As machines are increasingly connected to the internet, it’s becoming easier to discover the numerous ways Industrial IoT (IIoT) is helping to shape the business world. This is exactly why we have decided to take a closer look at this pervasive movement and to examine the desire to connect more things!
Now if you need a refresher on IIoT and how it is changing the world, take a moment and listen to Greg Gorbach with ARC Advisory Group. Gorbach believes, “IIoT will significantly change the world. You won’t participate with conventional thinking and an incremental approach.”

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The Internet of Things has the potential to completely change how we live and work. It’s already causing an evolution in the workplace – especially where IT is involved.
By 2020, there will be over 38 billion connected devices. In the interest of convenience and efficiency, we’re shoving embedded computers into pretty much every single product and appliance we use, from fridges and blenders to thermostats and security systems. Wi-Fi connected device are no longer an oddity or for use simply by the elite; they’re a regularity in both our personal and professional lives.

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Many banks and financial institutions are experimenting with containers in development environments, but when will they move into production? Containers are seen as the key to achieving the ultimate in information technology flexibility and agility. Containers work on both public and private clouds, and make it easy to build and deploy applications.
The challenge for regulated industries is the cost and complexity of container security compliance. VM security compliance is already challenging, and containers increase the problem exponentially. Simplifying and automating security compliance will be critical to achieving the high ROI expected from containers.

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In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Bruce Swann, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, will discuss how the Adobe Marketing Cloud can help marketers embrace opportunities for personalized, relevant and real-time customer engagement across offline (direct mail, point of sale, call center) and digital (email, website, SMS, mobile apps, social networks, connected objects).
Bruce Swann has more than 15 years of experience working with digital marketing disciplines like web analytics, social media, mobile marketing and email marketing, as well as marketing and CRM technologies, including marketing automation, predictive analytics and marketing resource management. At Adobe, he is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign, focused on marketing and product strategy for cross-channel campaign management.

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Managed IT services provider IT Specialists (ITS) has put together a list of the top 10 business continuity disasters to hit the UK over the past 12 months, including storms Abigail, Desmond, Katie, as well as a fire at Holborn and power cuts at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and Heathrow Airport.

The list of disasters encompass various business situations, from the Forth Road Bridge Closure in December where 80,000 vehicles were diverted daily for 19 days, to the Heathrow power cut which saw an outage for three hours and up to 4,000 people left without bags.

The full list of disasters, in chronological order from April 2015 to March 2016, were the Holborn fire; the Kennington floods; the Royal Berkshire Hospital power cut and flood; the Heathrow Airport power cut; the Hampton-in-Arden fire; storm Abigail; the Forth Road Bridge Closure; storm Desmond; storm Katie; and the Saltley recycling site fire.

The study was conducted for the Business Continuity Institute’s Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) which runs until May 20. Matt Kingswood, head of managed services at ITS, told CloudTech: “We want to help businesses create and improve their business continuity programs, but first they must realise the need for one. With this research, we wanted to help businesses understand the types of incidents that could affect them.”

As Graham Jarvis pointed out for this publication back in November, the business case for data centres, specifically those associated with disaster recovery, have to be geographically dispersed. It’s just common sense. Even though in some instances you can assess how ‘disaster prone’ a geographic area is – minimal resistance to flooding among others was one of the key criticisms of China as a cloud ready nation according to a recent report – Kingswood argues disasters ‘of all sorts’ are becoming more frequent in the UK.

“This increases the urgency of having a business continuity programme,” he explains. “Investing in forward planning can save valuable time, protect the organisation’s revenue and preserve its customer base.”

Kingswood argued the extent of the downtime was not especially surprising, but said not all businesses were as prepared as they could be over business continuity. “We’re seeing progress, but still too many businesses either don’t have a business continuity programme or don’t understand what business continuity entails,” he says.

“There are those who put a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution in place and all but forget about it. However, to avoid wasting money on a product that doesn’t function as needed in the aftermath of a disaster, businesses need to work with their DRaaS providers to test the solution and have a plan for coping with power outages and other consequences of a disaster.”

You can find out more about ITS here.

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Over the last 12 months, the UK has seen floods and fires upend businesses of all sorts – from hospitals, to factories, to recycling centres. Commuters faced their own significant set of challenges, with incidents such as the closure of the Forth Road Bridge and the Heathrow Airport power cut, which diverted more than 130 flights. Meanwhile, the Met Office has plenty of opportunities to test the new convention of naming storms, with the likes of Katie, Abigail and Desmond wreaking havoc on the nation.

These are a few of the findings of new research from managed services provider IT Specialists (ITS). Inspired by the Business Continuity Institute’s Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) 2016, from May 16 to 20, ITS looked at incidents that caused significant issues for UK businesses. With the theme of BCAW being return on investment (ROI), ITS examined the ROI of having a business continuity plan – particularly one containing a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution – in the aftermath of incidents like the ones covered in the research.

ITS discovered that regardless of whether the incident was a cataclysmic tropical storm or a seemingly mundane burst pipe, disasters have the ability to cause billions of pounds in damage. Flooding is the most expensive and prevalent issue to affect the UK. Accountancy firm KPMG has estimated that the total cost to the UK’s insurance sector, businesses, individuals, communities and government as a result of winter 2015-16 flooding will top out at £5.8 billion.

Natural disasters don’t discriminate based on business size – so SMBs shouldn’t write off business continuity as just something large enterprises do

However, at least some of these costs can be avoided by businesses with a solid business continuity strategy. Without a proper plan in place, there is a risk of negative consequences such as lost inventory, reduced productivity due to employees being unable to work remotely, property damage, and the all-important revenue loss.

Disasters such as these don’t discriminate based on business size, so SMBs shouldn’t write off business continuity planning as something large enterprises do. Likewise, large organisations shouldn’t assume insurance coverage is a sufficient business continuity plan. After all, no insurance policy will help employees continue working if they don’t have access to business-critical applications. To gain the most ROI from business continuity, businesses need to form a cloud-based data backup strategy, give employees network access, set guidelines for personal device use, provision a telephony solution, have a plan for Internet outages, and set up an alternate workspace.

A poster child for business continuity is an accountancy firm which was affected by the fire in Holborn in spring 2015. The event forced 5,000 people to evacuate and cut off gas and electric supplies from thousands of properties. The firm itself had to evacuate 70 staff, but it has already moved its servers to the cloud, so employees were able to keep on working from another office or their homes using a remote login system.

Investing in forward planning can save valuable time, protect the organisation’s revenue, and preserve its customer base. Businesses need to formulate a business continuity programme to identify inefficient processes that cost the organisation money on a daily basis and can prove a barrier to disaster recovery.

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The major colocation players continue to extend their leadership – and comfortably beat overall market growth – in large part due to significant acquisitions, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

According to the firm’s Q1 2016 figures, the top three vendors in the space remain Equinix, Digital Realty, and NTT, with 28%, 26%, and 41% year on year growth respectively. Yet while the analyst house argues the three firms grew well enough organically, the acquisitions made – in particular Equinix acquiring Telecity and Bit-isle, Digital Reality with Telx and NTT with e-shelter – helped boost the coffers further.

Equinix is the only single colocation player with more than 10% market share, according to the researchers; to put this into context, the remaining seven vendors in the top 10, including CenturyLink, Global Switch, and KDDI, hold just over 15% share between them. According to the data the colocation market is expanding steadily across all regions, with China, Germany, and Japan the highest growing countries in Q1.

Regardless, it shows the market in comparatively rude health. “We’ve seen a constant stream of M&A activity over the past five years and several more big deals are in the pipeline – and yet there remains a very long tail of independent small to medium sized colocation operators,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Many of these will continue to operate successfully by focusing on specific metros or countries, while others will inevitably succumb to market consolidation,” he added.

451 Research conducted a similar study back in April which argued that 2015 was the best year on record for deals in the data centre, hosting, and managed services sector. Global colocation revenues will reach more than $33 billion (£23bn) by 2018, the researchers argued, with Equinix leading on market share despite Digital Realty owning more real estate.

Anyone asking why the colocation market continues to see market growth needs to look no further than Logicworks’ description in this publication back in February. “As enterprises begin to move ‘easy’ workloads to AWS [et al], they want to move not-ready workloads to a managed environment outside their internal data centres,” Logicworks argues. “Somewhat paradoxically, colocation is rising in popularity precisely because enterprises want cloud.”