Three Magazine: Issue 1

three

three issue 01

Southern Cross Austereo Retiring technical debt Streamlining workows Fuji Xerox Australia

Design thinking HPE Primera The circular economy Issue 1 2019 AC3 online magazine Cover.indd 2

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Need help bridging the gap between public and private cloud?

AC3 are leaders in hybrid cloud and we can help you ďŹ nd the right mix. ac3.com.au

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Did you know?

AC3 are HPE’s #1 Service Provider in APAC.

We have your hybrid cloud needs covered. Get in touch today. ac3.com.au

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Contents SUCCESS STORIES

18 A PERFECT PARTNERSHIP – FUJI XEROX AUSTRALIA From printers to holistic solutions, Mike Schembri explains his company’s evolution

25 THE POWER OF THREE – SOUTHERN CROSS AUSTEREO Southern Cross Austereo’s Stephen Haddad reveals the synergy of a threeway approach to technology

09 NEWS

44 CX AND SERVICENOW

Bulletproof acquisition – one year on

Claudia Couzi explains the challenges behind maintaining operational excellence combined with creative customer experience

14 RETIRING TECHNICAL DEBT Why you should take your technology issues out of the ‘too hard basket’ before they become insurmountable challenges

16 STREAMLINING WORKFLOWS 32 SECURITY – Using technology to optimise your workflows is a great productivity boost

34 STANDING OUT FROM THE CROWD

REGULARS

The top factors to consider when choosing an IT partner

06 WELCOME 10 INFOGRAPHIC

38 THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY How it can return value to your business, while also ticking all your sustainability boxes

Data breaches and their costs PEOPLE

40 AGILE IS ABOUT CULTURE,

12 PROFILE

NOT CODE

The original cloud warrior – Greg Cockburn

Greg Cockburn reveals the advantages of being nimble in the public cloud

INSIGHTS

42 DESIGN THINKING

08 BUSINESS INSIGHTS Three tips to navigate business change from Simon Xistouris

TECHNOLOGY

If all your tech projects are IT led, perhaps it’s time for a different approach

THE WEAKEST LINK Damien Luke on all you need to know about cloud security

36 CASE STUDY – MOVEMBER AUSTRALIA How the rapidly expanding charity handled its tech in a scalable way

46 NANOSATELLITE NETWORKS FOR IOT What are you left with when you take away IoT’s connectivity?

48 REVIEW HPE Primera Storage

50 PRODUCT RELEASES VMware Cloud on AWS helps bring hybrid cloud to life

Stock images via 123RF Printing Southern Colour HEAD OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS Stephanie Challinor

MANAGING EDITOR Madeleine Swain madeleine.swain@niche.com.au

MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS EXECUTIVE Michaela Higham

PRODUCTION Production manager Stephanie Yang stephanie.yang@niche.com.au

Level 8 East, 8 Central Avenue, Eveleigh NSW 2015 Australia +61 2 9199 0888 info@ac3.com.au

DESIGN Editorial design and digital prepress Karl Dyer CHAIRMAN Nicholas Dower

Three is a publication of Niche Media Pty Ltd ABN 13 064 613 529 Suite 2.02, Level 2, 3 Bowen Crescent, Melbourne VIC 3004 T (03) 9948 4900 F (03) 9948 4999 All unsolicited material should be addressed to the attention of the editor at the address above.

Material will only be returned if a postage prepaid selfaddressed envelope is supplied. Niche Media Pty Ltd accepts no liability for loss or damage of unsolicited material.

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4 Contents

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Do you know how your cloud strategy stacks up?

Get your free personalised report today. ac3.com.au/benchmark In partnership with

three — issue 01

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Welcome to Three The entire AC3 team are excited to launch this magazine, designed to share, educate and connect. As a managed services partner, we are fortunate enough to work with some amazing organisations and individuals, every day. Through our network of global customers, vendors and our team, we hear stories and ideas, learn about trends and innovations, and watch the market evolve before our eyes. What we learn is fascinating and we thought – why can’t we curate this content and share it with our network?

Inside the magazine, you will find stories on emerging technology, the new way of thinking in the technology world, and hear from successful people and their tech careers.

At AC3, our purpose is to make technology real, so we hope that you enjoy reading Three and take away something new to help your business.

Stephanie Challinor Head of Marketing and Communications

6 Welcome

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Did you know 964 data breaches were reported in Australia last year?

We want to make sure you’re not the next statistic. ac3.com.au

three — issue 01

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Three tips to navigate business change A year of rapid change at AC3 has brought us closer to the challenges our customers face. Here are three lessons learned along the way that can be applied anywhere.

By Simon Xistouris, CEO, AC3

Over the last 12 months, we acquired a business and balanced the challenges that brought with delivering for our customers. During this process, our perspective changed. In our business, we spend a lot of time helping people make changes in their business. We advise them on why, what and how they should change their technology architecture to provide better business outcomes. During the last 12 months we’ve developed a much greater appreciation for the true impact these types of organisational changes can have to a business; we walked the walk and went through some of the same challenges our customers do.

Looking back, we underwent a digital transformation of our own. Our goals have been to improve our customer and employee experiences. This meant overhauling many processes and systems.

Most notably, we created a dedicated product management team, designed to anticipate our customer needs and bring new products and services to market faster. One of the most common challenges that our customers ask us to help them solve is how to do exactly that – bring products to market faster – and we do this by using technology as an key enabler. Many of our customers rely on us to scan the market and keep them informed on which new trends they should invest in, so we’re excited to have formalised this in our business to enable us to help our customers, at even greater speeds.

Big change doesn’t just mean changing technology; if you’re seeking a different outcome, it means changing the way people work. Sometimes that change is well thought out and planned, sometimes it is thrust upon us and preparation is a challenge.

Here are three lessons from our journey to keep in mind that may be helpful, and it’s no surprise that each has a lot to do with people.

1. CHANGE INTERNALLY FASTER THAN THE MARKET, BUT STRIKE A BALANCE To stay ahead, your business must adapt faster than the competition and this starts within. This may sound simple, but the real challenge is finding the balance. Consider your team and remember that people get change fatigue. You must think about their tolerance levels when you’re sprinting at 100 kilometres an hour. Can your colleagues absorb any more change? Stay relevant, anticipate what the market is doing, but strike a balance.

2. RECOGNISE THE INVESTMENT YOUR PEOPLE MAKE AND INVEST IN THEM IN RETURN There’s just so much going on in times of change.

Your people invest their personal time, work longer hours, go above and beyond the call of duty and, by the end, they can end up feeling like they’ve been dragged from pillar to post. They won’t do that for the money alone. People need recognition, but they also need to be personally invested in the outcome for any change to be successful. How can you get them connected to the cause so they are invested in the outcome, beyond the inputs?

3. SET AND SHARE GOALS TO AVOID DISENGAGEMENT AND PROCRASTINATION Over the last 12 months, we’ve made a lot of decisions, but a decision without action won’t result in change. It’s all about being able to move quickly, limiting procrastination, so your people can see incremental change. ‘Dragging it out’ with change, saying ‘we are doing something and it’s going to take six months’ without a shared goal or demonstrated results, is no way to keep the team invested. Producing results and sharing outcomes is a great way to keep your people invested; it shows the benefit of the change quickly.

8 Insights

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Bulletproof acquisition – one year on It has been one year since AC3 acquired public cloud company Bulletproof and expanded its hybrid cloud solutions that solve business problems, not just tech ones.

One year ago, we acquired Bulletproof, a leading public cloud provider, with the goal of boosting our skill set with complementary services, to add more value for our customers and anticipate their needs.

We’ve undergone a lot of change since then, bringing our people, products and services together to deliver true hybrid and multi cloud solutions. In addition, we’ve refreshed the way we look, and have decided to move forward under one name – AC3.

We brought together extensive expertise in both private and public cloud, and we are proud to say we’ve created a true hybrid cloud expert in the ANZ industry. But what have we learned about our industry along the way?

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen a clear shift in the wants of our customers. We’re no longer finding customers coming to us with a clear on prem, private or public cloud preference. The conversation has shifted so customers are now asking us for a business outcome. There’s an understanding in the ICT industry that the answer to any business’ technical strategy is not investing all in one or the other; it’s about finding the right mix

and delivering a bespoke solution to suit the customer. Our customers are now talking to us earlier in the journey, with a clear picture of the business or technical outcome they are trying to achieve, but are relying on advice from a partner like us to help them decide where they sit on the spectrum. As the conversation is starting earlier, we have also learned a lot about those business problems our customers have, and being part of that early conversation has enabled us to add more value. The exchange of ideas helped us identify other ways we could help, like DevOps engineering. So many customers have turned around and said ‘OK, I didn’t realise you could do that for us. Let’s talk about it.’

Ultimately, we have found that we’re not just selling public or private cloud to people anymore, and we’re not even just solving tech problems, we’re solving business problems.

As the ICT landscape changes and the role of technology changes, we have also seen a change in the buyer.

The world of business has changed and technology’s role in it has changed too. While we may deliver technical solutions, our audience has changed from solely CIOs (chief information

officers), CTOs (chief technology officers) and IT managers, to include business unit owners. We now speak with HR managers, CMOs (chief marketing officers), product owners, all sorts of people who use technology for their specific applications.

The most common link between all of these people is the shared concern they have around security, and rightfully so. It stands to reason, as more people move to a hybrid cloud world, and workloads are constantly shifting to optimise environments. We are currently undertaking a research program and the early results indicate that participants see security as their biggest barrier to embracing the cloud. We are also seeing a trend in the plan to modernise business applications over the next 12 months, with security again being a concern that needs to be resolved before commencing the project.

Our opportunity moving forward is to continue focusing on you, the customer and to continue focusing on our services.

With the acquisition and rebrand well and truly in our stride, our focus is on expanding our security practice, growing in that area to ensure we’re delivering the right solutions to you.

9 Insights

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DATA BREACHES Cases of serious data breach are rising. As are the costs to those involved…

$3.86 million

6.6

Cost of the average data breach, at an average cost of US$148 per lost or stolen record.

The number of records breached in the first five months of 2019, already surpassing the 2.3 billion records breached in all of 2018.

SOURCE: IBM 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study

SOURCE: IT Governance

billion

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27.9%

78%

12%

The average global likelihood that an organisation will experience one or more data breaches in the next two years.

The increase in supply chain attacks in 2018.

The rise in business targeted ransomware in 2018, with a global financial impact of US$8 billion.

SOURCE: IBM 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study

SOURCE: Symantec Internet Security Threat Report

SOURCE: Symantec, Cybersecurity Ventures

197 DAYS

95%

The mean time to identify breaches, after which the mean time to contain breaches is 69 days. Companies that contain a breach in less than 30 days save more than $1 million.

The percentage of breaches that could have been prevented.

SOURCE: Symantec Internet Security Threat Report

SOURCE: Internet Society

Don’t underestimate the cost of a data breach or the value of investing in your security posture. At AC3, we have government grade security and would love to help. Get in touch today on 02 9199 0888 or visit us at ac3.com.au.

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THE ORIGINAL CLOUD WARRIOR One of Australia’s longest−serving AWS ambassadors, AC3’s Principal Practice Lead Greg Cockburn was quick to see the potential of the cloud and DevOps to revolutionise the way businesses approach technology.

Born in Wellington in the 1980s, Greg was one of those children who started pulling things apart to see what made them tick. Thankfully he also started to learn how to put them back together, much to the relief of his parents who nurtured his passion with a Dick Smith electronics kit.

After studying electrical engineering, Greg changed direction with a computer science degree. Working as a sysadmin with a start-up eventually brought him across the Tasman to work with Macquarie Group in Sydney in the 2000s.

A budding entrepreneur, Greg also founded a business working with virtual private servers, during which time he first started to dabble with the then fledgling Amazon Web Services.

The rise of cloud services opened his eyes to new ways for businesses to approach technology, and Greg became an active part of the community – speaking at the inaugural Sydney Puppet User Group and later becoming the treasurer of DevOps Australia.

“Cloud is not just about technology, it’s about getting the best out of technology,” Greg says. “This means

your people need to change the way they think about technology, which is where Agile and the DevOps culture become so important.

“Technology is an enabler, but working effectively as a team requires empathy, which is why my talks on DevOps and Agile emphasise the importance of communication skills, not just technology skills.”

Greg’s passion for the cloud saw him move to cloud services specialist Bulletproof Networks (now rebranded to AC3) where he holds the title of Principal Practice Lead.

Earning all five core AWS certifications, plus one speciality certification, Greg was declared one of Australia’s inaugural AWS Cloud Warriors in 2015 and then an AWS Partner Network Ambassador in 2018.

“When it comes to individual technologies I’d say virtualisation has probably had the biggest impact on my career but, in a broader sense, the biggest influence would be the rise of AWS,” he says.

“The shift in thinking has been profound when you consider the

fundamental differences about how you approach building infrastructure on AWS compared to any other cloud provider.”

Greg has handled data centre migrations involving thousands of servers on tight deadlines, following Agile and DevOps principles to bring the project in on time and under budget.

Despite these efforts, he considers his biggest achievements to be his shift in focus from being purely a technology specialist to also becoming a leader and evangelist.

“Making the most of technologies like the cloud requires strong leadership, which means understanding how people think and how to work with them to get the most from them,” Greg says. “As an introvert by nature, I had to work hard to take that step of standing up in front of an audience to share my knowledge and passion with people.

“Today I think it’s one of my greatest strengths, not just understanding ever-changing technology, but also knowing how to share that knowledge and encourage others to reach their full potential.”

12 People

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three — issue 01

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Retire technical debt before your business pays the price Leaving technical debt unchecked is a business risk that can eventually cripple your operations. If you keep dumping technology issues in the ‘too hard basket’ they may become insurmountable challenges.

The term ‘technical debt’ originally comes from software development, but it can be applied to a businesses’ broader technology landscape – from hardware, software and integration to networking and security.

The basic idea is that if you continue to sweep technology problems under the carpet they will eventually come back to haunt you. Taking a shortcut, or applying a quick and dirty fix, may save you time and effort in the short-term, but eventually you’ll need to deal with the consequences.

The longer you leave technical debt unchecked the more difficult it becomes to deal with – accruing interest, just like a financial debt. This in turn increases the temptation to leave the issue in the ‘too hard basket’ or declare it someone else’s problem, even though it may be a ticking time bomb. This cycle simply increases the time and effort required to resolve the problem, not to mention the impact on productivity and employee or customer experience.

Consider a simple analogy like your car. If you maintain and service your car regularly, it takes much less effort and

expense than if you were to never visit the mechanic – until the day you break down and end up with a bill for roadside assistance, towing and major repairs.

While technical debt can occur in a wide range of areas, particularly when you’re relying on legacy systems, it’s easy to illustrate the concept within lines of software code, where a simple shortcut can have dramatic long-term consequences.

Early software developers chose to save on precious storage space by only using two digits to record a year, rather than four. At the time it seemed like a reasonable shortcut, when the potential consequences were decades away. Over time this simple issue snowballed into an overwhelming industry-wide technical debt that presented as a major issue at the turn of the century.

The moral of the story is that the impact of poor decisions and unaddressed problems compound over time, so it is crucial to nip technical debt in the bud or, better yet, avoid it in the first place.

One of the challenges with technical debt is that it can often be invisible

to the business leaders until the debt comes due.

To put it in perspective, the cost of technical debt per average business application is more than US$1 million, according to software intelligence toolmaker Cast. This figure is based on analysing 1400 applications submitted by 160 organisations, covering 550 million lines of code. It found an average technical debt of US$3.61 per line of code.

Calculating your own technical debt should also account for how much of your ‘keeping the lights on’ efforts are due to managing technical debt within the business.

Of course, just like financial debt, not all technical debt is bad. A managed amount of technical debt can actually be a good thing, just like a business may elect to take on financial debt in order to retool or expand operations.

Sometimes the quick and easy choice is actually the right choice, to avoid over-engineering and implementing gold-plated solutions. For example, a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) will often contain technical debt to reduce time to market, so the business can seize on a new opportunity.

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123RF’s belchonock © 123RF.com

Such debt is a calculated risk, meaning that it needs to be evaluated and managed at the highest levels, while ensuring the technology strategy remains aligned with the business strategy.

Other forms of technical debt can be the consequences of poor planning, or simply the unexpected or unavoidable flow-on effects from other changes.

While businesses can’t always avoid technical debt, they can get into good habits to prevent it accruing and minimise its impact.

Tackling technical debt is not just a technology issue, it’s a cultural issue – which means the solution needs to come from the top down.

The first step is to develop a culture of thinking long-term when addressing technical challenges, rather than opting for the quick fix. It also requires proactively addressing technical debt as it arises, rather than deferring it or fostering a culture of declaring such issues ‘someone else’s problem’.

Knowing how to effectively manage technical debt requires visibility of the issue, which may include

tracking deliberate technical debt so you can see it on the balance sheet.

Technology plans and budgets should explicitly consider technical debt, perhaps adopting a chargeback or showback model for business units to highlight areas where technical debt has accrued.

Maintaining legacy systems generally comes with a level of technical debt that must be closely monitored lest it become an unacceptable risk to the business.

This is where code ‘refactoring’ can assist with keeping technical debt in check. More than merely spring cleaning, code refactoring involves continually optimising your code to make it easier to manage and accommodate changes to your environment.

This helps reduce the risk when deliberately introducing technical debt, as well as lessen the impact when unintended technical debt makes its presence felt.

Migrating systems and services to the cloud offers businesses the perfect opportunity to assess their technical debt levels. This includes determining

which legacy systems should be retired or transformed to eliminate technical debt, rather than simply replicating your old systems in the cloud.

This is where application and infrastructure discovery tools are key when planning a cloud migration. These tools can uncover legacy applications that have perhaps sat idle for years, letting businesses make a clean start in the cloud rather than wasting resources carrying these dead weight applications into a new environment.

Looking forward, one of the best was to minimise the impact of technical debt on your business’ technology landscape is to avoid tightly-coupled components in favour of modular architecture. The use of microservices and self-healing APIs (application programming interfaces) can reduce the impact of technical debt by reducing the likelihood of one technical issue bringing everything to a standstill.

Left unchecked, insurmountable technical debt can take a heavy toll on your business. Reducing and retiring this debt requires a cultural change, ensuring that you don’t let past oversights jeopardise your business’ future.

three — issue 01

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Streamlining workflows gives your business a shot in the arm Whatever your business does, leveraging technology to optimise your workflows can deliver a productivity boost while freeing up resources so you can focus on what you do best.

Technology is a force multiplier that enables your business to abide by the old adage of working smarter, rather than working harder. It allows you to do more with less, empowering small businesses to punch above their weight and large businesses to counter more nimble rivals.

One of the key ways in which technology can deliver benefits is in streamlining business workflows. For starters, it can reduce the amount of paperwork shuffling around your office, but to see the full benefits it’s important to look beyond the goal of simply swapping sheets of paper for PDFs. Beyond merely digitising paperwork, the true optimisation benefits come from reducing and even eliminating some steps of the process. The idea is to streamline business workflows, using workflow automation and system integration based on defined business rules. Rather than swapping every paper form for an online form, for example, the idea is to eliminate the need for some forms completely.

Every business relies on a wide range of workflows every day, from generating purchase orders to following up sales leads and onboarding new employees.

Process mapping allows your business to break down these complex workflows to identify those simple steps and tasks that do not require human interaction and could be handled automatically once your business systems are correctly integrated.

Removing redundant steps, minimising delays and eliminating bottlenecks can deliver efficiencies, as can standardising workflows across the business. This can improve turnaround times, resulting in a more nimble business that is better equipped to move quickly on new opportunities.

Remember, streamlining workflows is not a one-off process. Instead, best practice is to embark on a process of continual improvement and never accept ‘but that’s the way we’ve always done it’ as an answer for why a workflow cannot be improved.

Automating simple, manual repetitive tasks such as back office functions are the low-hanging fruit. It frees up your people to handle higher-value tasks while reducing double-handling and manual data entry errors.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) takes things to the next level.

Rather than blindly following the preprogrammed steps, RPA is governed by business logic, which lets it make decisions on the fly. It can capture and interpret information and then decide the best way to proceed, such as triggering responses, communicating with other systems or processing transactions.

RPA can power unattended bots, working behind the scenes, but it is also underpinning a new generation of self-service robots that are capable of handling increasingly complex requests, which can be internal or customer facing. This includes trawling through unstructured data to retrieve and summarise relevant information from a wide variety of sources – such as

16 Insights

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assisting during the discovery process of legal proceedings.

The power of RPA can even be built into the desktop, monitoring workflows and looking for opportunities to lend a helping hand to users by automating processes such as copying data between applications and populating data fields.

This ongoing quest in search of new tasks to automate can deliver ongoing efficiencies, but these days tech-savvy businesses are beginning to take a more holistic view regarding automation.

It’s not just about greasing the wheels so things run more smoothly, it’s about looking at the big picture.

Workflow automation is an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how you do things, adopt new methodologies and embrace new technologies to help the business be more productive and perhaps even tackle new opportunities.

Artificial intelligence and ‘cognitive computing’ are taking workflow automation and optimisation to the next level with technologies like IBM’s

Watson and Salesforce’s Einstein, not by usurping the role of people but rather acting as subject matter experts to help people make better decisions.

Rather than just crunch numbers, these AI assistants rely on deep learning to see the whole picture – using multiple processing layers to look at a problem in different ways simultaneously. This allows AI to find insight when wading through huge amounts of unstructured data.

Thanks to advances in machine vision and machine learning, these kinds of tools can train themselves by studying large data sets and constantly improve.

IBM’s Watson has been applied to everything from checking moles for skin cancer to monitoring power plant equipment for the telltale signs of impending failure, in order to reduce downtime. The technology can also assist information workers, with KPMG taking advantage of IBM’s Watson for audit and compliance work.

AI can be put to use in many different ways to optimise workflows

123RF’s Denis Ismagilov © 123RF.com

and improve productivity. Technologies such as natural language processing allow for intuitive chatbot-style interfaces – virtual assistants that allow users to explain their requests in everyday terms rather than formulate complex queries or get their hands dirty in code.

On the factory and warehouse floor, AI and robotics are also progressing efficiencies. While some robots are removing people from the equation in order to optimise performance, other robots are learning to work side-byside with their human colleagues.

Human-machine collaboration is a major industrial robotics trend, with the rise of ‘cobots’, which are designed for safe physical interaction with humans in a shared workspace. This allows for more flexible factory production workflows that are not constrained by fences and safety barriers.

Of course as artificial intelligence and robots enter more workplaces, it is important to remember that people are ultimately responsible for their decisions and actions. This means care must be taken when programming and training them, lest we inadvertently transfer human biases.

For example, vast historical data sets such as home loan data may seem well-suited to training AI to approve loans or chase debts, but machines can easily learn bad habits. A process needs to take care not to introduce unintended biases, such as decisions that inadvertently discriminate against applicants based on race or gender, due to historical prejudices.

Leveraging technology to optimise your workflows can take your business forward significantly but, at the end of the day, you need to ensure that the buck stops with a real person.

three — issue 01

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A PERFECT PARTNERSHIP Fuji Xerox Australia’s mission is to provide an environment for the creative and effective utilisation of knowledge, and productive partnerships are key to its success, says Mike Schembri, Head of Information Management at Fuji Xerox Australia.

Like other companies with a background in printers, copiers and multifunction devices, Fuji Xerox Australia wants to deliver solutions rather than simply stand-alone products, and increasingly this means working digitally rather than just with paper.

“We’re in the information industry,” says Schembri, pointing out that while “print is not going to go away,” it is unlikely to grow.

Fortunately, people are generally comfortable with a digital environment in their working lives, so they are open to the possibilities provided by technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

But the switch from selling hardware to selling services did present Fuji Xerox Australia with a challenge that’s not unique to this industry. A change of mindset was required, Schembri says, and that was achieved by taking several measures.

On the ‘people’ side, a combination of staff development and bringing in new talent did the trick. Intellectual property

from the parent company also helped take care of ‘process’ and ‘technology’.

Fuji Xerox Australia was able to build from a strong base, says Schembri, because it already had the biggest market share in several categories, as well as trusted relationships with customers. This was key in helping turn their challenge into an opportunity.

As Fuji Xerox Australia had been operating a network of multifunction devices (MFDs) for many years, the company was already engaged with its customers in a connected way, which enabled them to serve as the bridge between the digital and paper worlds.

Various technology developments mean information is able to remain in digital form right up to the point where a paper copy is finally needed.

The way the company has evolved with its customers allows the delivery of better solutions, says Schembri.

But his role as Head of Information Management (equivalent to chief information officer in many other organisations) is mostly internal looking

rather than customer facing. “The tech piece is meant to be invisible,” he says, so his team provides internal managed services to the rest of the business, whether that is in a context of traditional IT or digitisation. A significant part of this responsibility involves linking systems so they work seamlessly together.

Since the focus is on services rather than technology, it is important for Schembri’s team to be a good business partner for the rest of the organisation rather than simply being a bunch of ‘nerds’ in the basement.

“IT often has a cultural mindset [separate from the business],” he says, and so may sometimes be considered an outsider in traditional, nontechnology, businesses. Consequently, the challenge is to become business specialists who are also very good at technology rather than being technology specialists first and foremost.

Perhaps uncharacteristically for a CIO, Schembri says, “I find technology boring, [but] people are fascinating.”

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The general philosophy is “if we can’t be the best in the world at something, let’s hand it to someone that can be.

LEAN AND AGILE At one stage, he took on the responsibility for running billing and operations in addition to his IT role. By applying ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ approaches he was able to reduce the billing backlog by 93 percent. He discovered that late billing was causing unpleasant surprises for customers, which led to more complaints, which in turn led to more late payments.

There was a feeling that the problem was due to the IT systems, but when he and a couple of his team moved across to this area of the business they determined that the systems were actually robust, and what was needed was a closer relationship between IT and the billing and operations department.

The ‘lean’ philosophy says the person closest to a problem is likely to be in the best place to solve it, so the team implemented 15-minute stand-up meetings of the billing staff, using a whiteboard as its core tool to collect information. While the billing team initially feared that the meetings were just a way of “applying the blowtorch”, they soon realised that it was really about finding solutions

together, and even junior staff came up with suggestions that could be usefully implemented.

Apart from improving performance, the changes led to a dramatic reduction in departmental staff turnover.

“We wanted to improve our business credentials… [and this project] gave us a whole new level of credibility,” says Schembri.

Another – and more common – part of his philosophy is that where any particular service cannot be best provided by the IT team, it instead acts as a broker and sources that service from outside providers.

Until three or four years ago, most workloads ran in Fuji Xerox Australia’s in-house data centre. But the company had the realisation that it does not have the scale required to run data centres effectively (partly because of the problems small sites have with staff retention), and so this function was put out to tender, with the eventual winner being AC3.

BEST IN THE WORLD The general philosophy is “if we can’t be the best in the world at something, let’s hand it to someone that can be,” says

Schembri, noting that this approach is very scalable.

Another positive upside of partnering with a cloud provider was that hardly any floor space was needed for IT infrastructure, apart from a small amount of space for the switch cupboards.

The use of certain Fuji Xerox proprietary technology meant some workloads could not be moved to the cloud, but currently almost all of Fuji Xerox Australia’s infrastructure lives in AC3’s data centres. That includes the systems that run a non-virtualised ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.

The company also uses AC3’s Storage as a Service, Compute as a Service and Backup as a Service, and finds them “highly secure and scalable”.

In all, Fuji Xerox runs more than 100 applications.

These include software associated with Fuji Xerox Australia’s managed print service (MPS).

The idea behind MPS is that instead of having to select and purchase appropriate printers and MFDs, keep stocks of consumables such as paper and toner, and arrange for servicing when required, an organisation can turn

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A good partner has to understand what the company needs, and relationships like that take time to build.

over these responsibilities to an MPS provider and simply pay according to the number of pages actually printed.

The provider is responsible for installing and managing hardware that can cope with the required volumes in an economical way, making sure that consumables are delivered just in time, and for keeping the fleet running.

While “MPS is pretty old” (Schembri notes that he has been deploying it since the early 2000s), many vendors continue to offer it in order to retain their customers’ business in other areas.

It’s a service that vendors have to offer in order to be in the running for many organisations’ business in other areas.

To provide this service, Fuji Xerox Australia uses a variety of applications to handle aspects such as metering and fault reporting. Some of them are run globally for the Fuji Xerox operation as a whole (with selected data sent back to Australia; for example, for billing purposes), but the local applications run on AC3’s infrastructure.

“MPS is bread and butter these days… we look to extend beyond that,” says Schembri. To do so requires the customer’s trust, as it means Fuji Xerox Australia becomes increasingly embedded in various processes.

These processes can be key to a customer’s business, he notes. For example, concrete trucks are not allowed onto construction sites without the right documentation, so the management of paperwork (or its digital equivalent) is crucial for a concrete supplier.

By putting in the time and effort necessary to understand customer needs, Fuji Xerox Australia is able to assemble the technology required to deliver these kinds of solutions to customers.

PARTNERSHIPS When organisations see value, they buy, Schembri explains, and if that value is actually delivered, they stay in longterm partnerships. “That’s where the Fuji Xeroxes of the world have advantages, providing they continue to evolve as their customers’ requirements change.”

It is about understanding what can be done, and then helping to make it reality.

For instance, larger organisations are taking up robotic process automation (RPA) as a way to streamline processes.

RPA is becoming a “table stakes capability” for business software, says Schembri, but if implemented internally there is a serious risk of losing expertise

if a key person resigns. Investing in a long-term, trusted partner ecosystem can provide expertise and continuity, as well as a more holistic view. This broader perspective can also help mitigate any governance issues that can occur when non-specialist staff use RPA to combine data from two or more systems.

Returning to in-house technology, the next step for Fuji Xerox Australia is to move from co-location to a full cloud environment, and AC3’s extensive public cloud capabilities means it is in the running for that business.

Fuji Xerox Australia’s relationship with AC3 is similar to what it tries to provide for its own customers, says Schembri: “Find a great partner and work with them.”

Fuji Xerox Australia works with a handful of key partners, he adds. “A brand like ours is courted by everybody,” he says, but the company finds it gets better outcomes when it is not just one of many customers.

“We interview prospective partners as carefully as we interview prospective staff,” Schembri concludes, because a good partner has to understand what the company needs, and relationships like that take time to build.

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FEAR NO CLOUD Accelerate your cloud transformation with HPE hybrid cloud expertise and build an ecosystem that’s perfect for your business.

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THE POWER OF THREE When it came time to address technical debt and modernise its technology, Southern Cross Austereo found that three heads are better than one.

If you live in Australia the chances are SCA will touch your life in one way or another. And very likely every day. SCA is how the people in this huge entertainment company refer to Southern Cross Austereo, the umbrella group that was formed in July 2011 following the merger of the Southern Cross Media and Austereo Groups.

SCA owns a broadcast radio, television and digital network that includes 86 radio stations. It also broadcasts 92 free-to-air TV signals across the country with the Nine Network, the Seven Network and Network Ten’s programming.

Then there is the wide array of social media, live events, video, online, podcasts via PodcastOne Australia and mobile assets that the company produces every day. It’s a formidable output and the role of SCA’s Chief Technology Officer is a considerable one.

That role has been the responsibility of Stephen Haddad, a highly experienced CIO/CTO and business transformation expert who has spent many years working across various industries and has extensive experience in the Australian media landscape.

Starting out as a developer in banking and finance, Haddad progressed to team leadership roles and his first CIO role before joining Bauer Media as CIO and now as CTO of SCA. At SCA he is now responsible for the IT teams, the Digital Technology teams and Broadcasting Technology teams across both Audio and TV. “As part of this role, we’re responsible for looking after our back office systems for content, advertising and other facets of the business, which includes ad booking systems and IT systems for finance,” says Haddad.

SCA has a number of different approaches to technology depending on which stream of the business is involved, but reliability, stability and simplification are central requirements across the board, he explains.

“For our internal stakeholders, our approach towards technology is to ensure that our staff are enabled to work anywhere in the most convenient ways with the most modern tools.”

GOALS “In terms of our external view of what technology does for our business, we want to have the best digital assets and the best digital presence of a media organisation in the market.

That’s demonstrated through our mobile apps, websites and our smart speaker presence.

“In terms of our broadcasting capability, we obviously want to have

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We’ve had a 26 percent reduction in incidences.

a reliability and consistency in the way that we broadcast to ensure that we’re able to reach the largest number of people we can.”

Understandably, when he took over the role there were myriad systems and legacy technologies in place that needed to be overhauled and re-evaluated. But with over 20 years’ experience in defining future-state operating models and leading business transformations across complex multilocation structures, Haddad was the right fit to spearhead the organisation’s technological restructure.

He thrives in a challenging environment, he says. “As a leader, I encourage teams to challenge the ‘way they’ve always done things’,” he says.

And at SCA the way things had always been done meant that the company was faced with a number of core challenges in its technical operations.

“The three predominant challenges we faced began with our technical debt and the underinvestment and disparate technologies from a variety of providers,” explains Haddad.

“Second, there were a number of challenges surrounding our ability to converge our traditional IT teams with our traditional engineering and broadcasting teams.

“The third challenge was around the ability to maintain and attract specialised technical skills in areas where we may not have historically had technologies or operated in,” says Haddad.

THREE-PRONGED ATTACK For a three-part challenge, it was fitting that SCA approached it with a three-part response. The three-part, or more accurately three-party, response comprised an alignment between SCA,

AC3 and HPE. “This partnership came about as a result of a process we ran in the market a couple of years ago,” recalls Haddad. “We had looked at a number of partners supporting HPE in the marketplace and we selected AC3 as our primary partner. We had a long relationship with HPE and believed that HPE was able to support us ongoing due to its continued innovation in the technology space.

“HPE played the role of working with our internal architects to look through our corporate strategy and find technical solutions that enabled us to deliver on that strategy.”

To extend the relationship to AC3 was a natural fit, says Haddad.

“AC3, as a partner of HPE, had also already done some significant work for us and had a very detailed understanding of the complexities of our business, which has more than 55

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As a leader I encourage teams to challenge the ‘way they’ve always done things’.

different offices – all of which have infrastructure and technical support requirements.

“AC3 played the role of augmenting our staff and supporting us in deeply technical areas in which our teams had neither the expertise or the experience to deliver the required solutions.”

Haddad describes how these solutions were executed by SCA first engaging HPE to design the technical response to problems before engaging AC3 to work with SCA’s internal staff, architects and technical team to deliver the proposed solution. “They’ve assisted us and supported us every step of the way in both design and implementation,” stresses Haddad.

OUTCOME What this three-party response meant for SCA was a vast improvement in its technical operations. “The results were a less complex, modernised footprint

across our organisation,” says Haddad, “which has really provided us with an increased amount of stability and a reduction in the number of [adverse] incidences we experience.”

One of the primary solutions implemented by the partnership was an improved back-up system, which replaced the legacy solution for tape back-ups. The previous system regularly failed and required significant human interaction, says Haddad. “We designed our storage strategy with a view to replacing our complex 3Par platform with Nimble. Nimble was better suited to our performance requirements, scaling with us as demand increased and reducing our technical support and configuration overheads thanks to the predictive analytics.

“But now with a modern and fit-forpurpose solution, which is scalable and highly reliable, this has reduced our risk in a highly extensible solution to reduce the

time and effort required to support it.”

The less complex footprint has had immediate and tangible results.

“We’ve had a 26 percent reduction in incidences,” notes Haddad. “We’ve reduced our risk and removed tens of hours of manual labour. We now also have a well-defined and simpler partner and vendor landscape.”

FLOW-ON EFFECTS The three-way relationship with HPE and AC3 has also given SCA an invaluable template for the way it does business in other areas.

“We’ve learned a lot from this partnership,” says Haddad. “We use this model of the tri-party relationship to really set a standard for the way that we deal with a number of our other service providers. Clearly, what we’ve learned is that deeper relationships result in improved technical and commercial outcomes.”

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INTELLIGENCE CHANGES EVERYTHING

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THE WEAKEST LINK Cloud security is only as strong as the weakest link in your supply chain.

The concept of the traditional network perimeter is dead in the age of the cloud, with attackers exploiting weaknesses along your entire supply chain in an effort to breach your defences.

By Damien Luke, Cyber Security Practice Manager, AC3

Supply chain attacks have become a prevalent target for cyber criminals, knowing that a weak link in the chain can gain them access into highly secured environments. This means that auditing the security credentials of your suppliers and partners must become a priority, as their shortcomings can lead to your business’ downfall.

Likewise, they are entitled to ask the hard questions about your own security efforts. Most businesses still fail to take supply chain threats seriously, even though they have claimed high-profile victims like British Airways and ASUS. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses of all sizes make is thinking about security as a one-off

investment, as simply a checkbox item to be ticked off.

The fact is, the threat landscape is always changing. Malware is rapidly evolving to the point that traditional antivirus tools struggle to keep pace. Cybercriminals are actively working together to bolster their capabilities and stay ahead of the game, commoditising the market with offerings such as Ransomware as a Service and compromised IoT botnets for hire.

While cryptolocker ransomware attacks are still common, cybercriminals are also looking to more subtle attacks such as cryptojacking – quietly using your business’ computer

resources to mine cryptocurrency while you foot the bill.

The only way to stay on top of security is to constantly grow your security capabilities and enhance your cyber hygiene efforts. One of the biggest hurdles to this is the deeply ingrained view that security is ‘someone else’s problem’ but this is slowly changing over time as executive boards start to realise the real threat that businesses face in a hyperconnected world.

So how do you step up and bolster your cyber defences? First, staff education is critical, ensuring your people understand the threats and can identify the telltale signs of phishing attempts and other social engineering

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123RF’s Maksim Kabakou © 123RF.com

attacks. A healthy scepticism is one of your best lines of defence.

From a technology perspective, the demise of the traditional network perimeter makes endpoint detection and response crucial – focusing on whitelisting and monitoring for behaviours that are outliers.

Along with this comes pervasive monitoring, ensuring that you know everything that happens on your network, as it happens. Correlate and link as many Indicators of Compromise (commonly referred to as IoCs, meaning any evidence that a cyber attack has taken place) as possible to grant you a holistic view of what is going on in your environment. This will also give you the

ability to actively hunt threats within your network and look back in time to identify previously overlooked security threats.

Real-time insight is only useful when accompanied by the ability to rapidly respond to security incidents. If there is a security incident, you need the ability to neutralise it quickly and address the damage. Like any other security drill, it is important to practise your incident response procedures and ensure that everyone understands their role and what function that role needs to perform.

Many executive boards are starting to recognise cyber security as a board-level problem and are looking to invest more, but require evidence that

the program is effective and actively protecting business assets. It’s key that you create clear, understandable metrics that you can use to measure your performance, wrap governance around this and report on it, so you can demonstrate the effectiveness of your security program.

In a landscape that constantly evolves, the possibility of a security incident can never be ruled out, which means your response capabilities are just as important as your defences.

The cost of the average data breach is US$5 million within 30 days and only grows over time, so investing in security becomes an easy decision when you weigh the cost of doing nothing.

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Standing out from the crowd Choosing the right IT partner can propel your business to new heights, or cause headaches. So what are the key factors in building a successful partnership?

Managing the risk that comes with inviting a third party to your company’s technology ecosystem can prove an overwhelming prospect.

Aside from the basic confidentiality and security issues faced when exposing an outside vendor to your brand’s inner sanctum, there are often hurdles in the form of cross-cultural differences when it comes to the execution and integration of new information and communications technology (ICT) roadmaps.

While a robust procurement process, defined strategy, mutual trust and transparent cost structures can go some of the way to minimising this risk, partnerships can and do fall apart when communication breaks down, objectives are not met or budgets blow out.

Research and advisory company Gartner says spending on information technology products and services in Australia is forecast to reach almost $93 billion this year, an increase of 3.5 percent from 2018, slightly higher than the global average growth rate of 3.2 percent.

According to Gartner, 28 percent of spending within key enterprise IT markets globally will shift to the cloud by 2022, up from 19 percent on last year.

And in a market where 80 percent of customers plan to make a major change to their IT environment within the next two years, it’s important that providers operating in this field work hard to be at the top of their game to deliver on the value of these technology investments to customers.

With a goal of understanding how to offer more value to customers in both the public and private sectors, AC3 recently asked the industry what it wanted from a service provider. It sought input from nearly 400 existing customers, staff members and non-customers about what they consider to be the most important factors when it comes to choosing an end-to-end IT managed service provider. The results were enlightening.

Asked to rank a set of 22 factors by importance when choosing an IT managed services partner, 85 percent of respondents ranked “timely and efficient response to issues and requests” as the biggest issue that would persuade them to pick one service provider over the next. Boasting a “highly skilled and knowledgeable team across all customer touch points, and capacity to deliver expertise at any scale” was ranked second (84 percent), showing a clear expectation by customers that their chosen technology provider must be able to provide them with a knowledge base that far exceeds their internal skills.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, cost transparency was ranked third with customers outlining a clear preference for an IT vendor able to eliminate any financial ‘surprises’ for the duration of the project by providing proactive cost management practices. It’s worth highlighting that “lowest cost in the market” was ranked second last, indicating that customers are looking for value for money rather than the cheapest price. According to respondents, other must-have factors included the vendor: • having a financially strong and stable company • offering flexibility around the business engagement model, and • providing expertise in compliance and legislation to ensure audit readiness.

When it comes to the least important factors when selecting a new IT partner, these included “visible thought leadership on future trends” (71 percent) and “specialised expertise rather than end-to-end provider” (73 percent), suggesting that customers are looking for partners who ‘walk the walk’, instead of just ‘talking the talk’.

The respondents also identified slow call resolution times, poor communication and anxiety around purchase decisions as the biggest pain points involved in dealing with end-to-end IT managed service providers.

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Movember How does a charity movement that started from scratch, but went global in less than a decade, handle its rapid growth in a way that’s simple, scalable and slick?

From barely-noticeable peach fuzz to full-on facial forestry, November is the time of year when men around the world sport their ‘taches to support men’s health initiatives worldwide. With origins tracing back to a pub conversation in Australia in 2003, Movember has become a global movement, partnering with charities and institutions around the world, driving the conversation about a topic that for many remains too silent – men’s health and well-being.

THE CHALLENGE Movember enlisted the help of AC3 in 2007 to plan and manage changes in the organisation’s tech stack. There are 600,000 not-for-profit organisations in Australia alone, which means intense competition for charity dollars. Movember needs to stand out while offering a remarkable experience for every ‘MoBro’ and ‘MoSista’ who participates.

Expanding rapidly and with a seasonal model in which a great majority of Movember’s online traffic and transactions occur in October, November and December, the organisation needed a scalable online solution that could be managed with ease by its members.

The Foundation needed to migrate from Private Cloud, with complex legacy systems, into AWS without impacting its work. It also needed to mature its DevOps capabilities to release products earlier, and often to the public.

AC3 was assigned the task of moving Movember away from a physical/hybrid environment towards an AWS solution that provided the versatility required for its seasonal traffic and transactions.

THE EXECUTION The platform began with a single environment, with mostly handcrafted servers running on the AC3 VMware environment. Testing, content and development environments were required.

AC3 built Puppet-managed infrastructure to manage the environments, while maintaining

the same configuration. As Movember grew, AC3 designed a mixed dedicated VMware and physical environment located closer to more of Movember’s key clients in the US. It was soon decided that AWS was the right platform for Movember. The existing automation was morphed with CloudFormation to use managed services where possible, reducing the need for staff to manage complex tasks that sit outside their everyday activities. This infrastructure transformation saw AC3 replace Movember’s legacy systems with AWS capabilities including: • CloudFormation • RDS and EC2/Autoscaling • S3 and CloudFront • SQS, SNS, SES, and • CodeDeploy, and many others.

AC3 was also able to provide Movember with the DevOps expertise to guide its team to the appropriate technical solution, to take full advantage of AWS. THE RESULT “The project we’ve embarked on with AC3 has been a game changer,” says Byron Hill, Head of Technology at Movember. “We can take full advantage of the cloud, with the ability to scale and we can save a lot of money. We are even able to completely turn off environments when they are not required.”

Movember moved its ‘whole house’ without a single one of its four million members noticing. It has achieved a saving of approximately 70 percent, is now scalable and has a disaster recovery site that can be activated at short notice.

It doesn’t stop there. AC3’s collaborative support of Movember is ongoing with incident response, daily interaction with the DevOps team, and with updates to code, infrastructure requirements deployed in hours or even minutes, not days or weeks, so MoBros around the world can keep growing and showing their support.

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THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY ENSURES A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE Improving product design, while also refurbishing and recycling IT products, contributes to a ‘circular economy’, which returns value to your business while helping meet your sustainability goals.

While rapid innovation offers businesses a competitive advantage, there can also be social and environmental impacts that need to be managed. Factoring the circular economy into a complete product life cycle allows businesses to not only counter these impacts, but also yield financial and environmental savings. The concept of the circular economy is based on building an economic system designed to maximise resources and minimise waste.

Today, many vendors have programs to assist businesses in participating in the circular economy and, at AC3, we partner with HPE’s leading program to help our customers contribute to the cause. The impact of simply returning old end user hardware is wider than most of us would imagine. More than 90% of workplace units such as desktops, notebooks, monitors and printers recovered by HPE are refurbished, according to HPE’s Circular Economy Report. Of that which can’t be refurbished, almost all can be recycled. It’s a similar story with enterprise units such as servers, network, storage and power.

The benefits of asset life cycle solutions are clear. HPE Financial Services’ IT refurbishing and recycling efforts have recovered the equivalent of

three million bottles worth of plastic, 1100 cars worth of ferrous metals and 27 commercial jet engines worth of non-ferrous metals.

Meanwhile, the energy savings are equivalent to the average annual energy consumption of 40,000 households. The reduction in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions is equivalent to the output of 1200 cars.

Engaging in something as simple as an asset life cycle program can improve your business’ sustainability efforts. It’s even better if you can quantify your own environmental impact and savings, which will not only improve your contribution to the community, and likely your corporate social responsibility strategy, but will also go a long way to engaging your workforce by doing good.

Along with ‘reuse’ and ‘recycle’, there is also a strong ‘reduce’ aspect to the circular economy. It is not just about refurbishing and recycling products at their end-of-life; it extends throughout the entire life cycle, right back to the initial design and manufacturing.

Designing out waste and maximising the value of resources throughout the product life cycle is

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123RF’s Tsung-Lin Wu © 123RF.com

Designing out waste and maximising the value of resources throughout the product life cycle is a key pillar of the circular economy approach.

a key pillar of the circular economy approach. Not only does this benefit the environment, it can also benefit a business’ bottom line through optimising operations and processes.

The aim is to achieve more with less environmental impact, incorporating aspects such as materials selection and effective use of resources. Efficient designs that maximise material, resource and equipment efficiencies can help businesses reduce CapEx and OpEx. These efforts don’t end when a product rolls off the production line. It also covers developing more efficient processes – in terms of energy and

materials – to manage IT assets in an ongoing secure, compliant and environmentally responsible manner.

Improvements at the design phase also pay off at the other end of the life cycle, providing a longer useful life while retaining residual value. This includes improving options for repair, upgrade, reuse and refurbishment.

Embracing the circular economy isn’t just a question of changing the way your business handles IT products once they’ve reached the end of their useful life. It’s also about ensuring that those products are contributing towards a sustainable future from the moment they leave the drawing board.

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What if we told you the best way to build a house was one room at a time? Would you believe us?

123RF’s Dmitriy Shpilko Š 123RF.com

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AGILE IS ABOUT CULTURE, NOT CODE Agile isn’t just a software development methodology; it’s a culture that ensures all your different business units are working as one towards common goals.

By Greg Cockburn, Principal Practice Lead, AC3 An agile business strives to break down silos between business units such as IT, sales and marketing. This even extends to aligning their KPIs, so they’re not inadvertently working against each other in the pursuit of their own narrow goals.

Working in unison requires empathy on all sides, walking in the others’ proverbial shoes in order to appreciate what they require to deliver efficiently and effectively.

The Agile Manifesto lays out how to approach this. Keep in mind it’s a guiding principle, rather than a hard and fast set of rules and regulations. Every business approaches agile a bit differently, but one of the key tenets is to minimise work in progress.

You can see this in action in the Toyota Production System (TPS) and Kanban just-intime (JIT) manufacturing, but you’ll also see it on television every night if you tune into home renovation shows like The Block.

Their weekly workflows are built around agile sprints, aiming to complete one room at a time rather than have a house full of half-finished projects. The traditional waterfall approach would see them finish all the flooring throughout the house, move on to all the plastering, then all the painting and so forth until the entire house was complete.

A builder may tell you that constructing one room at a time is a bad way to build a house from scratch, but it’s actually a very good way to build IT projects.

Partly, it’s because you’re looking to minimise work in progress. The aim is to complete core features and get a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) up

and running so that you can start delivering benefits to the business while iterating based on feedback.

This approach also lets you remain nimble, evolving the project to meet demand rather than committing to a long journey when there’s every chance the landscape could change along the way and you’ll be passed by more agile competitors.

So how do you embrace agile? Start small, rather than trying to boil the ocean.

Focus on tasks that fulfil the business strategy, weeding out areas where you’re spinning the wheels. You’re looking to remove constraints in your processes and align with customer expectations.

Agile is all about alignment and it starts from the top. Ask the executive team about their top three priorities and, if these don’t align with the business goals, then straightaway you can see a problem.

The agile mindset needs to permeate throughout the business, such as ensuring stand-up meetings focus on sharing information rather than getting bogged down in trying to solve all the world’s problems in one meeting.

So how do you get started with Agile? The most practical advice I can offer is not to start with tools and technology – they come later. Start out old school, with Post-It notes and a blank wall. As soon as you start putting a million notes into the ‘work in progress’ column, that’s a good sign that you’ve got too much going on and your priorities are probably out of alignment. Use the agile way of working to begin to align your priorities, and change your culture to ensure that the business is working in unison toward a common goal.

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DESIGN THINKING With most technology projects being IT−led, the focus has often been on designing systems and processes with a focus on a specific outcome. But perhaps it’s time to take a different approach.

Design thinking takes a human-centred approach that integrates the needs of people with the potential of technology and what it takes to deliver a successful business outcome.

David Storey, a director at G plus D, says, “Design thinking is about deeply understanding who you’re designing for, the problem you’re trying to solve for them, being very clear on all the things you know and those you don’t know, and dismissing a very fixed A to B mindset.”

The approach Storey and other design thinking practitioners take complements the shift technology teams are experiencing towards using agile development technologies.

“That can be a bit daunting to someone new to this process. So, I like to take a step back and break it down specifically around the word ‘design’ because it really is a loaded word,” says Storey.

When people think about design, they often see it as relating to beautiful objects. But in design thinking you need to shift your mindset to see design as a verb.

“It’s a process to do or plan something with a specific purpose in mind,” explains Storey, adding that the design thinking process starts with empathy – listening to the people you’re designing for and watching them interact with whatever you’re designing.

This is the approach the SBS On Demand team took when Storey worked with them. By spending time in people’s homes, reviewing customer feedback, reviewing first party data for key trends, working with manufacturers to understand what was

coming down the pipe, prototyping fast and testing options with customers, the team found that its delivery of the SBS On Demand platform was one of its smoothest client uptakes in recent times.

“A desk can be a very dangerous place to make decisions from. Get out into the real world and engage with your customer,” says Storey.

It’s also important to not be too fixed in how you define things when a project starts. There’s a human tendency to define everything, says Storey, that stops us from identifying ambiguities and new perspectives. By ‘embracing the grey’ you can create an environment where innovation takes place.

The US engineer Charles Kettering once said, “A problem well stated is half-solved.” Storey says you need to invest in taking the time to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.

As you move through the design thinking process, ensure you deliver outcomes and not just theory.

“It’s through creating tangible, action-led ideas that you’ll start to see change really occur,” he adds.

The iterative delivery of features and benefits, something that the agile model of systems development strongly espouses, lets you keep moving forward even when upstream management is sceptical. Moving forward continually creates confidence in both the approach and the delivery team.

“The business benefits speak for themselves,” says Storey. “It’s a way to create autonomy in teams, to spark creativity and true innovation, to solve problems from different perspectives, to truly understand your customer, and to keep iterating to ensure you make it better.”

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A desk can be a very dangerous place to make decisions from. Get out into the real world and engage with your customer.

123RF’s eireen © 123RF.com

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CX AND OPERATIONAL STABILITY GO HAND IN HAND When we think about customer experience, we often think about the more creative and exciting aspects, but for operational stability and excellence is the foundation you need to deliver on the promise of CX.

By Claudia Couzi, General Manager of Operational Services, AC3

I was recently asked what I thought the most important outcome of service management was for an IT environment. My answer was simple and came to me instantly – operational stability.

It made me think, in today’s business world, the trend of customer experience is widespread.

And rightly so. Delivering an exceptional customer experience should be the goal of every business, in whatever form it takes for their industry, and it is important to winning and retaining customers. As we strive to deliver these kinds of experiences, however, we can’t lose focus on operational stability. Without it, a great customer experience cannot exist.

In the ICT industry, specifically for managed services providers like AC3, we are seeing these two things converge. Operational stability is as much about the people as it is about the technology. They go hand in hand to achieve business continuity because the reality is, as well architected as the technology is, there is always a chance something will go wrong. It could be an unexpected event like a

rush to your website, or it could be a cyber security attack, or you could simply yet unexpectedly run out of storage. It’s important to recognise that these things are likely to happen at some point, and that, most of the time, they are a result of humans rather than technology.

But how do we use technology to minimise the likelihood of instability in our IT environment, while maximising our customer experience? First, it’s about considering who your customers are. You may know exactly who they are; they may be well defined by your marketing team. But what about internal customers? Most CIOs or IT Managers spend a great deal of their time working with internal teams, so these colleagues need to be considered customers. Simply changing the language here can change the perspective of your team in how they treat these customers.

Once you start considering your internal customers, you can start to build their IT journey and look for gaps on how to best solve their issues.

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Operational stability is as much about the people as it is about the technology.

123RF’s Ivan Kruk © 123RF.com

We worked with one customer recently on a project to implement ServiceNow as their ITSM tool. During the requirements gathering process for the project, we uncovered that the HR team was one of the largest internal customers of the IT team – and they weren’t having the best customer experience. This was a case of the people doing the best that they could with technology that wasn’t built with user experience in mind. Once we understood that this was a problem, it made it simple to workshop the ideal user journey and use technology, in this case ServiceNow, to implement it. The technical tool supported the user in delivering ideal HR engagements, and improving the internal customer experience, while ensuring operational stability.

Developing processes must be done in partnership with systems and tools, so your people know how to leverage them to keep your business running. This can sometimes be easy to overlook, but is key to ensuring your technology is doing its

job. My advice is to enable the easy sharing of this knowledge, once it’s been documented. Consider an internal knowledge base so your team can easily access information. This limits your risk when a key resource or subject matter expert is unavailable. At AC3, we leverage ServiceNow to deliver an internal knowledge base across all of our systems. We’ve been able to create dashboards and use metrics to understand how that information is being used, and constantly optimise it to help us deliver for our customers.

Developing a great customer experience is an ongoing process but, most importantly, it needs to be done in partnership with keeping your ship steady and delivering on the promises you make to your customers – whether they are internal or external customers. Once you have a solid foundation in place, start innovating, learning and looking for ways to get better, so you can keep ahead of your market and keep delivering great business outcomes.

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NANOSATELLITE NETWORKS FOR IOT IoT is all about connectivity. Take away connectivity, and all that’s left is the things.

Maintaining connectivity across your own premises – whether that’s a factory, office or farm – is a solved problem, generally speaking.

But what happens when your IoT (Internet of Things) devices need to be spread more widely, perhaps around a 10,000-square kilometre cattle station, on board ships at sea or at your customers’ multiple premises (where permission to connect to a local network cannot be assumed) around the world.

Cellular (3G/4G/5G) connections may be feasible in some of these situations, whether each device connects directly or via a gateway.

Cellular coverage is not, however, universal and the technology wasn’t designed for devices that may need to operate for years without being recharged.

The footprint of communications satellites covers much of the Earth’s surface. Traditional satellites are in high orbits (tens of thousands of kilometres above the Earth), so communication requires a significant amount of power.

Nanosatellites are a relatively recent development. The term is generally applied to satellites weighing a few kilograms and usually operating in low Earth orbit (just several hundred kilometres above the surface). Low orbit means less power is required for transmission, making it practical to equip IoT devices with suitable transceivers. In some cases, one battery can last

for 10 years, especially if there are mechanisms to allow transceivers to sleep while they wait for a satellite to come overhead.

Nanosatellite companies generally plan to operate constellations of satellites, somewhat like the well-established Iridium system. The constellations form a mesh network, so even though the footprint of each individual satellite is small, a given message can travel between any two places within the footprint of the overall system. How long that takes depends partly on the number of satellites deployed in the constellation and the location of the devices relative to the orbits of those satellites, but the model is generally storeand-forward rather than a live end-to-end link.

Their small size, low weight and low orbit capability mean nanosatellites are relatively cheap to launch, reducing the overall cost of running such a system and therefore the price charged to users.

It’s important to realise that these systems are not designed to provide high-bandwidth connections. Generally speaking, nanosatellite services expect devices to send no more than a few kilobytes of data per day. But that makes them ideal for many IoT applications where devices record and transmit small amounts of data such as temperatures, moisture levels or (for movable assets) GPS coordinates.

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Even though the footprint of each individual satellite is small, a given message can travel between any two places within the footprint of the overall system.

123RF’s Vasin Leenanuruksa © 123RF.com

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REVIEW: HPE PRIMERA

By John Ferlito, Head of Product & Technology, AC3

HPE continues to develop its storage array offering with the Primera series, announced at the recent HPE Discover event. The new array combines the best elements of the company’s 3PAR and Nimble storage platforms, while adding substantial enhancements to how it uses Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage. This delivers significant business benefits by taking advantage of new technologies.

Five-nines is the gold standard in service reliability, but 99.999% means about 3.25 minutes of downtime per year. That’s almost 30 seconds per month. While that doesn’t sound like much, many services and applications, when they can’t detect storage for that long, believe that the storage is unavailable and will time out or, worse, transition to a safe-mode state requiring manual intervention. So, even a short period of storage unavailability can lead to longer business outages as applications are restarted and data integrity checks are carried out.

That problem is exacerbated when multiple applications try to reconnect at the same time. Many applications, especially older ones, are only designed to manage a small number of reconnections at one time. But an app that has been offline for a few minutes or longer may have hundreds

or thousands of users, process and service reconnections occurring at one time. Often called the ‘thundering herd problem’, it’s like a cattle gate that can handle a few cattle at one time, but becomes a point of failure when too many cows try to enter at once.

The Primera solution resolves this through an architecture that ensures 100% uptime. It is a big commitment, but HPE is so confident that it is backing this with SLAs (service-level agreements). If a Primera array suffers downtime, HPE will provide service credits to the customer as a penalty.

So how is HPE delivering on the promise of faster performance, greater resilience and improved uptime?

FASTER DATA DELIVERY With Primera, each storage controller can access all the storage media at the same time, delivering data faster than ever before. This parallelism allows multiple streams of data to be processed at one time. And by delivering the data faster, your compute capability will be better utilised, rather than waiting for data to make its way from storage.

Performance is also aided by HPE’s InfoSight platform. The platform collects data from thousands of storage installations around the world

and uses that information, aided by an AI engine, to determine the optimal configurations and tweaks needed to get the most from your storage array. InfoSight is tightly integrated into Primera and can either provide recommendations to your storage team or make updates automatically, in line with your operating policies. That frees your technical staff to focus on more pressing business issues rather than operational tweaks to your storage.

Resilience is built into the Primera platform; it’s possible for a fourcontroller array to keep operating even when three of the four controllers are removed or upgraded. A big part of how this is achieved comes from moving many functions away from the disk array’s Linux-based operating system out to the user layer. That means a kernel-level failure is less likely to affect what’s happening to users.

For businesses, better uptime and faster performance is critical. Storage lies at the heart of your technology stack and even short failures can have acute consequences. Primera’s focus on resilience and performance, backed

by SLAs, isn’t just about ensuring storage is available. It also ensures that applications that depend on storage being always-on aren’t affected by even short unexpected outages.

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Fast track your cloud journey VMware Cloud on AWS helps bring hybrid cloud to life.

The hybrid cloud model offers the best of both worlds, with VMware Cloud on AWS making it easier than ever for businesses to pick and choose which resources they move into the cloud.

The traditional ‘lift and shift’ approach of businesses migrating all their IT systems to the cloud has given way to a more nuanced ‘hybrid’ approach, which allows businesses to still keep some resources on-prem or in a private cloud while integrating seamlessly into public cloud.

“It doesn’t need to be an ‘all or nothing’ approach and there are a number of reasons why businesses may elect for some data and workloads to remain on-prem or in a private cloud, from data sovereignty concerns to reliance on legacy systems or the need to make the most of on-prem investments,” says Ross Xenos, AC3 Head of Platforms and Cloud Operations.

“Embracing hybrid cloud ensures that these considerations don’t hold a business back on its cloud journey. It can actually fast track them by allowing the business to keep using existing skill sets, rather than needing to retrain their entire workforce to work with cloud native services.”

The flexibility of the hybrid cloud model puts businesses in a better position to adapt to change, with that elasticity allowing them to burst into public cloud to meet peak demand while still retaining complete control over where specific data and workloads reside.

This is where the benefits of VMware Cloud on AWS come into play, underpinning the concept of the software-defined data centre. Building on the ability to seamlessly move individual servers between on-prem and cloud environments, VMware Cloud on AWS makes it easy for businesses to spin up entire data centres in the cloud when needed.

“You can basically view VMware Cloud on AWS as a conduit into the public cloud, consider it Platform as a Service,” Xenos says.

“It lets businesses take advantage of the full range of AWS services, but still work with familiar tools like the VMware hypervisor to manage workloads – effectively extending your data centre into AWS without needing to learn how to interact with AWS native services.”

EXPANDING FOOTPRINT VMware Cloud on AWS’ footprint is expanding around the globe and the service already has a presence in Sydney. One of the key use cases is disaster recovery (DR), eliminating many of the limitations of traditional DR solutions.

“One of the biggest challenges for businesses is having faith in their DR solution to do the job when disaster strikes and VMware Cloud on AWS makes DR easier to design, test and deploy when you need it to save the day,” Xenos says. “As a software-defined network it’s much more flexible in terms of being able to perform DR testing or enabling a DR environment in a real disaster scenario.

“As a bonus, with the right architecture in place you don’t need to worry about AWS egress and ingress data charges because VMware has a pointof-presence in those environments.”

Data centre evacuations offer another key use case, offering a virtual-to-virtual like migration from VMware into AWS, whilst still managing it all within vSphere.

“VMware Cloud on AWS epitomises all that is great about hybrid cloud,” Xenos says. “It’s the perfect launching point for businesses embarking on their cloud journey.”

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Your guide to choosing a technology partner Call AC3 anyway, did you know we can help you scale with our on demand workforce and recruitment services?

NO

I use technology in my business.

YES

I need cloud expertise.

I need top notch security.

YES NO YES We don’t believe you, start again!

We would love to work with you, but only if we can help you deliver a great outcome, so call us to find out how!

NO

Who doesn’t need top notch security?!

I need tangible business outcomes.

NO

YES

Call AC3, so we can help you leverage technology to deliver genuine business outcomes.

We have your technology needs covered. Get in touch today. ac3.com.au 190826024519_1_Decision Tree OBC.indd 2

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