CH1610

Cloudhosting 

Oct/Nov 2016 l www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk l £8.50 Where Sold 

Winning ways: 

The Cloud Hosting Awards winners in full 

Going native: 

Digital Asset Management 

GDPR: 

Don’t be strung along 

In the right direction: 

Cloud backup strategies 

Locked in: 

Is the Cloud the best place for your 

emails? 

Trust issues: 

Security for CSPs 

INDUSTRY NEWS - USER STORIES - OPINIONS - INTERVIEWS - ANALYSIS

COMMENT 

From the Editor 

We have had a few weeks now to recover from the first ever Cloud Hosting 

magazine Awards night, and I'm delighted to report that the event was a huge 

success, exceeding our expectations in terms of numbers of votes cast and 

guests attending on the night. The splendid Cumberland Hotel on Marble Arch was full 

almost to bursting as MC and cricket legend Chris Cowdrey and comedian Stephen 

Grant kept us all entertained throughout the evening. 

As I said in the last issue, we very much hope that the CH Awards is set to become a 

regular feature of the industry calendar - not just as an opportunity to show off to 

customers and prospects about your successful products and projects, but also as a 

networking and social event for the sector. It was great to see so many people from 

different businesses, large and small, sharing a drink and a trade secret or two over a 

glass of bubbly. In my case, as I had to fly to Naples very early the next morning, I had 

to stick to water - but nonetheless I managed to thoroughly enjoy the night. Here's to 

next year and many more. You can find a full breakdown of all the winners and runnersup 

(along with photos from the night) on page 14 of this issue. 

Elsewhere we still manage to cover a broad selection of topics in our regular editorial 

features, from the impact of GDPR on information strategies to the pros and cons of 

moving email archives to the Cloud. In this last piece, Barracuda's Stefan Schachinger 

warns that without adequate planning, organisations might end up with their email 

content effectively 'trapped' in the Cloud. Nonetheless, he concludes, there are very 

good reasons for making the move: "One of the important factors is interoperability 

across Cloud computing providers. Organisations cannot blindly rely on the fact that 

their new Cloud provider will support the same standards and protocols as their 

existing provider. In reality, there is still a lack of world-wide adopted standards, for 

example around standard data structures and APIs." 

As is so often the case with debates around Cloud strategy, we find ourselves 

wondering where the standards and best practices are going to come from. I'd be 

fascinated to hear what readers think; as ever, feel free to email me at the address below. 

David Tyler 

david.tyler@cloudhostingmag.co.uk 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

(david.tyler@cloudhostingmag.co.uk) 

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www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk Oct/Nov 2016 

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Cloudhosting 

3

CONTENTS 

Contents 

Locked in..............................................................................................................10 

There are good reasons not to lock your email archive up in the Cloud, argues Stefan 

Schachinger, Consulting System Engineer in Data Protection at Barracuda Networks 

Cloud Hosting Awards 2016..................................................................14 

The first Cloud Hosting magazine awards night went with a bang - discover more about all 

of the winners and runners-up here 

GDPR: don't be strung along................................................................24 

Lillian Pang of Rackspace addresses some of the most common misunderstandings 

surrounding the new GDPR legislation; rules that will affect any business that handles 

personal data, and therefore the majority of organisations in the UK 

Trust issues......................................................................................................28 

The move to Cloud leaves many businesses with new security concerns, suggests Dave 

Nicholson of Axial Systems: organisations now need to ensure that their standards are mirrored 

- at least - by that of their Cloud services provider 

Editor’s comment..............................................................3 

News.......................................................................................6 

BT and Microsoft team up 

UK firms 'failing on Cloud strategy' 

Ancient and modern......................................................8 

The University of Manchester's digital collection of rare books, medieval 

manuscripts, maps, and historic archives is moving to the Cloud 

Close connections.......................................................12 

Asset Handling, a leading UK software provider for asset 

management services, has selected Interoute to deliver its Cloud 

infrastructure platform and disaster recovery 

DR: Test and test again.............................................21 

A recent roundtable gathered business leaders to debate the 

findings of iland's 'State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK 

Businesses' survey 

Opinion: Data sovereignty..........................22 

Daniel Hickmore of Arkivum explains why a 'digital embassy' 

approach to data sovereignty could be the way ahead for 

organisations struggling with data sharing and retention issues 

such as healthcare providers 

Research: Cloud backup..........................26 

According to new research from CTERA Networks, enterprise 

data protection strategies may not be fully aligned with IT 

modernisation initiatives driven by cloud computing 

DAM goes native...............................................27 

Digital asset management (DAM) powers the processes that run 

business, argues Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo - but without a 

cloud-native approach, the benefits may be limited 

Case study: Coal Authority.......................30 

The Coal Authority is moving its supplier sourcing, 

management and purchasing to the cloud with Wax Digital's 

web3 Source to Pay 

4 

Cloudhosting 

Oct/Nov 2016 


www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk

NEWS 

NEW FABRIC SOLUTIONS 

NetApp has announced new data fabric 

solutions and services that maximise 

control and improve the secure 

movement of data across the hybrid 

Cloud. These include: 

Cloud Sync Service - This on-demand 

software-as-a-service offering simplifies 

Cloud service usage by allowing users to 

continuously move and synchronise data 

between on-premises storage and AWS 

Simple Storage Service (S3) in the Cloud. 

NetApp Private Storage (NPS) as a 

Service-NetApp is expanding the availability 

of NPS for Cloud by making it available 

as a service through a growing partner 

delivery ecosystem, including Arrow, 

Faction, ASE, DARZ, and ThinkOn. 

Cloud Control for Microsoft Office 365 - 

This SaaS offering provides a simple way 

to control and protect critical data stored in 

Microsoft Office 365, including SharePoint 

Online, OneDrive for Business, and 

Exchange Online. 

Cloud Backup Solution - This solution 

delivers simplified end-to-end Cloud backup 

for NetApp ONTAP customers using 

NetApp SnapMirror technology. 

www.netapp.com 

OPENSTACK CLOUD 7 

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 is the latest 

enterprise-ready OpenStack platform 

from SUSE for building Infrastructure-as-a- 

Service private Clouds. Powered by the 

newly released OpenStack Newton, SUSE 

OpenStack Cloud 7 includes new 

Container-as-a-Service capabilities along 

with non-disruptive upgrade capabilities to 

avoid downtime and service interruption. 

"SUSE OpenStack Cloud is uniquely 

positioned to assist customers to take full 

advantage of rapidly evolving technology 

trends such as containers and DevOps for 

the development of new cloud-native workloads," 

said Joseph George, SUSE vice 

president of solutions strategy. 

www.suse.com/cloud 

BT TEAMS WITH MICROSOFT TO SIMPLIFY HYBRID CLOUD 

BT Compute for Microsoft Azure is a 

new service that allows BT customers 

to order Microsoft Azure alongside BT's 

own Cloud services through its Compute 

Management System (CMS) online management 

tool. The service enables customers 

to build hybrid Cloud infrastructure 

with a single service wrap, contract and 

on a single bill. 

BT customers already use private and 

public Cloud services (hybrid Cloud) hosted 

in BT Compute's 48 data centres globally. 

With BT acting as their Cloud services 

integrator, and by using CMS, customers 

can manage their Cloud services 

end-to-end from datacentre to network, 

maximising the benefits and minimising 

the complexity, risk and costs of moving 

to the Cloud. Using local delivery with 

global scale allows BT to meet the evolving 

needs of organisations for Cloud services 

and at the same time address the 

complexity of regulatory requirements. 

Neil Lock, vice president of BT Compute 

at Global Services, BT, said: "Hybrid 

Cloud has become a major focus for 

many large enterprises as they choose a 

variety of Cloud solutions to suit their 

complex business needs. In fact, BT 

research suggests that 90 per cent of its 

largest customers expect to be using a 

combination of public and private Cloud 

in the next few years. 

"Through our relationship with Microsoft, 

customers can build their own hybrid 

Cloud environment and enjoy the benefits 

of Azure whilst removing costly management 

concerns from the equation. Our 

Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy is all 

about empowering our customers take 

advantage of the choice, flexibility and 

control of Cloud without concerns about 

the complexity and security." 

http://bit.ly/2g1INTT 

ABERLOUR PUTS TRUST IN PULSANT HOSTING PLATFORM 

Pulsant has been selected to provide its 

Enterprise Cloud solution to Scottish 

charity Aberlour Child Care Trust. The platform 

will be hosted in Pulsant's South Gyle 

data centre in Edinburgh and uses the latest 

HP servers, Cisco networking and VMware 

virtualisation technology that is deployed on 

top of the company's 10gb network. 

As an organisation that delivers such critical 

services and support, having access to 

data and core systems at all times is a vital 

requirement. The charity needed to update 

its legacy infrastructure at its head office 

and was also looking to reduce costs and 

increase efficiency as well as move to an 

OPEX model, which led to it selecting a 

hosting partner. In addition, Aberlour wanted 

to bolster its back up capabilities and 

reduce the complexity of its existing backup 

solution. 

"Our key systems at our head office in 

Stirling were on old hardware and we decided 

the best way forward, in terms of cost, 

security and resilience, would be to move to 

a hosted platform. In this way we could take 

advantage of significant cost savings by 

employing an OPEX model and also leverage 

the resources of a hosting partner in 

delivering a more secure and resilient platform 

than we could do ourselves, onsite," 

says Ros Dowey, IT manager, Aberlour. 

Pulsant already supplies connectivity and 

has an established relationship with the 

charity. "Pulsant has an excellent track 

record when it comes to helping charities 

reach their business outcomes and this 

project is the ideal example of this collaboration 

and how there is no one-size-fits-all 

cloud solution," says Ian Appleyard, business 

development executive, Pulsant. "We 

worked with Aberlour in defining the 

requirements and developing a solution 

that best met them - from the cloud solution 

itself, to backup and the colocation 

aspect of the project." 

www.pulsant.com 

6 

Cloudhosting 

Oct/Nov 2016 



NEWS 

ZERTO VIRTUAL REPLICATION FOR HPE CLOUDSYSTEM 

Zerto Virtual Replication is to be sold by 

HPE to provide business continuity and 

disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities for 

HPE Helion CloudSystem solutions. HPE 

Helion CloudSystem is an integrated hardware 

and software solution for hybrid 

Cloud that allows customers to move traditional 

apps to the Cloud and build Cloud 

native apps with rapid infrastructure provisioning 

and management. 

Zerto's software helps protect critical HPE 

Helion CloudSystem applications and 

data, while improving BC/DR for hybrid 

Cloud applications. Zerto for HPE Helion 

CloudSystem provides a recovery point 

objective (RPO) of seconds and a recovery 

time objective (RTO) of minutes and 

failover automation for applications. 

Additionally, Zerto provides integration with 

CloudSystem's management stack. 

"As companies of all industry types and 

sizes continue to embrace Cloud-based IT 

infrastructures, they're facing the challenge 

of building hybrid Cloud capabilities that 

improve their IT resilience and help keep 

mission critical operations moving forward 

no matter what comes their way," said Paul 

Zeiter, president of Zerto. "Zerto's software 

coupled with HPE CloudSystem offers a 

highly resilient and flexible platform supporting 

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Cloud service 

models that helps customers achieve 

full protection from any outage and a competitive 

advantage." 

The combination of HPE Helion 

CloudSystem 10 and Zerto Virtual 

Replication gives users the flexibility to protect 

their critical workloads running on HPE 

hybrid and private Cloud environments 

from disruptions such as human error, to 

more catastrophic cases such as ransomware 

attacks and natural disasters. 

Additionally, users can protect workloads 

in their private and hybrid Cloud environments 

on VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, and 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) using this 

integrated and automated BC/DR solution. 

www.zerto.com 

UK FIRMS FAILING TO FORM A CLOUD STRATEGY 

The majority of the UK's SMEs have no 

plans to formalise a Cloud computing 

strategy, according to the findings from 

Close Brothers' quarterly survey of UK 

SME owners and senior management 

from a range of sectors. Of the 906 businesses 

that took part in the survey, 464 

(51%) answered 'no' to the question 'is 

your organisation formalising a Cloud 

computing strategy?', with only 266 (29%) 

responding positively. The remaining 176 

(19%) were 'unsure'. 

Companies in the North East (62%) and 

Wales (65%) were the least likely to have a 

Cloud computing strategy, while 50% of 

businesses in the capital were clear about 

the requirement for a strategy. When asked 

to rate the importance of having a formal 

Cloud computing strategy, only 9% of businesses 

said it was 'very important', with 

24% agreeing it was 'important'. 14% of 

SMEs were of the opinion that it was not 

essential at all. 

"Cloud computing is one the key digital 

developments of the last few years," said 

Ian McVicar, CEO, Close Brothers 

Technology Services. "It's very important 

businesses don't get left behind because it 

can be used as a competitive advantage. 

The results of the survey are quite sobering 

and make it clear that there is some way to 

go before business owners fully appreciate 

the importance of the Cloud. 

"Fundamentally, Cloud computing means 

companies can avoid, for example, purchasing 

and hosting servers, along with 

other infrastructure costs. This is not only a 

cost saving, but means companies can 

focus on their core business instead of 

spending both time and resource on establishing 

and maintaining an IT infrastructure." 

www.closebrotherstechnology.co.uk 

CALLING ON THE CLOUD 

easycopiers have launched a hosted 

telephony solution. The telecoms platform 

is securely hosted in the cloud, so 

there is no need for on-site 'phone board' 

equipment, and the fast plug-and-play 

setup uses a company's existing network 

infrastructure. With calls made as usual 

over IP handsets and an uptime of 'five 

nines' (99.999%) the system effectively 

never needs to be serviced. The advantages 

of a cloud-based system include: 

• Disaster recovery and business continuity. 

The system is off premise, meaning 

calls can be routed anywhere, so operations 

can continue from any location within 

a matter of minutes. 

• Scalability. Both mobile and fixed line 

services can be scaled up and down with 

ease depending on staffing needs. New 

locations can be connected straight away. 

• Cost control. Capital outlay is removed 

and replaced by a monthly set cost which 

is easy to plan and accommodate in 

budgets. Importantly calls are often free to 

UK landlines and mobiles. 

• The system can be managed from a 

web interface with a wide range of features 

and the ability to access detailed reports. 

www.easycopiers.net 

HYPERGRID JOINS CIF 

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has 

today announced that HyperGrid, the 

only application delivery platform that 

solves the key challenges of DevOps for 

the enterprise, has become the latest 

vendor to join the industry body’s growing 

membership roster. 

HyperGrid was founded following the 

acquisition of DCHQ earlier this year to 

deliver an application aware offering that 

brings the simplicity and ease-of-use of 

HCI together with a pay-as-you-consume 

pricing model that scales elastically, 

enabling true DevOps for the 

Digital Enterprise. 

www.cloudindustryforum.org 

www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk @CHMagAndAwards 

Oct/Nov 2016 

Cloudhosting 

7

CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER LIBRARY 

Ancient and modern 

The University of Manchester's digital collection of rare books, medieval 

manuscripts, maps, and historic archives - including both 4,500-year old 

clay tablets and contemporary email correspondence - is moving to 

Preservica's digital preservation and access solution hosted on the AWS 

Cloud, to ensure it is accessible and future-proofed indefinitely 

The University of Manchester Library 

has begun moving its digital Special 

Collections to the AWS Cloud with 

the help of Preservica's Cloud based 

digital preservation and access system. As 

one of only five National Research Libraries 

in the UK, the University of Manchester 

Library holds one of the world's 

outstanding collections of rare books, 

manuscripts, maps, archives and visual 

collections, which are being digitised to 

make them more widely available to the 

academic and research communities. With 

more than 3 million printed books and 

manuscripts, over 41,000 electronic 

journals and 500,000 electronic books, as 

well as several hundred databases, the 

library is one of the best-resourced 

academic libraries in the UK. 

The Library's primary aim is to support 

students and staff of The University of 

Manchester in all areas of their study. But it 

is also fully committed to widening 

participation, and access to many of its 

services provided for individual researchers, 

schools and the local community. 

Chronologically, the library's collections 

span many centuries, from the 3rd 

millennium BC to the 21st century, 

encompassing a wide range of formats. 

Virtually every medium that has ever been 

used for writing can be found in its 

collections, including papyrus fragments in 

many languages. The most famous 

8 Cloudhosting Oct/Nov 2016 @CHMagAndAwards 


CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER LIBRARY 

"It's about letting people use the tools they are used to and giving all customers 

access to the collections. For a long time people have had to use various 

systems to get access to different objects that were stored in different places. 

Now they can just use the application they prefer to access everything in the 

collections, which, when we are finished, will all live in Preservica." 

fragment is the piece of St John's Gospel 

(pictured here as reproduced in the 

collection), which is believed to be the 

earliest known example of the New 

Testament in existence in any language. 

Physical objects are being photographed, 

documented and archived using the 

Preservica Cloud-based digital 

preservation platform. 

"We're in the process of moving 30TB of 

digitised and born digital material to the 

Cloud," says Andy Land, Digital 

Programmes Manager at The University of 

Manchester Library. "It's part of a University 

wide initiative to capitalise on the cost and 

accessibility efficiencies offered by the 

Cloud. We're pleased to be consolidating 

our Special Collections in one system that 

will ensure our digital materials are both 

digitally preserved and more widely 

accessible." 

The University Library is also pioneering 

the way forward in preserving emails and 

attachments, a practice not often 

considered in other large-scale digital 

preservation programmes. A unique part 

of its Special Collections is the archive of 

over 250,000 emails to the Carcanet 

Press, an internationally important 

publisher of poetry and works in 

translation. 

"These emails are a perfect example of 

how we need to preserve newer materials 

with the same care we allocate to ancient 

manuscripts," says Land. "For the past 15 

years, many people have been writing 

emails rather than letters to editors, and 

we need to preserve this important part of 

written history. Email applications and 

formats have changed over the years, so 

ensuring emails and their attachments are 

entrusted to a digital preservation system, 

so that they can be readable in the future, 

is extremely important to us." 

The Library is also unique in selecting 

Preservica's Enterprise Edition hosted in 

the Cloud in order to use the platform's 

APIs to integrate the system to serve as 

the backend to its many search-based 

applications, such as its 'Discovery' 

application. "It's about letting people use 

the tools they are used to and giving all 

customers access to the collections," says 

Land. "For a long time people have had to 

use various systems to get access to 

different objects that were stored in 

different places. Now they can just use the 

application they prefer to access 

everything in the collections, which, when 

we are finished, will all live in Preservica." 

The University Library did a three-month 

pilot test of the Preservica platform in 

2015. Preservica was selected from a 

series of vendors, and the platform was 

deployed in April 2016. Training on the 

platform was conducted in June and the 

digital programmes team have now begun 

moving what will eventually be 30TB+ of 

files in to the system. 

"As part of its digital programme, The 

University of Manchester joins a community 

of universities and colleges we are working 

with in order to future-proof vital history, and 

we are pleased they have selected 

Preservica as their digital preservation 

partner," says Jon Tilbury, Preservica CEO. 

"It is encouraging to see the University 

Library include digital preservation in its 

Cloud-based strategy, and we look forward 

to seeing the new exhibitions and initiatives 

this programme will bring." 

The University Library is looking forward to 

using the Preservica system to help make 

its Middle Eastern studies collection more 

widely available. Middle Eastern Studies 

have been offered at the University since 

1851 and Iranian studies has been a key 

part of this since the late 19th century. Its 

collection of Iranian newspapers and 

periodicals offer unique insight on the 

minute details of historical developments of 

major consequences, such as the Coup of 

1953, the Revolution of 1979, or the "Tehran 

Spring" of 1999-2002. 

Over the coming months, the Library's 

team of archivists, photographers and IT 

specialists will work to digitise and ingest 

files in to the Preservica platform via the 

Preservica Bulk Upload Service, which 

works in conjunction with AWS 

Import/Export Snowball to accelerate 

moving large amounts of data into and out 

of the AWS Cloud. 

More info: www.preservica.com 

www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk 


Oct/Nov 2016 Cloudhosting 

9

STRATEGY: EMAIL ARCHIVING 

Locked in? 

There are good reasons not to lock your email archive up in the Cloud, 

argues Stefan Schachinger, Consulting System Engineer in Data 

Protection at Barracuda Networks 

It is now a relatively simple process to 

migrate emails to a cloud solution such 

as Google Apps for Work or Office 365. 

Even demanding projects rarely take longer 

than three months and it is rare for projects 

to overrun. But as easy as it now is to get 

your emails into the Cloud, there are a few 

risks that need to be considered right from 

the planning stage, in order to avoid your 

email archive getting trapped on Cloud. 

Free email services, like social networks, are 

usually among the first places where users 

encounter Cloud services. They are quick 

to set up, easy to use and reliable. These 

attributes become positive prejudices that 

users unconsciously transfer to corporate 

solutions when the question of whether a 

company's internal email should be 

migrated into the Cloud comes up. But 

this question is a little more complicated 

than it first appears. Legal requirements, 

cost considerations and internal 

guidelines mean Cloud-based email 

services have to meet completely different 

requirements in business scenarios. True, 

it's easy to get to the Cloud, but if 

businesses neglect to take these 

additional requirements into consideration, 

they face getting trapped there. 

ARCHIVING: A KEY CONSIDERATION 

Let's first take a look at one of the major 

differences between Cloud-based email 

services in a business versus consumer 

scenario. As convenient as email is, as a 

form of corporate communication it is often 

essential that business emails are kept for a 

number of years. If this correspondence 

includes content that is relevant for tax 

purposes, such as invoices, account items, 

budgets, and organisational documents, 

then emails must be retained for up to six 

years. In some industries, certain emails 

must be kept indefinitely, so that cases can 

be reviewed at any point in the future. 

On top of this, the line between work and 

personal emails is often quite blurred. The 

latter may only be stored with the explicit 

consent of the employee concerned. But 

companies that expect their employees to 



STRATEGY: EMAIL ARCHIVING 

keep their brands and products a talking 

point on social media don't get very far 

with blanket bans on personal 

correspondence and often permit personal 

or semi-personal emails. 

For archiving purposes, this means that 

there are emails that must be stored, others 

that can be stored, and others that 

definitely cannot be stored under any 

circumstances. This scenario simply 

expects too much from the in-built 

regulatory mechanisms of the majority of 

Cloud services on the market today. 

The legal requirements around archiving 

are at the core of the most important 

questions surrounding what happens if a 

company wanted or needed to switch to 

another Cloud service provider at a later 

date and can be one of the biggest causes 

of vendor lock-in. 

SPIRALLING COSTS 

Another aspect to be considered upfront is 

whether costs scale with the actual usage of 

services. One of the great advantages of the 

Cloud is the ability to adapt resources 

according to needs. This can work 

wonderfully when managing seasonal 

peaks, but can backfire where email 

accounts and the corresponding archives 

are forgotten about, and take up valuable 

memory space. 

For example, most Cloud services have a 

per-user pricing structure. When it comes 

to archiving, this per-user fee is charged for 

as long as each user appears in the Active 

Directory. That includes former employees 

or accounts that can no longer be used, for 

example due to a change in the 

employee's surname. 

According to the international consulting 

firm the Hay Group, employee turnover in 

Germany was 14 per cent in 2013, while the 

European average was 18.3 per cent. Thus, 

it would not even take eight years to create 

an email archive that contains twice as 

many accounts as active employees, with 

the company paying its fee on a peraccount 

basis. 

If a business was to implement a separate 

archiving system from a third party provider 

at the time of their migration to the Cloud, 

these costs could easily be saved. 

LACK OF INDUSTRY STANDARDS 

Companies are now making conscious 

efforts to avoid a vendor lock-in when 

designing their IT infrastructure, and this is 

leading to the realisation that Cloud lock-in 

should also be avoided. One of the 

important factors in this is interoperability 

across Cloud computing providers. 

Organisations cannot blindly rely on the 

fact that their new Cloud provider will 

support the same standards and protocols 

as their existing provider. In reality, there is 

still a lack of world-wide adopted 

standards, for example around standard 

data structures and APIs. 

Even so-called 'industry standards' are 

often a result of distribution and market 

share, as opposed to open protocols or 

formats that have been defined by 

standards development organisations. 

Competitors therefore only support them if 

it can no longer be avoided. For example, 

Microsoft Azure now supports AMQP and 

Azure Active Directory now supports the 

majority of identity protocols and token 

formats. Organisations should also be 

wary of industry standards, because more 

and more providers are pursuing an 

"embrace and extend" strategy, where 

standards are supplemented with 

proprietary extensions to enable enhanced 

functionality. 

While commonly overlooked, this can 

actually become one of the major causes 

of Cloud vendor lock-in. Therefore, 

organisations must be aware of the 

appropriate standards and protocols used 

by various Cloud providers to support data 

and application portability. 

SOLUTION? AUGMENT YOUR 

PUBLIC CLOUD 

The Cloud offers a whole host of benefits, 

from simple remote access to essential files, 

streamlined collaboration capabilities and 

reducing the burden on in-house IT teams. 

However, in many respects, public Clouds 

are the lowest common denominator for 

most users. The need for bespoke additions 

applies to archiving just as it does to 

encryption, security and integration with other 

applications. Every customer has different 

requirements, and this is where a mix of 

public Cloud, private Cloud and on-premises 

systems needs to be considered. 

In its most recent report on the topic, Gartner 

stated that hybrid Cloud will be the most 

common type of deployment. Gartner VP 

Thomas Bittman noted that, even though 

Cloud adoption is on the rise, "most 

enterprises will continue to have an onpremises 

(or hosted) data centre capability". 

Considering the flexibility, scalability and the 

ability to retain a degree of control over 

company data, it's easy to see why a hybrid 

setup is advantageous for many businesses. 

Moving an entire email archive between 

Cloud-based solutions such as Google Apps 

for Work and Office 365 can quickly become 

a mammoth task when the migration must be 

done in accordance with legal and 

compliance regulations. A separate archiving 

solution, which can work regardless of the 

mail client in use, can make it possible to 

comply with various requirements around the 

storage of data, even if the system it's 

attached to were to change. 

It's essential that this third-party archiving 

solution can operate smoothly with all Cloud 

and on-premises systems in the company's IT 

infrastructure. Such a solution is the only way 

to protect data regardless of any technology 

changes, future developments, or any 

necessary migrations, while also keeping costs 

under control and providing the company 

maximum flexibility with their IT infrastructure. 

More info: www.barracuda.com 




11

CASE STUDY: ASSET HANDLING 

Close connections 

Asset Handling, a leading UK software provider for asset management 

services, has selected Interoute to deliver its Cloud infrastructure platform 

and disaster recovery 

facilities in the UK. However, the company is 

seeing increasing international interest in its 

proven industry solutions and the Interoute 

platform offering of more than a dozen 

geographical locations across Europe, USA 

and Asia, makes it a good fit for future global 

expansion of the company's customer base. 

Software provider Asset Handling 

has chosen Interoute managed 

Cloud services to run its relational 

database SQL platforms for storing 

customer data collected from sensors and 

other asset management input streams. It 

also uses Interoute Virtual Data Centre 

(VDC) as an agile, scalable IaaS service 

to perform real-time big data analysis of 

its vast quantities of system data and 

logs, which processes around 20 million 

records of data per week. 

Asset Handling helps its customers 

make informed decisions based on 

intelligent data. Its products target 

specific business challenges such as the 

management of assets, resources, 

projects and risk. A consultancy service is 

offered to ensure data is captured at the 

right time and is made available to people 

who need it, ensuring seamless delivery 

of a full service to clients, reducing costs 

and improving operational performance. 

Its asset management products and services 

use the Interoute Cloud to process data 

gathered by customer-side sensors and other 

input mechanisms, and assist customers in 

using the results to identify risks, prevent 

breakdowns, optimise maintenance regimes 

and reduce unplanned downtime. Via a 

customised dashboard, Asset Handling 

provides its customers with real-time access 

to critical asset information such as vibration, 

temperature and acoustics. Customers can 

access and share real-time meaningful 

information wherever they are and from any 

connected device. Service engineers, for 

example, can access the analysed data 

before they arrive on site and make sure they 

have the right replacement parts for any 

repairs, to avoid multiple trips. 

Asset Handling has a strong customer base 

that includes many UK water companies. To 

meet the data residency requirements of these 

customers, Asset Handling currently uses 

Interoute's physical and Virtual Data Centre 

Stephen Harrison, Director at Asset 

Handling, said: "Interoute's excellent reputation 

provides additional credibility to our portfolio 

and has helped us win new business. For us, 

Interoute is the perfect partner to meet our 

requirements for a trusted, scalable and global 

Cloud provider. The Interoute Cloud gives us 

a complete digital platform with the flexibility 

that we need. With Interoute, we can quickly 

stand up an SQL server or expand our big 

data analytics platform to interact with new 

production environments. We can focus on 

developing our product roadmap safe in the 

knowledge the platform is under control." 

Matthew Finnie, CTO at Interoute, 

commented: "Asset Handling's systems 

manage over a million readings each day. 

Faced with such large volumes of data, it's 

essential for it to use a highly secure, yet 

agile platform. Interoute's geographically 

distributed Cloud computing facilities 

benefit from being built directly into the 

private network backbone. Data can be 

hosted and processed closer to users, 

providing a better overall performance 

experience. With the support of Interoute's 

digital platform, Asset Handling is turning 

big data into valuable information for its 

customers in the UK and beyond." 

More info: www.interoute.com 



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CLOUD HOSTING AWARDS 2016 

Winning ways 

The first Cloud Hosting magazine awards night goes with a bang 

Well, we got there in the end - the 

first ever Cloud Hosting 

magazine Awards night was a 

resounding success from every 

perspective, hugely exceeding our 

expectations in terms of numbers of votes 

cast and guests attending on the night. 

The splendid Cumberland Hotel on 

Marble Arch was full almost to bursting 

as MC and cricket legend Chris Cowdrey 

and comedian Stephen Grant kept over a 

hundred attendees entertained 

throughout the evening. 

Big winners included SUSE (Cloud 

Storage Product of the Year), 4D Data 

Centres (Cloud Provider of the Year) and 

FalconStor who won the overall Product 

of the Year award for FreeStor. 

We very much hope that the CH Awards 

is set to become a regular feature of the 

industry calendar – not just as an 

opportunity to show off to customers and 

prospects about your successful 

products and projects, but also as a 

networking and social event for the 

sector. It was great to see so many 

people from different businesses, large 

and small, sharing a drink and a trade 

secret or two over a glass of bubbly. 

Read on to see the full list of winners and 

runners-up. 




INNOVATION OF 2016 

WINNER: Internet Watch Foundation for IWF Image Hash List, Global Release 

RUNNER UP: Acronis - Backup 12 

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has been working for over 20 years to eliminate child 

sexual abuse imagery from the internet. We offer a safe and anonymous place to report these 

images and work internationally with over 130 Members from the industry to get this content 

removed, no matter where it is hosted in the world. 

The IWF partnered up with Microsoft and created a revolutionary system called the IWF Image 

Hash List. This pioneering technology has the potential of eradicating online child sexual abuse 

imagery for good. A 'hash' is a unique code -similar to a digital fingerprint- which is generated 

from the data in an image. Companies using our Image Hash List - a collection of digital 

fingerprints - can therefore stop the upload, sharing and hosting of these indecent images on 

their systems.With more than 125,000 individual hashes to date, our Image Hash List is the most 

up-to-date and effective way of protecting both customers and colleagues from illicit imagery. 

The Hash List has already been implemented by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo, and is changing the way industry fights 

online child sexual abuse. We at the IWF are very proud to have been awarded the Innovation of the Year award. We believe that our work is 

important and we work hard to support the industry in doing the right thing and stop online child sexual abuse. Winning this top technology 

award shows us that collaborating with the industry and developing new technology will help us achieve our vision of a child sexual abuse free 

internet. A big thanks to Cloud Hosting Magazine for their support and encouragement! 

ONE TO WATCH: COMPANY 

WINNER: StorPool 

RUNNER UP: Neopost 

“It is an honour to be one of the Cloud Hosting Awards winners. We are proud to be recognised 

for our efforts to help businesses transition to the cloud Era and improve their competitive 

position and grow market share by innovation in the IT stack. Being shortlisted was important, 

but winning this prestigious award shows that our efforts to reinvent the storage industry are 

noticed and appreciated, that we are having a real impact," said Boyan Ivanov, CEO and cofounder 

at StorPool Storage. "We found a prominent place in our headquarters to keep this 

award and see it every day. It serves as an inspiration to our team, whose exceptional expertise, 

professionalism and motivation will continue to drive StorPool further ahead.” 

StorPool is a software-defined storage solution that allows companies building public and 

private clouds to run data storage, alongside applications, on standard x86 servers. StorPool 

usually replaces / upgrades legacy SAN solutions, all-flash/SSD arrays and other inferior storage 

software solution. StorPool was founded in 2011, based on the belief that storing data should be simpler, cheaper and more efficient. 

StorPool’s intelligent storage software allows businesses to achieve real business value by innovation in the IT stack. Its advanced fullydistributed 

architecture delivers extraordinary performance, exceptional efficiency, scalability and flexibility. It can reduce Total Cost of 

Ownership (TCO) of a cloud by up to 10 times, thus helping companies build the most efficient clouds currently possible. For further 

information, please visit www.storpool.com 

CLOUD PROJECT OF 2016 IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR 

WINNER: Secure Cloudlink with Innovate UK for Cloud and Identity Management 

RUNNER UP: Talend with UNOS for Life Saving Organ Transplant Work 

Secure Cloudlink’s winning project involved integrating and securing all of Innovare UK’s 

internal applications, including Salesforce and Office 365, whilst providing all users with a 

single point of access through a branded marketplace. The user experience for Innovate was 

significantly enhanced due to the personalised desktop, which specifies and orders all the 

cloud services employees have access to. With Secure Cloudlink, all applications are 

accessed via a single sign-on (SSO) experience, which removes the frustration of setting and 

remembering login names and passwords by the user. Users are now able to request access 

to new applications via the marketplace from an administrator, set by Innovate internally. 

Commenting on the award win, Gideon Wilkins, VP of Sales and Marketing, said: “Our 

approach is very much geared towards overcoming the issues that organisations face in 

today’s digital economy. Our aim is to deliver an exceptional client experience whilst 

protecting the brand and reputation of companies, which ultimately saves them money. This award win and the work we have done with 

Innovate comes as welcome validation of our mission. We are delighted to have won this award and we look forward to making great 

strides within the industry as we continue to provide seamless, secure yet password free user access to cloud and on-premise 

applications and services.” 




15


CLOUD PROJECT OF 2016 IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR: UNDER 100 EMPLOYEES 

WINNER: Nutanix with Millennia Computer Services for Overhauling Disaster Recovery Capabilities in the Data Centre 

RUNNER UP: Eaton with Total Cloud for Eaton guarantees uninterrupted service for Total Cloud 

Thanks to Nutanix, hosting company Millennia Computer Services has overhauled the 

disaster recovery capabilities of its data centre, to support the mission critical systems of its 

leisure and theatre ticketing customers. 

With many of Millennia's customers handling terabytes of data and millions of transactions, 

the company sought a robust disaster recovery solution to replace the existing server and 

storage area network infrastructure in which disparate systems had led to frequent 

incompatibility and reliability issues. 

Turning to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform for its production system, Millennia has 

been able to leverage web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design to natively 

converge compute, virtualisation and storage into a highly scalable and resilient, softwaredefined 

solution. 

Paul Phillips, Senior Regional Director at Nutanix, stated: "Millennia's journey with Nutanix exemplifies both the accessibility and impact that 

can be made in a short space of time with the enterprise Cloud. It's an approach which delivers what the modern data centre demands, where 

end users expect 100% application availability and reliable performance SLAs." He continued: "Being recognised at the Cloud Hosting Awards 

in the Private Sector Cloud Project of 2016 category is a true honour and underpins the fact that when it comes to high availability, 

hyperconverged systems are not all made equal." 

CLOUD PROJECT OF 2016 IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR: OVER 100 EMPLOYEES 

WINNER: Commvault for The HarperCollins Cloud Story 

RUNNER UP: iland with Bluestone Group for Disaster Recovery for UK Financial Services Firm 

It's Commvault's mission to help customers like HarperCollins, on their journey to the Cloud. 

70% of our customers are managing some of their data in the Cloud and by focusing on 

simplicity and automation we can help customers cut costs, save time and reduce risk. 

HarperCollins UK prides itself on leading the industry in innovation. 

Parent company NewsCorp has a "Cloud first" strategy that aspires to migrate 75% of its 

global IT infrastructure into the Cloud. HarperCollins decided to migrate to Azure, but it 

involved a steep learning curve for everyone involved, as everything would have to change - 

except for Commvault. HarperCollins realised the Commvault platform it had bought five 

years previously would work exactly the same in the Cloud, as it had on premise. Aside from 

this easing the transition, Commvault's deduplication feature proved to be a key benefit, 

delivering high savings in terms of space and the IT department's time. 

In addition to following the NewsCorp Cloud First Strategy, moving to Azure Cloud services enabled HarperCollins to consolidate its IT and 

switch to a more manageable OPEX commitment. 

TRANSFORMATIONAL PROJECT OF 2016 

WINNER: NaviSite and SRD Technology UK for Safeline enabled to help thousands more sexual abuse survivors with SRD 

and NaviSite’s Cloud solutions 

Sean McAvan, Managing Director of NaviSite Europe comments: "Winning the 

Transformational Project of the Year for our work with Safeline and our partner SRD 

Technology UK is a powerful example of how technology can deliver an impressive societal 

impact, enabling the charity to help even more victims of abuse and secure their highly 

confidential case data. 

Safeline had been struggling with overcrowding in their office space and staff were unable 

to work remotely. In short, they were being held back from helping more people due 

tooutdated technology. 

That's why we're really proud that through the work of the NaviSite team and our partners at 

SRD Technology UK, we were able to provide Safeline with a Desktop-as-a-Service solution 

to deliver secure application access to their staff, via laptop and mobile devices. These 

changes made it possible for the charity to help far more people, enabled staff to work remotely, saved them tens of thousands of pounds in 

operational costs, and allowed them to more than triple their staff! 

We're honoured to be a part of such a fantastic project, and delighted that Safeline can now help even more people." 

Cloudhosting 

16 Oct/Nov 2016 




ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECT OF 2016 

WINNER: easycopiers Limited for Project Noble 

RUNNER UP: Verne Global and Datto for Icelandic Campus 

easycopiers are absolutely delighted to have won the Environmental Project of the Year at the 

Cloud Hosting Magazine awards. 

We believe that doing good business means intelligently deploying new technologies to 

make the workload easier both to employees as well as the planet. Being environmentally 

friendly should no longer be a goal, it should be an integral part of doing business and Cloud 

technologies give a scale and flexibility to achieve that. This project is a real example of the 

Cloud in use to deliver environmental benefits that every company should be inspired by. It is 

not just a big or theoretical example of Cloud computing, unavailable to the masses. 

If this forward thinking attitude to using Cloud based technologies was replicated across 

every larger enterprise (and indeed to the smaller and mid-sized SMEs) there would be a 

demonstrable change in both better business practice and for the environment. 

easycopiers are looking forward to the next 12 months of projects with our customers and to entering and winning next year's awards! 

CLOUD RECRUITMENT COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Evolution Recruitment Solutions 

RUNNER UP: Avion Recruitment Solutions 

We are proud to announce that Evolution are the Cloud Recruitment Company of the Year. 

It is fantastic to see our team recognised for all their hard work within the Cloud sector. 

We work with leading companies and start-ups across the world in the development of Cloud 

products. Thank you to everyone who voted for us to win this award. It continues a fantastic 

2016 for Evolution which has, so far, seen us win: 

Best IT Recruitment Agency - Recruiter Awards 

Best Niche/Specialist Agency - The Drum Recruitment Business Awards 

Security Recruitment Company of the Year - Computing Security Awards 

Best Recruitment Agency to work for - Recruitment International Awards 

1st company globally to achieve - Investors in People : Platinum accreditation 

As leaders in talent attraction, team building and employee value proposition, we can help your business to grow. 

We partner with clients to develop specific recruitment strategies, tailored to their requirements utilising our world class recruitment 

methodology and bespoke candidate intelligence systems. 

If you have a vacancy or a team to build, it would be great to listen to your plans and challenges to see where we can add value. 

SECURITY PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Barracuda - NextGen Firewalls 

RUNNER UP: Symantec - MSS 

On what was a brilliant evening at the 2016 Cloud Hosting Awards, we were thrilled to see our 

NextGen Firewalls awarded Security Product of the Year. We are really proud to once again be 

publicly recognised as providing a leading security solution for public Cloud deployments. 

We believe that this success comes down to not only our technical innovation but also the 

very close partnerships we have fostered with the world's leading public Cloud services. The 

Barracuda NextGen Firewall was among the first security products available on Amazon Web 

Services and Microsoft Azure. We are also one of the few security vendors with the Microsoft 

Azure Certified badge, which assures customers that our firewalls have been tested for 

readiness and compatibility with a wide range of deployments. This year, we were honoured 

to be named Microsoft Azure Certified ISV Partner of the Year, for our continued innovation to 

help customers securely move workloads and applications into Azure. 

We believe that the NextGen firewalls provide exactly what customers need: comprehensive, next-generation security capabilities - based on 

application visibility and user identity awareness - combined with optimal efficiency and throughput for the Cloud. For many organisations, the 

Cloud is beginning to feel like a natural extension to their networks and data centres. Our firewalls help businesses enjoy the scale and 

economics of the public Cloud, without having to compromise on security. 




17


DISASTER RECOVERY PRODUCT OF 2016 

WINNER: Arcserve - Arcserve Cloud 

RUNNER UP: Barracuda - Backup Disaster Recovery 

We are delighted to have won Disaster Recovery Product of 2016 for Arcserve Cloud, voted 

by readers of Cloud Hosting Magazine! Arcserve Cloud backup solutions go beyond 

advanced data recovery capabilities such as: 

Cloud disaster recovery and disaster recovery testing 

Remote virtual standby for Cloud failover and Cloud disaster recovery capabilities 

Offsite long-term data archiving for regulatory compliance 

Recovery point conversion at the remote site to a virtual server 

Manual triggered failover to remote resources 

What's more, Arcserve Cloud ensures business continuity with efficient image-based Cloud 

storage and unprecedented data protection which is user-friendly and a piece of cake to 

deploy! 

For your free trial: http://arcserve.com/uk/data-protection-software/cloud-backup-storage-disaster-recovery/ 

CLOUD STORAGE PRODUCT OF 2016 

WINNER: SUSE - Enterprise Storage 3 

RUNNER UP: Acronis - Acronis Backup 12 

SUSE is delighted to have won the "Cloud Storage Product of the Year" award for 2016. 

Today, enterprises are typically facing data growth in excess of 30 % a year, including 

the management of large files and unstructured data. When this is combined with tight 

budget constraints, it's clear that traditional proprietary storage systems simply can't 

provide all the answers. 

SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph technology, is the highly scalable and resilient 

software-defined storage (SDS) solution that today's businesses need. It delivers costefficient 

and highly scalable storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives. 

Having won this award, SUSE is certainly not resting on our laurels. On November 28th 2016, 

SUSE announced SUSE Enterprise Storage 4. This new release now offers unified support 

for file, block and object storage. It will be the first distribution of the leading Ceph open 

source platform to deliver this functionality, helping drive further reductions in capital and operational costs. 

If you'd like to know more, please take a look at http://www.suse.com/storage. 

CLOUD PROVIDER OF 2016 

WINNER: 4D Data Centres 

RUNNER UP: UKFast 

4D are extremely proud to announce that having been shortlisted for two awards at this year's 

Cloud Hosting Magazine Awards we came away with Cloud Provider of the Year, an award 

based on reader voting. 

Commenting on the news, Marketing Director Laura Ongaro said: "Even to be nominated for 

Cloud Provider of the Year and also the Editor's Choice award was an absolute privilege for 

4D in a consistently competitive market. We are extremely proud of the Cloud product and 

service we deliver, have always believed that we offer something unmatched in the market 

and the fact that our customers voted for us in such large numbers reinforces this. We'd like 

to say a massive Thank You to all those who took the time to acknowledge what we deliver 

for our customers every day." 

Cloudhosting 

18 Oct/Nov 2016 




ERP PRODUCT OF 2016 

WINNER: NetSuite - NetSuite 

RUNNER UP: IFS - IFS Cloud 

NetSuite is the world's most deployed Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, 

with more than 30,000 organisations across 160+ countries. 

NetSuite ERP delivers the proven, comprehensive financial management capabilities 

required to grow a changing, complex business. NetSuite ERP takes your business beyond 

traditional accounting software by streamlining operations across your entire organisation 

and providing you with the real-time visibility you need to make better, faster decisions - at its 

core, NetSuite ERP helps your employees to do their jobs more efficiently by consolidating 

the use of disparate systems, removing isolated spreadsheets and breaking down barriers 

between business departments or business units. 

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY OF 2016 

WINNER: Vectorworks Inc - Nomad 4 App 

RUNNER UP: LogMeIn 

Based off nominations and votes from readers, as well as a judging panel, the Vectorworks 

Nomad app won Mobile Technology of 2016 at the Cloud Hosting Awards. Specifically, the 

Mobile Technology award honours products that simplify working on the go and inventive 

mobile products or services. 

As part of Vectorworks Cloud Services, the Vectorworks Nomad app was developed to 

empower designers to access their files on any mobile device, whenever, wherever. Available 

for iOS and Android, the app makes it possible to view and navigate 3D renderings, share 

files with clients or collaborators and mark up PDF files to save to Cloud libraries. The app is 

available to anyone, although an expanded feature set is exclusive to Vectorworks Service 

Select members. Learn more at vectorworks.net/cloudservices. 

CHANNEL PARTNER OF 2016 

WINNER: Wick Hill Ltd 

RUNNER UP: Ingram Micro Cloud 

Wick Hill, part of Nuvias Group, holds this award in high regard because it is something that is 

voted for by our peers within the industry. Barry Mattacott, marketing director cyber security 

for Nuvias, commented: "With Cloud services becoming ever more important to our lives and 

businesses, we are particularly pleased to have been voted Channel Partner of the Year at the 

Cloud Hosting awards. The award win shows Nuvias' commitment to delivering and 

supporting Cloud-based solutions and services through the channel." 

Nuvias Group is the pan-EMEA, high value distribution business, which is redefining 

international, specialist distribution in IT. Nuvias has created a platform to deliver a consistent, 

high value, service-led and solution-rich proposition across EMEA. This allows partner and 

vendor communities to provide exceptional business support to customers and enables new 

standards of channel success. The Group today consists of Wick Hill, an award-winning, 

value-added distributor with a strong specialisation in security; Zycko, an award-winning, specialist EMEA distributor, with a focus on 

advanced networking; and SIPHON Networks, an award-wining UC solutions and technology integrator for the channel. All three companies 

have proven experience at providing innovative technology solutions from world-class vendors, and delivering market growth for vendor 

partners and customers. For more information see www.wickhill.comwww.nuvias.com 




19


EDITOR'S CHOICE 

WINNER: iomart 

iomart is proud to have received the Editor's Choice award for 2016 from Cloud Hosting 

Magazine. We have grown as a result of the huge changes in the hosting industry 

brought about by Cloud computing and we have been privileged to share our knowledge 

and insight with the magazine's readers. It has given us the opportunity to educate 

businesses about harnessing the power of the Cloud to its fullest advantage and it has 

connected us with companies that want to innovate and grow. Cloud Hosting Magazine 

is a great resource. We wish the editorial team many more years of success. 

PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: FalconStor - FreeStor 

RUNNER UP: SUSE - SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 

FalconStor is delighted to announce its success at this year's Cloud Hosting Awards by 

winning Product of the Year for its flagship product Freestor. This is the 11th award 

FalconStor has won this year. FreeStor is a single software-defined platform. It allows an 

organisation to control their storage across both legacy and virtual environments. Built on 

four key pillars, FreeStor offers business continuity, optimisation, migration, protection and 

disaster recovery. IT teams have the ability to maximise storage utilisation and reduce costs 

while providing intelligent insight into operational efficiencies. 

FreeStor is an intelligent abstraction layer that allows data to migrate to, from and across 

any platform, be it physical or virtual. By sitting above any hardware, FreeStor allows 

organisations to avoid vendor lock in, thereby significantly reducing costs. FreeStor's 

horizontal architecture unlocks a new world of storage opportunities. This has allowed IT 

Managers, MSPs and CSPs to maximise efficiencies and lower costs while taking advantage of the public Cloud, hybrid Cloud, flash storage 

and software defined storage. FalconStor's goal is to maximise data availability and system uptime to ensure nonstop business productivity 

while simplifying data management to reduce operational costs. Additionally, FalconStor has also recently announced the launch of FreeStor 

for the hybrid Cloud. This update to the FreeStor platform enables enterprises and Cloud service providers (CSPs) to utilise the performance 

and reliability benefits of block-based enterprise storage within a hybrid model at public Cloud prices. 

COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

WINNER: Tintri 

RUNNER UP: Acronis 

Tintri was named Company of the Year at the inaugural UK Cloud Hosting Awards on 20th 

October, 2016. Tintri won the award for the last 12 months of product innovation specific to 

enterprise Cloud. This included predictive analytics, automated optimisation of VM 

placement, and an architecture that makes scaling storage as simple as compute. In this 

same time period, Tintri was recognized as a Visionary on the Gartner Magic Quadrants for 

both Solid State Arrays and General-Purpose Storage. 

The company currently has more than 1,200 customers and has embarked on several 

new programs this year. This includes launching a Global Partner Program to assist 300 

partners worldwide, recently recognised with a five-star rating in the CRN 2016 Partner 

Program Guide. 

Also shortlisted for "Product of the Year" and "Editor's Choice", Tintri offers an enterprise 

Cloud platform that simplifies management, delivers cross-infrastructure visibility and guarantees performance. This is achieved via Tintri's 

unique web services framework-combining the DNA of public Cloud with total control and automation of storage. 

Cloudhosting 

20 Oct/Nov 2016 



ROUNDTABLE: DISASTER RECOVERY 

DR: Test and test again 

A recent roundtable gathered business leaders to debate the findings of 

iland's 'State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK Businesses' survey; 

Monica Brink, EMEA Marketing Director, summarises the conversation 

Outages happen more frequently than 

we think. In the month prior to the 

roundtable British Airways lost its 

check-in facility due to a largely unexplained 'IT 

glitch', ING Bank's regional data centre went 

offline due to a fire drill gone wrong (reports 

suggest that more than a million customers 

were affected), and Glasgow City Council lost 

its email for three days after a fire system blew 

in its data centre. 

Our survey showed that 95% of companies 

surveyed had faced an IT outage in the past 

12 months. We looked at some of the reasons 

for those outages and top of the list were 

system failure and human error. It is often not 

the headlines we see such as environmental 

threats, storms or terrorism that brings our 

systems down, but more day-to-day mundane 

issues. The group suggested that it was often 

at the application level that issues occur rather 

than the entire infrastructure being taken down. 

We discussed the importance of managing 

expectations and how DR should be 'baked in' 

rather than seen as an add-on. Most 

businesses have a complex environment with 

legacy systems so can't really expect 100% 

availability all of the time. DR isn't about failing 

over an entire site any more; it's about preempting 

issues, for example testing and 

making sure that everything is going to work 

before you make changes to a system. 

When we asked respondents about the 

impact of downtime and how catastrophic this 

was, 42% said near seconds would have a big 

impact. This statistic rose to nearly 70% when it 

came to minutes. The group's advice was that 

businesses really need to focus on recovery 

times when looking at a DR solution. 

The roundtable discussed 'over-confidence' in 

DR solutions: the survey found that 58% had 

issues when failing over despite 40% being 

confident that their disaster recovery plans 

would work. Only 32% executed a failover and 

were confident and it all worked well. There 

appears to be a gap between believing your 

business is protected in a disaster and having 

that translate to a successful failover. 

The bottom line is that DR strategies are 

prone to failure unless failover systems are 

thoroughly and robustly tested. Confidence in 

failover comes down to how often IT teams 

actually perform testing, and whether they are 

testing the aspects that are really important, 

such as at the application level. Equally are 

they testing network access, performance, 

security and so on? If testing only takes place 

once a year or once every few years then how 

confident can organisations be? 

The group agreed that the complex web 

of interlocking IT systems is one of the 

biggest inhibitors to successful testing. 

While testing may be conducted on one 

part of a system in isolation, if that fell over 

this can often trigger a chain of events in 

other systems that the organisation wouldn't 

be able to control. 

There appears to be an intrinsic disconnect 

between what management wants to hear in 

terms of DR recovery times and what 

management wants to spend. 

In conclusion, we discussed the need to 

balance downtime versus cost: nobody has 

an unlimited budget. Many of the issues 

raised in the survey can be traced directly 

back to simply not testing enough or not 

doing enough high quality testing. The 

overall advice that iland recommends from 

the survey is to test, test and test again. 

More info: www.iland.com 




21

OPINION: DATA SOVEREIGNTY 

Digital Embassies: 

the new data 

sovereignty 

paradigm? 

Daniel Hickmore of Arkivum explains why a 'digital embassy' approach to 

data sovereignty could be the way ahead for organisations struggling 

with data sharing and retention issues such as healthcare providers 

Before the topic of what a digital 

embassy is can be broached, it is 

important to set out exactly what we 

mean when we talk about data archiving, as 

opposed to the storage of data. Data 

archiving is the process of providing long-term 

data retention by moving data that is no longer 

actively used to a separate storage device. 

Typically, archived data consists of older data 

that is still important to the organisation for 

future reference, and can also consist of 

massive amounts of data that must be 

retained for compliance with best practice or 

regulatory body reporting requirements. 

Traditionally, access to an archive is 

managed by the prime data owner. In health 

and life sciences there is an additional factor: 

the data may need to be shared securely 

between different organisations. This needs 

to be performed in a way that ensures the 

original data is safe, retained in its original 

form and actively managed in order to 

ensure that these requirements be met. 

Examples include the sharing of data 

between life sciences institutes for research 

purposes, or the process of consolidating 

clinical diagnostic services across STP 

(Sustainability and Transformation Plans) 

footprints within the NHS. 

Operations like these are complex and 

fraught with risk. Data security and sovereignty 

have become paramount concerns amid the 

emergence of new models for data retention, 

such as Cloud and hybrid storage strategies, 

and the need to provide controls over multistakeholder 

access to the archived data. 



OPINION: DATA SOVEREIGNTY 

"In the digital embassy, data access by third parties is negotiated within 

controlled conditions, access policies and protocols in order to ensure 

compliance with the relevant privacy, clinical access or data governance 

guidelines. Due to legal and clinical best practice guidelines, it is important that 

the prime data owner is always in control of the data and has confidence that 

the data is preserved and protected with chain of custody processes to prove 

that the record of what has taken place is accurate." 

ENTER THE "DIGITAL EMBASSY" 

The digital embassy model has emerged as a 

new way of defining these requirements and 

creating an appropriate technical architecture 

and methodology to satisfy them. In the same 

way that the embassies of nations provide a 

physical location in which sovereignty is 

demarcated and controlled, the purpose of 

digital embassies is to provide a demarcated 

data safeguarding area under the full 

sovereignty of the data owner. 

The patient or donor needs to trust that their 

data is safeguarded, and available only to the 

appropriate parties. Privacy, security, data 

protection and data integrity are central to 

this: data integrity must be assured for longterm 

retention and future access, while digital 

continuity is ensured through a robust 

disaster recovery and business continuity 

planning approach. 

In the digital embassy, data access by third 

parties is negotiated within controlled 

conditions, access policies and protocols in 

order to ensure compliance with the relevant 

privacy, clinical access or data governance 

guidelines. Due to legal and clinical best 

practice guidelines, it is important that the 

prime data owner is always in control of the 

data and has confidence that the data is 

preserved and protected with chain of custody 

processes to prove that the record of what has 

taken place is accurate. 

ADDED COMPLEXITY 

There is - of course - more to this. An 

additional layer of complexity is introduced 

when considering particular datasets where a 

number of different parameters must be taken 

into account, including: 

Privacy 

Security 

Access rights and privileges 

Data safeguarding and retention 

Data sovereignty, including ownership 

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) 

Industry-specific best practice and 

legislative guidelines 

Geographic jurisdictions: legislative 

guidelines which may vary per country / 

region and per data type 

Several of these parameters are very 

closely interrelated. If it were not enough to 

cope with today's digital security challenges, 

when you couple this with the ticking clock 

to comply with regulatory guidelines and the 

deluge of data being generated by - for 

example - digital healthcare, it is vital that 

organisations consider privacy and 

safeguarding as paramount. 

Currently, Information Lifecycle Management 

(ILM) retention standards and policies do not 

necessarily reflect the rate of progress of 

digitisation in health and these standards are 

changing. The new General Data Protection 

Regulations will be enforced in May 2018. 

The failure of the US Safe Harbour laws has 

undermined data sovereignty, and with Brexit 

changing the European landscape and 

taking us all into unknown territory, it is 

essential for health organisations to 

reappraise their data management strategy. 

UNPRECEDENTED GROWTH 

Concurrently, the acceleration in technology 

innovation in health is driving greater data 

volumes and challenging the robustness of 

health organisations' ILM standards. Massive 

growth in genomic diagnostic sequencing 

and its imminent arrival in mainstream clinical 

diagnostics, along with the shift to digital 

imaging in pathology and uptake in 

document digitisation, have all contributed to 

unprecedented growth in data volumes and 

long-term retention requirements. The current 

standards are struggling to keep up with 

these changes and demands. 

Arkivum is focused on providing solutions 

for this digital horizon, by providing certainty 

of future compliance around data 

sovereignty, security and retention. Part of 

the approach is to consider the digital 

embassy model as the way to provide a 

flexible, exploitable safeguarding 

architecture, whether it be on-premise, 

offsite, in the Cloud or a combination of all 

of these simultaneously. 

More info: www.arkivum.com 




23

STRATEGY: GDPR 

GDPR: don't be strung along 

Lillian Pang of Rackspace addresses some of the most common 

misunderstandings surrounding the new GDPR legislation; rules that will 

affect any business that handles personal data, and therefore the majority of 

organisations in the UK 

With under two years until the UK 

Data Protection Act 1988 is 

replaced with GDPR, businesses 

need to get access to the right information 

about the new legislation to properly assess 

the impact it may have. Misinformation has 

already started to spread which could 

cause some companies to come unstuck, 

so in order to combat some of the most 

common GDPR myths before they take 

hold, we at Rackspace would like to put 

right some of the misconceptions. 

1. GDPR will become irrelevant to British 

businesses once the UK leaves the 

European Union 

UK businesses may think that once the UK 

leaves the European Union they will no 

longer have to follow GDPR mandates. 

However, regardless of whether the UK 

ultimately leaves the EU, the new GDPR will 

apply to all businesses that deal with 

customers within the EU. 

2. Responsibility lies with Cloud and security 

providers - not the business 

It's not just businesses that collect data: any 

business that handles the data will also 

have to ensure they are compliant with the 

new regulations. This means that any 

business that provides data processing - 

regardless of whether it stores the data - will 

be impacted. Previously, businesses may 

have assumed that they could pass on the 

responsibility to their Cloud and security 

providers to be compliant with data security 

regulations, but the onus is beginning to 

shift towards both providers and business 

customers to become more savvy about 

what security measures are necessary to 

protect their data. 

3. German data can't leave its borders 

One myth that has re-emerged since GDPR 

was approved is that German data cannot 

leave its borders. But this is inaccurate - 

data can leave German territory if the 

correct process is followed. There are 

always restrictions on where data can go, 

how it can be used and who has access to 



STRATEGY: GDPR 

it, but as long as a business is compliant 

with EU regulations then Germany 

shouldn't be treated differently to other EU 

countries. For example, in the case of tax 

data, this may be stored outside of 

German borders so long as a copy of the 

original data still exists within Germany and 

the stored data is accessible by the 

applicable German tax authority. 

4. Powerful countries like the USA can get 

access to data in other countries 

The myth that powerful governmental 

bodies can demand access to data stored 

in foreign countries is a very common one, 

but is untrue. For example, the USA 

government recently demanded that 

Microsoft should hand over data stored in 

Ireland, and like all countries, the US had 

to follow due process when Microsoft filed 

an appeal against this in the US. The 

courts decided that the legislation on 

which the US government was relying 

when making the request was not 

sufficient. Although this leaves the issue to 

be debated, it's clear that governments 

cannot operate freely outside of their own 

jurisdiction. 

This myth feeds off the worries around data 

localisation - consumers are naturally 

concerned when they cannot see where 

their data is being sent. As news of large 

businesses and governments requesting 

access to foreign data becomes more 

frequent, the demand for clear legislation 

and regulation will help reassure customers 

that only those that have been granted 

permission maintain control and access to 

their data. 

5. My business encrypts its data, so I'm 

compliant with security regulations 

It would be easy to assume that by simply 

deciding to encrypt its data a business is 

therefore secure. Unfortunately, encryption 

alone is not sufficient. It should be 

regarded as the minimum standard with 

alternative mechanisms also being 

considered. 

As more customers become securitysavvy, 

and ask about measures beyond 

mere encryption, businesses need to 

consider alternative methods to enable 

them to secure data. This could include 

looking at two-factor authentication and 

key management strategies to safely and 

securely store their users' data or deleting 

data that is no longer needed. 

More info: www.rackspace.co.uk 

GDPR: THE ICO PERSPECTIVE 

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) offers a wealth of guidance for businesses concerned about the possible impact of the 

GDPR on their information governance policies, including the following key points: 

The GDPR applies to 'controllers' and 'processors'. The definitions are broadly the same as under the Data Protection Act - i.e. the 

controller says how and why personal data is processed and the processor acts on the controller's behalf. If you are currently 

subject to the DPA, it is likely that you will also be subject to the GDPR. 

If you are a processor, the GDPR places specific legal obligations on you; for example, you are required to maintain records of 

personal data and processing activities. You will have significantly more legal liability if you are responsible for a breach. These 

obligations for processors are a new requirement under the GDPR. 

However, if you are a controller, you are not relieved of your obligations where a processor is involved - the GDPR places further 

obligations on you to ensure your contracts with processors comply with the GDPR. 

The GDPR applies to processing carried out by organisations operating within the EU. It also applies to organisations outside the 

EU that offer goods or services to EU citizens. 

Like the DPA, the GDPR applies to 'personal data'. However, the GDPR's definition is more detailed and makes it clear that 

information such as an online identifier - eg an IP address - can be personal data. The more expansive definition provides for a wide 

range of personal identifiers to constitute personal data, reflecting changes in technology and the way organisations collect 

information about people. 

For most organisations, keeping HR records, customer lists, or contact details etc, the change to the definition should make little 

practical difference. You can assume that if you hold information that falls within the scope of the DPA, it will also fall within the 

scope of the GDPR. 

The GDPR applies to both automated personal data and to manual filing systems where personal data are accessible according to 

specific criteria. This is wider than the DPA's definition and could include chronologically ordered sets of manual records containing 

personal data. 

Personal data that has been pseudonymised - eg key-coded - can fall within the scope of the GDPR depending on how difficult it is 

to attribute the pseudonym to a particular individual. 

More info: ico.org.uk 




25

RESEARCH: CLOUD BACKUP 

Heading in the right direction 

According to new research from CTERA Networks, enterprise data 

protection strategies may not be fully aligned with IT modernisation 

initiatives driven by Cloud computing 

The research shows that while enterprises 

continue to migrate workloads to the 

Cloud at a rapid pace, protection of 

cloud-based servers and applications has not 

fully evolved to meet enterprise requirements 

for business continuity and data availability. 

CTERA's new eBook, 'Game of Clouds', 

showcases the findings of the company's 

inaugural Cloud backup survey, and presents 

a deep look at the state of enterprise Cloud 

data protection. The CTERA-commissioned 

study was conducted by independent 

research firm Vanson Bourne to examine the 

data protection strategies of 400 IT decision 

makers and IT specialists in organisations 

using the Cloud for application deployment 

across the USA and Europe. 

The study analyses the benefits and pitfalls 

of current backup strategies, offers key 

considerations for organisations moving to 

the cloud, and looks at the impact of poor 

backup practices on business continuity. Key 

findings from the research include: 

Organisations are moving to the Cloud 

at a rapid pace to realise efficiency 

gains, real-time scalability and cost 

savings. More than two-thirds (67 

percent) of organisations deploy more 

than 25 percent of their applications in 

the cloud, and 37 percent plan to grow 

their Cloud use by at least 25 percent, if 

not more. In addition, 54 percent of 

organisations are embracing a hybrid 

Cloud strategy that leverages both onpremises 

and Cloud services. 

But two out of three companies (66 

percent) strongly agree or somewhat 

agree that there is less focus on backing 

up applications in the Cloud due to a 

misconception that the Cloud is inherently 

resilient compared to on-premises 

applications. This is perhaps not a surprise 

considering that 62 percent of 

organisations rely on the Cloud provider to 

back up applications running on their 

platform. 

As more enterprise applications move to 

the Cloud and threats such as 

ransomware become more pervasive, the 

criticality of business continuity prevails. 

Thirty-nine percent of respondents claim 

that ensuring business continuity is the 

highest priority when backing up and 

protecting applications and data running 

in the cloud. And 71 percent of 

organisations cite data protection and 

availability as one of the biggest 

challenges when moving to the cloud. 

With more than a third of respondents 

(36 percent) reporting that the loss of 

data in the Cloud would be more 

catastrophic than their data centre 

crashing, and 14 percent of respondents 

claiming it would cost them their jobs, the 

need to get a Cloud strategy right the first 

time is imperative. 

"The enterprise's move beyond traditional 

data centres has re-written the playbook for 

data protection in the cloud," said Jeff 

Denworth, SVP Marketing, CTERA. "As 

organisations adopt Cloud and multi-Cloud 

strategies, traditional backup tools fall down. 

Our research spotlights the key data protection 

considerations and challenges for enterprises 

as they look for simple, efficient, and 

automated solutions that protect critical cloudbased 

applications." 

The full 'Game of Clouds' study eBook can be 

downloaded at the URL below. 

More info: www.ctera.com/re/enterprise-data- 



TECHNOLOGY: DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT 

DAM goes native 

Digital asset management (DAM) powers the processes that run business, 

argues Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo - but without a Cloud-native approach, 

the benefits may be limited 

Cloud-based applications proliferate in 

today's enterprise. From Google Drive, 

Box and Dropbox to Salesforce and 

Adobe Creative Cloud, on-the-go workforces 

rely on the Cloud throughout their day. The 

problem? The traditional digital asset 

management platforms they use to drive 

business workflows and manage business 

content lack the Cloud integration, scalability 

and availability necessary to truly realise the 

benefits and efficiencies of Cloud computing. 

THE VALUE OF DAM 

Why is digital asset management so 

important? Comprised of the management 

tasks, policies and controls for intelligent 

decision making, advanced digital asset 

platforms enable comprehensive business 

workflows that can transform business 

processes. Through the ingestion, 

annotation, cataloguing, storage, search, 

retrieval and distribution of digital assets, 

digital asset management powers the 

processes that run business. 

Yet, without a Cloud-native approach, the 

benefits of digital asset management may be 

limited. A true digital workplace needs to 

enable its workforce to use content efficiently 

and collaboratively, wherever it resides. That 

means powerfully connecting local systems 

with Cloud-based storage, content delivery 

networks, Cloud-file services like Google Drive 

and more. The success of a digital asset 

management solution is directly related to its 

integration capabilities and reach it has 

throughout all content repositories, Cloud and 

on premises. 

While most digital asset management 

vendors refer to their software as Cloud-based, 

they're really products that are Cloud-hosted; a 

version of their legacy on-premises application, 

retrofitted to run on virtual machines. What 

Cloud-hosted solutions can't support is the 

integration, infrastructure, agility, availability and 

security essential to truly benefit from the cloud. 

ADVANTAGES OF A CLOUD-NATIVE 

APPROACH 

In contrast, cloud-native platforms have been 

built for the Cloud. They're rapidly deployable to 

Cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web 

Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure and they 

more intuitively integrate with the Cloud-based 

applications users want to use, like Google 

Drive or Dropbox. 

For example, a true Cloud-native digital asset 

management platform merges local and 

Cloud-based content within a single 

addressable framework with ease. It can use 

content residing in enterprise file sharing 

services (EFSS), as if they were local files, 

making them a seamless part of the content 

workflow. The most advanced digital asset 

management platforms will actually manage 

these files in place while adding full text search, 

versioning, security and integration into 

enterprise workflows as if they were stored in 

the native repository. Developers can thus build 

specific application logic and business 

workflows using files retained in the Cloud, 

while users can access, share and collaborate 

on them right alongside other related content. 

Taking the Cloud-native DAM approach a 

step further is sophisticated search 

functionality. Advanced digital asset 

management platforms that use a Cloud-native 

approach feature powerful embedded search 

functionality that will search across content 

repositories, including those residing in the 

Cloud. As a result, sophisticated workflows can 

be built using faceted search, fuzzy search, 

synonyms search, geo distance and more for 

truly transformative business operations. 

Finally, a Cloud-native approach to digital 

asset management empowers the user 

through comprehensive desktop sync. 

Potential version conflicts between local 

desktop files and the content repository - 

including content residing in the Cloud - are 

automatically avoided. This improves 

workforce productivity, avoiding user frustration 

and saving countless hours of file conflict 

resolution. Collaborative projects instead stay 

up-to-date and efficient to ensure business 

workflows run seamlessly. 

The Cloud is powering digital transformation 

everywhere. But only if and when DAM 

technology is used to its fullest - truly using the 

cloud to its advantage - will transformation 

become embedded throughout the enterprise 

workflows of tomorrow. 

More info: www.nuxeo.com 




27

OPINION: CLOUD SECURITY 

Trust issues 

The move to Cloud leaves many businesses with new security concerns, 

suggests Dave Nicholson, Technical Sales Consultant, Axial Systems: 

organisations now need to ensure that their standards are mirrored -at 

least - by that of their Cloud services provider 

Driven by a range of benefits from 

enhanced scalability to cost reduction 

to ubiquitous access to applications, 

the migration of businesses to the Cloud is 

continuing apace. Indeed, according to 

analyst, Gartner, more than $1 trillion in IT 

spending will be directly or indirectly affected 

by the shift to Cloud during the next five years. 

Any business making the transition will 

naturally be focused on achieving optimum 

levels of data security. The choice of a third 

party Cloud services provider is therefore 

critical - and there are a host of issues to 

consider. For example, do the terms and 

conditions of their prospective provider meet 

their requirements; and what about data 

sovereignty, security and even compensation 

if something goes wrong? 

ENCRYPT EARLY 

Just the simple fact of moving data to the 

Cloud brings with it security concerns - and 

having a rigorous approach to encryption in 

place is critical in this context. Businesses 

need to ensure for example that any data 



OPINION: CLOUD SECURITY 

"One of the big issues for any business running hybrid cloud is: do they 

have a security policy that works seamlessly across both on-premise and 

cloud services? If somebody wants to access the business's on-premise 

data they go through a gateway: generally a VPN, or front-end web server. 

However, if an employee tries to access data in the cloud, the business is 

unlikely to have any control over, or visibility of, that process. That's because 

there is typically a standard way of accessing cloud services that is not 

necessarily in line with the organisation's standard security policies." 

transitioned to the care of that provider is 

encrypted the moment it lands rather than 

post-landing. Best practice is for the business 

to encrypt data itself as it leaves their building. 

This ensures there are two layers of 

encryption - so that if one is compromised, 

one remains encrypted. 

While the choice of provider is a key upfront 

concern, businesses also need to decide 

from the outset what data they want to move 

to the Cloud and what to retain in-house. 

That's why we are seeing the hybrid Cloud 

model becoming de facto especially for larger 

businesses, who see benefits in keeping 

more sensitive customer data on-premise. 

A MATTER OF POLICY 

Ultimately, the business itself needs to accept 

a high level of responsibility for the security of 

its cloud-based data and this is especially key 

with regards to data access. One of the big 

issues for any business running hybrid Cloud 

is: do they have a security policy that works 

seamlessly across both on-premise and 

Cloud services? 

If somebody wants to access the business's 

on-premise data they go through a gateway: 

generally a VPN, or front-end web server. 

However, if an employee tries to access data 

in the cloud, the business is unlikely to have 

any control over, or visibility of, that process. 

That's because there is typically a standard 

way of accessing Cloud services that is not 

necessarily in line with the organisation's 

standard security policies. 

BRING YOUR OWN CHALLENGE 

Many Cloud services will come with user 

name/password authentication out-of-the-box 

and that is likely to bring with it an element of 

risk. The challenge for the business is to 

manage and mitigate those Cloud service 

access risks in the same way as it would its 

on-premise service risks. After all, Cloud data 

belongs to the business not the Cloud service 

provider, and the business is ultimately 

responsible for protecting it. And in the age of 

BYOD where many devices used in the 

corporate environment are unmanaged, that's 

often a significant challenge. 

So what's the solution? Education is key, of 

course. Businesses need to highlight the 

message that employees should take a 

responsible approach to data protection. They 

must be aware of the potential security threats 

and do all they can to mitigate them - from 

keeping care of devices they use at work to 

ensuring passwords are consistently strong. 

But in this new security environment, 

businesses also need to find technology 

solutions that allow them to mitigate risk. A 

key part of this is to step up the level of 

authentication that those devices require 

before they can access Cloud data. 

Businesses can, for example, deploy an 

authentication portal or an access broker 

which means that if a user wants to access 

data in the cloud, they have to authenticate 

via the business's own domain. That critical 

touch point enables the organisation to 

establish control over data access. And they 

can further mitigate risk by making the 

authentication mechanism adaptive 

depending on who and where the user is; 

what they want to access and what devices 

they are using. 

REAPING THE REWARDS 

So in summary, before businesses move to 

the cloud, they first need to find a Cloud 

service provider they can trust; define 

which services and applications they are 

going to transition and then put a security 

policy in place. 

Critically also, across all of this process, they 

need to find some form of access broker and 

an adaptive authentication mechanism that 

delivers the highest possible level of control. 

At that point, they will have a fully secure 

approach to data access in place and be 

ideally placed to reap the many rewards that 

moving to Cloud services can bring. 

More info: www.axial.co.uk 




29

CASE STUDY: COAL AUTHORITY 

Repairing the 

procurement process 

The Coal Authority is moving its supplier 

sourcing, management and purchasing to the 

Cloud with Wax Digital's web3 Source to Pay 

The Coal Authority manages the 

effects of past coal mining, 

including subsidence damage 

claims which are not the responsibility of 

licensed coal mine operators. It deals with 

mine water pollution and other mining 

legacy issues. 

As an executive non-departmental public 

body, sponsored by the Department for 

Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, the 

Coal Authority has been protecting the 

public and environment in Britain's coal 

mining areas for over 20 years, and brings 

their experience to deliver more 

sustainable solutions to resolve the 

impacts of mining. 

Focusing on improving spend visibility 

and supplier compliance across its £30 

million annual expenditure, the Coal 

Authority is using web3 Source to Pay to 

drive a standardised and connected 

approach to its sourcing and 

procurement practices. 

The Wax Digital solution will digitise the 

entire Source to Pay process, from 

sourcing suppliers through to raising 

purchase orders and e-invoices, to 

issuing payment. It is geared to improving 

and enhancing the process and making it 

more efficient by removing the use of 

paper and manual approvals. 

Coal Authority staff will use web3 to buy 

goods and services, including contractors 

to deal with coal mining related hazards, 

contracts for the construction of mine 

water treatment schemes and their 

ongoing operations, as well as 

purchasing everyday office items, such as 

IT and stationery. 

The organisation often needs to 

purchase goods and services quickly so 

they can provide solutions to manage 

public safety and environmental issues 

associated with historical coal mining 

activities. web3 Source to Pay will facilitate 

rapid purchasing and approvals through 

compliant suppliers in these timepressured 

situations. 

Paul Frammingham, Chief Finance and 

Information Officer for the Coal Authority, 

said: "We wanted to make it as easy as 

possible for our colleagues to buy from 

approved suppliers at the right price. So 

we turned to the digital market place to 

source cost effective services and found 

that the intuitiveness of Wax Digital's web3 

technology met our requirements." 

The Coal Authority will also use web3 

Source to Pay to automate its supplier 

sourcing and management processes, 

which are vital to ensuring that it has a 

supply base that is compliant with public 

sector and environmental regulation. 

Wax Digital's ability to easily integrate 

with the Coal Authority's finance platform 

SunSystems and other data sources using 

its Integration Platform as a Service web3 

Connect was also critical to its selection. 

web3 Connect's custom application 

connectors also make it easy to integrate 

the Source to Pay platform to support 

procurement and wider business 

processes. 

Anne Coleman, Head of Procurement for 

the Coal Authority, added: "We also 

selected web3 due to its integration and 

ability to achieve a continuous automated 

Source to Pay cycle. Integration is vital to 

the success of our Cloud approach, 

allowing us to easily connect procurement 

into wider processes." 

Paul Ellis, Managing Director, Wax Digital, 

commented: "Complex purchasing and 

buying requirements like the Coal 

Authority's can cause delays in cases that 

require urgent responses, but they also 

require compliance with industry and 

environmental rules. By using web3 

Source-to-Pay the organisation will have 

the assurance of a clear understanding of 

its spending and the ability to react quickly 

when its procurement needs change." 

More info: www.waxdigital.com 



What if you could store, synchronise and share your 

Vectorworks files in the cloud to make decisions from any location? 

Now you can. 

www.vectorworks.net/service-select/cloud-services 

Authorised Distributor 

For more information visit 

www.vectorworks.co.uk 

or call 020 8358 6668 

In partnership with:

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