geolocation across networks. These include weather, iBeacons, ships, aircraft and even animal trackers. “You really start to get an instrumented view of the world,” Starks says.

“That has some quite profound implications on businesses, individuals and governments. The access to information, for example, about weather could be derived from sensors on windscreen wipers rather than from the Met Office. There are ways we could combine all these different data sets together to create new insights. There is huge potential for innovation and efficiency.”

However, some companies have questions about what data should be open, what should be shared and what should remain closed. Sometimes firms do not realise the benefit open data can have.

Starks says: “We have seen an example of this with one of our start-ups, Demand Logic. They went into King’s College and deployed sensors for energy monitoring. They took all the energy data across the estate and found a £300,000 saving in energy.

“King’s College, after they got their head around

If the IoT is to progress from a jumble of connected objects to a functional integrated network, its technology must become more standardised

Below: The ODI’s Gavin what was happening with the data, said, actually Starks believes big data will make the internet why wouldn’t we make this open, why wouldn’t we of things more efficient make this available to the estates, so they could see

the kinds of patterns we found and maybe found more efficiencies? They started with closed and they moved to open.”

Starks believes that if governments and companies were willing to make more data open, the cost saving for cities could be staggering.

“We spend hundreds of million pounds a year digging up roads in central London to put in new cables,” he says. “That is because there are multiple different agencies that have all the data. Can you combine that with information about traffic flow? Can you look at peak disruption times?

“Can you combine that with other data to reduce that overall cost and disruption to the city? The benefits of that could go into hundreds of millions of pounds.”

IoT will have a big impact on society. Sensors in buildings and bridges will be able to let people know of potential structural issues, or traffic lights will be able to tell us about road problems. But in order to get the most benefit for society, a common structure will need to be found and companies will need to understand how making some data open could improve things for all.

utting-edge technologies are being embedded in new Information and Communications Technology (ICT) standards that establish interoperability and global collaborative platforms for further innovation. When these technologies are patented, rules are crucial to avoid issues caused by the very nature of the patent system.

The role of a neutral standards body like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is to set the ground rules that ensure a level playing field for small and big companies, incumbents and newcomers, including competitors, to develop standards. As such, standards organisations are responsible to both their industry stakeholders and society at large to maintain these platforms as globally open and inclusive.

Against this backdrop, IEEE recently updated its patent policy because we deeply believe there is a need to introduce more clarity and predictability for patent holders and implementers with technologies that are included in our widely used standards, such as the IEEE

802.11 family of global Wi-Fi standards. Otherwise, this ecosystem is in danger.

IEEE is uniquely positioned as an independent, global not-for-profit technologydriven organisation, with the flexibility to engage decisionmaking as a neutral body not representing any particular constituency or government interest. IEEE believes patent owners should be reasonably rewarded for their contributions to IEEE standards. For precisely this reason, we clarified what is “reasonable,” levelling the playing field and enhancing value for all parties.

Our new patent policy supports our fostering a healthy, inclusive standardisation ecosystem that does not structurally favour one party over another.

We want the ecosystem to remain open to everyone on a global basis, especially as we embark on exciting new technologies like the internet of things.

Innovation cannot be a winner-takes-all proposition.

It is only when the innovation process is inclusive and open that we truly advance technology for humanity. https://standards.ieee.org Twitter: @IEEEorg

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ormed in 1865, Bath Rugby, one of the oldest professional rugby clubs in England, are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year. Throughout the 80s and 90s the club were renowned for their world-class players and multiple league and cup titles.

In 2015, Bath Rugby are stronger than ever. Within a matter of two seasons, they have risen to become one of the most feared teams in club rugby, bolstered by the world-class facilities at Farleigh House. The club’s tradition of fielding talented players renowned for their thrilling brand of play continues to this day.

Part of this renewed success has been achieved by investing in technology to help improve the club’s performance. Bath Rugby engaged Getronics, ICT services provider, to act as their performance analysis partner and to facilitate the technology that would be a key enabler in driving Bath Rugby towards the goal of becoming the best rugby club in Europe.

Matt Powell, business development director at Bath Rugby, says: “Technology is important across the whole business. Crucially, it allows us to analyse players to recruit, to look at the players’ nutrition, diets, strength and

How Bath Rugby scored using hi-tech tactics conditioning, and to review their medical assessments and rehab.

“We analyse huge amounts of data, generally focused on performance.

Naturally, we will be analysing training, as well as team and individual performance. However, we will also analyse the opposition.

There are 12 clubs in this league and they are all trying to win the championship – everybody is trying to look for that edge.”

Players can look at how they have performed immediately after training or a game, and coaches can provide feedback on their performance and

use it to develop the game plan. Stuart Hooper, club captain of Bath Rugby, says: “The professional rugby environment is fast-paced, but the technology provided to us by Getronics allows us to analyse all facets of the game wherever we are and at our own convenience. As a player, that’s invaluable.”

All rugby staff and players have an iPad which they can use anywhere, at any time, to execute performance analysis. Making performance analysis mobile has not only unified the club through creating a one-team mentality, but also allowed the players

to take complete ownership of their performance and become increasingly involved in the strategic development of the game plan.

Powell says: “If a player is travelling to a game, they may decide to log in and start to look at footage of the team or the individual they are coming up against to look for trends.

“Ensuring players take ownership of their own performance and role in the game plan enables them to become leaders on the field. It gives them the ability to adapt, because if things are not going their way during the game they need not look to the

coaches on the sideline to understand why the tactics are not working.”

The partnership and relationship between Bath Rugby and Getronics has proved successful, and discussions are in place for Getronics to act as a strategic partner to Bath Rugby, designing, implementing and supporting the IT infrastructure that will look to meet the club’s requirements today and in the future.

Getronics will look to provide a solution to deliver IT that can be relied upon – supporting Bath Rugby’s day-to-day business operations – as well as acting as a key enabler in supporting important initiatives to grow the club and drive them towards their primary objective of excellence both on and off the pitch.

Mark Cook, group CEO of Getronics, comments: “With a young and exciting team, Bath Rugby have set their sights high and we are very proud to be a partner of the club.

Their investment in technology and strategic partnership with Getronics is a positive step in pursuing their goal of becoming the most successful rugby club in Europe, and there is every chance that the team will be winning silverware again soon.”

Twitter: @Getronics www.getronics.com

How the industrial internet of things will help us compete on the world stage

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ith the growing availability of internet-connected devices, forward-thinking global manufacturers are reaping the benefits of highly secure, real-time connected factory automation systems. Here comes the industrial internet of things.

But what is the industrial internet of things and how will it improve industry? Modern, intelligent process control enables manufacturing to be remotely monitored and controlled. This integration of complex machinery, automation systems, IT networks and the internet puts management of asset performance right at the fingertips of manufacturers.

More impressively, remote availability of live process information creates opportunities for operational improvement when partnered with lean manufacturing practices, increasing effectiveness and profitability. Advance warnings of raw materials shortages or component failures, for example, are invaluable tools for plant managers.

The concept of an industrial internet of things is still in the early stages. However, significant investments from overseas manufacturers such as Intel, General Electric, Cisco, Hitachi and many others demonstrate industry’s commitment to it.

Meanwhile in the UK, the government’s chief scientific adviser warns of the danger of trivialising the importance of the internet of things. His recent report recognises the enormous opportunities for business and recommends more support from government. At last year’s CeBIT technology show in Hanover, David Cameron announced a doubling of UK funding for the

internet of things in an effort to encourage UK business.

UK-based WH Good Automation is at the forefront of process control and automation technology. As a long-established and respected systems integrator, it has delivered hundreds of automation projects in the UK and overseas. Projects range from small standalone controls for individual processes right up to full factory automation schemes. WH Good designs, builds and installs plant instrumentation, electrical control panels and process software.

“In the last few decades the introduction of automation into manufacturing has had an enormous impact on our clients’ business performance,” says Barry Foster, managing director of WH Good Automation. “Even modest projects can have a huge impact on profitability. However, modern intelligent control systems are also able to generate savings in areas not traditionally considered to be automation. For example, resource management within the control system can significantly reduce energy, raw materials and labour costs.

Gathering this resource usage data can inform production scheduling, recipe development, regulatory compliance and maintenance planning.

“Integration of the plant and factory within site-wide, highly secure and high-availability enterprise IT systems have become routine, as manufacturers recognise the value and return on capital investment.

“In response to the opportunities represented by revolutionary concepts such as the IIoT, the senior management team at W H Good is consistently progressive and self-critical, taking challenging initiatives and forming long-term strategic partnerships with other industry leaders.

This commitment, together with leading technical expertise and superior customer service, means we are well equipped to deliver high-complexity manufacturing automation projects to industry. “It’s time for UK industry to embrace this new technology in order to compete on the worldwide stage.” automation@whgood.co.uk www.whgood.co.uk

Business Technology · July 2015

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Internet of things

Like us: www.facebook.com/biztechreport | Contact us at info@lyonsdown.co.uk

Inspector Dogberry

writers for you to get your teeth into.

Follow them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to keep updated.

By Sarah Tuxworth, web assistant

Stephenson blogs on Internet of Things www.stephensonstrategies.com

BEING A DOG, the

installed across Britain’s water

they occur, allowing engineers

project that could transform our

Inspector has quite

mains is to change this old method

to prioritise fixing pipes before

approach to managing water

acute hearing – to be

and make leaky pipes a thing of

they burst, preventing damage to

networks, saving money and

specific, his hearing is

the past.

local communities and wasting of

large amounts of water across the

precious water.

country’s water network.

four times more sensitive than all you regular humans. He has found this heightened sense to come in

Tidworth (inset) in Wiltshire is to be one of the first towns to have this new technology installed.

very useful and has managed

Hundreds of

to alert his neighbourhood of

sensors and Smart

potential pipe bursts just by

Water Meters are

being able to listen to the noise of

being installed

the water underground.

across its 100km

Listening to water pipes

of water mains

through a device called a “listening

and 140km of

On average around 22 per cent

beneficial for consumers and the

water mains is lost to leaks or

environment, reducing the risk of

unauthorised use. It is expected

hosepipe bans and the disruption

reduce this to as low as 5 per cent,

“Introducing the internet of things to businesses and the public,” Stephenson Strategies owner W David Stephenson has many a blog on the ins, outs and essentials of IoT. Follow his blog for insight on the future of IoT and what steps should be taken to develop it.

caused to homes and communities by burst water mains.”

Thoughts on Cloud www.thoughtsoncloud.com

saving water companies billions of

stick” has been a technique in uses

sewers. The £1.5million project,

litres, tons

since the 1860s to detect leaky

funded by environmental

of carbon

pipes and stop potential bursts.

services firm Veolia, will

But now an intelligent water pipe

showcase the potential for

of pounds, as

network set to be

the future roll-out of the

well as increase

technology across the UK.

the water networks’

The new

“This would be hugely

of water flowing through Britain’s

this new technology will

If you want to explore the technology behind, and the effects of, cloud computing, Thoughts on Cloud provides articles by different

in partnership with tech giant, IBM, will

gevaperry.typepad.com/main Geva Perry, named among the Top 50 Cloud Computing Bloggers and one of the 12 Top Thinkers in Cloud Computing, leads this blog, a handy archive of in-depth knowledge of the development of cloud technology.

IoTBlog: Decoding the Internet of Things dblaza.blogspot.co.uk IoTBlog balances the musings of its creator, David Blaza, with unravelling myths and making predictions about the future of the internet of things. Visit his site for advice on the IoT, alongside other hot technology topics such as big data, security and apps.

TribeHR (Free, iOS)

climate change.

Approve vacation leave, share files for employee access and post job vacancies for your business with this handy all-round app.

John Abraham, chief operating

be able to monitor

officer at Veolia

the flow of water in

UK, says: “This

real time and predict bursts before

Thinking Out Cloud

and millions

resilience to drought and

technology, developed

15

Quick Books Online (Android, iOS)

Quick Books Online is a cloud finance app for small business owners who want to take care of their bookkeeping efficiently and securely.

is an ambitious

Cloud-powered IT – why you should care

C

loud computing applications can be found for almost any business unit within a company, from HR and finance to sales and marketing. Business units are taking a more active role in deciding which of these systems are best for them, changing the role of the CIO. With adoption of cloud, the CIO also plays a key part in business decision making.

With market forces changing the way IT is consumed, businesses can procure from outside sources which they previously needed IT for. IT has become a democratised service within enterprises – no longer the sole remit of the CIO, it is now something more collaborative, with IT and other departments working together to reach the best software solution.

Individual business units are already using the cloud directly – sales teams adopting salesforce.com, for example, or HR using salary payment modules – and overall adoption of the cloud has increased dramatically over the past five years. Results of a recent survey by Tata Communications showed cloud computing has been widely adopted by 97 per cent of organisations, with 84 per cent saying it is a critical or a very important part of their organisation.

Sumeet Walia, head of global enterprise

business at Tata Communications, says: “Around five or so years ago, when we would speak to customers about their IT roadmap a lot of it was restricted to what their internal IT architecture allowed for, which the CIO was at the centre of. The CIO was deciding what the enterprise was allowed to do.

“In a short span of five years, business units are now choosing what IT systems they want to deploy. Tata Communications is now heavily engaged in speaking to business units as well as the CIO about IT services. IT is moving under the power of the individual users. The business users are choosing what systems they want to deploy.”

Walia explains that every IT ecosystem within the different business units can sit in the cloud, from HR to finance to marketing.

He views the CIO role as the enabler of these systems, the person that makes these applications come alive.

He says: “The CIO’s role is to drive the user experience in the cloud, and to help make adoption to it an easy process.”

Cloud adoption has been extremely high within companies because it increases productivity, gives employees better access to data and reduces costs. By encouraging the different departments to adopt cloud services which work best for them, the CIO can help make an organisation more efficient.

The survey by Tata Communications discovered that nearly two thirds of respondents, 65 per cent, found using the cloud had led to increased speed of access to technology, while 67 per cent, over two thirds, had experienced reduced delivery times to clients and partners.

It also puts small companies on a level playing field with larger ones. Walia explains the same applications are available to all

companies, no matter what size they are – monolithic, start-up or mid-sized.

Walia says: “One of the benefits of cloud is that it gives you low cost of entry as well as increasing productivity and efficiency.

The chief information officer will be the driver behind this.”

Twitter: @tata_comm www.tatacommunications.com

16 · Business Technology · July 2015

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INSIDE TRACK

Finding cloud nirvana: discover happiness through the cloud T he role of cloud computing in a modern business strategy is both overestimated and underappreciated. Undoubtedly, the cloud is a game-changer, but to believe that it could provide everything a business needs is a narrow and frankly naive view.

For decades now IT has been a crucial part of running a business, from the initial mainframe, allowing organisations to innovate the way they create and deliver their products or services to customers. IT could be slow, promising more than it could deliver and gaining a reputation as an expensive, though necessary, cost centre.

Cloud computing can reverse this, making businesses more nimble and more available by allowing them to increase their IT capacity whenever they need it, at minimal cost, in just a few clicks.

Something of a nebulous concept, the cloud is involved in everything we do – whether it’s answering emails, listening to music or sharing documents. IT has never been more accessible, much to the concern of the IT department, thanks to a rise in so-called shadow IT (IT purchases without the CIO’s knowledge through other departmental budgets), as employees take advantage

Five issues to consider before moving customer service into the cloud

T

he cloud is widely established across most industry sectors.

The cloud-based contact centre infrastructure market has matured rapidly, and there is now a standard set of capabilities customers can access. However, moving to the cloud will not be right for every business. Here are five factors organisations should consider before taking the plunge:

1. Remember – it’s not all about size

of cloud services to boost their personal and departmental productivity – but with possible risks to data security and availability planning. HR, finance, and marketing – everyone is at it.

Unsurprisingly, with everyone trying to get into the cloud some end up with cloud hangovers. Our research* found that not only is each UK organisation paying an average of £200,000 per year to ensure cloud services run effectively, but also an additional £270,000 over the last five years of unforeseen costs, such as people to manage deployment and systems integration.

But, hangover or not, businesses simply can’t escape the draw of the cloud’s potential, with numerous overzealous industry figures calling for “cloud-only/ digital-first” approaches or chastising UK organisations for falling behind their US counterparts.

It’s worth a reminder that many supporters are somewhat removed from the coalface, and perhaps lack a full understanding of the practicality of using IT in business. After all, most businesses weren’t born yesterday – they have existing working practices and legacy systems (previous

IT investments) that can be complex, necessary and operate across multiple platforms to keep everything running.

Despite connotations of being outdated, legacy technology often carries out some of the most crucial functions. Businesses can’t afford to rip and replace the backbone of their IT when a new model or approach appears.

Reaching cloud nirvana has little to do with the cloud – it’s about using the technology to deliver specific business objectives. Businesses need a hybrid IT approach, mixing and matching technologies to achieve the right outcomes. Ask your business: what are we really trying to do? Can the cloud replace, or augment, current IT to deliver this?

Forget the technical specifications, today’s IT is about enabling businesses to increase their bottom line by reacting quicker to market changes, staying ahead of the competition and offering the right services to customers in an all-time world.

Keith Tilley (left) is EVP, global sales & customer services management, Sungard Availability Services 0800 143413 www.sungardas.co.uk

*Interviews were carried out in February 2015 by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Sungard Availability Services. 400 interviews were conducted across the UK, France, Sweden and Ireland. The research spoke to IT decision makers in businesses of over 500 employees in the UK, France and Sweden and 250 in Ireland across a variety of sectors.

The cloud has the potential to bring enhanced flexibility regardless of contact centre size or location. The management challenge will change depending on scale but migrating to a cloud infrastructure will typically drive future agility.

2. Understand your customer demographic and channel choice Companies need to consider their customer base.

Increasingly, customers use multiple online channels and are more willing to self-serve to achieve their goals. Moving to the cloud allows you to trial new channel types and change

self-service options quickly while keeping risk levels low.

3. Do you need remote access?

Cloud can enable remote workers, ensuring service can be provided at all times. You can bring staff on at busy times then effectively switch them off again during quieter periods.

4.How complex are the enquiries you receive likely to be?

Moving to the cloud will not be right for every company. If you need heavy customisation, or if security is paramount, you may be better off creating your own private cloud environment.

5. Think about costs Cloud can move you from a predominantly capex-based to an opex-based model, allowing you to start saving money immediately; to budget more effectively and to invest money in other growth areas.

Enghouse Interactive is leading the way in taking customer communications into the cloud +44 (0)203 357 3040 enghouseinteractive.co.uk

Business Technology · July 2015 · 17

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My view Cloud-powered disaster recovery

A

s the market matures, we’ll see disaster recovery as one of the main drivers for cloud. The recent fire in Holborn and threats of terrorist activity serve as stark reminders that sometimes the unthinkable does happen, and there is no advance notice. Such disasters are not only horrific for the community, but businesses – especially at the small and medium end

– can also be left crippled. The economic cost of the Holborn fire alone is estimated at £40million, but more common operational outages, such as power or hardware failure, can have significant repercussions too if the right recovery plans are not in place.

Starting with identifying core services and systems, we help small and medium businesses think carefully and

cost-effectively about the unthinkable. And so, when the fire blazed through Holborn, clients of ours with offices in the area were not among those businesses hit hard. As members of the Cloud Industry Forum, we are committed to ensuring trust, transparency and confidence in the delivery of public, private and hybrid cloud services as

part of a broader disaster recovery plan.

Tailoring services to minimise the risk of business downtime is what we do, and we’re increasingly seeing cloud – in various forms – forming a big part of the plan.

Paul Coote is founder and MD of Instant On IT, London www.instantonit.com

Improving people’s lives in a meaningful way

I

Cloud: enabling the move to managed services T he “break-fix” model of IT support doesn’t work in the best interests of either the IT support provider, or the customer. Only engaging with IT support when something has broken means that the engagement is predicated upon frustration and time pressure – hardly a recipe for a harmonious relationship. And for the IT support company itself, the business model is reactive and one in which revenue is essentially driven by clients’ IT failures.

The managed service provider (MSP) model gives clients a far better service than the “break-fix” model – preventing or detecting and solving problems before they become serious, rather than responding to emergencies. So many businesses rely entirely on their IT estate that a problem simply means business stops. No matter how short the gap between break and fix in “break-fix”, it is always too long. The MSP’s role is therefore to spot problems in advance and prevent the break happening in the first place.

The company is rewarded with a steady income, reflective of the quality of service delivered.

However, providing a managed service is not as

simple as changing the sign above the door and charging customers each month. The best MSPs understand customer requirements, excel at process management and have insights into market conditions and new technologies.

Cloud is often dismissed as a marketing buzzword, but this doesn’t reflect the changes that the cloud is making to the transition from break-fix to MSP. Cloud-based management tools make managed services much more efficient and effective – onboarding is simpler, less maintenance is necessary and, most importantly, there can be a single online dashboard that gives the MSP visibility of all of its services, and all of its clients. With this “single pane of glass” it is possible to identify issues and perform necessary tasks without the time-consuming burden of interrogating and cross-referencing a variety of information sources.

Having said that, the ability for IT support to move away from break-fix to MSP relies on more than just the introduction of cloud-based IT monitoring and proactive patching.

Against the backdrop of a constantly growing

number of technology options born out of cloud infrastructures, being a perpetually valuable MSP depends on offering customers a reliable and deep knowledge of a wide variety of technologies and the experience from which to advise on best courses of action.

Cloud has created a business IT landscape that inherently requires more from IT support – more choice leading to more confusion. One of the biggest challenges for companies in recent years has been IT fragmentation – different departments using different tools to meet their needs, and shadow IT as people circumvent the limitations of current solutions by using their own.

The ambition for IT support to break out of the break-fix mould was already there – cloud is the all-important catalyst that enables MSPs to present a unified IT landscape to their customers and serve them effectively, despite the inevitable ongoing changes in business technology.

Alistair Forbes (left) is general manager, LogicNow 01382 309040 www.logicnow.com

ntamac is a marketleading internet of things (IoT) software company and the recent winner of the Frost & Sullivan 2015 European Internet of Things New Product Innovation Award. The company enables electronics product manufacturers, service providers and others to connect their devices to the internet; enhancing user experience, lowering operating costs and enabling exciting new functionality.

Since 2001 Intamac has worked with many blue chip partners including BT, Technicolor, Fire Angel, Swann and Ideal, powering more than 18 fully commercial deployments and securely connecting more than 500,000 “things”. Intamac’s IoT software products are modular and endto-end (embedded device software, SaaS cloud platform and both consumer and business apps), enabling features such as remote control from smartphones for consumers and giving vendors and service organisations rich analytics and remote fault fix and upgrade capabilities.

The IoT sector is moving

quickly, with new entrants and technology innovations appearing almost each week. Standards and best practices are emerging but are not universally adopted.

This means that care must be taken both in IoT strategy planning and partner selection. Intamac offers market-leading innovation coupled with proven, scalable, secure solutions.

David Perez (inset), Intamac chief executive, says: “The IoT is multi-faceted and it’s important to be focused and to understand your niche within it. Intamac is a “smart connected home” specialist – a sector that has been evolving for more than 10 years. Tech majors like Apple, Google and Amazon are entering the space and will be important market makers. The next two years will see market consolidation and a shake out. There has been a huge rush to enter the space and many are likely to fall by the wayside. Ultimately products and companies that improve people’s lives in a meaningful way will succeed.”

44 (0)870 111 7234 info@intamac.com

Business Zone

18 · Business Technology · July 2015

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The future

How the UK has blazed a trail in the digitisation of public services

B

ritain is ranked as one of the top digital economies in Europe. In an analysis of 47,000 companies, Tech City’s Tech Nation Powering The Digital Economy 2015 report found that 1.46 million people are employed by digital companies and employment growth is forecast at 5.4 per cent by 2020.

Over in Brussels, the creation of a digital single market is a top priority. It is estimated that merging 28 national markets into one will inject €415billion a year into Europe’s economy, and create 3.8 million jobs.

Digital innovation and growth is already disrupting traditional industries.

The UK government has embraced a Digital by Default strategy which is transforming public service delivery.

For instance, cloud hosting and other innovative approaches have enabled the DVLA – which recently launched its View Driving Record on gov.uk and abolished the paper counterpart to driving licences – to save 66 per cent against its original cost estimate.

The digitisation of public services in the UK has been genuinely transformative – saving the government millions, revolutionising how citizens interact with government and changing the face of the UK economy, as a new generation of SME suppliers flourish. Cloud computing underpins digital growth and is at the

forefront of the digital economy.

A European Commission study recently estimated that cloud computing alone will create at least a million new jobs in Europe by 2020. In the UK, the government’s G-Cloud initiative is estimated to be saving buyers an average of 50 per cent per purchase, while a recent Eurocloud survey showed that 30 per cent of G-Cloud suppliers had increased their turnover by more than 20 per cent, and 20 per cent had employed more staff as a result.

The UK government’s digital model and learning is now being adopted overseas: both the US and Australian governments have set up digital services functions, a UK Government Digital Service director

has recently been appointed as CEO of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office, and a global community of public servants focused on digital transformation is emerging. G-Cloud has been held up by the former US Federal CTO as a global template for public sector procurement.

Using cloud to deliver public services is no longer the exception, and is becoming the norm. Services are low-cost, secure and reliable, and can be rapidly deployed.

Europe and the rest of the world are now following suit. Britain is blazing a trail and cloud is leading the way. info@skyscapecloud.com www.skyscapecloud.com

In focus Digital transformation: disrupt or be disrupted

W Video special

Unleash the Power of the IoT Gemalto’s vice president of M2M Solutions & Services, Laetitia Jay, discusses the expanding Internet of Things http://business-reporter. co.uk/video/technology/unleash-the-power-of-the-iot

hat does digital transformation actually mean, and how might it affect your organisation? Digital transformation is a process to optimise business models by using data to simplify and enhance the customer experience.

Organisations successfully undergoing digital transformation can be large or small, in the private or the public sector – the important factors are an innovative mindset and a holistic approach. In a recent European IDC survey, 59 per cent of enterprises said that digital transformation is

a major business priority over the next year. In the digital economy, things move fast: customers expect immediate delivery, new service timeto-market is compressed, internal stakeholders demand immediate solutions. Success still looks the same as ever – increased business value leading to satisfied customers – but those innovative ideas have to be realised in the marketplace much more quickly, before your competitors get there. Disrupt or be disrupted, in other words.

The first step an organisation should take to be a disruptor in the digital economy is to create an open and flexible IT

platform. The network is the heart of digital transformation – connecting people, devices (and “things”), applications and ideas.

The network drives cloud-based architectures that bring business agility and enables organisations to extract business advantage

from data intelligence in support of better results, connecting the boardroom firmly to IT. This network-centric approach to digital transformation means that IT becomes a business enabler and innovator, not a cost.

Innovative, softwarecentric networks can simplify operations, accelerate process automation and agility. Bringing new ideas to life quickly and easily is made real. In the digital economy it is about survival of the fastest. Traditional enterprises have a network.

Digital enterprises leverage the network as a strategic advantage. www.juniper.net

Everyone’s got the power now

T

he beauty of the cloud is the promise of better, more accessible insight into the data we all collect and store.

Rapid insight gives all kinds of business advantages. The chance to spot and capitalise on a market opportunity, or the ability to identify trends that shape sales tactics – all of these can give your company the lead over others.

The problem is, getting business insight quickly takes time, money and expertise. It locks smaller businesses out, and it drains the resources of those that can afford to do it. In these days of big data, analytics and business intelligence, it’s easy to feel left out.

But we’ve a lot to be thankful for. Big data is a problem because it’s now affordable to collect, store, process and retrieve that data at speed – with the right technology. What we need is access to the technology that gets us insight. We also need a measure of the extra value that insight creates, both in savings and new business opportunities.

The cloud helps create a level playing field where any company, big or small, can get the things they need to set about creating more value with what they already have. We’ve seen it first-hand with our customers. The medical device manufacturer that cut inventory costs by $100million, or the brewer that slashed its data centre bill by $200,000 a year. These aren’t isolated stories, either – they are now everyday transformations that anyone can make.

James Petter (below) is vice president EMEA at Pure Storage +44 (0)1784 895000 www.purestorage.com

Business Technology · July 2015 · 19

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The debate Why is the cloud good for business?

Daniele Catteddu Managing director Cloud Security Alliance

Alastair Mills CEO Six Degrees Group

Andy Johnson Managing director GTT

Simon Yeoman General manager Fasthosts Internet

Eradicating the need for a larger IT department to build the underlying infrastructure, the cloud enables a business to stop worrying about technology and to focus on its customers, business objectives and results.

Cloud start-up costs are minimal; the capital expenditure required to build new IT environments simply does not apply, saving a business significant funds. Using a cloud-based OPEX model also means that when a new business idea arises, it can be executed in hours, not weeks. Many cloud services have in-built elasticity designed to accommodate any deviations in business operations and storage requirements, making any expansion smoother and more elegant.

The cloud enables employees to work from anywhere, on any device, keeping the business running at all times. This has the potential to change how you work as a business, and can make a more collaborative and flexible workforce.

It is paramount that a business finds the right cloud to suit its needs; one size certainly doesn’t fit all when it comes to the cloud.

Cloud is a major technological development that makes IT resources and applications easily accessible through a smart network. The cloud – be it private, public or hybrid – inherently provides more flexibility, lower costs, greater scalability, ease of use and, if done correctly, increased security and disaster recovery.

Cloud democratises IT and allows businesses to focus on their core competencies, knowing that the IT infrastructures will be there when and how they need then them, while being easily adapted to changing company usage habits.

For a start-up, IT is no longer an immediate drain on hard-won capital investments and for mature businesses the commoditisation of IT releases capital to alternate projects, while delivering improved systems performance.

Cloud can act as a business differentiator, driving innovation, accelerating timeto-market and promoting operational excellence. Enterprise must embrace and harness these best-of-breed capabilities across a smart communications network to benefit from this latest IT evolution and maintain competiveness.

The cloud has the flexibility and agility to react to a business’s growth more effectively than any platform has before, making it easy to see why it has become an integral part of business strategy. For start-ups, this means building their business on current, fully supported technology that is agile enough to evolve as their business does. Those with established IT systems can migrate from traditional on-premises solutions to a platform designed with accessibility and scalability in mind.

Combining the latest market-leading cloud technologies with industry expertise, the reliability of the cloud becomes undeniable. Uncertainties around migrating to the cloud and managing the new technologies is sometimes a barrier to adoption. To overcome this, providers now offer services to help with anything from set-up and automation of regular tasks to more complex migrations, while remaining competitively priced. It’s an obvious choice for any business wanting to capitalise on the latest, fully supported platform – essentially a hassle-free IT solution.

Cloud computing is not risk free.

There are several risks, especially related to information security such as loss of direct control/governance, concentration of valuable resources, compliance, insider threats, insecure data deletion, etcetera, that would need to be properly managed when migrating services to the cloud. But it is exactly in the space of security that most organisations can take advantage of the greatest benefits of the cloud.

Cloud computing is about implementing economy of scale. Defensive measures such as filtering, patch management, hardening of virtual machines, geographical redundancy, threat intelligence management and incident response, are other examples of the security benefits that the cloud can bring to businesses.

Most of the people working in IT know that the security of their assets is a function of the strength of the weakest link in the security chain. It should be clear that, while it is possible to outsource security responsibilities, it is not possible to outsource accountability.

connect@6dg.co.uk www.6dg.co.uk/standout

+44 (0)20 7029 4873 www.gtt.net

0333 0142 715 www.fasthosts.co.uk/cloud-servers

+358 44 9712804 dcatteddu@cloudsecurityalliance.org

T

here’s no getting round it – who you entrust your critical applications and workloads to in the cloud has a direct impact on your business performance. Twothirds of UK decision makers expected at least 50 per cent of their application infrastructure to be in the cloud by 2017 – but, in a maturing service provider market, how can you tell whose cloud is right for you?

– turnover may entice but the business may not be committed to long-term investment and customer retention.

The ugly Sometimes things just turn ugly – think 2e2 and Colt’s Managed Services. And, unless hybrid cloud is the absolute core of your provider’s medium-term strategy and the dominant revenue stream, the chances are they will fail. So what do you do when your provider no longer wants your business?

The good Cloud promises flexibility, agility and ease of use – attributes equally applicable to good service providers – but ask them for proof. “Good” providers are mature, capable and efficient, with a clear strategy and the stability to execute effectively.

Good Providers • Ask about your application workloads instead of telling you about their platforms • Don’t blink when your strategy changes mid-contract and you need to reshape your service • Offer clear, first-hand detailed evidence of customer value delivery • Have a strong technology investment roadmap that directly benefits customers. Ask them what they will be doing in 12, 24 and 36 months • Know that what makes a managed service is people, rather than hiding behind portals and live chat

The bad “Bad” in provider land is about immaturity, either at a service or business level:

Spotlight The good, the bad and the ugly of managed cloud weak contracts, data governance issues, insufficient security – the typical risks of choosing fragile start-ups or traditional businesses with stretched models.

Bad providers • Typically sell on technology which can quickly become irrelevant.

They need to be able to talk to you (and deliver) in business terms • Love bespoke solutions (lock in; bigger price tag), when you could achieve the

same outcome using a more standardised, lower-cost and future-portable approach. Push them hard on this • Do not overinvest in engineers, platforms or innovation – an absolute requirement for future relevance and business stability • Lack vision and a history of delivering against it. You have to believe in your provider so make sure there’s substance and direction under the bonnet • Use their size to indicate capability.

The provider market is acquisitive

• Don’t panic. If you have to move, you need to take control. If you can’t resource the change immediately, find an experienced partner to help • Take stock. What do you have today and what do you need? Do you have to recreate like-for-like?

• Nail the basics first. It takes 90-plus days to provision new network connections. Choose a provider in the same data centre/with the same carrier to reduce timescales • Look for technology commonality.

Transformation should be undertaken at your pace on your terms. Common technologies lower your migration risk • Focus. You have three immediate priorities: safe hands, soft landing, great people.

Kevin Linsell is director, strategy and architecture at Adapt Got questions? Email domore@adapt.com or contact Kevin directly @KevLinsell