Migrating from legacy infrastructure to the cloud is a mammoth task for any organisation, yet it’s particularly daunting for the National Health Service (NHS) – one UK’s most critical public services and its largest employer.

NHS Digital, the organisation underpinning the health service’s digital transformation, issued guidance in January outlining how Trusts should approach migration – marking the first time an authority has greenlit the use of public cloud in the health service.

Previously, cloud providers would approach Trusts to offer their services only to get knocked back, with many claiming NHS Digital prohibited the use of public cloud services. NHS Digital would then have to clarify to vendors individually, when subsequently approached with complaints, that there was no explicit ban on the use of cloud.

Because of this, NHS Digital commissioned a working group on the safe use of cloud with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in 2016, with policy at the time dictating any data stored overseas couldn’t contain sensitive information. The working group was set up to investigate how the policy could be changed to make use of cloud benefits, with a framework eventually agreed with ministers the following year.

“What the guidance is providing is a mechanism for organisations to do their own risk assessment as to whether or not cloud services can be used for their service or requirements,” Michael Flintoff, NHS Digital associate director for platforms and infrastructure, tells Cloud Pro.

“The main thing for me is clarity,” he adds, as Trusts have indicated a desire for guidance around data risk modelling and accessing services, something which traditionally hasn’t been there.

Sam Smith, coordinator at campaign group medConfidential, agrees the guidance is needed in principle, explaining “what it does – and the reason for the guidance – is it means hospitals can no longer say [to vendors] ‘NHS Digital told us not to’,” also claiming NHS Digital grew weary of having to repeatedly clear up the misunderstanding on an individual basis.

But Smith does not believe the guidance will make a difference, and, despite the clarity it provides, sees this as NHS Digital having “dumped [responsibility] back on the hospitals”, while criticising the organisation for failing to introduce a set of minimum standards for the products available.

NHS ‘can be, and will be attacked’

Cloud transformation has been central to the digital transformation strategy of many organisations, including swathes of the public sector, with the government issuing its own cloud-first guidance last year.

NHS Digital says the benefits extend beyond cost-saving to being able to develop, test and deploy services quicker, without large initial capital expenditure, as well as a better scope for data interoperability.

Flintoff said a cloud-first strategy has led to greater efficiencies in his own “heavily technical, development-orientated” organisation; undergoing transformation on a service-by-service basis and pay-as-you-go type services, such as SQL-as-a-service, to ensure best value.

But for an organisation as large and fragmented as the NHS, an IT project of this scale poses huge challenges, with the health service keen to forget a string of failed efforts in the past; the most notable example being the care.data scheme abandoned in 2016.

Security, meanwhile, is an equally pressing concern. NHS Digital assured Trusts they could safely locate health data, including patient records, in the public cloud, but a string of reports have underlined security risks. For instance, 100GB of secret NSA data was found exposed on a misconfigured Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) S3 bucket in late 2017, among a host of other high-profile leaks including those at FedEx and Accenture.

“The days of blithely assuming that an IT system can be made totally secure are gone,” says Dr Paul Miller, senior analyst at Forrester.

“It is far more realistic to assume that any IT system can be attacked and will be attacked, and the emphasis should, therefore, be on detecting those attacks, defending against the vast majority of those attacks, and mitigating the impact of any attack that does get past the initial set of defences.”

medConfidential’s Smith adds that while the chances of suffering a breach aren’t necessarily higher in the cloud, the consequences of any breaches are likely to be far more severe in nature if they occur on public cloud infrastructure as opposed to within the NHS firewall – particularly if Trusts simply opt for the cheapest option.

In light of these “additional challenges,”, the NHS is deploying tools like privileged access management and two-factor authentication to bolster security.

“The fundamentals of what we’ve done with IT for the last 20 years haven’t changed,” says NHS Digital’s Flintoff. “They don’t change because we go to the cloud, we might just have to approach them differently because we do that”.

Third-party access to patient data

For others, meanwhile, one of the biggest concerns centres on privacy, and whether third-party organisations, such as large tech companies, may have access to sensitive patient data once it’s put into the cloud.

“These people are here to make money, if not today, tomorrow, and you need to understand very clearly what their business model is if you are going to be part of that,” said Javier Ruiz Diaz, a director at Open Rights Group. “For the NHS it would be highly irresponsible not to be asking those questions right now”.

He cites arrangements with DeepMind in which hospitals, most notably the Royal Free in London, were slammed for granting Google access to patient data without consent.

Provided additional concerns around ensuring trusts do not become locked-in to one provider, and retaining ownership of public data, are dealt with, he believes the benefits could be substantial.

But these benefits, which include “better ICT, more innovative, and faster development”, can only be reaped on the condition it’s “done properly and it’s not done with short-sightedness” or as a money saving exercise.

“If you say you need to do cloud just because you’re saving money – that in itself is very, very short-sighted, because there are costs,” adds Ruiz. “You are bringing risks, so to just say you are going to save money is a false economy, because in the long term you are going to lose a lot more.”

‘It makes no sense to train a new army of experts’

McAfee’s research also found a quarter of organisations cited a lack of staff with skills to manage security for cloud applications as a key challenge, with only 24% reporting they suffered no skills shortage. Significantly, 40% of IT leaders reported a skills shortage was slowing their organisation’s cloud adoption.

The NHS is suffering a staffing shortage in clinical areas, let alone in the technical skills required to maintain an IT project of this scale. NHS Digital itself only has “18 to 20 deeply technically skilled people”, according to a House of Commons report into the WannaCry attack that crippled the health system last year.

The report highlighted the struggle faced by NHS organisations trying to recruit and retain skilled cyber security staff in the midst of a national shortage, in a landscape where the private sector can pay far more than the health service to attract talent.

“Teams within the NHS already have skills and experience in the relevant areas, but there aren’t enough of them,” says Dr Miller. “It doesn’t make sense for the NHS to train or hire a new army of cloud experts for the migration: there are systems integrators, consultancies, and other partners ready and willing to provide those services to the NHS. But, equally, the NHS should not outsource the whole problem to a third party.”

He called for an increase in the size and funding for internal IT and digital capabilities, given the NHS needs people with the skills and expertise to understand the migration, as well as continue to ask the right questions with regards to what its partners may be proposing. Above all, this transition must be designed, shaped, and led by NHS employees.

“The work must also be done within the broader umbrella of a digital strategy for the NHS. This isn’t just about moving from one server to another, or upgrading one application to its cloud-based equivalent,” he adds.

“The real opportunity here is to think about what a digital NHS should look like, how a digital NHS can help NHS staff be more efficient, informed, and empowered, and how a digital NHS can improve interaction with and care for patients.”

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No-one likes a stealth tax, yet that’s exactly what some people accuse Microsoft of implementing. While we wouldn’t want to go back to the days of paying £400 for a single-user licence of Office desktop software, the monthly drip of £6 to £13 per month starts to add up. So is Microsoft delivering real value for money or are we all mugs?

Make no mistake, Office 365 is a crucial part of Microsoft’s drive towards a cloud-first future. And with it, profitability: it made a $21 billion profit in 2017 compared to $12 billion in 2015, when Office 365 was released. Through aggressive pricing, marketing and a steady depreciation of the standalone versions, Redmond has done everything in its power to make Office 365 the standard way to buy Office.

Sadly for Microsoft, not everyone is keen to jump on board.

The sales pitch for Office 365 has always focused on shifting away from the big releases to a continually evolving office suite, with new features rolling out on an almost monthly basis. Yet, you don’t have to be a cynic to suggest that Office 365 still looks and feels an awful lot like the version that launched three years ago, which closely resembled the one that emerged back in 2012.

Are we paying a subscription for software that’s constantly improving, its incremental improvements being overlooked because we’ve forgotten what we started with a few years ago? Or are we merely paying a monthly retainer for the same old Office? To find out, we’re going to delve into Office’s features, focusing on those that have rolled out since July 2015, when Office 2016 hit the shelves.

What’s changed in Office?

If you’re a casual Office user making light use of basic features, or even an old-school power user with an established way of working, you might agree that Office hasn’t changed noticeably in the past three years. In terms of the basic look and feel of its core features, Office 2016 wasn’t a huge leap forwards from Office 2013, with much of the focus on collaborative editing and teamwork tools, alongside closer integration with OneDrive and Skype.

Moreover, many of the post-2015 enhancements centre on current Microsoft preoccupations, which may or may not interest you. Many focus on the pen and ink tools being pushed on the company’s Surface devices, or on support for the 3D content tools that came with the Windows 10 Creators Update.

For instance, a new customisable, portable pen set can be used across all Office apps on all devices, while new ink and pencil effects give you fresh options for annotations, notes and plans. You can use a pen to select and change objects in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, or sketch out rough squares, circles and blobs before converting them into shapes in Word. These features might be game changers if you’ve embraced the stylus, but for those of us working on a normal desktop or laptop, they’re almost irrelevant.

As for 3D content, it’s interesting that all the major applications now support 3D models, allowing you to pull one into a document then resize and rotate it to your heart’s content. But for many business users, the lack of relevant content – or resources and desire to create their own – is a real sticking point. There’s good news for 2D artwork: the Remove Background feature gives you Photoshop-style tools that can remove a plain background in a matter of seconds.

Other changes simply ensure that features apply more consistently throughout the suite. For example, real-time collaboration features, where you can see a document updating, character by character, as another editor works on it, were restricted to Word in the initial release. Now they’re there in Excel and PowerPoint too, though you need to share the files through OneDrive or SharePoint to benefit.

Word

Let’s start with Word. One of Office 2016’s biggest strengths has become its use of Microsoft’s AI and machine learning to get you started on common Office tasks or enhance the quality of your work.

Take Word’s Editor pane, for example, or the new Researcher tool. Call the latter up from the References tab, type in a subject, and Bing will go away and search for sources. From these you can pull out notes and even quotes, with Researcher tracking citations and adding them automatically to the document’s bibliography.

Word’s Editor tool is far more than a replacement spellchecker – used wisely, it can genuinely improve your use of words

You may prefer working independently through your browser, or you might trust Google to deliver stronger sources, but Researcher can be great for getting a head start on a topic or searching for a relevant snippet of info to support a key point. It’s arguably of most use to students or journalists, but if you spend any time trying to pull notes together for a report or meeting, having a built-in tool that tracks sources and citations can be a real time-saver.

Right next to Researcher, you’ll find the new Smart Lookup, again powered by Bing. Apply it to a word or phrase and you’re presented with not only a definition, but more in-depth explanations from a range of different sources, along with more general web search results. Smart Lookup isn’t always all that smart, however. I looked up “fiesta”, in the context of festivities, and was shown content around Ford’s small car and a US grocery chain.

Type in a subject and Researcher will bring up a list of sources, making it easy to get to grips with a topic

Other new features might not set the world alight. You can page through longer documents like a book instead of continuously scrolling through them – great on a big desktop screen, if almost useless on a laptop.

You can also add a character count to the status bar, or view and restore changes in shared documents without leaving Word. Smart Quotes have been improved to work more accurately around punctuation.

Meanwhile, the new Translator for Office 365 feature is basically a replacement for the old Mini Translator window. On the plus side, it’s a more effective tool, handling longer passages and producing reasonable working translations that make almost perfect sense.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint hasn’t sat still for the past few years, either, with the most useful addition being Designer. While no replacement for a real designer or a strong set of corporate templates, its Design Ideas can transform a deck of slides into something that looks professional.

If you’re pressed for time, the new QuickStarter template could be tempting. Just type in a topic and this intelligent tool goes to work with the help of Bing, asking you to pick from a selection of visual treatments before coming back with a suggested structure, relevant facts to get you started and even ideas for other areas or points for further research. It’s a feature that should play well with Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers, but is it useful in a business context? Possibly not. It’s one of those tools that hints at a future where intelligent assistants dig out ideas and insights to improve your productivity, but at the moment it’s more suited to the classroom than the boardroom.

SmartLookup provides useful reference material– and the ability to import 3D models

Other additions are smaller, but potentially more useful. The new Morph transition allows you to duplicate a slide and move or add elements, then morph between the original and the copy with all the elements shifting simultaneously. It’s a classic maximum impact, minimum effort effect. The same is true of the new Zoom feature. Insert a zoom into a slide, select the slides or sections you want included and PowerPoint will flick from one to the next with a sweeping zoom in, zoom out animation.

Excel

If Word and PowerPointboast eye-catching new features, Excel’s enhancements are less immediate. Few of us thrill to the sound of faster opening of complex documents, improved autocomplete or a more flexible copy feature, but all improve basic usability, albeit in ways that you might not notice.

Excel’s map chart tool allows you to compare data – for example, population density – using maps gleaned from Bing

Other improvements make more of a difference when you’re dealing with large or complex datasets in research or enterprise. Over the past two years, Microsoft has steadily drip-fed out additions to the Query Editor, such as new transformations for Adding Columns by Example or splitting and grouping columns to manipulate their data. Again, these features rely on Microsoft’s algorithms to get Excel to handle the grunt work, leaving you to dig further or refine. When you do come up with something interesting, closer integration with Power BI makes it easier to share queries or insights with colleagues.

Of course, not every Excel user ever touches the Query Editor, let alone uses Power BI, but if you do then the experience should have improved.

Outlook

You could argue that, with Outlook, Microsoft is stealing Google’s tricks. The new Focused Inbox view is one example, borrowing from Google’s Inbox, but Outlook has also pinched Gmail’s idea of sucking information out of your incoming emails and using it to create reminders or events.

Gmail users will know that this is particularly useful for meetings and travel arrangements, and Outlook does a reasonable job of putting appointments, flights and hotel reservations on your schedule where they’ll be more accessible, though Microsoft’s assistant isn’t quite as smart as Google’s when it comes to spotting and capturing the vital info.

Outlook’s new, Google-style Focused Inbox view makes it easy to quickly see your most important emails via a tab

Vanilla Outlook 2016 introduced a move away from sending files via email to leaving those files in your OneDrive cloud and sending permissions to share, view, download and edit. More recent changes have made this more straightforward, by allowing you to drag-and-drop cloud-stored attachments as if they were attached to the email. You can also set permissions to these files, ensuring that people can’t edit and reuse them if you only want them to view.

Finally, sales teams or smaller businesses shouldn’t underestimate the Office 365-exclusive Outlook Customer Manager add-in. This enables you to set up companies, contacts, events and deals within a customer-centric view, so that you can view touchpoints, conversations, meetings and opportunities company by company, with all the relevant data close to hand. It transforms Outlook into something a little more like a customer relationship management tool; one that’s tracking your email conversations and calendar events to give you a bigger-picture view.

Just be aware, however, that it takes a while to set up and start using, and even more time before it starts getting to grips with your data and throwing up useful information.

The verdict

So, are you really benefiting from that Office 365 Subscription?

Based on the incremental rollout of new features, it depends. None of the new features are what you might call game-changers. None seriously impact everyday Office workflows or are likely to transform the way you do your job. In fact, if you use Office the way many of us do, working with established tools and templates, you might not even be aware that these new features exist.

To balance, some are genuinely useful. Word’s Editor is an improvement on the old Spelling and Grammar check when you’re giving work a read through. PowerPoint’s Designer can help non-designers produce better-looking slides.

Office 365’s great strength is its range of bundled services, but do you use them?

Outlook’s Focused Inbox is a better way to organise your mail. And while Excel’s enhancements are more specialist, they provide similar shortcuts for data analysis. Most of all, these tools point to Microsoft’s wider vision of an Office where intelligence and automation make it easier to get real work done.

What’s there right now might not be enough for those paying monthly or annual subscriptions and wondering why Office isn’t evolving faster, in which case the question is how much value you’re getting from the other benefits: the Outlook.com email, the OneDrive storage or SharePoint, Teams and Yammer in the Business Premium version. If you or your company use them, then it’s hard to argue with the package on value for money. If not, Microsoft still has a way to go before it convinces us that the “as a service” model is really paying off.

Let’s be clear: as a bundle of services Office 365 is an excellent deal, but if you’re only paying to use the core Office apps of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, it might be time for a rethink.

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SAP has moved to curb the impact Salesforce is having on its own CRM play with its latest product, C/4 HANA, analysts say.

C/4 HANA is SAP’s attempt to tie together its ERP applications with front-office customer-facing tools, aiming to create a better customer experience overall.

“SAP was the last to accept the status quo of CRM and is now the first to change it,” said CEO Bill McDermott.

“The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4 HANA is all about the consumer.”

Industry observers suggest that SAP has made the move to stop the likes of Salesforce eating into its installed base.

C/4 will comprise all of SAP’s CRM acquisitions to date – SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud (including the acquired Gigya services) and SAP Sales Cloud (including the newly-acquired CallidusCloud services and acquired Hybris business).

SAP is the second largest CRM vendor, owning 8.5% market share in 2017, according to Gartner’s statistics. But while customers of SAP’s ERP products are loyal purchasers of its front office kit in sectors like utilities, chemicals and industrial manufacturing, those in retail and consumer goods are more likely to use Salesforce, Gartner research VP and distinguished analyst Ed Thompson said.

“The battle is between those who want a unified front-office and value it more than those who want an integrated front to back-office,” he told Cloud Pro. “The issue has been whether they’re patient enough to wait for SAP to get their act together or whether they want something more quickly.”

Another factor is the size of the CRM market – it overtook the ERP market in 2015 and is expected to be worth $75 billion by 2022, according to Gartner figures, compared to ERP’s $44 billion market cap.

“So in essence SAP has to do well in CRM; it will one day be bigger for them than ERP,” Thompson said.

But bearing in mind Salesforce’s 19% market share, SAP must reach beyond traditional users of its CRM products to offset its dominance.

“It will take more than launching C4/HANA for SAP to close the gap,” Thompson said. “They’ll need to find a way to appeal to those who are not existing SAP customers for CRM, widen their ecosystem of ISV and consulting partners and make ground in the industries they haven’t traditionally sold CRM to.”

C/4 HANA simplifies the branding of SAP’s range of CRM software by putting it under one roof. One level up from that, and SAP is effectively selling S/4 and C/4 under the ‘intelligent cloud suite’ brand as one whole connected service tying together front and back office IT.

As McDermott put it: “When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviours of the supply chain.”

But Constellation Research’s Mueller stressed that customers now need to see the new positioning backed up in product announcements.

“SAP has a shot to redefine #CRM with the @CallidusCloud and #S4HANA assets,” he tweeted, “but must show complete processes.”

This means integration via APIs, and fast – something Thompson also highlights.

“It will require a quick follow up with details on architecture and roadmap to back up the strategy and it doesn’t yet address the issue of how this will encourage a CRM ecosystem of partners and facilitate increased innovation,” he claimed.

Both analysts view it as a move to limit the impact Salesforce is having on SAP’s CRM business, rather than an aggressive push of its own. “Pressure on CRM must be substantial,” Mueller observed.

“This is a defensive [move] in response to Salesforce,” Thompson added. “It will take more to get on the offensive.”

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Microsoft has leveraged the technologies of submarines and renewable energy to plunge a 40ft-long datacentre into the sea near Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

The experimental shipping container-sized prototype, called “Project Natick”, is currently in operation on the seafloor next to the European Marine Energy Centre, just off the Northern Isles.

This Davy Jones’ datacentre is the result of a year’s worth of research into environmentally sustainable data storage technology that Redmond hopes could one day be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate at the bottom of the sea for years.

“That is kind of a crazy set of demands to make,” admitted Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft AI and research, who leads the NEXT group, a Microsoft research program for pioneering new technologies, which is overseeing the experiment. “Natick is trying to get there.”

Microsoft is pursuing what it calls a “relevant moonshot”; projects the company believes have the potential to transform the core of its business and the wider cloud computing industry.

The cylindrical storage container is loaded with 12 racks containing a total of 864 servers and has a self-sustaining cooling system that Microsoft has adapted from the heat-exchange process used in submarines. It works by piping seawater through radiators on the back of each rack to cool them down, before the now-heated water is expelled back into the ocean where it mixes with the surrounding currents.

An underwater cable from the European Marine Energy Centre on the Orkney Islands will power the datacentre. The energy centre is a test site for experimental tidal turbines and wave energy converters that generate electricity from the movement of seawater.

By plunging datacentres in bodies of water near coastal cities, data would have short distances to travel to reach coastal communities. It’s estimated that half of the world’s population live within 120 miles of a coast, so off-shore datacentres could lead to faster web browsing, streaming and a boost for AI-driven technologies.

“For true delivery of AI, we are really cloud-dependent today,” added Lee. “If we can be within one internet hop of everyone, then it not only benefits our products but also the products our customers serve.”

Microsoft hopes to leave the datacentre in place for five years without having to intervene – once submerged, it’s impossible for engineers to gain access to the facility. It will monitor its performance for 12 months to see if such an idea is practical.

Pictures: Microsoft