Imagine if every PhD dissertation resulted in something that changed the world?
That’s what happened when Roy Fielding presented his doctoral dissertation on the “representational state transfer” at University of California-Irvine in 2000.
This dissertation laid the groundwork for the staggering growth of RESTful web services, which have reshaped how organizations deploy and utilize APIs. In fact, today 70% of public APIs depend on REST services.
CMA ruling requires open API for banks to bring finances into single app
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has released the final report from its retail banking market investigation enforcing widespread technological upgrades in some of the industry’s more traditional institutions, report Telecoms.com.
The five person investigation committee, which was initially launched in November 2014, were required to decide whether features of the retail banking industry distorted competition within the UK. After two years, the report stated traditional retail banks were not doing enough to ensure the consumer is receiving the best possible deal, and has now set out a number of new rules including the introduction of an open API to enable customer’s access to all their finances, irrelevant of organization, on a single app.
“The reforms we have announced today will shake up retail banking for years to come, and ensure that both personal customers and small businesses get a better deal from their banks,” said Alasdair Smith, Chair of the retail banking investigation. “Our central reform is the Open Banking programme to harness the technological changes which we have seen transform other markets. We want customers to be able to access new and innovative apps which will tailor services, information and advice to their individual needs.”
The development and adoption of an open API standard will have to be in place in all retail banks by Q1 2018, and will enable customers to see their finances, whether they be current accounts, savings accounts or mortgages, in a single app. By providing a single place for all accounts, the CMA hopes this will benefit consumers in a number of ways including avoiding fees incurred by unauthorized overdrafts, which currently adds £1.2 billion a year to the pockets of the retail banks.
Other rules from the CMA include enforcing banks to make all products available to customers through mobile applications, including loans, investments and mortgages. Despite the promise of banking apps, the report has concluded the technology in the more established retail banks is lagging behind other industries. Technology has proved to be a leveller in other sectors, AirBnB is a prime example of technology encouraging the growth of a SME, though this would not appear to be the case in the retail banking sector.
“Mobile financial services have long been approached as a luxury to the banked population in Britain, with banks offering limited services only through their respective applications,” said Maya Barkay, Product Marketing Manager for Mobile Financial Services at Amdocs. “In fact, the true potential of mobile financial services as a whole is being best explored in developing countries, such as Kenya and the Philippines, where these services are providing both basic and advanced financial services to a previously unbanked population.
“Regulation has time and time again been proven an essential enabler to mobile financial services, and this new ruling from the CMA is ensuring that British citizens will finally have the opportunity to harness mobile financial banking in a more useful and user-friendly way.”
The rules set in place are set to encourage more competition in the retail banking market, as larger organizations do not currently have to work hard enough to acquire or retain customers. Moving banks, irrelevant of the money which can be saved is too difficult, thus making growth for challenger banks more difficult and not encouraging competition in the industry.
Despite the efforts of the CMA to increase competition in the industry and provide more of a level playing field for smaller banks, some in the industry do not believe the report has gone far enough.
“As expected, the CMA’s report has fallen short and failed to deliver solutions to a number of the key issues it identified, in particular those facing SMEs seeking larger loans,” said Rishi Khosla, CEO of OakNorth Bank. “The CMA has explicitly stated in its report that a combination of factors make it difficult for new entrants and smaller banks such as OakNorth to effectively compete. Yet despite this, the solutions it’s provided for SME lending are limited to unsecured loans of up to £25,000, so won’t address the issues facing SMEs that need secured or larger loans.
“The fact that the CMA is simply going to pass the buck to the Treasury who won’t look to launch their own investigation until two years from now is extremely disappointing. There are millions of SMEs that are struggling to secure growth capital who may now need to wait up to four years for the situation to improve.”
While the CMA’s ruling does have the best interest of the consumer in mind, aiming to create a more transparent and competitive banking environment, the reception will not be truly known until the Open Banking app is released. During a time where security is top of the agenda and headlines detailing data breaches are not uncommon, it is not clear how many customers would agree to have all their financial information in one place.
Can data transparency be the future of outsourcing?
(c)iStock.com/4X-Image
The benefits of storing data in the cloud are clear. However, as businesses are beginning to closely examine what having data in the cloud entails, they’re discovering that their relationships with cloud vendors are sometimes, well, cloudy.
In a 2015 Forrester Consulting survey, more than 60% of businesses said issues with transparency were stalling further expansion into the cloud. These organisations are justified in being wary, because knowing where data is going and how it is being treated is paramount.
I’ll explain why the next wave of successful cloud providers will compete on these issues rather than price, product or market.
Why is location important?
If backups are vaulted in the wrong geographic location, businesses limit their ability to rebound from an incident within the necessary recovery time objectives (RTOs), due to latency concerns and bandwidth cost. The goal of strategically selecting where data will be vaulted is to minimise organisational risk as much as possible. To achieve this goal, businesses need to have two separate RTOs in place for operational issues that are specific to the individual environment (such as a server outage), and regional disasters.
A business would likely require a lower RTO for an operational issue, which would allow for local data vaulting, whereas a regional disaster could either have an equal or less aggressive RTO, simply because customers view events affecting several providers in a given area differently to an event affecting a single entity only. Unfortunately, many organisations focus solely on addressing operational RTOs in the disaster recovery (DR) planning process, which is catastrophic in a widespread event.
One of the benefits of the cloud is that it allows businesses to achieve a solution that addresses both operational and DR RTOs – they just need to know where the cloud’s data centres terminate. The important thing is to have their data as close as possible, but far enough away to ensure there’s not a common risk between geographies. The further apart locations are, the more availability and recovery challenges there are – and of course cost and latency (affecting communications, user experience, and so on).
It’s also important to know where data is stored, as compliance obligations – whether explicit or implicit – sometimes restrict the flow of data across EU borders, and many cloud-based solutions have multiple back-end data centres spanning multiple regions.
Knowing where their data is being sent allows businesses to dictate risk aversion or assumption. To win new outsourcing deals, cloud providers will be upfront about where an organisation’s data will be sent. Additionally, the provider will demonstrate that it can meet the client organisation’s RTOs by offering a service level agreement (SLA) that both IT and executive management can understand.
What data handling responsibilities must a business meet?
One issue that complicates the matter of data transparency is the fact that the data businesses manage isn’t just data that’s critical to operations – it’s personal data entrusted to the business by its employees and customers.
Many organisations have to adhere to regulatory requirements which require businesses to handle sensitive data in accordance with a specific set of standards. Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, organisations handling personal data belonging to EU members will be responsible for ensuring that information is protected and are responsible for breaches of this data. The GDPR promises citizens the right for data to be forgotten, easier access to one’s data and a right to data portability. This responsibility extends to third-party cloud providers, which is why transparency into service providers’ data management practices is crucial.
In the wake of Brexit, UK businesses might expect that GDPR is no longer relevant, but they’d be mistaken. GDPR analyst Chiara Rustici is one of many pundits who argue that UK companies should continue forging a path toward GDPR compliance. The reason, she argues, is that GDPR will affect UK businesses serving EU customers. GDPR isn’t so much about where the company handling the data resides, but rather where the person to whom the data belongs resides.
Even if GDPR were removed from the picture, UK businesses would still need to be aware of how their and their customers’ data is being handled in the cloud. Some businesses, for example, have mandated data retention time frames for specific types of data, such as the six-year retention period for payroll information, as required by the Taxes Management Act 1970.
For cloud vendors to reassure businesses that they can protect sensitive data, they’ll emphasise their encryption and archival practices. In the event that an individual invokes their right to be forgotten as per GDPR, cloud providers should be able to identify all the places this data resides and provide the client organisation with a written record of the applicable records’ destruction.
Again, successful cloud vendors will be those which back all of the above guidelines with an SLA that includes predefined, clearly outlined terms.
How much does price matter?
Price has long been touted as a benefit of moving to the public cloud, and public cloud providers are continually competing for customers by slashing prices. In 2013, for example, RightScale reported that the four public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google and Rackspace) rolled out a total of 25 price drops, up from 22 in 2012. When it comes to overall cost reductions, the providers are in a constant battle. In 2012, Azure had the most cuts, only to be edged out by Amazon in 2013. These price wars have continued into 2016. However, this so-called race to the bottom draws the focus away from the more important issue of data transparency.
Today, while cost is important, it’s not the top driver for cloud adoption. Research released by 451 Research earlier this year indicated that customers are concerned with cloud providers’ ability to provide value in terms of managed services, especially with regulations requiring strict data protection measures. In Europe, 451 Research assigned customers a 12 per cent Cloud Commodity Score (CCS), which measures price sensitivity – the higher the score, the greater the impact of price on adoption.
If a cloud provider is unable to meet an organisation’s need for data security and comprehensive support, the organisation won’t hesitate to invest more in a provider that can meet its needs. For cloud vendors to be able to win more deals, they should focus on value-added services – not cost.
Data transparency is a legitimate concern for businesses, but it needn’t be a barrier to cloud expansion. Competitive cloud providers will be upfront about their data handling practices and work with their clients to help them fulfil their compliance requirements.
Google backs multi-cloud strategy with Orbitera purchase
Google has confirmed the acquisition of cloud commerce platform Orbitera, marking an alternative strategy to its main cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, reports Telecoms.com.
The Orbitera platform acts as a marketplace for cloud solutions which simplifies the way in which customers search and purchase products. The platform currently supports deploying applications on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but not currently Google Cloud Platform, though the company said it would continue to support software deployments on platforms other than its own.
As the practise of cloud computing has become normalized throughout the industry, multi-cloud strategies have become more common as enterprise organizations aim to spread workloads to reduce risk. It would appear Google are using the move to multi-cloud environments to further establish its platform and build credibility in the industry. Although Google is generally ranked in the top three cloud providers worldwide, the gap between Microsoft and AWS, and Google in third place has been widening slightly in recent quarters.
Microsoft and AWS do also support multi-cloud propositions, though the majority of the marketing messages are focused on standardizing on a single platform. It would seem Google are moving to a position which would be more aligned with customer trends in the cloud ecosystem.
“At Google, we partner closely with our enterprise customers and software providers to ensure their transition to the cloud is as simple and seamless as possible,” said Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, on the company’s blog. “We recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles.”
The deal ties in well with another acquisition which the internet giant made in recent months. Back in November the company acquired enterprise development platform start-up bebop, which some industry commentators believed was a move to lure former VMware CEO Diane Greene to head a new business-oriented cloud service. The bebop business created a set of tools which simplified the process for enterprise organizations to build cloud apps. Combining Orbitera with Bebop could potentially form the central theme of a new marketing message for Google; simplifying the cloud.
Google are still playing catch-up with cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, though it does have lofty ambitions. Last year, Urs Hölzle, SVP for Technical Infrastructure, stated he believes the cloud business has the potential to exceed advertising revenues for the internet giant, which stood at $19 billion for the last quarter. Although the company has been growing in the cloud space, its competitors are expanding at a faster pace. Taking Microsoft and AWS on at their own game does not appear to be working, though a new strategy have the potential to act as a differentiator, as it does match customer trends moving towards multi-cloud strategies.
Install Windows 10 on Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac
Guest blog from support team member: Gunasekaran Udayakumar Install Windows 10 on Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Have you just installed Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac and need to set up your first virtual machine? Odds are you’re looking for the latest version of Windows, right? Here are the instructions on how to install Windows 10 on […]
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Why IT Security Is a Top Concern for SMBs | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Security
Although security is one of the most talked about topics in the IT channel today, there’s a widespread lack of education and awareness in the workplace. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are welcoming more technology into their everyday environment, but the rapid development of this technology is also accompanied by changes in cybersecurity and Internet threats.
AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft top IHS Markit cloud IT infrastructure analysis
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Here’s a slightly different take on a widely analysed space: IHS Markit has put Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft as leaders in the cloud IT infrastructure services sector – but put Amazon at the left of the others.
The analyst house released its cloud services scorecard which provides an interesting examination of the landscape – certainly different in its approach to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for instance. The graph is divided into three segments; challengers, established players, and leaders. Assuming the two axes, of market presence and momentum, average at 3.0, any organisation which scores higher in both is automatically in the leaders’ square.
It’s a clever way of putting the crosses in the box. Other vendors in the scorecard included CenturyLink, Equinix, Rackspace and Verizon in the established bucket, and Salesforce as the only challenger.
“Leadership in the cloud IT infrastructure services market requires very strong in-house software development skills, and all the leaders in our scorecard have a long history of innovation,” said Cliff Grossner, senior research director for data centre, cloud and SDN at IHS Markit in a statement. “This is not expected to change moving forward.”
Grossner added: “Established players, meanwhile, are able to leverage an existing services client base to which they can offer operational efficiencies. Although they have lower market momentum than the leaders, their significant presence indicates strong adoption of their solutions.”
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant arrived late last week, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google clearly holding the first three positions in that order. The former two were, for the second year running, the only vendors to make an appearance in the leaders’ section, while Google was the only company which found a place in the visionaries’ pile.
IHS and Markit, both analyst firms in their own right, announced a merger in March, with the details being fully ironed out in July. You can find out more about the report here (subscription required).
Orchestration Sets the Beat for Agile IT | @CloudExpo #SaaS #Cloud #Agile #DevOps
Agile IT has been widely heralded (and equally widely decried) as a way to align the pace of change in IT with the pace of change in the broader business.
At its core, Agile IT is making the very basic point that if in house IT cannot keep pace with the business there are a rapidly increasing number of cloud and SaaS providers for whom that is not a problem.
In short, IT must innovate around time to market or die a death of a thousand credit card cuts as individual developers outsource the IT they need to Amazon and other public cloud providers.
A Practical Guide to SLAs | @CloudExpo #APM #SaaS #Cloud #DevOps
While visiting a customer last week (a large SaaS platform company), we started to have an interesting discussion around Service Level Agreements (SLAs) during which he encouraged me to write this blog.
When I was tasked with setting up the QoS Team at DoubleClick in 1999, the primary mission was to setup a monitoring team (internal, external, etc.) and the secondary mission was actually an accidental one: to manage our SLAs.
This became a hot priority in 2001, we paid out over $1 million (in real money) in penalties for SLA violations to a single customer. Basically, someone on our side signed a contract with insane service commitments like 100% uptime.
[session] Monitoring with Artificial Intelligence | @CloudExpo #APM #Cloud #ArtificialIntelligence
Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before. They have a question on their mind like “How is my application doing” but no idea how to get a proper answer.