The Cloud Circle Issue 2 by Optic Juice

The Cloud Circle

2nd Industry Trends Report

Sponsored by:

contents 05

The Survey: The practicalities of cloud deployment The Cloud Circle presents the findings and in-depth analysis of our 2nd Industry Trends Survey, with input from a panel of industry experts

The Interview: Paul Coby – At the forefront of the cloud’s retail revolution Paul Coby got to grips with cloud in more ways than one as CIO of British Airways. He tells Dominic Pollard how he is now taking a blue sky approach to his role as director of IT at the John Lewis Partnership

The Feature: The ins and outs of moving to the cloud Mark Young and Dominic Pollard explore ways to get your house in order and things to look for in a cloud supplier before you take the leap into cloud adoption

CA S E S T U D I E S:

The national postal service: Royal Mail Group

The fast growing fast-food chain: Yo! Sushi

Editor’s note

With plans under way to privatise the business and a host of competitors springing up in recent years, Royal Mail is under more pressure than ever to be as competitive as it can be – it turned to cloud for a helping hand

In less than 15 years, Yo! Sushi has become one of Britain’s best known restaurant chains and has expanded overseas. But with a growing brand comes growing IT needs

Everything we do at The Cloud Circle is completely driven by our members. If you have any feedback or thoughts on how you wish the community to develop, or if you would like to speak to our editorial team about the possibility of sharing your cloud experiences in a case study, please email me at mark.young@thecloudcircle.com. If you’d like to become a member of The Cloud Circle, gaining completely free access to all of our events and editorial, please email charlotte.tite@thecloudcircle.com.

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The 2nd Cloud Circle Industry Trends Survey

The practicalities of cloud deployment

etween late September and early November 2011 we conducted our 2nd Cloud Circle Industry Trends Survey. We sought the views of 250 senior business, finance and IT-based personnel to ascertain the key objectives, issues and trends facing organisations as they prepare for cloud migration. The respondents represent a wide range of enterprises, both in terms of the size of their organisation and the range of industries they work in, including the private, public and third sector. Here we review the findings of our survey with the help of a panel of cloud experts.

Key findings: Cloud economies remain an enigma; 56% don’t know how much money they’ll save while 45% are unsure of how much

SURVEY PRACTICALITIES OF CLOUD

ost savings have never been more pivotal to business than in the present economic climate. Indeed, in our 2nd Cloud Circle Industry Trends Survey, ‘saving money’ was the joint leading objective in adopting cloud computing, with 56% highlighting this option when asked for their three primary objectives (see fig. 1). ‘Improve agility/flexibility’, also with 56%, was the other leading goal. And there is strong anecdotal evidence that shows the pursuit of cost savings through cloud is no holy grail. Simon May, IT pro evangelist for Microsoft, says an insurance quote aggregation company he is working with has been able to reduce its operational costs for collating and serving up quotes from £500,000 per year to just £15,000 using a public cloud. However, calculating those savings is not easy. More than half (56%) of Fig respondents to our survey

What are/were your primary objectives in adopting the cloud? Respondents asked to select three.

56%

40%

35%

initial investment they’ll need Performance & response time (60%) and uptime (53%) eclipse security (34%) as the most

26%

23%

21%

important features of

19% 13%

an SLA

11% Only 15% plan to encrypt data themselves,

highlighting a lack of understanding over responsibilities

stated that they are not in a position to say what savings they are likely to achieve, while 14% say they do not stand to save anything at all (see fig. 2). This latter finding was met with scepticism from our panel. “It suggests to me that people are failing to properly analyse the true economies involved with cloud,” says Aoun Shamsi, head of business solutions at London-based loan servicing company Hatfield Philips. “There are many intangibles that need to be taken into account. For instance, if you’ve got an extra rack of servers then you’d need

www.thecloudcircle.com

SURVEY PRACTICALITIES OF CLOUD

Fig

T H E 2 N D Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

When will/did you start to see a return on investment? 30%

23% 21%

8% 5%

2% >4 years

3 - 4 years

Not sure at this time

Fig

2 - 3 years

someone to manage it. A lot of people don’t include the additional staff costs when they weigh things up.” Unsurprisingly, ‘return on investment (ROI)’ (29%) and general ‘financial savings’ (21%) were considered the top two factors in achieving board buy-in. However, a third (30%) revealed that they are currently unsure about the timeframe in which they can expect to realise that ROI (see fig. 3). Positively, 57% expect a payback within two years. But adding to the confusion, 45% are unsure about how much upfront investment they’ll need for their cloud project with 5% claiming they won’t need to spend a penny (see fig. 4). So whereas cost savings are a primary driving factor behind organisations’ move to the cloud, there is still a naivety about how to calculate or measure them. The Cloud Circle members often report that comparing the pricing of multiple suppliers is an extremely difficult task with no standardised set of metrics to aid them. Shamsi suggests cloud suppliers could look to the telecoms industry for inspiration. “When you take a mobile phone contract, you select what’s important to you, whether that’s call time,

1 - 2 years

£500,001 - £1m – 3% £1m - £5m – 3% >£5m – 1% Not sure – 56%

6 months - 1 year

No savings – 14% <£20,000 – 6% £20,001 - £50,000 – 5% £50,001 - £100,000 – 5% £100,001 - £500,000 – 7%

3 - 6 months

How much money do you estimate that you will save from the cloud?

texts, data or the handset you need. These days you can usually see how the package has been costed up. Cloud could feasibly work in a similar way.” On a positive note, freelance business consultant Graham Oakes says that though the initial costs of migrating to the cloud may be difficult to assess, a cloud-based environment does provide transparency over ongoing IT costs once the initial deployment is completed. This is sure to resonate with finance directors. Furthermore, it is also something that applies to many other facets of the business as well as the balance sheet. The onset of a cloud project forces an enterprise to assess the areas of its business that have remained uncharted before and from there they can make improvements. This is an example of the agility that our respondents sought. “When people see how much storage they use and what it costs they start to think about their archiving policy and how to stop people keeping numerous copies of the same presentation,” says Oakes. However, Simon May warns that the very opposite could be true if proper procedures are not put into place. “I’ve seen organisations which introduced a cost centre model that caused unexpected behaviour,” he relates. “The finance department started to directly bill each department for the amount of storage they were using in the data centre. People began to say: ‘It costs too much to host this, let’s just store it locally’. It inadvertently created a nightmare, with critical information lost. Improvement projects have to be business sponsored, but IT’s role in the user education is pivotal.” In fact, increased agility and flexibility will often lead to cost efficiencies but the reverse is not always true. Therefore, when considering the objectives of moving to the cloud by industry sector (see fig. 5), May was disappointed that such a high number of the public sector respondents were looking primarily to ‘save money’ (82%), rather than ‘improve agility/flexibility’ (42%). Interestingly, education organisations, which are often part of the public sector, recorded a more balanced outlook than the rest of the sector, with a high focus on ‘scalability’ (80%). This suggests the sector is a front runner in understanding all of the benefits that the cloud can offer.

<3 months

Fig

SURVEY PRACTICALITIES OF CLOUD

How much initial investment do you/did you plan to provide for your cloud implementation?

C LO U D AT YO U R S E R V I C E When asked what the most important features of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) are, the most popular answer was ‘performance and response time’ with 60%, closely followed by ‘uptime’ with 53% (see fig. 7). Graham Oakes salutes these choices but warns that it is necessary to dig a little deeper beyond the headline results. He says: “A lot of suppliers will give you the uptime rate on the virtual machines, the storage, the network and so on, but they often won’t give you what the uptime is on the end-to-end system. Your website will be no good to you if it’s running but the database behind it isn’t.”

Fig Nothing – 5% <£20,000 – 12% £20,001 - £50,000 – 11% £50,001 - £100,000 – 8%

£100,001 - £500,000 – 10% £500,001 - £1m – 6% >£1m – 3% Not sure – 45%

One point that all the panellists were keen to reiterate throughout the analysis was that migrating to the cloud must be a business project, not simply an IT one. It must involve a full understanding of all aspects of the enterprise and must benefit it as a whole. Being fully aware of your own needs, therefore, is of paramount importance, as is ensuring that the solutions implemented will be advantageous organisation-wide. For all the uncertainty around the analysis of the costs involved, respondents do not see money issues as a major barrier to their cloud adoption (see fig. 6). Of far greater importance to the larger organisations (over 5,000 employees) were the security (39%), compliance (38%) and location (29%) of their hosted data and applications. Small enterprises (1-100 employees) also cited security as their greatest concern (28%) while mid-sized enterprises (101500 employees) found organisational culture the biggest barrier (39%). The fact that more mid-sized enterprises see organisational culture as a barrier than their smaller and larger peers came as no surprise to our panellists. They pointed out that the smaller organisations will have fewer reporting structures involved in decision making while the larger ones have established protocols to follow. With mid-sized organisations, there is more of an opportunity for in-house politics to impinge upon the project.

Top objectives for cloud by selected industries. Respondents asked to select three. Manufacturing

Retail

Professional services

Save money – 59%

Improve agility/flexibility – 60%

Improve agility/flexibility – 51%

Improve agility/flexibility – 59%

Improve IT responsiveness – 53%

Save money – 47%

Improve employee efficiency – 47%

Improve employee efficiency – 40%

IT responsiveness – 40%

Financial services

Public sector

Education

Improve agility/flexibility – 63%

Save money – 82%

Scalability – 80%

Scalability – 61%

Improve agility/flexibility – 42%

Save money – 60%

Save money – 58%

Scalability – 33%

Improve agility/flexibility – 60%

Fig

What do you see as the biggest barriers to cloud adoption? Respondents asked to select three answers. Split by employee numbers.

Small (1-100 employees) Medium (101-500 employees) Large (>5000 employees)

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SURVEY PRACTICALITIES OF CLOUD

Fig

covered by the best practice of their supplier rather than by formal agreements (see fig. 8). The SMEs (organisations with a turnover of less than £25m) made ‘high levels of customer support’ their second biggest priority with 50% of the response. Organisations with a turnover of £1bn plus, meanwhile, had it as the third most important item on their agenda with 32%. The 18% differentiation between the two could be an indication of the levels of customer service they are accustomed to – large corporates often get dedicated account managers whereas SMEs have to vie for attention with one another. Therefore, the smaller organisations are keen to ensure they will get good support before they embark on a cloud project. Charles warns that nothing should be taken for granted when choosing a supplier and agreeing terms. “There is an inherent understanding that things like get-out clauses will be included when the service fails,” he says. “Leave nothing to chance.”

What are the most important features of a Service Level Agreement? Respondents were asked to select up to three answers.

53%

60%

8% 11% 18% 14%

27%

34%

15% 10% 5%

He also advises companies to use the SLA negotiations to find out how the supplier plans to improve its service. “If I’m agreeing a three year contract with an uptime guarantee of 99.999%, I’ll want to know what they are planning to do to get this up to 99.9995%. For software products, you need to be able to see the roadmap for future versions, including what additional functionality they’ll include and when they’ll be addressed. This is difficult to get written into the SLA but it’s a good chance to have the conversation.” Michael Charles, product manager at cloud supplier Outsourcery, said the response for ‘service and support’ ought to have been higher than the 27% it received in the survey. “If something goes wrong, you will have to engage with the supplier. What form that takes, in terms of the method you use to contact them, how long they take to get back to you and the timeframes involved, will be down to your SLA. I would recommend getting a specific agreement drawn up for both response and resolution.” This consideration was reflected to a larger degree in the most important factors in choice of supplier, indicating that companies may see service as something that is inherently

Fig

What are the three most important factors in your choice of supplier? SMEs (<£25m turnover) vs blue chip (>£1bn turnover). 50% 32%

T H E 2 N D Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

41% 34%

23% 32%

36%

60%

8% 7%

21% 18%

22% 23%

28% 29%

4% 6% 5% 10% 3% 6%

56% 47%

SMEs Blue chip

Fig

SURVEY PRACTICALITIES OF CLOUD

What are the most pressing concerns around security in the cloud for your organisation? Respondents could choose multiple answers. 74%

39% 10%

6% 14%

42% 30%

24%

31%

7% 4%

SECURIT Y – ARE THE PRIORITIES RIGHT? The security issues make for interesting reading throughout this survey. The respondents from organisations with a turnover of more than £1bn put ‘security’ top of their list of factors in choosing a supplier with 60%. However the SMEs put it only at third with 36% (see fig. 8). According to our panel, the danger could be that while organisations by and large realise that security is a priority, some may erroneously be under the impression that moving to the cloud absolves them of their responsibilities – a mindset the panel suggests could be more prevalent among smaller organisations. Supporting this notion, one of the most surprising findings from the survey was that only 15% of respondents said data encryption would be a part of their preparation for moving to the cloud. Furthermore, when asked what their biggest security concerns were, 74% highlighted data protection (see fig. 9). Simon May suggests this could be down to confusion over what their obligations are from a data legality perspective. However, he also feels that this overarching concern could be deflecting attention away from what should be more pressing concerns. “Data protection is a long term thing and there are fairly consistent practices across the industry on the supplier side for ensuring that it happens,” he says. “But you have to deal with back-up and restore and people leaving your organisation on a daily basis, yet these things aren’t considered to be as important by the looks of this study.” Overall though, reiterating the earlier point about visibility, Aoun Shamsi maintains that for many companies, security will only improve as a result of a cloud project, providing preparation is performed adequately. “There are bad practices going on in every company up and down the land – cloud forces you to address them,” he says. “Most companies have grown organically and they often haven’t addressed things like compliance, encryption and file storage. They’ll quite often look into the chasm and find a bunch of old socks.”

Significantly higher on the priority list for preparation than data encryption were data analysis (45%), application rearchitecture (44%) and staff training (34%). Even so, Oakes thinks that preparation is often underestimated – something that The Cloud Circle has heard from its members retrospectively on a number of occasions. “There’s a huge array of things which people don’t take into account,” says Oakes. “Things like I/O (input/output) characteristics will be different in moving applications to the cloud from in-house servers, so you may need to think about how you partition your databases, for example. Of course, if you only use third party apps then it might not be a problem, but if they are your own you need to pay close attention to making sure they will work properly in the new environment.” In reality, preparation for the cloud should present no deviation from any other business implementation project. “The most crucial piece of preparation is to ensure that the solution is aligned with your real business needs,” says Aoun Shamsi. “Those who stand to benefit from the initiative must have buy-in into it.”

C A LC U L AT I N G REQUIREMENTS The issue with calculating your requirements is a tricky one, the survey revealed. The danger is that overestimating your requirements will change the economics involved and could push you towards a private cloud when a public one would be better. In-house assessments are the most popular option here (48%) followed by supplier assessments (31%) and consultant assessments (25%). It may be prudent to employ a combination of two or more of these options. It will not just be a case of going around and totting up though. “One of the other intangibles is that you don’t know how much of your current workload is being capped by your current capacity,” says Graham

www.thecloudcircle.com

Fig

SURVEY PRACTICALITIES OF CLOUD

10 When will you reassess your solution for potential upgrades or to switch supplier?

Oakes. “You may be able to see the user figures for your website, for example, but what you may not realise is that it peaked out at some point and you could have had more.” On a similar note, Shamsi recommends that companies should be prepared to uncover a lot more requirements than they first bargained for as they go through the calculation process. Storage is a prime example. “It’s invisible,” he says, “you don’t think about it. But when you want to do document management you have to work out how you are going to manage 50,000 copies of the same presentation. Migrating from an unstructured environment to a structured one presents myriad problems and while you may have thought you wanted one solution you suddenly realise that you need three or four. You have to have the confidence to take them all.” The only way to calculate your needs effectively, our panel agrees, is to ensure that all scenarios and processes that the business divisions are involved in have been taken into account. For example, marketing campaigns often go out with no consultation with the IT department, meaning that there may not be enough resource for the resultant spike in demand, while procurement can often bypass in-house accountants. Collaboration, as we are so often told, is pivotal to a well-oiled machine. In terms of the level of personnel that will be primarily responsible for managing the cloud project, the biggest response was ‘senior managers’ with 52%, followed by ‘middle managers’ with 26%. This suggests that the cloud is now accepted as a legitimate business project to be pushed down the line of command from directors (19%) and CXOs (10%). However, projects look set to involve a wide number of roles across the organisation. When asked who will be involved in trials, 36% said a ‘cross functional team’, 26% said personnel in ‘multiple locations’ and 19% said the trial would be ‘organisation-wide’. Reassuringly, less than 1% said a ‘single user’ would conduct the trial. In terms of timescales, more than half (52%) will be looking to trial solutions for more than eight weeks prior to implementation. This illustrates a very thorough approach is being taken towards ensuring that the best matched solution or supplier has been selected.

A S S E S S M E N T S T R AT E G I E S The majority of respondents (55%) plan to assess the success of their projects on an ongoing basis, rather than opting to undertake holistic reviews at pre-designated check points (see fig. 10). This is something, as we have established, that is only possible because of the transparency which cloud provides. “The cloud offers the opportunity for visibility over areas which have been very difficult, if not impossible, to monitor properly before,” says Michael Charles. “The majority of companies will want to take advantage of this and it naturally means that they’ll be evaluating the success of the solutions as they do so.” In terms of how they evaluate, almost three quarters (73%) will use a system of ‘in-house key performance indicators’ (KPIs). Simon May, however, points out that most people create their own standards based on industry standards anyway – things like PRINCE2, for instance. But he reiterates an earlier point about opening the proverbial ‘can of worms’. “Without a thorough and detailed plan for evaluating, there’s a good chance that only the top level things will be assessed,” he says. “You have to make sure that the knock-on effects throughout the organisation are being monitored.”

T H E 2 N D Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

Assessment will be ongoing – 55% <6 months – 5% <1 year – 16%

<2 years – 12% <3 years – 4% >3 years – 8%

A number of recurring themes have become apparent through the course of this analysis. Among them are that cloud offers the opportunity for providing visibility over areas which have thus far remained uncharted and that the very process of moving to the cloud brings true understanding of the business. What’s more, our panel reiterates that it is critical that any cloud deployment must be led by the business functions of an organisation, with IT providing guidance to ensure best practice protocol is observed. So although the desired destination of cost savings is key for most businesses embracing the cloud, the route to getting there remains complex.

ur thanks go to our panellists who helped us to analyse the results. They were: Aoun Shamsi, head of business solutions, Hatfield Philips; Dr Graham Oakes, business improvement consultant, Graham Oakes Ltd; Michael Charles, product manager, Outsourcery; Simon May, IT pro evangelist, Microsoft; Emma Taylor, founder and managing director, The Cloud Circle; and The Cloud Circle editorial team.

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INTERVIEW PAUL COBY

Paul Coby got to grips with cloud in more ways than one as CIO of British Airways. He tells Dominic Pollard how he is now taking a blue sky approach to his role as director of IT at the John Lewis Partnership.

T H E 2 N D Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

INTERVIEW PAUL COBY

aul Coby’s CV certainly makes for – we can now receive and deliver orders around the impressive reading. Cambridge world which we wouldn’t have been able to do flexibly educated, the former CIO of British with solely UK-based computing.” Airways (BA) is now the director of Closer to home, John Lewis’s appointment booking IT for John Lewis, a position newly system is now ready to be rolled into the cloud. It will created for him. And whether it was allow partners from any one of the nationwide stores sending jumbo jets emblazoned to input, monitor and manage both their own and their with the Union Jack halfway around the world, or selling colleagues’ appointments. This cloud-based solution, household goods on the high street and online, the cloud provided by TOA Technologies, will improve the flexibility, has been an important enabler at his disposal. efficiency and visibility of this service company-wide. From a drapery store opened on Oxford Street in 1864, Harnessing the benefits of the cloud and other there are now 34 John Lewis stores and 264 Waitrose collaborative exercises to improve a supermarkets across the UK. The company employs over company’s agility, flexibility and 76,000 people. functionality across national Despite having been in his new role for just seven borders is not something that’s months, Coby is in no doubt when he asserts that “IT new to Coby. As chair of is revolutionising retail in the UK”. Essentially, Coby SITA (Société Internationale says, “the boundaries between high street shopping de Télécommunications and online shopping are blurring,” something which Aéronautiques) and former means that as IT director of the UK’s leading high CIO of BA, he has plenty of street online retailer, he has his work cut out. It is a experience in creating and challenge, however, that he relishes. implementing IT systems for “The thing that really excites me,” he says, “is this very purpose. how you can translate the long-standing “Airlines have come together principles of our founder, John Spedan for decades in terms of providing Lewis. Our challenge is to take Value, shared, basic services,” says Coby. Assortment, Service and “SITA, which is a co-operative Trust (VAST) and then project owned by the world’s airlines, We can now receive and them in the modern multiwas founded in 1948 to deliver orders around the channel world.” provide telecommunications world which we wouldn’t The main way Coby and services globally and we have been able to do his team are doing this is by are now launching cloud creating a multi-channel, online computing services for the air flexibly with solely UKservice which offers customers transport industry.” based computing the same range of products Cloud is nothing new for Paul Coby with the same levels of service this particular industry either, and trust that you would expect in any sense of the term. In the when you go to any one of the 1980s a group of airlines came sizeable high street stores. Through together to provide core services such www.johnlewis.com customers can ‘click as reservations, inventory management and collect’, scout around or buy products and departure control and to do those from online. And the cloud is going to be an increasingly one single point for any airline. One of these global important part of delivering this strategy. distribution systems, Amadeus, based in Munich, is used to John Lewis first created a cloud-based system for host the airlines’ reservations and they simply pay for the customers, which enables them to view, schedule and number of transactions they use. “That is a pretty good manage customer appointments with staff members (or working definition of what cloud services are and how partners, as they are known). It then moved onto grander useful they can be,” says Coby. plans – international retail via the web is now live. “About three months ago we opened for sale and Coby looks back to his decade at BA to pick out some delivery in 33 countries around the world,” Coby explains. career highlights to date. The development of www.ba.com “We are now delivering in all of the European Union as well between 2000 and 2010 is a particular source of pride. as South Africa, North America and Australia. What we’ve “I know we were the first people to do something done is to use Amazon’s cloud so that, rather than having called calendar selling at scale,” he says. “As you know, our own physical servers around the world, we can use when you go online to buy a ticket, you get to see what Amazon’s global ones to improve service for international the cheapest flight is by destination and by day. That customers. This is a great example of how you can use revolutionised air travel and we were the first significant cloud in order to increase your presence in the marketplace

Sky high

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INTERVIEW PAUL COBY

airline in 2002 to use this. Now everyone has copied it.” BA technology, under Coby, also led the way in integrating dynamic packages of hotels, car hire and excursions into the air travel booking process, as well as creating mobile apps for BlackBerrys, iPhones and

to access services at the economics of the big providers. Security is really important and has “Clearly there are many things that, in always been an issue in the cloud. the foreseeable future at least, companies Where is your data going to be stored? are still going to want to do themselves because they are strategic, confidential, What undertakings can they make complicated or bespoke to how you about that? Are you convinced that it’s do things. But as a real commodity for secure? These must be addressed. At services, the cloud still offers attractive this stage, we would be very unlikely economics. For instance a lot of people are now renting cloud space for testing to put any secure information in the rather than establishing a large and cloud like customer data expensive server farm of their own.” Paul Coby Coby says there are three things you should look at when choosing a cloud supplier. “Firstly, security is really important and has always been an issue in the cloud,” he says. “Where is your data going to be stored? What undertakings can they make about that? Are you convinced that it’s secure? These must be addressed. At this stage, we would be very unlikely to put any secure information in smartphones the cloud like customer data. and implementing “Then there’s service; what service levels are there and are they going to be electronic check-in. sustained? Finally, of course, it has to be low cost.” When reflecting upon cloud The best way to evaluate if these boxes are ticked or not, he stresses, is to computing more generally, Coby trial a cloud solution. observes that “it’s a very big thing “People are putting their toes in the water to see how cloud works,” he across other industries because says, “then, if they are happy with how it works, they consider moving more it’s becoming less specialised and into the cloud. You should start by testing something which isn’t business more generic – the big providers are critical and see if it works for you.” all thinking about how to provide Although quite clearly an advocate of the cloud and the benefits it can generic cloud services. Rather bring to both an IT department and also a business in general, Coby says that than industry specific services like cloud is really nothing new. Rather, it is a new term for describing things that Amadeus, they are creating much have been around for quite a while. It is, though, a cost effective tool that wider, more generic and more can support a company’s expansion and although strong reservations remain accessible systems to be used across about hosting sensitive or business critical data in the cloud, Coby believes “the many industries.” cloud is a useful item in the IT department’s toolkit. It can allow you to provide However, he says that because “the a greater range of services and then extend those services cost-effectively.” retail industry is still based on a country He may have only been at John Lewis for seven months, but it is clear that basis, there hasn’t been an industrythe foundations have been laid for an important role in the future of the wide tradition of using the cloud. company. And, with IT driving a revolution in the retail industry, John Lewis But,” he states, “I think that in this next can rest assured that in Paul Coby they have a man with experience to deliver decade the cloud is going to be big on the vision that could make retail a truly global industry. because it enables all IT departments

T H E 2 N D Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

Suppliers Evaluating

Roadmapping

Solutions

Responsibilities FEATURE MOVING TO THE CLOUD

ins &outs The

resources

Implementation

SLA

of moving to the cloud With the market becoming increasingly saturated with new products and services, it’s easy to find yourself in a situation where you can’t see the blue skies for the clouds. Mark Young and Dominic Pollard explore ways to get your house in order and things to look for in a cloud supplier before you take the leap.

Business needs

Preparation Calculating

reparation, you’ll surely agree, is the most important process when you physically step into the clouds. Unless you set your parachute up properly, it isn’t likely to end well. The same applies to IT. Yet as anyone in charge of large scale technological implementations knows, real life situations rarely allow for strict adherence to the text books. One of the things we hear most often from The Cloud Circle members is that they wish they’d carried out more groundwork. Take Mark Evans, IT manager at Rider Levett Bucknall – the third largest construction consultancy in the world. He recently implemented a private cloud for the firm’s European, African and Middle Eastern regions. Though the project was a huge success, bringing many secondary benefits to the company as well as achieving its key objectives, Evans says time pressures meant the company could not accurately gauge what its resource infrastructure needs would be once populated in the cloud. “We found that our server environment mushroomed,” he said. “We kept adding more servers which, in reality, I don’t think we needed – we just weren’t allocating things efficiently. You should never just throw servers at a problem as it only masks it. Usually you wouldn’t do it because you’d be paying cash for that physical server – it can happen far too easily in the cloud.” Beyond evaluating your internal requirements (the ‘ins’), you also need to make a sound judgement on the supplier you choose (‘the outs’). Here are some key areas to consider.

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ins The

EvaluatingBusiness needs

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getting your house in order

ssentially, technology needs to remain tightly aligned Unfortunately, cost is something which with the business need. That may seem obvious, but it’s remains very difficult to gauge with no revelation that IT departments have, on occasion, the cloud. The physical infrastructure been somewhat detached from business functions. But costs that can be removed from cohesion must exist between the two when it comes to operational expenditure are easy, but the procurement of new technologies and services. the activity-based costing, in terms of First off, you need to take stock of what you’ve got. As the process how much resource you will actually management specialist BMC Software pointed out in a recent white paper: use, is near impossible to predict “Many companies do not have an accurate, current inventory of both their to any degree of accuracy. This is physical and virtual environments.” something backed by the results of If you haven’t, this should be your first point of action. In completing this our 2nd Industry Trends Survey. Therefore, it is more worthwhile to exercise, you will be able to ascertain which systems you have, how they are identify what you could gain, rather interlinked and which could potentially be moved to the cloud, taking into than save. For instance, consider what account regulatory obligations. can be achieved by allowing your Evans himself advocates a thorough round of ‘so what?’ employees – most of whom will be analysis as part of the roadmapping process. Here, talented, qualified individuals – to beyond working out what you have and what work on innovation tasks which you do with it, an attempt is made to build an add value to the company, understanding of the chain reaction of your rather than unpacking processes. Evans says this is usually best boxes and booting undertaken as a cross-functional activity, up servers. utilising the full portfolio of knowledge Preparation is the most But there will be within the business. important process when new skills needed, Indeed, in a white paper from the you physically step into the skills you may not Centre for Technology Management have. For example at the University of Cambridge clouds. Unless you set your the ability to entitled Technology Roadmapping: parachute up properly, it linking technology resources to communicate with isn’t likely to end well business objectives, the authors suppliers and evaluate summarise that “many of the benefits your solutions effectively of roadmapping are derived from the is essential. It is not roadmapping process, rather than the uncommon to find that your roadmap itself,” through the synergy of different employees will be wary of the thinkers from across the organisation. cloud – they’ll see it as their long Although the bringing together of different talents will term replacement. If this is not your put you on a good footing, the organisation suggests that several intention, make sure your employees iterations of the first plan will be required before the right formula is found. are well briefed about the project and how their roles will change. A lack of U S AG E A N D C O S T E S T I M AT I O N S transparency breeds mistrust and for When it comes to calculating resources, we are often told by our members that any technological implementation to added requirements surface at the point you move to the cloud. This is because succeed, you need full buy-in across non-priority work which has been set aside is then brought to the fore in the the organisation. accounting procedure. This could go some way to explaining Mark Evans of Your applications will need attention RLB’s experience. too. When you move to the cloud, it

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Roadmapping

outs FEATURE MOVING TO THE CLOUD

The

isn’t simply a case of dragging and dropping them from one place to the next. The coding behind the applications has to be re-architected to ensure that it performs as it should when interacting with its host and, from a security perspective, the coding has to be watertight. “If you write bad code, it’s the same with the cloud as it is internally – applications are prone to failure,” says Microsoft’s cloud evangelist Steve Plank. “But with the cloud your applications are open for all to see, so you can’t have any flaws to exploit. This might come as a bit of a shock to the system for some overworked developers.”

PL AN N I NG F O R T H E WO RS T

Implementation

Calcula Preparation resourc

choosing the right supplier s if you haven’t got enough to worry about within your own enterprise, you also have to go about choosing a supplier that is the best fit for your business. With the cloud this is never going to come down to cost alone.

SO WHERE DO YO U S TA R T ?

The organisers of the 2012 Olympics are going to extraordinary lengths in At the 1st Cloud Circle Security their contingency plans against a terrorist attack during the event. Failure to Conference, HP’s Eoin Fleming said complete proper Disaster Recovery Planning with cloud projects might not put when talking to potential suppliers, lives at risk, but, considering the regulation and reputational risks, it could well be “if you follow The Cloud Security corporate suicide. Alliance’s questionnaire, you’ll be The British Computer Society (BCS), the Chartered Institute for IT, says there are five key asking 98 per cent of the right steps you need to take in a disaster recovery plan. Firstly, ‘identify the core elements of the questions... I won’t tell you what firm’ and then work out what you stand to lose if they failed. You can then ‘prioritise these the other couple are because I areas’ accordingly. Next, ‘define what customers, suppliers and stakeholders expect’, taking don’t want to answer them!” extra consideration of contractual obligations. Then go on to ‘communicate the strategy Humorous quip aside, throughout the firm’. Finally, ‘endeavour to integrate this planning and control process into Fleming says you cannot be every element of business planning and operation’. afraid to ask suppliers the Using these five points, BCS claims companies are able to “turn what would be for many a difficult questions, nor can major disaster into a minor inconvenience.” you afford to leave any In addition, at the 1st Cloud Circle Security Conference in October 2011, Steve Plank suggested proverbial stone unturned. creating a plan for dealing with the media in advance of the unthinkable occurring, including You must be both a public statement detailing the action you are planning to take. This could help you avoid the thorough and proactive negative publicity that BlackBerry suffered recently as a result of its near ‘wall of silence’ when its when trying to find the messaging and email systems went down for three days in October. right supplier – do not “The cloud is a new term and there is a lot of hype around it,” said Plank. “Therefore, as soon as accept their sales pitch any problems arise, the media will be straight on it.” at face value and never assume. “Vendors won’t P U B L I C V E R S U S P R I VAT E ? offer up information that In a nutshell, the public cloud option provides potentially greater cost efficiencies whereas the prejudices them,” Fleming private allows for greater customisation and added security. You have to weigh up the sensitivity said, “but they will give of your data and how business critical it and your applications are, which your stock check will you honest answers if you have illustrated. But it’s not necessarily a straight choice between the two – a hybrid environment ask them directly.” could give you the best of both worlds. The Cloud Security One way is to call upon overflow capacity from a public cloud. This can ensure that you are Alliance’s guidelines are a covered in the event of potential spikes, if certain workloads can be diverted there. It does take useful means of examining extra planning and architecture, but with all the colours of the rainbow at your disposal, why the strengths and draw in black and white? weaknesses of a potential

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Responsibilities

Solutions Implementation

supplier and will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the boxes they tick or, indeed, don’t. The patience-testing 197 questions probe into issues of data ownership, security testing, risk management and disaster recovery as well as all manner of things in between. As established already, these guidelines maintain that the client has just as much responsibility as the provider when moving data to the cloud. Cloud is a form of outsourcing – but it doesn’t free you from all obligations.

W H I C H B O X E S D O E S T H E S U P P L I E R T I C K?

Suppliers

SLA

Central to your choice of supplier, inevitably, will be the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is the contract which outlines exactly what you require from your supplier, what guarantees they make and, most importantly, what happens in the worst case scenario that your supplier fails to deliver on its promises. The SLA should cover all issues from uptime, performance and response time, support service and availability, data location, data protection, security to an exit policy. Much is made of the lack of legislation when it comes to the cloud, especially while security remains a key concern. There are, however, a range of different standards which cloud providers can adhere to and by doing so can gain accreditation – including ISO27001, SAS 70 (type 1 and 2), CIF, Open Cloud Consortium and many others. This certification indicates the steps taken by a supplier to ensure that its defences are suitably exhaustive so be sure to look out for them. Paul Simmonds, Jericho Forum co-founder and ex-chief information security officer of AstraZeneca, says that when scouting for potential Vendors won’t offer up providers, “you need to understand the chain of custody of the information that prejudices data; from when you put it in the cloud, to how they maintain it, them but they will give you how they back it up and, most importantly, when you move away from them, how you prove your data has been destroyed.” honest answers if you ask Where standards are concerned, “the ISO27000s are the ones them directly you want to be looking for,” Simmonds stresses. Eoin Fleming, HP Beyond security, knowing where your data is being held is often a deal breaker. RLB’s Mark Evans told us one of the biggest factors in his company’s choice of supplier was that “we know the exact location of our data; it’s about 100 miles up the M1. I can jump in a car, drive for a couple of hours and almost touch it.” Although you may not share Evans’s desire to touch the server in which your data is held, the value of knowing at very least which country it is being held in cannot be underestimated. It makes ensuring the legality and compliance of your data far easier – as laws and regulations change across national borders, knowing where your data is being held is very important so you can take the right steps to make it compliant. In fact, the Data Protection Directive places legal restrictions on the location of sensitive data, so establishing with a potential provider where they would store your data could be critical.

A P E R F E C T M AT C H Beyond the finer details of the technical solution – which of course are crucial – it is also important to take the supplier’s values into consideration. Whether it’s their green policies, experience in a particular sector or where the call centres are based, there are many factors that may or may not align with your ideas of good practice. If you want to be sure about your prospective provider, take some peer advice. Examine the existing client base, and pick up the phone. Also, make sure you are happy with the competence of the provider’s support staff – you’ll regret it later if you can’t get a word of sense out of them when it matters most. Whoever you choose, choose wisely – your supplier will become an integral part of the day-today running of your organisation. Remember, it’s cloud you’re after, not just a load of hot air.

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CASE STUDY ROYAL MAIL

through the cloud

The UK Royal Mail Group (RMG) is responsible for mail collection, delivery and related postal services. In its ongoing quest for increased efficiency and competitive practices, RMG looked to the cloud. Specifically, a CSC deployed Microsoft Business Productivity Online Dedicated Suite has helped it transform its business through the delivery of major cost savings and the introduction of innovative new services.

perating in a highly competitive environment, Royal Mail Group (RMG) processes and delivers more than 70 million items to 28 million addresses in the UK every working day. Directly employing 165,000 people, RMG prices are among the lowest in Europe. Currently governmentowned, RMG is likely to become partly privatised during the current parliament. In the meantime, the company – which operates from 3,000 separate processing sites across the UK – is making every effort to improve efficiency, so as to stay competitive with private sector service providers. RMG decided to upgrade its email messaging service for 28,000 employees who were using IBM Lotus Notes. The cost of storing email messages – managed by IT partner CSC – was rising, and many employees found Lotus Notes difficult to use. RMG realised that to receive maximum value from its email migration project, it should also empower its employees with more powerful communication and

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CASE STUDY ROYAL MAIL

collaboration. Adrian Steel, who oversaw RMG’s cloud project as the company’s head of infrastructure management, says: “We needed a complete redesign of our computer estate, starting with email, to bring down costs by adopting a pay-on-consumption model. We also wanted to improve our collaboration environment, which was running on out of date software and used very little.” When addressing the organisation’s outdated system, RMG directors were keen to transform the business and avoid incurring capital expenditure by adopting a flexible model that could accommodate growth or shrinkage. An emerging solution was to acquire a suite of business productivity tools using a flexible Software as a Service (SaaS) approach from suppliers,

Implementing a solution

RMG chose the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Dedicated Suite based on a CSC recommendation and its own research. It provides Microsoft Exchange Online for email, Microsoft Office Communications Online for instant messaging, Microsoft Office SharePoint Online for collaboration, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting communications tools for web-based audio and video conferencing. Working with CSC and Microsoft, RMG formed a unified deployment team, which helped the companies work together and achieve common ownership of the transformation. To speed up migration CSC built a suite of user training and management tools that helped employees start the migration process themselves. The result was that thousands of people were automatically migrated overnight with no downtime or business disruption. Steel says: “The advice from Microsoft was that the quicker the migration the better because that way we’d minimise the impact of running two systems at the same time.” The three business partners organised a series of workshops to help prepare RMG staff for the migration and change in business culture that the new productivity suite would bring. In the first eight weeks of deployment, 28,000 employees were supplied with their new collaboration suite, giving them access to tools such as instant messaging and presence awareness. Steel says: “Around 46 per cent of those 28,000 were fully migrated overnight, producing overwhelmingly positive reactions.” While around 30 per cent of Steel’s time was spent on the technical work behind the migration, the rest was spent on running a culture and change programme within RMG. “I was We needed a complete managing up to 1,000 people at individual sites as champions redesign of our computer of the new business productivity suite,” says Steel. “You have to remember that most of our people had only ever used estate, starting with email, to Lotus Notes. It was ingrained in the RMG psyche.” bring down costs by adopting The solution includes SharePoint Online, to replace a pay-on-consumption model an earlier version of SharePoint that was seldom used. Adrian Steel, head of infrastructure “We have launched SharePoint Online with a series of management, Royal Mail Group applications,” says Steel. “An example is a room booking system written in Microsoft Silverlight. It complements the business productivity suite with graphics and screenshots of all 1,000 rooms our staff can book for meetings.” including Microsoft, Google, and LotusLive. Over a period of nine months RMG analysed several other options, including retaining the existing system with minor upgrades, moving to a new version of Lotus Notes, or replacing it with Microsoft Exchange Server. Steel and his colleagues evaluated each option with consultants from Accenture and Avanade, as well as its outsourcing partner, CSC, and Microsoft. Steel says: “Cost was a driver, especially with the economy in recession. But an equally important consideration was the need to improve collaboration and give the workforce new communication tools to help them play a part in transforming the business.”

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CASE STUDY ROYAL MAIL

Realising benefits across the board

RMG considers the speed of migration for the first 28,000 users to the Business Productivity Online Dedicated Suite a world class achievement for a government owned, public sector agency. The award winning CSC project equipped its workforce with diverse new collaboration technologies and met RMG savings targets. Steel says: “We believe that the Microsoft Business Productivity Suite will save us more than £1m over the four year duration of this deal.” The need to move to a more flexible pay-as-you-go model and keep within existing budgets was a prerequisite for making the change. As a result, RMG challenged CSC to approach the project with innovative thinking for a solution that would both optimise existing systems and support cost-efficient development for the future. Simon Thomason, director and global leader of Microsoft Practice, CSC, says: “We are delivering on the RMG requirement for a cost-neutral change – a new environment at a price no higher than the maintenance costs of the existing infrastructure that gives the company greater flexibility at no additional cost.” A driving force behind the project was tapping into the benefits of the cloud for enhanced productivity in the business. Steel says: “RMG is concentrating on change across its existing user base for personal computers but also wants to make the potential of IT available to a much larger proportion of the workforce.” A cloud-based services model allows RMG to pursue this goal An example is a room booking cost-effectively. system written in Microsoft With the new solution Silverlight. It complements the from CSC and business productivity suite with Microsoft, RMG graphics and screenshots of all management 1,000 rooms our staff can book now has greater for meetings flexibility to Adrian Steel, head of infrastructure management, move beyond Royal Mail Group.

the 28,000 office staff with personal computers, to around 100,000 others who lack regular access to a computer. The agility and flexibility afforded by this cloud-based communication and collaboration solution means that RMG is much better positioned to react to market changes and develop new products and services to stay at the leading edge of the market. The meticulous planning for the migration and awareness helped speed adoption. The responses to postdeployment feedback surveys included: “Having a local expert is definitely the way to go for future changes of this sort” and “the best change in IT we’ve ever implemented.” The consensus was that Steel and his team had managed a seamless migration using excellent communications and training modules.

RMG moves ahead with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2010

Since embarking on the migration, RMG has taken additional steps to complete the transformation programme. It has concluded a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement for low cost licensing of its software giving RMG the tools it needed to move further away from its previous environment. It is now moving towards the modern IT infrastructure its employees and business partners expect from a world class postal service. Steel says: “This prepares the way for the roll-out of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite and Windows 7 operating system. We will be one of the first companies globally to deploy the Office 2010 suite – and certainly one of the first to run it on Windows 7.” The Microsoft practice at CSC played a key role in bringing all the stakeholders together. Steel says: “As a business in the middle of long term change, we required an environment that ensured we had a positive transformation and not just business as usual.” The RMG, CSC, and Microsoft partnership was unusually collaborative in its format. And yet, it delivered a SaaS solution that RMG is confident will position the company as a leader in global postal services for years to come.

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CASE STUDY YO! SUSHI

Founded in 1997, YO! Sushi has grown from a London only sushi brand to an international success, serving over 3.5 million customers a year throughout the UK and in Dublin, Sintra, Dubai, and Bahrain. But with a growing brand comes growing IT needs...

p u g in p p a Wr ty deal a tas cloud with

ast-food chain YO! Sushi hopes never to buy a server again. The reason? It has turned to cloud computing in a bid to improve its productivity and flexibility. Although expanding at a rate of ten stores per year, YO! Sushi maintains a “very lean IT department”, according to IT manager Billy Waters. “Our policy is to outsource to the experts wherever possible and with only one in-house IT professional, getting the most out of IT suppliers is crucial,” he explained. “We need connectivity and everything to be always on, all the time. Supporting that internally would be very difficult.” Running Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office and a number of other applications on seven-year-old servers was a cause of concern to the company. “The servers were reaching the end of their useful life and replacing them and upgrading our core office software would require substantial investment,” added Waters. “We were convinced that there was a more elegant, costeffective and efficient alternative and we didn’t really want to end up with a room full of servers.” Disaster recovery and business continuity also presented issues. “These are obviously ‘must haves’ for all organisations but we were concerned that our existing solutions were not as effective as they could be,” said Waters. “Again,

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with just one internal IT specialist, the back-up procedures were time consuming and upgrading to a new, automated solution would be expensive and require additional investments in hardware.”

Evaluating the options

Determined to find a flexible alternative that delivered the capabilities that YO! Sushi required – both today and for the future – and which delivered real value for money, Waters identified three options: replace and upgrade the onpremise infrastructure; partner with an organisation that provided hosted data centre services; or the cloud. During this search for a futureproof alternative to the ‘traditional’ infrastructure solution, Waters encountered IMGROUP – Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner of the Year in Business Intelligence and Data Management for four consecutive years. IMGROUP boasts a proven track record of delivering strategies and services for information management that help organisations achieve operational efficiency, agility and

CASE STUDY YO! SUSHI

Objectives: competitive differentiation through a combination of an innovative use of technology and extensive business experience. Having reviewed YO! Sushi’s objectives and analysed the company’s existing processes and procedures, IMGROUP proposed that the business migrate its entire infrastructure to Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is the familiar Microsoft Office suite but delivered through the cloud. “Microsoft Office 365 takes the industry’s most recognised set of productivity and collaboration tools and delivers them as a subscription service,” explained IMGROUP’s head of online services, Jeremy Neal.

A ‘no-brainer’

“IMGROUP’s proposal had a number of immediate attractions, even if it meant that YO! Sushi would be an early adopter of this innovative technology,” continued Waters. “The more we looked into the benefits of Office 365, the more we realised that it could have been tailormade for us – it was considerably cheaper than the other alternatives, far easier to manage and removed, at a stroke, all of our business continuity and disaster recovery concerns. It was, basically, a ‘no-brainer’.” Working in partnership with Waters and YO! Sushi stakeholders, IMGROUP began the process of migrating YO! Sushi’s 120 users to Office 365, sourcing the subscriptions, testing the environment, undertaking development and providing training, knowledge sharing and familiarisation sessions to ensure that the transition would be as smooth as possible.

40% cost savings

According to Waters, the cloud set-up will save YO! Sushi about 40% over a five year period compared to an on-premise Exchange server. “In addition to the upfront and long term savings, we get the benefit of having tools such as SharePoint online, as well as not being in the position of replacing an Exchange server again

The installation of Microsoft Office 365 The migration of YO! Sushi’s 120 users Sourcing the subscriptions Testing the environment Undertaking development Providing training, knowledge sharing and familiarisation sessions to ensure that the transition would be as smooth as possible

Benefits:

Elimination of high cost replacement/upgrade of server farm Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools delivered through the cloud Subscription service enables accurate budgeting Automatic availability of updates and enhancements Simplified management 40% cost savings over a five year period Improved collaboration and information sharing Future-proof solution Implementation partner IMGROUP provided migration, licence sourcing, environment testing, development, training, knowledge sharing and familiarisation sessions ensuring the transition would be as smooth as possible

in five years,” he explained. “And the solution is futureproof. If we went the traditional route, we would have to do the same thing again in five years time. This way, we never have to buy a server again!”

Committed to the cloud

IMGROUP is currently working closely with YO! Sushi so that the Office 365 implementation can be rolled out by the end of the year. The restaurant chain is also implementing a cloud-based stock management system, a payroll system, and more besides. “Every time we have something expiring and we need an update, we look for the cloud version rather than on-site,” added Waters. “YO! Sushi wanted to roll out a new intranet and consistent communication services to all employees – including restaurant staff. Cloud computing seemed an ideal way to do this at low cost and minimal impact to the business so we’re now getting the ball rolling on that too.” Waters says the choice of supplier has also been instrumental in the smooth running of its cloud projects so far. “As an early adopter of Microsoft Office 365, we needed an implementation partner with the right skills and experience to help achieve our goals. IMGROUP Online Services gave us that option, with a first rate team and customer service to make our move to the cloud a success.”

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