Managed service providers (MSPs) have received an unfair deal over the years. Despite being a mainstay of the IT landscape for decades, many practitioners still look down their noses at MSPs and the companies that use them, often viewing them as poor relations to the in-house IT department.

This is partly caused by a number of incorrect and damaging myths, such as the idea that MSPs are solely suited to managing in-house IT equipment and on-premise infrastructure deployments, or that they’re not suited to cloud-based IT models.

In fact, this could not be further from the truth. The modern MSP can actually support companies of any size in deploying personalised, enterprise-grade cloud strategies – and at a rate that actually offers greater value than maintaining your own IT department.

“Sometimes organisations can perceive cloud MSPs in a similar way to the more traditional approach,” says CDW’s head of cloud services Joel Berwitz. “However, the ability of MSPs to share their experiences with other customers, advise on best practice and ensure that investments are made correctly will make an organisation’s cloud transformation gather pace. This, alongside the scale that MSPs can bring to the more traditional values of maintenance and monitoring, is a way of mitigating risk and saving time.”

Far from being a sub-standard compromise for companies without the budget or skills to fuel an in-house IT department, partnering with an MSP can actually be the perfect solution for businesses who want to kick-start their digital transformation into a modern, cloud-driven organisation. MSPs such as CDW can offer these companies not just a wide-ranging level of strategic expertise and world-class support, but also battle-tested experience.

Major companies such as Atos, Hovis, and the Estee Lauder group have all partnered with CDW to provide various elements of their IT, and with good reason. MSPs can offer far more than simple commodity procurement or IT support services. Indeed, the best MSPs act as end-to-end partners, taking companies from the planning phase through to successful deployment, and supporting them on an ongoing basis. This is especially true of cloud migrations, where MSPs can help their customers cut through the complexity to help organisations meet their business goals.

Bridging the skills gap

Contrary to the idea that they’re jacks-of-all-trades, one of the biggest advantages to partnering with an MSP is a deep level of expertise. Thanks to a widening skills gap within the UK technology industry, hiring talented, qualified IT staff can be a struggle for some companies, and tight budgets can prevent them from hiring specialists in every area they need.

Partnering with a managed services provider can solve all of these problems and more. That’s because MSPs have a large number of people to hand with a range of skills and certifications, allowing businesses to draw on a wide pool of talented IT specialists. It also means they can make use of specific skills like cloud architecture as and when they need them, rather than hiring a member of staff who may end up being under-utilised for most of the time.

Strategic expertise is also one of the key benefits of engaging with an MSP. Having an MSP involved at the planning stage of a cloud rollout can be invaluable; because it is intimately familiar with the cloud industry’s full range of tools and services, and can draw on that knowledge to craft a unique package tailored to your specific business challenges.

“Change is a constant, certainly with public cloud providers, and therefore the ability to keep up to date with the advancements in the services available is difficult for any organisation,” says Berwitz. “MSPs who are close to their customers have the ability to advise on only the changes which are relevant to their organisation and therefore save time and increase efficiency in each case.”

Another misconception about MSPs is that moving to managed cloud services means outsourcing your whole IT organisation and getting rid of all its existing staff. Again, this is most certainly not the case. While MSPs can offer a full-service package to do the job of an internal IT department, they can also provide a huge advantage to businesses by working in unison with a company’s existing tech teams.

With an MSP taking care of essential, everyday tasks like printer maintenance, network monitoring, and cyber security internal IT staff are freed up to focus on projects that can deliver additional value to the business – such as upgrade programmes, cloud deployments and training courses.

“Organisations nowadays have somewhat expensive resources that are best utilised in building the services and applications in the cloud which are key to differentiating their organisation and adding value,” Berwitz explains.

“MSPs can help where there is a skills gap internally or to take care of the more mundane maintenance tasks, alongside ensuring that optimisation and cost management/forecasting is under control.”

The true value of partnership

One of the biggest – and least accurate – myths is that partnering with an MSP is more costly than using an in-house IT model, but this assumption can be safely put to bed. Indeed, partnering with an MSP is generally more cost-effective. As previously discussed, companies that work with MSPs don’t have to spend vast sums recruiting technical specialists, nor do they need to invest in training existing IT staff to use new technologies.

MSPs can also scale up at no cost to the end-user company, while in-house IT cannot. Companies that make use of an all-you-can-eat service package are free to expand their business at whatever pace they see fit, without the worry of overstretching their IT resources or having to invest in more support capacity.

This is also true of cloud services; many MSPs will offer the option of rolling cloud-based services like backup, infrastructure or SaaS apps into a customer’s monthly subscription, which means that (within reason) the customer doesn’t have to sweat about incurring extra costs as they scale.

The savings from all of these cost reductions – recruitment, equipment, subscriptions, et cetera – mean the IT department will have a lot more room in their budget, which smart managers will invest in expansion of the business and its IT capabilities – whether that’s hiring more in-house team members, upgrading existing equipment or adding new capabilities with the help of their MSP partner.

“CDW has an established cloud practice, having been through hundreds of cloud migrations,” Berwitz says. “This experience has helped us to mitigate risk for our customers, ensuring that their cloud transformation is timely and, regardless of the business drivers and reasons for migrations, the organisation has a successful outcome.”

To learn more about CDW Cloud Services, download your free guide or contact CloudEnquires@uk.cdw.com

The rise of cloud platforms and services has arguably been the most important development in business computing since the birth of the internet. Cloud vendors now allow organisations across the world to take advantage of cutting-edge IT capabilities with little more than a credit card.

Moving to a cloud-based IT model has a huge amount of advantages. There’s a much lower cost-of-entry than a traditional approach, and the ‘pay-as-you-go’ consumption model makes it much easier for companies to scale up as they grow. On top of that, there’s more flexibility and greater choice, and access to a much wider range of capabilities than would be possible with on-premise infrastructure.

With this in mind, it’s not very hard to see why, according to a survey of IT professionals, 77% ranked cloud technologies as the most important tool in their arsenal. However, migrating your IT to the cloud isn’t an easy process. In fact, if not properly managed, it can become a black hole of time, money and effort which ends up adding stress rather than reducing it.

There are many moving parts to consider when planning a cloud migration, and it’s imperative that you fully think through your migration strategy and plan out your roadmap. Without a comprehensive roadmap, you run the risk that your migration could fall at the first hurdle.

The first step is to ensure that all of the organisation’s primary stakeholders are in agreement about the migration, including the board, the IT department and so on. This may sound like a simple and obvious step, but skipping over it can lead to major trouble later on, if one of your board members decides to oppose the project when it’s already underway.

For Joel Berwitz, the head of cloud services at CDW, this dovetails with some key questions that arise when considering cloud migration: “Is the organisation setup to understand, migrate and run services in the cloud, and is there sufficient skills and desire from the business to undergo the changes required?”

With everyone on board, you can start planning your migration in earnest, and the first decision to make is whether you want to use a public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Public cloud infrastructure involves renting server capacity from a third-party provider like Microsoft or Google, while private cloud infrastructure involves hosting your own cloud servers in your own data centre (or a third-party host’s). Hybrid cloud, as the name suggests, is a mix of both strategies.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Public cloud gives you effectively infinite capacity without having to purchase expensive hardware, but it also means you’ll be sharing server space with other clients. Private clouds, however, are more expensive to set up and maintain but allow for greater customisation of the stack itself, ensuring that problematic but essential legacy apps can be supported.

Hybrid is proving to be a very popular option, as it can offer a ‘best of both worlds’ approach – workloads that are high-volume but non-critical can be run in the public cloud, but anything particularly sensitive can be hosted on a private cloud for security and peace-of-mind.

Once you’ve decided on a cloud strategy, the next step is to take a full inventory of all of the workloads that run in your data centre. This is an excellent chance to do some spring cleaning; work out which workloads and apps are still useful and which ones you no longer need to support. This can trim down your consumption significantly, saving you money when using metered public cloud services.

In addition to data centre workloads, you should also make a note of what business software is in use by your staff. It’s worth incorporating cloud-based replacements into your roadmap so you can ensure compatibility with the rest of your IT estate.

With a full catalogue of your workloads, identify which ones can be ported over to the cloud with minimal fuss, which ones will need to be tweaked, and which ones will need to be revised or replaced altogether. This is a crucial step, as you don’t want to get halfway through the process only to find out that a critical workload won’t run on your new cloud.

Berwitz also notes that businesses need to ensure that their migration is underpinned by a solid commercial strategy, and that all of their services and applications are properly cloud-optimised, “whether that’s a lift-and-shift to Infrastructure-as-a-Service or re-architecting the applications into code which can be run more effectively.

“We’re seeing organisations who are migrating to the cloud hit some common hurdles along the way,” he says. “Certainly, ensuring that the services and applications are right sized in the first instance is key to making the move commercially viable. Network architecture, alongside resilience/backup and DR should also be discussed, as utilisation in the cloud can mitigate many of the risks that companies traditionally see on premise.”

At this point, you should start comparing cloud providers. It’s tempting to just go for the lowest-cost provider, but take some time to talk to them about your specific requirements to be sure that they can fully support you – not just now, but in the future. It’s worth looking outside the ‘big three’, too – unless you’re a giant multinational company, you may find that a smaller local cloud provider is actually better-suited to meeting your individual needs.

Once you’ve picked your provider, you’ll want to start working on the roll-out, but pacing is key. Stagger the deployment of your new cloud tools, making sure that each one is running as expected before moving on to the next one. This makes it much easier to test each one thoroughly, and minimises business disruption; rather than your staff having to learn how to operate multiple new systems all at once, they only have to learn one at a time.

Speaking of which, staff training is paramount. Make sure that team leaders and department heads are briefed and trained on how to use any new tools and systems that are relevant to their roles, before they’re deployed to the rest of the company.

Once a system is rolled out, you’ll need to make sure that all staff have easy access to user-friendly guides and documentation on how to use it, and training courses are a good idea for anything particularly complex or business-critical. Adopting a new cloud system is pointless if your staff don’t utilise it effectively, and if they don’t know how it works, they’re not going to use it.

Naturally, it’s important to thoroughly test your cloud-based workloads – not just to make sure they’re working, but to make sure that they’re delivering the efficiency, performance and value that you anticipated at the start of your cloud journey. Ensure that you continuously monitor and tweak your cloud estate – identify new technologies and tools you want to deploy, and regularly check that your cloud tools are serving their intended purpose.

As you may have gathered by now, migrating to a cloud-based infrastructure model isn’t as simple as it may first appear. There’s a whole range of hidden pitfalls that an unprepared company could fall foul of. Making sure that your cloud migration roadmap is airtight can be a big task, especially when you’re also trying to run your business at the same time – but you can make this mammoth undertaking quicker and easier by working with a capable and experienced partner.

Thanks to its team of experienced cloud architects, CDW can work together with your business to draft and implement a migration roadmap, offering an end-to-end service to support you at every stage. CDW understands that cloud deployments should be built around business needs rather than the other way around, and has the experience and expertise to help you craft the cloud model that’s perfect for your specific business goals.

“We have a portfolio of cloud services which can help organisations understand their current environment and help to make the right decisions on which services and applications are right for which platforms,” says Berwitz. “We also represent the market, helping make the transition more risk free by using our experience across the many hundreds of customers who we’ve assisted in their migrations to cloud services. Alongside the technical design, we’re also able to assist with the managed services to optimise and transform customer environments as they continue to make the most out of these investments.”

A well implemented cloud solution could deliver your business improved efficiency, productivity, availability and resilience, and with the right planning and partner, the migration needn’t be a worry.

To learn more about CDW Cloud Services, download your free guide or contact CloudEnquires@uk.cdw.com

A popular phrase usually found alongside “big data” is “smart city”. This is because a large conurbation with hundreds of thousands or millions of inhabitants will be a significant source of data, and could also greatly benefit from the effective analysis of that data. Traffic information from city dwellers’ use of personal vehicles and public transport is just the beginning. The sheer volume of people habitually found in a given location can help city planners manage resources, assist retailers to know where they can most effectively place outlets, when to open them, and much more.

One of the most significant sources of this information is the smartphone. In figures cited by Consultancy.uk, Deloitte has claimed that, in 2017, 85% of the UK population owned smartphones, and this figure has been increasing every year. A smartphone is packed with sensors and connects to external ones as well. It knows our location, is increasingly the conduit for our travel and retail transactions, and forms the hub of our social interaction. This makes it the perfect device to supply the big data for a smart city.

But smartphone users are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of data their devices collect about them, and who it is being shared with. Even when we are sure where our data is being sent, we still worry that big corporations know too much about where we are going and what we’re doing when we get there.

Although it’s very easy to see these kinds of news stories as a valid impetus to restrict all our data from being shared with anyone, this will be preventing some of the most significant advancements afforded by contemporary technology. The benefits for our lifestyles and work needs can be very real. The data collected doesn’t have to be directly linked to specific individuals, and in fact some of the greatest potential can be available from looking at the trends found in large aggregations with no need to drill down to individual records.

The key word here is “anonymous”. Your data can be separated from your identity, so you become merely one sample amongst millions that are grouped under categories such as demographics. For example, O2’s Smart Steps uses anonymised, aggregated smartphone geolocation data from over 24.5 million O2 mobile network customers to track the number of people who visit a location. All of the data collected by Smart Steps is secure, anonymous and aggregated so no personal information can be extracted. Whilst anonymous, if its customers have recorded their preferences, it can be referenced by time, gender and age. It can also track where its users have come from and where they are going, using data that spans back to 2013.

Without needing to know who individuals are, this kind of information can pay huge dividends. O2’s Smart Steps has been harnessed to tap into real-time and historical data on over 100 daily journeys to help one company to advise clients much more accurately and quickly than when they were using their previous data collection methods. This helps clients decide whether to go ahead with airport, building, road or high-speed rail schemes, saving four months of work on a typical 16-month project. Thus the planning of city infrastructure can be much smarter and faster than before, with adjustments according to where people actually go in their daily lives.

A lot of information is available without needing to identify individuals. Records may be tagged with an ID, but this will still be securely separated from which user it is referring to. There are benefits from this, as it can provide details about whether visitors to a location are newcomers or returning, and when they come. Shops can work out whether their marketing is working to bring in new customers, and at what times to employ more retail staff to cope with demand. This is likely to be of benefit to the customers as much as the retailer, since the former won’t find themselves stuck in check-out queues or unable to find an assistant to help them because the shop is too busy, and the latter will be able to better manage their people.

However, there are also potential benefits that are more directly targeted at the individual, without specifically requiring them to part with their anonymity. Where historical mass travel data can make public development schemes smarter and more finely targeted, retailers can use similar generalised real-time data to plan the best times and places to offer discounts – either to attract customers to an underutilised outlet, or reach them where and when they are gathering in large numbers, such as a shopping mall or venue with associated restaurants. They can then track the effectiveness of these endeavours.

This concept gains particular power when end users don’t have to wade through a massive list of offers, many of which aren’t relevant to their tastes or current location. O2 Priority, for example, uses geo-location to present offers and savings that are tailored to where the customer currently is, making them more relevant and likely to be of benefit. Especially if the customer has also registered what’s important to them.

The offers are essentially tailored to your lifestyle as you travel. For example, you might be attending a concert at the O2 Arena, so Priority presents a selection of restaurants near the venue that are currently offering discount deals. This isn’t an intrusive system like the personalised advertising shown in science fiction movies such as Minority Report. People choose to be alerted, and can also access the service purely on demand.

This really is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible when you allow your smartphone to share information with aggregators that apply the necessary, regulatory safeguards to anonymise your data. Real-time traffic details derived from smartphone locations can help route drivers away from congestion. Dynamic variable speed limits can react to smooth out flow ahead of a bottleneck. Environmental controls in enclosed public spaces can be adjusted to suit the volume of people visiting. So long as customers can be assured that their data will not be abused, and will remain anonymous when requested, the power available to manage city life more smartly can be huge.

Discover how O2’s technology is helping businesses empower their workforce.

Organisations both large and small are striving to understand their people better so they can give them more opportunity to be productive and put into their hands the technology that they need, and are familiar with in their daily lives. That kind of tech is good morale and productivity, and is great for a company’s bottom line.

There’s an ulterior motive, too. If your business fails to keep pace with innovation, you’ll ultimately be left behind.

It was in last year’s, rather than 2019’s ‘O2 Future Trends’ report, that the futurist Graeme Codrington said: “Within two years, if you are not mobile-first (which naturally implies cloud-first) you might be too far behind the curve to catch up… We can expect that tomorrow’s employees will expect to be able to use the same level of technology at their workplace as they do at home. That means mobile-first, AI, natural language processing and staying always connected.

“We joke about how Wi-Fi should now be the foundation layer for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But the time is coming when transport, work, medical treatment and civil liberties are all so reliant on the internet that connectivity will be as much a human right as running water and electricity. Now is the time to seriously question the legacy IT investments that are holding you and your people back, because waiting is a costly game. Implementation cycles are being shortened from five years to five months, because of the risk of obsolescence over time.”

A landscape of growing threat

Sadly, as companies empower their people more and unlock the good that the cloud and mobile advancements have to offer, there are those out there using the self-same technologies for their own ill gains.

“In 2017 hackers made a lot of easy money and caused huge disruption as a result of UK business missing the basics when it comes to securing data. Most of the breaches I read about in the press could have been easily prevented by taking a more proactive approach to cyber security and following the government’s guidelines,” wrote Dean Thomson, cyber security specialist at O2.

Whether it’s ransomware, malware, cyber crime, physical theft or something else – it feels like a new threat emerges every day. The media is littered with horror stories about data breaches, security blunders and tech tales of woe, so how can you avoid being next – and keep your people happy?

Follow the money

Security is big business. Analyst firm IDC predicts spending on security software, hardware and services will reach $120 billion by 2020. That’s a lot of money going towards fighting a real and growing problem.

«Three overarching trends are driving security spending: a dynamic threat landscape, increasing regulatory pressures, and architectural changes spurred by digital transformation initiatives,» said Sean Pike, IDC’s Security Products and Legal, Risk, and Compliance programme vice president.

Ultimately, the more we adopt mobile technology in our personal lives, the more we’ve come to expect these same technologies to make our lives easier when we’re at work. Implement technology in the right way and businesses should see a positive outcome across the board.

“Digital workplaces are good for employees, good for customers and good for profits.” said Emma Thompson, Head of Technology and Telecoms Business Partnership Team, UK Government Cabinet Office in O2’s Futures summary 2019.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for digital transformation. It means different things to different businesses, but one aspect that’s fundamentally important is security. For instance, an organisation that becomes mobile first will need an agile infrastructure to allow its people to work and collaborate from anywhere.

This also requires end-to-end security, with each part of a company secure – whether that’s a server at head office or a member of staff using a work smartphone on an overseas business trip.

A big problem for business of all sizes

Whether you’re a large or small business – or any size in between – security has to be front of mind. Like taking out an insurance policy you hope you never need, it’s a must.

It’s a dilemma. Ultimately, we need technology. Its benefits far outweigh any negatives and it makes a very real difference to businesses and individuals alike.

However, in order to reap the rewards rather than be exposed to the risks, we have to tread carefully. To help, here is our guide to what you really need to consider when it comes to workplace security.

Click to view the above workplace security guide infographic full size

Do the following…

Do: Utilise two-factor authentication

Many employees actually like two-factor authentication as it helps if they forget their passwords as well as protecting what the company holds dear. By ensuring two verification steps need to be followed before granting access, you are reducing the chances of unauthorised access.

“Two-factor authentication may not be quite the security silver bullet it was once thought to be, but it’s still an important area of security and access control to keep in mind when obtaining and setting up services for your business or personal life,” according to an IT Pro article on the subject.

“The more hurdles you can put in the hackers’ way, the less likely they are to target you.”

Do: Look at both WAN and LAN

Devices that have connectivity can become dangerous in the wrong hands. That’s why it’s so important to focus on all network security elements – from LAN to WAN and beyond.

O2 was the first mobile operator to achieve CAS(T) certification (the government standard for secure communications), to validate the financial and human resource effort placed into security to protect the businesses that rely on it.

Do: Embrace behavioural analytics

By taking advantage of Big Data platforms and sophisticated technologies such as Machine Learning, behavioural analytics looks at user activity to try and identify and stop insider threats. For example, employees who are able to interpret behavioural analytics can spot potential security breaches by looking at who is accessing various network assets, how often and what devices they are using to communicate with.

Do: Focus on endpoint protection

The majority (around 70%) of businesses in the UK still rely on signature-based detection to fend off malware and ransomware attacks, according to O2’s Dean Thomson. This, simply, isn’t good enough, he says.

“It’s time to deploy next generation endpoint protection that uses behavioural analysis to detect and stop malicious activity. This technology will also go a long way in helping to protect against chip based exploits such as Meltdown and Spectre,” Thomson added.

Do: Ensure you focus on the knowns and unknowns

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and it’s easy to try and learn from what’s happened in the past to try and affect what may happen in the future. But, while it’s good to learn from experience, organisations must remember that the threats that expose our weak spots need the same amount, if not more, attention.

Do: Embrace evolving behaviours

With new threats emerging all the time, it’s important not to stand still when it comes to security. Be prepared for every possible eventuality and respond accordingly.

The most dangerous threats to your business are the ones lying dormant waiting to activate. There’s no place for complacency when it comes to workplace security. And, while people are your biggest and best asset, where security is concerned, they are also your biggest allies.

Don’t do the following…

Don’t: Shut people out

People need to feel valued and listened to. And there’s no greater way of showing you’ve been listening than answering their needs. So when you’re implementing any new technology, don’t do it without first talking to those who will end up using it. Get your people on board early on to help educate them on being security aware.

Don’t: Get the balance wrong

When it comes to accessibility boundaries and rules, there needs to be the right balance between tech security and tech freedom. Use it in the right way, tailored to how people work – with the right security in place – and technology can help unlock employees’ potential.

Don’t: Allow unauthorised devices on the company network

In the same way you wouldn’t allow any uninvited guests into your house, the same goes for your business. Many larger organisations may have this covered, but if a smaller business is keeping an eye on costs then unauthorised devices could slip through the net. In this case, ensure you maintain an audit of company issued devices as well as making sure employees understand the responsibility they hold every time they connect their personal devices to your corporate network.

Don’t: Think you can do it alone

No one really understands your business as well as you do, but you’re not expected to have all the answers. That’s why it’s important to work with your trusted partners to reinforce your defences. When it comes to security management, a third-party engagement can make a great deal of sense.

“Don’t waste money on trying to build and tool your own Security Operations Centre, instead outsource the problem to the experts,” according to Thomson.

“The costs for managed security services have come down considerably in the last year and it is far more secure to use a SOC that can see threats that are not just targeting your own business. There’s strength in numbers. We’re here to help if you need us.”

In conclusion

Technology is only one part of the puzzle when it comes to effective security; but ultimately, your people are the best defence. That’s why it’s important not only to educate employees on all the dangers, but also get them onside with your security strategy.

“Don’t let’s talk about the technology as if it’s the technology’s fault that we’ve
gotten better or worse at anything. It’s about how we choose to use the tools we’ve got,” Codrington added.

A business’s biggest asset is its people, and equipping them with the right technology to unlock their productivity is key. If an organisation and its people are always going to be connected, they need to be able to work on any device, collaborate with colleagues and access data and apps securely wherever they are.

When it comes to security, it’s often said, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. So, make sure you strengthen those defences and continue to invest in them as the threats evolve. Together, it’s far easier to stand up to the many against threats and stop them rather than taking them on alone.

Discover how O2’s technology is helping businesses empower their workforce.

The phrase “big data” itself unnerved some of us a few years ago. And in light of recent worries concerning improper use of personal data, it’s taken on a sinister note for some. But the increasingly huge wealth of data about every aspect of life now available is one of the miracles of the connected computing era. We create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and that figure is also increasing daily. Despite the valid concerns about the misuse of personal data, all this information has the potential to revolutionise every area of our lives in beautifully beneficial ways.

The key ingredient is how you interpret and use all that data and we’re only just scratching the surface of what can be achieved with all the information. This is because big data is by definition beyond what traditional data-processing application software is designed to cope with. Research group Gartner’s Doug Laney coined the “3 Vs” to define big data back in 2001, standing for volume, velocity and variety. More recently variability, veracity and complexity have been suggested as additions.

What all these parameters are intended to illustrate is that it’s not just the amount of information that defines “big data”, but the speed at which it is arriving and the many different categories involved. Both the number of cases and the attributes for each one are orders of magnitude larger than previous data repositories. For example, wearables such as sports watches are collecting a wealth of information about people’s exercise habits and this often includes details like heart rates, location throughout a routine, cadences for cycling and running, and even blood oxygen levels.

Businesses now rely on the data they collect about their customers, so how this is used effectively by employees is paramount. The modern era of “digital” companies like Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are more about how they use the data they collect than what they actually trade in or produce. There is a huge debate about the relationship between these kinds of companies and their users. In the case of pure data companies like Facebook, there is a more complex value exchange than traditional commerce. With the latter, the customer parts with money and receives a product or service in return.

But with a company like Facebook or Google, the end user doesn’t part with any money for the service they receive – such as social network media sharing or internet search results, email and cloud-based applications. Instead, what they exchange is their personal information. Data is the currency that users spend to receive the services provided. Regulatory frameworks like GDPR have arisen in recognition of the value of the data users part with when they access these services. However, many users don’t realise (or care) how much personal data they are giving away. The entertainment and social interaction they receive in return is sufficient to make them feel that they get more back than they spend.

All businesses collect data about their users, and whether or not users feel uncomfortable about this depends on how this information is used, as well as what they get in return. At one end of the scale, passing on personal details for third-party marketing purposes is not usually appreciated. However, the ability to use a system like Apple Pay to order a food delivery using just a thumbprint to verify identity and transfer the necessary funds is much more convenient than digging in your pocket for a credit card. Handing over your credit card details to Apple is necessary for this convenience. When this process also passes on your address details to the delivery company automatically, it’s an even more seamless experience.

This is just the smallest tip of the iceberg. Big data promises to make emerging services like car sharing meet end user needs more seamlessly. Putting aside those who own cars for enthusiast reasons, the biggest barrier preventing people from switching to car sharing from personal ownership is the fear of not having their vehicle available exactly when they need it. But accurate predictive analysis of behaviour, bringing in factors like weather, current events and even personal habits, could mean that there is always a car nearby when required, because the data analysis calculated that you would. Perhaps a little spooky, but undeniably convenient. The ability of services like Uber and Airbnb to match provision with need is already showing the potential from well-honed analysis of behavioural data. Similarly, Amazon’s grasp of supply-chain flow allows it to deliver many products the next day, or even the same day.

Over the next few years, the amount of information we share and is amassed about the world around us is set to increase exponentially. Virtually all companies can potentially benefit from collecting the right data and analysing it appropriately. Internet of Things devices, like per-room home thermostats, per-socket power consumption monitoring, health monitoring patches and connected cars with real-time tracking, are set to proliferate. These will be providing huge volumes of data and new possibilities of analysis. The relationship between health and lifestyle, for example, can be explored continually to find improvements.

The bandwidth available to wireless devices will be an order of magnitude higher, too, with 5G already being tested in the UK, for example O2’s trial at the O2 Arena in North Greenwich, London. When 5G is eventually introduced it will allow wireless data speeds up to 1,000 times faster than 4G, and promises much lower latency too. In combination with the Internet of Things revolution, 5G will further enable the exponential growth of data accumulation, particularly real-time supply from intensive sources like video surveillance.

Big data also has the power to make jobs easier for workers in critical areas such as emergency services. Police in the UK, for instance, are already using ‘predictive crime mapping’, where huge amounts of data on crime types, locations and times are processed to generate hotspot maps showing officers where crime is most likely to occur. The NHS, too, has a rich pool of patient data on which to draw. This can aid doctors in everything from recognising the warning signs of diabetes to effectively managing patient flow and ward demand during busy winter months.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this feature, there are potential dangers from all this data. But with the right safeguards and observance of regulations, the fears people have can be allayed, allowing the benefits to shine through. O2, in its business blog post “What does the future of big data look like?”, highlights how regulations like GDPR can be viewed as an opportunity for companies, rather than a threat. Testing your data for compliance should be seen as a chance to review what is being collected and how it is used, with the aim of finding untapped potential. Rather than just being an unwanted extra cost, this process can truly uncover the beautiful future possibilities of big data.

Discover how O2’s technology is helping businesses empower their workforce.

The financial services sector, once one of the most stable and slow-moving industries in the world, is currently in the middle of a vast upheaval. A status quo which has remained largely unchanged for decades – if not longer – is being turned on its head, and it’s all thanks to fintech.

Fintech (or financial technology) has undergone an explosion in recent years. Widespread connectivity and the growing ubiquity of mobile devices have enabled an unprecedented growth in the number, sophistication and accessibility of fintech tools and services, and it’s having a noticeable impact on the financial services sector.

These tools have allowed new digital-native companies to disrupt the market, as well as letting existing companies bolster their offerings with an increased range of financial services. Digital-only ‘challenger banks’ like Monzo, Starling and Revolut, for example, have started drawing customers away from traditional consumer banking firms, and mobile-based trading platforms have opened up the stock market to everyday people who otherwise would never have considered buying shares.

Established financial institutions are now having to rethink how they operate in light of these new developments. Customers are demanding faster, more convenient and more secure experiences from their financial providers, and many are choosing to ditch their existing banks when they don’t meet these new, evolving standards.

It’s not hard to see why; the new capabilities being unlocked by emerging fintech are very attractive. The combination of AI-driven chatbots and advanced data analytics allow customers to have 24/7 access to their own personal financial adviser who can give them insights into their personal spending patterns. Moreover, it can help them set and control their budgets, while a digital-only bank means no longer having to make inconvenient in-branch appointments to manage your money.

Fintech offers the key to increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction, but having the right technology is key. Even if you introduce the kind of advanced features that customers demand from their financial service providers, a poor experience thanks to long wait times, dodgy security or frequent errors is just as likely to drive them away as not having them in the first place.

So how can you ensure that your fintech tools are speedy and reliable enough to keep up with your users’ needs? Many businesses in other sectors have turned to the cloud for this, but in many cases, compliance and regulatory issues will mean that financial services companies simply aren’t able to enlist the services of a public cloud provider like Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

Instead, financial firms should be looking to modernise their own in-house data centres. Extra investment in data centre transformation projects can pay dividends for the performance of financial applications in particular, such as data analytics. The bedrock of any modern business strategy, data analytics is especially essential for financial services, allowing organisations to rapidly analyse market trends and real-time transaction data, as well as their customers’ banking information in order to provide them with new insights into their finances.

In order for this to be effective, however, your analytics model needs to perform at lightning speed, crunching through your datasets as quickly as possible to ensure your business retains a competitive edge. Similarly, you need to ensure that transactions and transfers are processed as quickly as possible; there’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than having to wait hours – or even days – before the money that a friend sent over for their share of a bill arrives in their account.

Achieving this is no mean feat, however, and it’s not just about adding more racks to your data centre. Making sure your data centre is running on the right infrastructure can be at least as important as its size, if not more so. Intel’s Xeon® Scalable platform, for example, is built specifically to support the kind of high-intensity data analytics workloads that modern financial services firms depend on.

Xeon® Scalable’s all-new Mesh architecture enables faster and more efficient data transfer between CPU cores – an essential benefit when dealing with high-volume datasets – and scales easily. In addition, Intel’s new AVX-512 instructions offer a 1.6x performance boost for data-driven HPC workloads and 2.2x speed increase for AI and machine learning tasks.

It’s also designed to couple seamlessly with Intel Optane™ storage and memory, slashing latency to the bone and processing instructions in a flash. It’s also super high-density, allowing you to put more memory in a given rack, thereby reducing data centre expenditure.

Another feature that will be particularly useful for financial firms is the added efficiency that the new Xeon® Scalable generation brings to security operations. In particular, the new instructions can process encryption tasks much faster than previous components thanks to a huge increase in the amount of floating-point operations that can be processed.

Encryption of network connections and data is essential for any financial services firm, but up until now, companies would be forced to suffer an increase in transaction time of up to 10% as a trade-off. Now, however, the improvements introduced by Xeon® Scalable and Optane™ mean that this time penalty is significantly reduced, resulting in faster and more secure transactions for your customers.

Financial firms are now more at risk of being overtaken and disrupted than they’ve ever been, but the same tools that are allowing their competitors to threaten them so greatly can also open up a world of new opportunities, increased revenues and more satisfied customers – for businesses that can embrace them.

Discover more about the technology powering Fintech at Intel.co.uk