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Cloudhosting
Feb/March 2017 l www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk l £8.50 Where Sold
Safe and sound:
Fintech goes virtual
What's on the
cards?:
Predicting the year
ahead
Data centre
resiliency:
Too much pressure?
Scared to innovate:
Security concerns hold IT back
Cashing in:
Metro Bank moves into the Cloud
Protection
mechanism:
Collaboration in the pharma sector
INDUSTRY NEWS - USER STORIES - OPINIONS - INTERVIEWS - ANALYSIS
COMMENT
From the Editor
This issue of Cloud Hosting will land on reader's desks and inboxes just a week or
two after Cloud Expo, an event which has grown into the biggest and best
attended trade show of its type in the whole of Europe. The multi-strand expo -
now encompassing Smart IoT, Cloud Security, Data Centre World and Big Data World
as well as Cloud Expo itself - was spread across almost the entire floor-space of the
voluminous ExCel in London's docklands.
The presentation theatres were hugely popular, with large queues outside in advance
of talks from the likes of BT, Google and Microsoft alongside industry specialists such
as Pulsant, Navisite and OVH. Cloud Hosting magazine had staff at the show
throughout both days, and as well as visiting stand and attending seminars we also
managed to sign up a healthy batch of new readers - so if this is your first time of
reading, welcome aboard!
Elsewhere in this issue Claranet unveil new research which suggests that UK IT
departments are more likely than many European counterparts to have concerns about
cloud security - which in turn may be making such organisations 'scared to innovate'.
Ian Furness of Claranet says it's understandable that organisations may prefer to host
applications internally, particularly those associated with high risk information: "But just
because your servers are under your roof, this doesn't necessarily make them more
secure. In fact, if managed and maintained correctly, alternative delivery models - such
as public cloud - are suitable for even the most sensitive data and can bring massive
transformational benefits to organisations."
We also look at the issue of data centre resiliency, something increasingly impacted
by the growth of cloud. Operators face a constant battle of balancing workloads
against available budgets. Many data centre owners choose to over-provision
resources and servers 'just in case' a disaster situation occurs, however this can be
immensely costly. There are other strategies available, as RF Code's Adrian Barker
comments: "It is all about understanding and managing your environment to ensure
reliability. Operational management solutions can provide real-time insight, control and
predictability so data centre managers can solve environmental and operational
challenges with valuable insight, rather than guesswork. Data centre assets need to be
monitored and tracked to maintain performance and guard against technical failure.
Environmental conditions need to be dynamically adjusted with changes in demand."
EDITOR: David Tyler
(david.tyler@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
NEWS EDITOR: Mark Lyward
(mark.lyward@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Abby Penn
(abby.penn@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
DESIGN: Ian Collis
(ian.collis@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR: Josh Boulton
(josh.boulton@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
MANAGING DIRECTOR: John Jageurs
(john.jageurs@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
DISTRIBUTION/SUBSCRIPTIONS:
Christina Willis
(christina.willis@cloudhostingmag.co.uk)
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With the likes of Cisco claiming that around 83% of data centre traffic in the next three
years will be generated through cloud computing, these issues need addressing, and
sooner rather than later.
David Tyler
david.tyler@cloudhostingmag.co.uk
www.cloudhostingmagazine.co.uk Feb/March 2017
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CONTENTS
Contents
Industry predictions...............................................................................................8
A little later than usual - due to unforeseen circumstances! - we ask leading industry names
to look ahead: what flavour of Cloud will we prefer, is file sync and share on its way out,
and even the future of the data centre itself are all under discussion
Case study: AstraZeneca..............................................................................14
Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is leveraging Cloud collaboration technologies while
keeping users and data secure
Automating the IT production line........................................................22
David Grimes, CTO at Navisite, discusses the growing role of APIs in reducing costs
and developing tomorrow's businesses
The main event.......................................................................................................24
Cloud Expo, Europe's biggest and best attended Cloud and digital transformation show
took place recently in London's ExCel: Cloud Hosting magazine was there to report back
Editor’s comment.........................................................3
News.......................................................................................6
88% adopting Cloud
Red Hat & IBM in new deal
Performance anxiety............................................12
Jonathan Arnold, Managing Director at Volta Data
Centres, explains how high performance computing can
change your business for the better
Scared to innovate?.............................................16
New research from Claranet suggests that UK IT
departments are among the most likely in Europe to
identify security/compliance as their biggest challenge
Technology: ECM....................................................17
Advantages of the Cloud reach to the core of most
businesses - but executives must choose their partners
carefully, argues Tim Rushent, Account Manager for
industry and commerce at Hyland
Pressure sensitive...........................................19
The growth in Cloud services is putting increased
pressure on data centre resiliency, suggests Adrian
Barker, General Manager EMEA at RF Code
Case study: FISCAL Technologies........21
Fintech specialist FISCAL Technologies is securing
customer data and winning new business thanks to The
Bunker's virtual hosting infrastructure
4
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26-27 April 2017, Manchester Central
NETWORKS &
INFRASTRUCTURE
26-27 April 2017,
Manchester Central
AI, ANALYTICS
& IOT
CLOUD
CYBER
SECURITY
OPEN
SOURCE
DEVOPS
BE INSPIRED
EUROPE’S NUMBER ONE ENTERPRISE IT
EVENT IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND
REGISTER FREE
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NETWORKS AI, ANALYTICS & & IOTAI, DEVOPS ANALYTICS & IOT DEVOPS OPEN
OP
INFRASTRUCTURE SOURCE SO
NEWS
HEAVENLY CLOUD
Navisite has partnered with PMGC to
provide its Infrastructure-as-a-
Service (IaaS) and Desktop-as-a-Service
(DaaS) solutions to multi-discipline, notfor-profit
organisation, BCHA
(Bournemouth Churches Housing
Association). PMGC and Navisite were
selected following a formal tender
process for their strong value-for-money
proposition, as well as the flexibility and
scalability of their solution. Nearly 500
users were migrated to the Cloud environments,
including roles, access rights
and over 1 Terabyte (TB) of data.
BCHA develops services that help bring
together housing, health and social care
in order to deliver support to society's
most in-need. Prior to reviewing its IT systems,
the organisation was using legacy
versions of software and carrying out their
important work through on-premise
servers. After a careful review process,
BCHA selected PMGC and Navisite's
Cloud hosting, IaaS and DaaS solutions
to meet the key objectives of reducing
system downtime and increasing the reliability
and speed of access to IT services.
With PMGC's help, BCHA's network
infrastructure was moved to an environment
that supports roaming use with centralised
profiles and file redirection. Since
moving to the Cloud, system downtime
has been vastly reduced and BCHA
employees are able to quickly connect to
applications and data - achieving a
reduction in access rate time of approximately
80 per cent, compared to the previous
system.
This reduction in time, facilitated by having
both their Cloud hosting and DaaS
environments in the same high quality
Navisite data centre facility, allows staff to
spend more of their working day to help
address real client needs. The migration
also involved upgrading and re-implementing
BCHA's full suite of both traditional
and bespoke applications.
www.navisite.co.uk
TIME TO DESIGN FOR FAILURE ON PUBLIC CLOUD SERVICES?
The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS)
outage, which impacted a number of
high-profile websites and service providers,
has highlighted the importance of specific
skillsets to support public Cloud services.
This is according to Radek Dymacz, head
of R&D at disaster recovery and AWS consulting
partner Databarracks, who states
that organisations should adopt a 'design
for failure' approach to prevent outages.
Radek explains: "The growth of hyperscale
Cloud services has led to an
increase in managed services for these
Clouds. We have seen telecoms providers,
data centre owners and managed service
providers launch their own Cloud services
and, in many cases, pull out of the market.
Many of these businesses are now focusing
their efforts on providing managed
services for the hyperscale public Clouds
of AWS, Azure and Google. However, platforms
like AWS need a different approach
to traditional hosting.
"The ability to design for failure is essential
to the value proposition of public Cloud
UK CLOUD ADOPTION RATE REACHES 88%
The latest research from the Cloud
Industry Forum (CIF) reveals that the
overall Cloud adoption rate in the UK now
stands at 88 per cent, with 67 per cent of
users expecting to increase their adoption of
Cloud services over the coming year.
However, while organisations are clearly taking
a Cloud-first approach, the industry body
predicts that the vast majority of companies
will be maintaining hybrid IT estates for
some time to come. Conducted in Feb
2017, the research, polled 250 IT and business
decision-makers in large enterprises,
SMBs and public sector organisations.
The results reveal that since the first
research was conducted in 2010, the overall
Cloud adoption rate has increased by 83
per cent, with an increase of 5 per cent
since last year. There has been a more significant
increase in Cloud adoption amongst
platforms, and yet organisations are still
consuming AWS services as though
they're building a traditional hosting environment.
The great strength of platforms
like AWS is that you can build in resiliency
in a way that scales depending on your
budget. At the larger end of the spectrum,
this might involve using object storage
across multiple Availability Zones and even
Regions to provide an extra layer of
resilience. This is expensive but, for large
organisations, so is downtime.
"We recommend that all organisations
adopt a 'design for failure' approach. This
means that if any single element fails then
there is an easily-identifiable specific
cause, with a known resolution.
Radek concludes, "What we're seeing in
customer demand agrees with this trend as
businesses are now more mature in their
use of Cloud services. They have gone
beyond testing, so they are now seeking
help to increase resilience, optimise cost
and support it round-the-clock."
www.databarracks.com
small and public sector organisations, who
have previously trailed behind overall adoption,
with adoption rates now standing at 82
per cent for both, up from 54 per cent and
62 per cent, respectively, a year ago.
Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF, commented: "This
research highlights how far the IT landscape
has come since we first conducted this
research in 2010. We are entering an
unprecedented time of change as digital
technologies disrupt entire industries and
customer expectations. Cloud is critical in
enabling companies to cope with this
change and this research highlights how
organisations are increasingly and consistently
warming to the Cloud delivery model,
especially as they begin the realise the benefits
to be had from migrating their apps and
infrastructure to the Cloud."
www.cloudindustryforum.org
6
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NEWS
NOVOSCO SECURES SEVEN-FIGURE CLOUD CONTRACT
A3,500-room hotel group has chosen
managed Cloud provider Novosco to
upgrade and managed its entire IT infrastructure.
The seven-figure deal will see
Novosco work in partnership with Village
Hotel Club, which has 28 hotels, to manage
its migration to the Cloud.
Founded in 1995, Village Hotel Group
employs over 4,000 people and has a presence
in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and
other major cities across England, Scotland
and Wales. It is one of the major hotel
groups in the UK, and has been continuing
to expand its presence, with plans in place
for a new 153-bedroom hotel at Lakeside
Business Park in Portsmouth.
Novosco is a managed Cloud provider
with clients in the public, private and voluntary
sectors across the UK and Ireland,
including Premiership football teams, some
of the UK's largest health trusts and many
top companies. Novosco employs almost
150 people and has offices in Belfast,
Manchester, Dublin and Cork. Last year it
acquired English specialist IT security solutions
and managed services expert NetDef.
Novosco Managing Director, Patrick
McAliskey, said: "Village Hotel Club is a
highly dynamic and growing company, and
we are delighted to work with them to add
value to their business and help facilitate
their on-going expansion. As a result of the
investment being made, we will be able to
scale the company's IT infrastructure as it
continues to grow."
www.novosco.com
SOFA SO GOOD FOR RACKSPACE AND DFS CLOUD DEAL
Retail giant DFS handled a 34 per cent
increase in transactions per day during
its most recent busy sales periods by utilising
a Rackspace managed Cloud solution.
By undertaking "peak planning", DFS has
managed spikes in website traffic around
Christmas, and has been able to grow the
business through new digital services.
DFS is the UK's leading upholsterer, with
more than 110 stores nationwide as well
as additional outlets in Ireland, Holland
and Spain. The company has experienced
a huge increase in mobile and online
shoppers, with the platforms especially
popular amongst customers researching
new purchases.
Undertaking a process of digital transformation,
DFS has introduced in store functionality
on staff tablets allowing them to
show customers the products they are
interested in on the video walls and
screens, really bringing the product to life.
The business experiences two peak
shopping periods throughout the year, one
being the 'Guaranteed by Christmas' ordering
period in September, and the other
around the Boxing Day sales that filters
through to the New Year. Traffic to the website
during these times spikes by 68 percent
compared to average levels during
the rest of the year.
Employing a VMware Managed
Virtualisation offering, Rackspace worked
with DFS to carry out peak period planning
to help ensure the retailer is prepared to
deal with traffic surges and help ensure
online channels work effectively for customers.
In addition, through a working relationship
with ecommerce specialists
Salmon who rebuilt DFS's websites,
Rackspace is able to provide DFS with the
reassurance that it has some of the top
technology minds supporting its business.
www.rackspace.co.uk
IBM, RED HAT COLLABORATE
IBM and Red Hat have announced a
strategic collaboration designed to help
enterprises benefit from the OpenStack
platform's speed and economics while
more easily extending their existing Red
Hat virtualised and cloud workloads to the
IBM Private Cloud. As part of this new
collaboration, IBM has become a Red Hat
Certified Cloud and Service Provider, giving
clients greater confidence that they
can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform and
Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private
Cloud when the offering launches for general
availability at the end of March 2017.
Additionally, Red Hat Cloud Access will
be available for IBM Cloud by the end of
Q2 2017, allowing Red Hat customers to
move eligible, unused Red Hat Enterprise
Linux subscriptions from their data centre
to a public, virtualised cloud environment.
www.ibm.com/cloud-computing
GOOGLE CLOUD PARTNER
Claranet is now part of the Google
Cloud Partner Program and has
achieved Premier status and the Partner
Specialisation in Infrastructure The Google
Cloud Partner Program is designed to
help partners build their practices or products
on the Google Cloud Platform in
order to help them reach higher levels of
success. The Partner Specialisation
recognises strong customer success and
technical proficiency.
Charles Nasser, Founder & CEO, at
Claranet, said: "Achieving Google Cloud
Premier Partner and Infrastructure
Specialisation status is an important step
forward for Claranet. Google Cloud provides
opportunities for significant business
transformation by allowing customers to
rapidly develop high-performance applications
and leverage data assets. Helping
customers improve through effective use
of platforms such as Google Cloud is central
to Claranet's proposition and reinforces
our commitment to customers."
www.claranet.co.uk
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2017 PREDICTIONS
What's on the cards this year?
A little later than usual - due to unforeseen circumstances! - we ask leading
industry names to look ahead to what 2017 might bring: what flavour of
Cloud will we prefer, is file sync and share on its way out, and even the
future of the data centre itself are all under discussion
Noone would argue that 2016 proved
to be a year of extraordinary events
and changes, politically and socially
as well as in terms of the Cloud industry
and the wider IT sector. Many of us are
eagerly looking forward to a new start and
hopefully some positive news. But as
always happens when we invite vendors
and analysts to submit their best guesses
for the sector in the coming 12 months,
there is a wide variety of opinion on offer.
WHITHER THE CLOUD?
The debate around what form Cloud
computing will most likely take in the future
continues, and as you'd expect, different
vendors have their own views on what
approach is likely to win out.
Jon Lucas, Director at Hyve Managed
Hosting comments: "Cloud computing has
been one of the biggest tech topics of last
year. Given the levels of hype, people could
be forgiven for thinking that it's already
established a winning position in the
technology industry. Yet, according to IDC,
Cloud spending is some distance away from
its peak, compared to investment in 'traditional'
approaches to IT. Their estimates say it will be
2020 before spending on Cloud services will
come close to equalling what is spent on
traditional IT. For IT users and purchasers, this
will mean Cloud will continue to dominate
strategic technology decision making next
year. For most, the debate has already gone
far beyond whether they will use cloud, to how
they can use it more effectively in even more
areas of their business. Businesses will also
seek out greater expertise in order to optimise
their use of cloud. The role of Cloud and
managed service providers will grow as IT
teams shift their emphasis from the traditional
role of 'keeping the IT lights on' to focusing on
how tech can deliver bottom-line benefits."
Jacco van Achterberg, EMEA Sales Director
at Cloudian sees security being a driver for
hybrid Cloud growth: "Last year we predicted
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2017 PREDICTIONS
"For most, the debate has already gone far beyond
whether they will use Cloud, to how they can use it more
effectively in even more areas of their business. The role
of cloud and managed service providers will grow as IT
teams shift their emphasis from the traditional role of
'keeping the IT lights on' to focusing on how tech can deliver bottom-line
benefits." - Jon Lucas, Hyve Managed Hosting
that Amazon S3 would become the de-facto
standard for Cloud storage. The rise of S3
has helped drive the adoption of cost-effective
object storage. Now, object storage is not just
a niche market; people are using it in everyday
life without realising, be it through social
media, Netflix and many other outlets that rely
on the service. S3 has turned object storage
into an industry movement. Looking ahead
into 2017, we are predicting a bigger
migration of data to cloud environments with a
focus on the deployment of hybrid
public/private Cloud solutions. With more
companies looking to deploy a Cloud storage
solution, the protection and control over
sensitive data will be a further driving force
toward hybrid solutions."
Geoff Barrall, CTO at Nexsan agrees but
goes further: "Towards the end of 2016 we
heard that vSphere-based Cloud services will
run on AWS in 2017, a move that shows the
major players are preparing to accommodate
customers in a hybrid Cloud environment. No
matter how far we look into the future, there
will always be data too sensitive to trust to
public Cloud services. So whilst some
companies will create a hybrid Cloud strategy,
and some may go all private, most
companies, especially larger ones, will not risk
their data to a 100% public Cloud strategy. So
what of file sync and share? Today's NAS
storage solutions have not kept up with the
times, creating a gap between the worlds of
the data centre and the connected mobile
user. 2017 will see forward thinking companies
not just creating secure file sync and share
capability, but intertwining them with the
company's storage environment to avoid
damaging or duplicating files. In essence, next
year we will see the delivery of the data centre
on the go."
CULTURE SHOCK
Paul Zeiter, President of Zerto is another
proponent of the hybrid Cloud approach:
"Over the last few years we've seen previous
predictions around increased public Cloud
adoption come to fruition, and we predict
2017 will be the year hybrid Cloud asserts
itself as the dominant Cloud environment.
Cloud spending will continue to be on the
incline, and we believe a majority of that
spend will go toward hybrid Cloud
infrastructures; this is proving to be the sweet
spot for the enterprise. Organisations that
have spent a lot of time and resources on their
own data centre are not likely to do away with
it all overnight. Adopting a hybrid Cloud
environment allows for a transition to Cloud in
a way in which feels most comfortable; a
gradual approach that can provide both
immense cost savings as well as recovery
benefits. Hybrid Cloud allows for a variety of
recovery options should the need arise, onpremises,
public Cloud or a little of both,
which help companies be better prepared for
a variety of disaster scenarios. Additionally, the
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2017 PREDICTIONS
"2017 will be the year that organisations are able to break
free from the shackles of their storage hardware vendor and
take advantage of innovations in hybrid Cloud deployments
for storage. This is being driven by the long-awaited promise
of Software Defined Storage and that public Cloud pricing
can be realised for data protection."- Gary Quinn, FalconStor
perceived complication and expense of
transitioning to cloud, that has previously held
many IT organisations back, is now starting to
wither. More and more companies are
realising that adopting a hybrid Cloud
approach, with the right partners in place, can
actually be quite simple and affordable."
On the other hand, Campbell Williams,
Group Strategy and Marketing Director at Six
Degrees Group sees Cloud having to win
friends in the boardroom: "Businesses have
continued to rapidly adopt Cloud computing
in 2016 and IT leaders have become more
business focused. Now, IT is not just about
'keeping the technology lights on', it is a way to
transform organisations. Cloud technology
may have high levels of automation, but it
doesn't run itself. Businesses now realise that
human expertise is central to the success of
Cloud strategies. Moving into 2017 we are
seeing the growth of a broader 'Cloud culture'
where the influence of IT leaders is going far
beyond just tech teams and instead going
right into the boardroom. IT leaders in 2017 will
have to be more business savvy than ever
before and those in the boardroom will need
to be receptive to this change."
SDS ON THE RISE
Software-defined is one of the buzzwords of
the last year, and there is no question that this
will continue to be the case in 2017. Gary
Quinn, CEO FalconStor, says: "2017 will be the
year that organisations are able to break free
from the shackles of their storage hardware
vendor and take advantage of innovations in
hybrid Cloud deployments for storage. This is
being driven by the long-awaited promise of
Software Defined Storage and that public
Cloud pricing can be realised for data
protection. While SDS has in the past been
more about utilising legacy equipment, it can
now be used to leverage multi-vendor
hardware implementations that also leverage
multi-vendor public Cloud offerings."
CENTRE OF ATTENTION
The growth of Cloud will of course continue to
impact on how data centres evolve, as Patrick
Brennan of Atlantis Computing suggests: "In
2017, Cloud will continue to drive radical
change across enterprise IT. Businesses will
make even greater investments outside of their
own data centres, particularly in 'as-a-service'
computing. 2017 will be the last year we
spend money in our own data centre as we
move applications to the public Cloud. The
Cloud will also bring about significant change
in the role of IT professionals - IT leaders with
more general experience will create teams of
people with specialised knowledge of key
elements of IT infrastructure, such as storage
and security."
Jonathan Arnold, MD of Volta Data Centres
also sees radical changes in the future of the
data centre: "The modern data centre is set to
undergo big changes in 2017. Companies are
now accepting the need and practicalities of
outsourcing the care of their IT equipment to
third parties, but it is more imperative than ever
that those partners have the right
infrastructure, service levels and set-up.
Location, performance and technical
excellence all underpin the choices a business
will make when outsourcing to a data centre.
These can't be underestimated and in 2017
we will see the rise of the 'super data centre' -
delivering a service like no other. Those legacy
data centres that don't invest and update to
keep up will be left standing in the wake of
facilities that can offer exactly what this new
breed of customer needs."
Arnold goes on: "Legacy equipment is
finding its way out of enterprise data centres,
giving way to new equipment capable of more
computing in a smaller footprint. With
customers being more aware of the amount of
data they use and how they are using it, they
are looking to data centres to use
supercomputing technologies, such as High
Performance Computing clusters which exploit
parallel processing to enable advanced,
resource intensive applications to be run
efficiently, quickly and sustainably."
Chuck Dubuque of Tintri sounds a similar
warning: "Companies don't want to actively
manage their data centres-in fact they can't. It's
impossible to meet the agility and scale
demands of the digital market. 2017 will be the
year companies turn away from legacy
architectures that are crudely automated (or
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2017 PREDICTIONS
"The rise of S3 has helped drive the adoption of costeffective
object storage. Now, object storage is not just a
niche market; people are using it in everyday life without
realising, be it through social media, Netflix and many other
outlets that rely on the service. S3 has turned object storage
into an industry movement." - Jacco van Achterberg, Cloudian
automatable) and look for intelligent
infrastructures built for virtualisation and
Cloud workloads that are highly autonomic,
providing guaranteed levels of service, high
performance, and policy based
management for workloads that run for 3
years or 3 seconds."
DIGITAL WATCH
A relatively new term that we are certain to see
more of in 2017 is 'digital transformation'.
Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, touches on
the theme: "While some commentators expect
2017 to be flat on IT spending overall, we
expect to see IT increase spend on Cloud and
digital transformation. In particular, we'll see
investment in emerging integrated digital
platforms that enable a business to move
faster, deploy resources quicker and exploit
new market opportunities. The majority of
business-critical information for many
organisations is still in systems that are not
currently in the cloud, but as part of their
development, many companies will seek to
exploit Cloud-based models of consumption.
Exploiting corporate information whilst
continually innovating will drive a need for a
bimodal digital platform approach, or else
companies will risk ending up losing ground."
Dimension Data's CTO Ettienne Reinecke
says digital is about building truly customercentric
business models on IT including the
network, data centre, applications, and other
infrastructure - which may be on-premise, or
Cloud-based. "Today, there's no such thing as
a digital strategy - just strategy in a digital
world. And while the digital age is creating a
degree of uncertainty for some organisations,
it's also opening the doors to exciting
possibilities and ushering in an era of infinite
potential. In the year ahead, control and
ownership of data and metadata will emerge
as a point of discussion - and indeed
contention. That's because data and metadata
are the 'gold dust' that allow organisations to
glean rich insights about customer behaviour.
In addition, metadata allows organisations to
identify specific behavioural patterns, derive
business intelligence, and make informed
business decisions."
POST-BREXIT BLUES?
The impact of the 2016 referendum on EU
membership is yet to be felt, of course, but
there is little question that data sovereignty
and information management issues will arise.
As Dimension Data's Reinecke argues,
organisations are increasingly protective of
their metadata, and wary of who has access
to it. "Organisations don't just want ownership
and control of their data for compliance
reasons: they want it to perform analytics. We
expect that this will trigger some interesting
discussions between businesses and their
Cloud providers. For example, where are the
boundaries with respect to ownership,
especially around metadata. We foresee this
issue resulting in a bit of 'push and pull' among
the various parties."
Volta's Jonathan Arnold suggests: "Brexit
has brought about a greater need for data
sovereignty and for consumers to
understand that their data is held in a country
with data privacy laws they have confidence
in. London continues to be the number one
city location for colocation, with 72% of UK
consumers highlighting that they would feel
more confident if they knew their data was
being stored in London rather than other
European cities."
Matthew Finnie of Interoute reminds us that
the GDPR legislation will still affect practically
every business in the UK in 2017, whatever
Brexit may bring: "We will see 2017 beset
with GDPR readiness and testing, as the
bounds and impact of the regulation start to
become apparent. The onus will be on
enterprises and providers to seek out
solutions that have definitive compliance,
rather than waiting for challenges and legal
disputes to unravel in the courts.
Investments in compliant platforms that
support a simple approach to geographic
location of data will avoid this confusion."
Ultimately, there is only one absolutely
certain statement that we can make with
regard to the coming year: that in about 12
months time, Cloud Hosting magazine will be
running another 'predictions' feature not unlike
this one, containing just as many diverse
views. Anything more than that - well, your
guess is as good as ours! Ch
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11
STRATEGY: HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Performance anxiety
Jonathan Arnold, Managing Director at Volta Data Centres, explains how
high performance computing can change your business for the better
Big data has changed the way
companies view information; they
now recognise its value almost as
an asset on the balance sheet. How it is
managed, analysed and used to deliver
new services determines everything, from
operational performance to customer
satisfaction - not least through the
effective use of that essential single view
of the customer.
As a result, more and more companies
are looking to data centres that have
embraced high performance computing
(HPC). With its foundations in
supercomputing technologies, HPC
clusters exploit parallel processing to
enable advanced, resource intensive
applications to be run efficiently, quickly
and sustainably. This is done by using
huge amounts of power while dividing
activities between multiple processors,
dramatically reducing processing times
from hours to minutes.
HPC enables companies to scale
processes significantly, for example in the
cases of collecting, storing, analysing and
processing more data. In turn this will reduce
costs and increase profits through optimised
production and delivery of a service.
Companies with access to HPC solutions will
be able to develop and analyse increasingly
large databases of information.
Previously the need for HPC was limited
to markets such as engineering or
science and academia, focused on dataintensive
calculations.
One of Volta's customers, Academia,
specialises in providing software, IT
hardware, training and service solutions to
a vast number of clients within the
Education (and other) sectors. It required
a partner able to cope and scale with the
ever-increasing data needs of its own
customers and chose to work with Volta.
This enabled it to provide excellent
service, uptime and data speeds to its
customers in line with their expectations
and demands.
However, the business world is now
recognising the advantages of HPC and
looking to data centres to provide these
same capabilities.
One industry that has embraced high
performance computing is media postproduction,
where high quantities of data
need to be processed and moved as
quickly as possible. In this market,
reliable, accessible and secure IT
infrastructure is imperative to ensure
companies can deliver their world-class
movies on schedule. Downtime, latency
and poor security cannot be accepted in
the fast-paced and commercially sensitive
movie marketplace.
Without a partner able to perform at the
same speed, post-production studios will
struggle to meet the pressing demands
required by real-time editing and online
collaboration.
While these two sectors are just
examples of early adopters of high
performance computing, it's clear that
other businesses will benefit from faster
and more efficient processing.
For anyone looking to get more out of a
lot of data, HPC could be the answer, or
at least part of the solution. While the
growth of data acquisition and processing
demands is far outstripping the ability of a
standard CPU, a data centre with HPC
infrastructures will be able to help
customers get more out of their big data
by developing patterns and analysis.
HPC heralds a new opportunity to
innovate in order to meet the demands of
our new, data-devoted world. It is costeffective
and powerful, putting more
information back more quickly into the
hands of the people who need it. With
speed and analysis at your fingertips, your
business processes could be what
propels you to the head of the pack. And
when data is fully recognised as a
financial asset on your balance sheet,
how you treat it and how you make it work
effectively for you will help determine how
successful your company becomes.
More info: www.voltadatacentres.com
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2017
COMING SOON
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CASE STUDY: ASTRAZENECA
Focused on protection
Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is leveraging Cloud collaboration
technologies while keeping users and data secure
As a global pharmaceutical
company whose footprint includes
operations in over 100 countries,
AstraZeneca has an immense amount of
data to protect, thousands of users to
connect, and a highly regulated
environment to operate in.
To help tackle these challenges,
AstraZeneca Chief Information Officer,
Dave Smoley, developed an IT strategy
that put collaboration at the forefront,
breaking the traditional mould of
conservative pharmaceutical companies;
allowing users, patients and medical
professionals to share data and make the
most of new science, creating a lean,
fast-paced and creative environment.
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
In addition to collaborating with leading
universities and other pharmaceutical
companies, AstraZeneca has tens of
thousands of salespeople globally who
need immediate access to their data from
anywhere in the world. With the old ways
of connecting through VPNs proving to
be cumbersome, the team at
AstraZeneca started looking to the Cloud
for answers, specifically, how to drive
secure and effective collaboration
through widely used Cloud-based tools
like Box.
"People couldn't understand why they
need to VPN-in to access Box," says Jeff
Haskill, AstraZeneca's Chief Information
Security Officer. "With the help of Skyhigh,
we've removed that friction and offer a
more streamlined solution which is still
secure and compliant, but a night and
day difference from what our employees
are used to." With Skyhigh, AstraZeneca
now enforces security and compliance
policies across Cloud services like Box
without adding any friction in the form of
VPN or new agents on devices, making
the secure path the easy path for users.
With the consumerisation of IT on the
rise, the use of shadow, or unsanctioned
Cloud services, has grown within the
enterprise as any employee with a credit
card or email address can sign-up for
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CASE STUDY: ASTRAZENECA
new Cloud services without the
knowledge or approval of IT. As
employees start sharing data outside the
enterprise, they increase an
organisation's overall risk of data loss and
exfiltration.
"What we needed was visibility," says
Haskill. "As we pushed more data into the
Cloud, we really had to answer the tough
questions - what are we using the Cloud
for, what's our data doing, where's it
moving to, and who has access to it?"
To gain the granular visibility and control
AstraZeneca was looking for, they
decided to leverage CASB (Cloud Access
Security Broker) technology and brought
in Skyhigh Networks. Haskill and his team
deployed Skyhigh for Shadow IT to help
answer questions about who had access
to their data and where it was going.
AstraZeneca uses Zscaler as their inline
proxy to monitor web traffic across users,
devices and locations and protect
employees from malicious or
compromised sites. Skyhigh seamlessly
integrates with existing technologies like
Zscaler to process proxy logs to provide
the visibility into AstraZeneca's Cloud
usage as well as the individual risk ratings
of each service.
Using the integration, AstraZeneca can
also analyse a particular Cloud IP address
to see if the site is malicious or serving
malicious content and block it if so.
With increased visibility, Haskill and his
team were able to leverage Skyhigh's
Global CloudTrust Registry which includes
the risk ratings of over 19,000 Cloud
services to allow or block Cloud services
based on their individual risk scores, and
further drive adoption to Box through justin-
time coaching and user education.
"I've been in this field a long time and
not much surprises me," says Haskill. "We
thought we would have a lot of shadow IT,
we found it was true and now we can act
upon it."
In addition to driving adoption and
consolidating services, AstraZeneca also
uses Skyhigh to further secure their Box
usage. By using Skyhigh, Haskill and his
team are able to drill down and see who
has access to sensitive data, who it has
been shared with, and also have the
ability to extend their existing on-premises
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to the cloud.
As such, they can limit and control
access based on user role, device type
(managed and unmanaged) and user's
geographic location; all while notifying the
security operations centre if compromised
accounts or insider threats are detected.
"Skyhigh lets us use Box to its full
capability," says Haskill. "We can see how
our data is being used and if it is being
shared with third parties."
DATA DRIVEN SECURITY
In utilising Skyhigh as a central control
point to enforce policies across all Cloud
services, Haskill and his team are armed
with the actionable information they need
to continue to lower risk across the
organisation and gain executive support.
"We have the proof, down to the
smallest kilobyte of data, which allows us
to have intelligent discussions with the
executive leadership teams and with the
business, because we have actionable
data to share," says Haskill. As a result,
Haskill knows that the overall risk posture
at AstraZeneca has decreased by the way
the business approaches Cloud usage:
"When IT can bring the audit committee
and the executive members together and
they are confident and comfortable using
the Cloud, it is huge. You know you've
made an impact on risk. It is no longer IT
security saying, 'we believe this, or we
think that'. We have the data we need to
answer their questions and provide the
metrics showing how Skyhigh is
mitigating and lowering risk. It's the facts."
FORWARD LOOKING
As Haskill and his team continue to
enable their workforce's needs for global
collaboration, all new services are
screened and "wrapped in Skyhigh,"
allowing for the required controls to be in
place. "Skyhigh has allowed us to
leverage new Cloud technologies that
wouldn't have been possible before,"
says Haskill. "Our users never see
Skyhigh even though it is a key part of
our whole IT security strategy, allowing us
to keep our users and data safe so they
can have the global access they need on
any device."
With a target of having a substantial
proportion of their apps in the Cloud by
2018, it is imperative for AstraZeneca to
have solutions that integrate into existing
solutions, as the old, traditional model is
heavy on paperwork and requires onpremises
devices.
"Skyhigh integrated seamlessly with our
existing providers like Zscaler, and feeds
into our SIEM, so we get the information
that is important for us and we can
continue to be fast, lean and agile," says
Haskill. Leveraging the integration
between Zscaler and Skyhigh,
AstraZeneca can secure and govern
Cloud usage, by pushing governance
policies based on Skyhigh's Cloud
insights directly to Zscaler to block highrisk
services, and enforcing granular DLP
policies on Cloud usage.
"Skyhigh has streamlined application
management from weeks to hours and
that's key to our overall strategy to be
fast," concludes Haskill. "The reduction in
man hours allows us to focus on more
important things, like enable our users
and deliver on the key science that makes
AstraZeneca a great place to work."
More info: www.skyhighnetworks.com
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15
RESEARCH: SECURITY
Scared to innovate?
New research from Claranet suggests that UK IT departments are among
the most likely in Europe to identify security/compliance as their biggest
challenge - and as a result, they are also more likely to host their
applications internally
stumbling block to the prosperity of
businesses in the UK."
Vanson Bourne surveyed 900 end user
IT leaders from mid-market businesses
in the six markets in which Claranet
operates (Germany, Benelux, France, Spain,
Portugal, and the UK) and found that 57 per
cent of UK organisations rank security and
compliance as the biggest IT challenge, joint
highest with security conscious Germany.
This concern is reflected by the fact that 50
per cent of applications managed by UK
businesses are hosted on internal
infrastructure, which can be attributed to
prevailing attitudes towards cloud security
and data ownership. Additionally,
authentication and security are the
applications that are most likely to be
hosted internally, with 63 per cent of UK
organisations doing so, due to the fact that
these are often associated with highly
secure data.
For Ian Furness, Hosting Services Director at
Claranet, it's critical that British businesses
address these security concerns and maintain
the integrity of their data so they can facilitate
innovation and respond to changing market
pressures. He explains: "Security concerns
amongst UK organisations are justified as
businesses come under increasing pressure
to keep up with the constantly evolving threat
landscape, especially as more data is
analysed and stored online. However, these
security concerns make organisations a lot
more risk adverse, which ultimately stifles
innovation.
"Considering that today's businesses are
becoming much more software driven and the
gate to competitiveness comes down to
adapting applications that respond to
increasing market pressures, security
concerns, if left unaddressed, present a major
According to Furness, organisations often
equate security with having perceived control,
which indicates why British businesses are
more likely to host their applications internally.
It's understandable, he argues, that
organisations may want to take this approach
for their applications, particularly those that are
associated with high risk information: "But just
because your servers are under your roof, this
doesn't necessarily make them more secure.
In fact, if managed and maintained correctly,
alternative delivery models - such as public
cloud - are suitable for even the most sensitive
data and can bring massive transformational
benefits to organisations."
Claranet's conclusions from the research
are clear: though security is not likely to
change as the number one IT priority any
time soon, the specific threats, and the ways
businesses manage and respond to them,
most certainly will. Ian Furness comments:
"Businesses will need to stay alert to changes
to legislation and the nature of prevailing
threats as more and more data is stored and
analysed. IT services providers (ITSPs) have a
critical role to play here. A well-staffed ITSP
with years of security expertise is likely to be in
a better position to maintain the integrity of
data, compared to an under-resourced inhouse
IT team. By working with a trusted
service provider businesses can benefit from
transformational benefits and highly compliant
security protocols in tandem."
More info: www.claranet.co.uk
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TECHNOLOGY: ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Choose your
partners
The advantages of the Cloud reach to the core of
most businesses - but executives must choose their
partners carefully, argues Tim Rushent, Account
Manager for industry and commerce at Hyland
Nearly four-fifths of all data centre traffic
will be Cloud-based by 2019
according to some predictions, fuelled
by a growing awareness of the opportunity to
scale an organisation's digital capacity, not just
in terms of storage, but also functionality.
As early concerns over security have been
assuaged, executives have been persuaded to
embrace the Cloud for its flexibility and
reduced costs: however, most remain unaware
of further opportunities that the move presents
- and its hidden risks. For example, a move to
the Cloud can be an ideal time to adopt an
enterprise information platform that unites data
from different systems and formats, from
where it can be accessed, analysed and
managed. From increased efficiency at a user
level, to automated workflow management
and vastly improved executive overview, a
fundamental technology overhaul may not be
necessary, as enterprise content management
(ECM) software can provide the seamless link
needed to bring together existing platforms.
The move to Cloud makes the adoption of
such systems even easier, as they will not be
restrained by capacity. But it is not enough to
simply trust that a Cloud provider will keep a
company's data secure: it is important to
thoroughly evaluate key aspects, such as the
provider's infrastructure and security
provisions, alongside their track record and
industry reputation.
Common pitfalls include failure to ensure a
system offers the scope to cater for longerterm
needs; becoming locked into contracts
that can hold a firm's data hostage; and failure
to make adequate provision for disruptive
events, such as outages or the Cloud provider
going bust. All of these scenarios can be
avoided or suitably mitigated, but they must
be considered at an early stage - not when
they happen out of the blue and leave a
company unable to use its essential IT
infrastructure.
Other key issues to consider include:
Security - What technologies are in place
to manage risks and what are the
processes for dealing with a data breach?
How is encryption used and what data
backup regime do they have in place?
Audits - Will the provider carry out regular
infrastructure reviews, to ensure regulatory
and legal compliance? Who is responsible
for carrying out such audits and are they
prepared to share earlier reviews with you?
Integration - Are there any technical or
other hurdles to overcome, to ensure the
Cloud resources can readily be integrated
with your own on-premise and existing
Cloud systems? Does the hosting
provider have sufficient networking
bandwidth in place to deal with increased
data volumes?
When evaluating vendors, remember not all
Cloud providers are the same. For example,
if you are looking for a provider to deliver
ECM services, that provider's infrastructure
must be specifically designed for the task.
Servers, data stores and networking links
must be optimised to ensure they can
provide the level of availability and
performance that is required.
Once a Cloud provider has been selected,
putting an effective contract in place is the
next important step. Don't get locked into a
long-term agreement from which it is very
costly to withdraw. Also, pay particular
attention to how data will be transferred at the
end of the contract and what would happen to
it in the event that the provider ceases trading.
The contract should be clear about what
would happen if there were difficulties with any
third party involved, where responsibilities lie
and what compensation would be payable in
the event of outages.
The flexibility and scalability offered by the
Cloud provides a golden opportunity for firms
looking to develop their digital infrastructure
and build further competitive advantage
through a single enterprise information
platform. However it is important to carefully
review the prospective hosting provider before
entering what should be a very productive
long-term relationship.
More info: www.onbase.com
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17
CASE STUDY: METRO BANK
Take that to the bank
Metro Bank, the first new UK high street bank in over 100 years, has
reduced close-of-business processing time by 50 percent and report
production time by two-thirds by moving its IT infrastructure to a managed
Cloud solution
focused culture and ethos of delivering
exceptional customer service. Kane explains:
"Rackspace just gets us - they understand
our culture and share our values. You can't
underestimate the power of people. They
have exceeded our expectations, and
provide us with superior levels of support
and guidance day in, day out."
Metro Bank was founded in 2010 and
has already launched more than 45
branches, providing banking
services for both personal and business
customers. With ambitions to reach 100
branches by 2020, Metro Bank stands out
from traditional financial organisations, with its
highly customer-driven approach that
includes services such as being open seven
days a week and the capability to open an
account in under 20 minutes - without having
to book an appointment.
Unlike its high street competitors, Metro Bank
is not tied to legacy IT systems, which means it
has the freedom to incorporate the latest
technologies that offer unparalleled scalability
and agility. This has enabled the business to
genuinely disrupt the banking sector and break
away from industry norms with services that
are focused entirely on providing high levels of
customer service and convenience. These
capabilities became a reality when seamlessly
migrating Metro Bank's entire infrastructure -
including its core banking operations, digital
offerings and even ATMs - to a managed
Cloud solution architected by Rackspace.
Metro Bank chose Rackspace to help
support its rapid growth, roll-out new services
and streamline existing processes, starting
with an initial 12-month migration project. This
was delivered on time, on budget and without
any costly downtime, with applications starting
to go online within six weeks. The day after the
first migration, close of business processing
on core banking systems were 50 percent
quicker and vital reports that were taking an
hour to produce could now be completed in
just 20 minutes.
Aisling Kane, Chief Operating Officer at Metro
Bank says: "We're growing exponentially so it's
essential that we partner with organisations
that can scale alongside us, which Rackspace
has clearly shown it can."
GROWING A CUSTOMER-FOCUSED
CULTURE
Both businesses share the same customer
Metro Bank is using a Rackspace
Dedicated Server Solution for its high
performance and enhanced security. The
company is also using DevOps to roll out
new services quickly in a controlled
environment as it moves towards automated
management. The infrastructure includes
Disaster Recovery capabilities.
Darren Norfolk, MD of Rackspace UK
added: "We're proud to be supporting Metro
Bank's impressive growth, and as an
organisation with a customer service
orientated culture ourselves, its mission to
deliver truly outstanding experiences for
customers. Metro Bank has used this
approach to pose a serious challenge to the
industry status quo during a period that has
seen technology change the face of
banking. These days, finance companies
have to focus on connecting people to their
money quickly, processing transactions
accurately and presenting customers with
access to their information at all times. We
have enjoyed helping the bank achieve this,
by providing the leading technology
platforms that power these compelling
customer offerings."
More info: www.rackspace.co.uk
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OPINION: DATA CENTRE RESILIENCY
Pressure sensitive?
The growth in cloud services is putting increased pressure on data centre
resiliency, suggests Adrian Barker, General Manager EMEA at RF Code
to damage or failure. A lack of capacity is
equally damaging - a spike in traffic could be
enough to cause downtime if equipment
becomes overheated and overworked.
The flood of digital content, internet
traffic, Big Data and eCommerce has
had a dramatic effect on data centres
in recent years. One of the most significant
trends to date is the meteoric rise of cloud
computing.
Cisco is forecasting 83% of data centre
traffic in the next three years will be generated
through cloud computing. Is that really
surprising? Businesses of every size are
utilising Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),
PaaS (Platform as a Service) or SaaS
(Software as a Service) offerings. Data
centres have had to physically transform in
order to meet availability demands.
With fundamental business tasks now
dependent on an uninterrupted service from
the data centre, the spotlight is on the issue
of downtime. This is more than just a financial
consideration. If a business cannot access its
cloud and hosted services it seriously risks a
loss in productivity and the potential for a
major impact on its commercial reputation.
DOWNTIME DEBACLES
Software company SSP Worldwide came
under fire in September 2016 when its SaaS
solution suffered an outage. The system is
used by 40% of the UK's brokers to track
insurance renewals amongst other services.
The downtime, which was said to be caused
by a data centre power outage, lasted almost
two weeks, by which time brokers had made
their frustrations known online. Their concerns
included loss of business and risk of action
from the Financial Conduct Authority.
Another incident saw Salesforce suffer an
outage attributed to a failure in the power
distribution in its primary data centre, causing
twelve expensive hours of disruption. In this
case, the CEO was forced to apologise via
social media; the kind of experience that all
business leaders dread.
COPING WITH DEMAND
There are many different ways in which data
centre and service availability can be affected.
Around a quarter of outages are due to power
failures, but software and hardware problems,
human error, natural disasters and cyberattacks
also play a big part.
Another problem is overheating due to
inefficient cooling. A rapid increase in
temperature can cause immediate equipment
failure but inadequate cooling of equipment
over a prolonged period of time will also lead
Operators face a constant battle of
balancing workloads against available
budgets. Many data centre owners choose to
over-provision resources and servers 'just in
case' a disaster situation occurs, however this
can be immensely costly. There are other
strategies available.
PREVENTION - BETTER THAN CURE
One of the methods to maintaining resiliency,
even in the face of an extreme weather event
or a catastrophic power failure, is through a
clear understanding of the data centre
environment. Operational management
solutions can provide real-time insight,
control and predictability so data centre
managers can solve environmental and
operational challenges with valuable insight,
rather than guesswork.
Data centre assets need to be monitored
and tracked to maintain performance and
guard against technical failure. Environmental
conditions need to be dynamically adjusted
with changes in demand. It is all about
understanding and managing your
environment to ensure reliability.
As data gets bigger and cloud computing
expands further, data centre dependency is
only set to increase, although the use of realtime
insight and other tools will ensure data
centres remain secure, resilient and reliable in
the face of businesses' unrelenting appetite
for more data.
More info: www.rfcode.com
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19
CASE STUDY: FISCAL TECHNOLOGIES
Safe and sound
Fintech specialist FISCAL Technologies is securing customer data and
winning new business thanks to The Bunker's virtual hosting infrastructure
Founded in 2002, innovative fintech
company FISCAL Technologies
provides forensic solutions that
empower purchase-to-pay (P2P) teams to
protect organisational spend. Ultimately, the
company creates software that prevents
money from mistakenly or fraudulently leaving
an organisation. It offers a variety of forensic
solutions that analyse financial transactions
across the entire P2P process, finding
anomalies, errors, duplicates and identifying
potential fraud. With offices in the UK and the
US, FISCAL has experienced seven years of
profitable growth, with ambitious plans for the
future.
INTERNATIONAL RESCUE
FISCAL Technologies' customers place a
premium on their security. Some of their
customers require contractual certainty that
their data does not come into contact with
any organisation that has any kind of
relationship with the US or American
organisations due to data sovereignty
requirements. FISCAL had kept US and UK
customers' data stored in the same data
centre in the UK, but subsequently needed to
split the data because of this segregation
requirement. Whilst FISCAL partnered with a
company in the US for their American
customers, they found that their previous UK
provider, who had been in place for three
years, did not have adequate measures in
place to guarantee adherence to their client's
data sovereignty requirements.
In order to guarantee its customers
complete certainty that they fulfilled the above
requirements, FISCAL needed a hosting and
infrastructure provider that not only met all the
most recent security accreditations, but also
had security embedded in everything it did. In
particular, adherence to the ISO 27001
security standard - a comprehensive,
technology-neutral specification that deploys
a risk-based approach going across all
sections of an organisation - was key.
Moreover, as an ambitious organisation
looking to accelerate its growth, FISCAL
needed a partner who could not only keep up
with them, but would have both the capacity
and the drive to grow with FISCAL and be
adaptable to its requirements. Another critical
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CASE STUDY: FISCAL TECHNOLOGIES
"It's hugely important to our clients to have certain security guarantees in
place. The Bunker is distinct for a security culture that is deeply embedded
in its DNA, and for having a more comprehensive security provision than
anyone else we spoke to."
consideration was experience, and FISCAL
sought a partner that had a heritage of
working with other fintech and financial
services firms.
ULTRA SECURE SOLUTION
FISCAL embarked on a wide-ranging
procurement process - and quickly found that
The Bunker stood out for its security provision,
which was more comprehensive than any
other they had encountered before and
covered all the necessary accreditations,
including ISO 27001. With a significant
amount of experience working in the fintech
sector, The Bunker fitted the bill perfectly.
The Bunker's solution was a virtual
environment, with powerful SQL Server
databases, load balanced firewalls, and
active directory domain controllers. This
system delivers not only a robust approach to
data and system security, but also the speedy
performance and seamless management that
FISCAL requires in order to deal with the
sheer volume of data and amount of
processing that it manages for its customers.
A NEW IMPETUS
Demonstrating a high-level of security
compliance has provided a powerful new
business impetus for FISCAL.
Howard Durdle, CTO at FISCAL,
commented: "Being in financial services,
security is absolutely paramount, and for
many of our customers, having the level of
security provided by The Bunker was a
prerequisite to making deals. For example, for
a large defence contractor who placed huge
value on security and on their data not
touching the US, The Bunker were a vital
element in passing a lengthy procurement
process and securing a deal. Hosting our
customers' data in a former Ministry of
Defence bunker, deep underground and fully
insulated from the outside world, gives us a
powerful story to tell potential and current
customers about the importance we place on
security."
Moreover, the benefits of running a fully
virtualised estate are clear to Howard: "In the
case of any kind of system failures, we can
migrate virtually across to other parts of the
infrastructure, massively reducing any
potential for downtime - not that it's been an
issue as of yet."
PRODUCTIVE PARTNERSHIP
Howard said: "It's hugely important to our
clients to have certain security guarantees in
place. The Bunker is distinct for a security
culture that is deeply embedded in its DNA,
and for having a more comprehensive
security provision than anyone else we spoke
to."
Looking to the future, while FISCAL is still in
the process of moving their customers off the
old platform, the company is looking to
expand the virtual infrastructure and to double
its customer load over the next year - all whilst
maintaining current performance levels.
"We have mutually complementary
narratives," concludes Howard. "FISCAL is
absolutely focused on protecting
organisations' money, whilst The Bunker has
the same obsession with protecting
organisations' data. This cultural overlap has
made for a productive partnership."
More info: www.thebunker.net
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21
TECHNOLOGY: APIS
Automating the IT
production line
David Grimes, CTO at Navisite, discusses the growing role of APIs in reducing
costs and developing tomorrow's businesses
Finding ways to reduce costs while
continuing to offer excellent
products and services is the eternal
business challenge. To help businesses
do this, IT teams and service providers
are increasingly looking to APIs
(Application Programming Interfaces).
APIs are sets of routines, protocols and
tools for building software applications
that enable automation, which supports
increased efficiency, consistency and cost
savings for businesses. How exactly are
organisations using APIs to do this, and
how is this likely to develop in the future?
OPERATIONAL RELIABILITY &
EFFICIENCY
One important outcome of the automation
enabled by APIs is consistency. Through
automation, businesses remove human
error (and human expense) from
operational processes. Even when a
repeatable task is well-documented with a
clear procedure, when human workers
perform the task it is likely that you will
end up with varied outcomes.
On the other hand, if that repeatable task
is automated, it will be performed in the
same way every time, improving
operational reliability and in turn
operational efficiency. API enabled
platforms are driving a true re-think in how
we manage IT; we are moving quickly
from a process-driven, reactive world to
an automation-driven, proactive world.
AUTOMATING DEVOPS
APIs allow for more dynamic systems that
can scale up and down to deliver just the
right amount of infrastructure to the
application at all times. For example,
instrumentation in your application that
provides visibility to an orchestration layer
can tell when more capacity is required in
the web or app tier. The orchestration
layer can then come back to the APIs
provided by the infrastructure and begin
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TECHNOLOGY: APIS
spinning up new web servers and adding
them to the load balancer pool to
increase capacity.
Likewise, systems built on APIs will then
have the instrumentation to tell when they
are overbuilt, for example at night and can
then use the APIs to wind down
unnecessary servers in order to reduce
costs.
Indeed, through the ability to script the
powering-on of development and testing
environments at the start of the business
day and automatically powering-off at the
end of the business day, businesses can
realise huge cost savings on their hosting
- up to 50-60 per cent in some cases.
Overall, leveraging APIs in support of a
DevOps strategy is always a blend of
optimising for cost, for performance and
the ability to have deep app-level visibility.
AUTOMATING REPORTING
APIs are also highly useful in reporting
procedures, as many applications are
now producing vast amounts of data that
are often an untapped asset. IT teams
therefore need to think about how to
make those datasets available efficiently
in order to build a dynamic reporting
engine that can potentially be configured
by the end user, who will be the person
that understands the nature of the
information that he or she needs to
extract from the data.
This is frequently accomplished through
APIs. IT teams and application services
providers can use APIs to build systems
that process data and make it accessible
to end users immediately, so that they do
not have to go through a reporting team
and do not lose any of the real-time value
of their data.
BUSINESS CONTINUITY & DR
The benefits of automation through APIs
make them a crucial part of modern
disaster recovery approaches. The
assumption that you'll be able to access
all of the tools that you would need during
a disaster through the typical user
interfaces is not always true. In the
modern world of highly virtualised
infrastructure, APIs are the enabler for the
core building blocks of disaster recovery,
in particular replication, which is driven
from the APIs exposed by the
virtualisation platforms. The final act of
orchestrating DR, failover, is also often
highly API dependent, for these reasons.
In essence, disaster recovery is one
specific use case of the way that APIs
enable efficiency and operations
automation. Humans make mistakes and
processes become very difficult to
maintain and update. Therefore a DR plan
based on processes and humans
executing processes is not an ideal option
to ensure the safety of your business in
the event of a disaster. Kicking off DR can
be likened to "pressing the big red button".
However if you can make it one button
that kick starts a set of automated
processes, this will be much more
manageable and reliable than thirteen
different buttons, each of which has a
thirty-page policy and procedure
document that must be executed during
a disaster.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
While there are some obvious benefits to
API-enabled technology and automation,
much of the IT industry is yet to get up to
speed to understand this technology's
potential. This is particularly true in
industries that have been using
information technology for a long time. In
these industries, we're still seeing a large
number of legacy applications, legacy
staff skill-sets and legacy approaches to
managing infrastructure.
As we watch the younger generation
coming into the IT industry, who have
grown up with and are being taught about
APIs, there is likely to be a shift towards
more comprehensive API use and
understanding of the value APIs can offer.
As we see disruptors displace incumbent
packaged software players and new
entrants to the enterprise IT community,
we are likely to see more realisation of the
benefits of API use - particularly as skillsets
build and the potential to utilise
capabilities inherent in new generation
Cloud infrastructures grow.
It will, however, take time to produce and
develop enough entry level IT
professionals who possess the training
and education required to take full
advantage of the opportunities APIs offer.
APIs are also contributing to reducing
the cost of developing new ideas.
Entrepreneurs can now quickly start a
new business on Cloud Infrastructure-asa-Service
platforms, without having to
make large upfront investments on IT
equipment to get an idea off the ground.
Start-ups can use APIs to control and
power systems down to reduce costs as
required and can then efficiently scale up
on the same Cloud infrastructure as their
new product or service grows.
To fully take advantage of the reduced
costs, APIs should be an integrated part
of Cloud solutions, rather than an
expensive addition to the service.
As the number of innovative startups in the
tech space grows and as enterprises
increasingly search for new, effective
solutions and ways of working, we are likely
to see more creative uses of APIs, driving
consistency, efficiency and automation.
Businesses are going to have to work hard
to stay ahead of the market and making full
use of API-enabled technologies and
software to increase efficiency and reduce
costs is a key enabler to support these
competitive drives.
More info: www.navisite.co.uk
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Feb/March 2017 Cloudhosting
23
EVENT REPORT: CLOUD EXPO EUROPE 2017
The main event
Cloud Expo, Europe's biggest and best attended cloud and digital transformation
show took place recently in London's ExCel: Cloud Hosting
magazine was there to report back
This year's Cloud Expo Europe -
alongside Smart IoT, Cloud
Security, Data Centre World and
Big Data World - played host to over 500
leading international technology
exhibitors and 600 speakers. Delegates
took advantage of the free entry to learn
from global business experts as well as
leaders of innovative UK and
international start-ups.
The comprehensive conference
programme included:
Over 600 top experts, including
number 1 rated CIOs, Acclaimed
Global Cloud Leaders, Cloud Gurus
from Box, BT, Google, McLaren
Technology Group, Microsoft, Paypal,
Spotify, Twitter and Vodafone,
covering all the major technology
and business issues
24 Cloudhosting Feb/March 2017 @CHMagAndAwards
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EVENT REPORT: CLOUD EXPO EUROPE 2017
The opportunity to learn from dozens
of real practitioners from blue chip
companies, service providers and
leading organisations including
organisations including Financial
Times, ITV, LEGO, Lloyds, LV and the
Ministry of Defence.
Suppliers at the show included AWS,
Commvault, LeGrand, IBM, Intel, OVH,
Navisite, NTT Communications, Pure
Storage, Samsung, Trend Micro,
VMware, Veeam, Volta and Western
Digital.
Delegates were able to network with
thousands of peers, industry
visionaries, leaders and people who
are facing similar challenges.
The industry-leading sister events
were all well attended: Data Centre
World, Cloud Security Expo, and
Smart IoT all took place at the same
time in the same place, as well as
brand new launch event Big Data
World.
SPEAKERS' CORNER
Pulsant CTO Matt Lovell presented at the
Infrastructure, Storage & Virtualisation
Theatre, talking about 'converting hybrid
services to value', and also told us about
Pulsant's newest collaboration with
Microsoft on AMP, a hybrid cloud
solution set. As one of only a handful of
strategic hosting partners to Microsoft,
AMP will strengthen Pulsant's delivery,
management and support of Azure and
Azure Stack.
We also spoke with Hiren Parekh, UK
Director at OVH, one of Europe's largest
cloud hosting providers and a relatively
new name in the UK market. The
company recently announced a new
data centre in the UK, and has ambitious
growth plans. OVH also presented at
Cloud Expo on 'Understanding different
types of cloud services' as well as 'My
CTO loves Software Defined Data
Centres' - we were sorry to have missed
that one!
On the IBM stand the focus was on a
demonstration of the 'Cognitive
Command Centre', showing social
sentiment around blood and organ
donation using URLs and hash tags.
The company was involved in a number
of speaker sessions including the 'Cloud
Super Providers' panel discussion which
was one of the best attended of the two
days.
THIS YEAR'S MODELS
Navisite had a very noticeable presence
at the event, and Sean McAvan, Navisite
Europe MD presented on the topic of
'Multi-Cloud - Practical Use Cases,'
exploring one of the hottest trends in the
cloud and IT industry. Sean's talk
covered why businesses across multiple
industries are adopting a multi-cloud
approach, and how this is impacting IT
across a range of industries. He also
discussed how IT teams and providers
could manage multi-clouds and
overcome the barriers to adoption.
A major Navisite customer, the National
Theatre was also at the show talking
about the importance of technology to
the Theatre's success, and how moving
to the cloud has enabled this, including
the enablement of better remote
working. Cloud solutions are supporting
digital transformation across the arts
sector, explained John Cheyne, IT
Director at the NT, and this is likely to
develop in the future.
HyperGrid attended Cloud Expo to
showcase their HyperCloud offering but
also to talk in more detail about how
consumption-based models are set to
define the way businesses embrace
cloud in the coming years. HyperGrid
were the first provider to move from a
traditional, hardware-based hyperconverged
infrastructure solution to a
SaaS solution. HyperGrid now offer a
fully consumption-based, on-premise
cloud service for the enterprise, with no
Capex costs - an approach also adopted
by the likes of Nutanix and Simplivity.
HyperGrid CEO Nariman Teymourian
was on hand at the show to discuss how
HyperCloud is 'shaking up the cloud
landscape', as well as share his thoughts
on the latest developments and future of
cloud, including how consumptionbased
models can bring added depth to
a space currently dominated by key
players such as AWS and Azure.
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Feb/March 2017 Cloudhosting
25
EVENT REPORT: CLOUD EXPO EUROPE 2017
Datapipe - who acquired Adapt late last
year - were named a leader in the 2017
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud
and Infrastructure Managed Service
Providers (the tenth time it has been
placed in a Magic Quadrant) and Stewart
Smythe, Managing Director at Datapipe
Europe was at Cloud Expo Europe to
discuss the strategies which have helped
to enable this achievement. This included
Datapipe's ability to support cloud
deployments in China, as a global
managed service provider of Alibaba
Cloud, as well as the recent launch of
Datapipe's end-to-end platform,
Trebuchet.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Elsewhere, Talend was promoting how it
is using data to develop the connected
car and also talking about the
government's journey from being 'data
rich and insight poor' to truly data driven.
Vice President Ciaran Dynes discussed
the issues surrounding data collection for
the 23% of UK cars that are predicted to
be connected by 2020.
Interoute unveiled its VDC Container
Orchestration platform with Rancher - to
help companies develop the tools needed
to improve customer experience and
service levels, as well as speed up
DevOps projects. Matthew Finnie, CTO at
Interoute hosted a keynote presentation
on 'Why digital transformation is no longer
a choice'.
Finnie was also keen to explain how
Interoute is enabling enterprises (such as
client AO.com) to digitally transform, as
well as explaining how organisations can
integrate legacy, third party and digital IT
environments.
Druva used the timing of the event to
announce news around Office 365 and
data protection for cloud applications,
based on a partnership with Phoenix
Software here in the UK. According to
Rick Powles, Druva VP for EMEA, many
companies don't consider how easy it is
for data to live outside the data centre,
but at least 40 per cent of all company
data is already there according to analyst
reports.
Rubrik, one of the fastest growing cloud
companies to come out of Silicon Valley,
is the start-up responsible for developing
the world's first Cloud Data Management
platform for data protection, storage and
archival - and has recently opened a
London office. In the three years since its
conception, Rubrik has grown
exponentially, announcing earlier this year
a booked revenue approaching $100m
run rate and a 700% annual customer
growth. As a company, explained Yvonne
Prest, Rubrik's recently appointed UK
Channel Manager, its fundamental aim
has always stayed the same; to reimagine
and radically simplify how data storage,
back up and cloud recovery works.
WHAT'S IN STORE?
As usual, storage companies were well
represented at Cloud Expo Europe. Tom
O'Neill, Kaminario's CTO International,
talked about the urgent requirement for a
scalable storage platform to enable cloud
businesses to grow rapidly without
adding complexity. To that end, Kaminario
set itself a challenge: how to create a
cloud storage platform which can scale
without adding complexity. The answer,
O'Neill explained, is to make storage
application-aware.
At the event Kaminario was
demonstrating its sixth generation of its
K2 all-flash array delivering multi-petabyte
scale storage. The newer generation AFA
delivers up to five times more capacity
than the previous generation and twice as
much performance. The array can linearly
grow the number of CPU cores and
independently grow solid-state capacity.
Samsung Semiconductor showcased its
industry-leading memory and storage
systems at the show - including its Z-SSD
products, 10nm class DRAM with 3D TSV
and AutoCache. The company was also
promoting its selection of all-flash array
and NVMe over fabric solutions.
Overall there can be no question that no
other UK business IT event is bigger,
better attended and packs more leading
educational content into 2 unmissable
days than Cloud Expo Europe - all at no
cost.
More info: www.cloudexpoeurope.com
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