data centre, data protection, data residency, Datacentre, DropBox, EU, News & Analysis

Dropbox opens Hamburg office to reduce US/EU data concerns

Dropbox GermanyDropbox has announced the opening of its latest European office, branching into the German market ahead of plans to open a new data centre in Europe latter in the year.

The company has answered concerns from European customers regarding the transmission of data across the Atlantic by committing to hosting their data within the EU; a region which the company claims is generating the majority of recent growth. This commitment has also been backed up with the company opening new offices in Dublin, London, Paris and Amsterdam, in addition to Hamburg.

Data residency has been an issue for European customers for a number of months since the Court of Justice of the European Union declared Safe Harbour void last October. Since then, there have been a number of efforts to sooth the relationship between the US and the EU, though the issue still remains contentious and newer drafts Safe Harbour have been criticized by various European quarters.

As Europe represents a healthy growth region for the Dropbox, it would appear the team are not prepared to wait for the EU/US data storm to blow over. Opening a new data centre in Germany has the potential for Dropbox to avoid the repercussions of the long-standing dispute.

“From manufacturing to professional services to healthcare, industries in Europe and around the world are discovering the benefits of increased collaboration on Dropbox,” said Thomas Hansen, Global VP of Revenue at Dropbox. “And the opening of our Hamburg office is just a part of our European commitment.

“From co-working spaces to corporations, people bring Dropbox to work, and adoption in Germany has been phenomenal. The top three cities in terms of Dropbox signups are also the largest: Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. But Karlsruhe and Dresden are the real hotspots when measuring users per capita.”

As with other freemium business models Dropbox has reportedly found difficulties in upgrading customers to the paid-for services. The company launched a new relationship with Adyen last year to offer localized payment models in 12 European countries, build around a direct debit payment mechanism, a more popular model in the European markets, as opposed to PayPal or credit card models.

data centre, Datacentre, Expansion, India, News & Analysis, ST Telemedia, STT, Tata communications

ST Telemedia continues expansion in data centre market

Location India. Red pin on the map.ST Telemedia Global Data Centres has expanded its data centre footprint through a joint venture with Tata Communications, where it will now take a 74% majority stake in Tata’s data centre business in India and Singapore.

The new deal expands ST Telemedia’s already healthy presence throughout the world as it adds 14 data centres in various cities across India, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune, and its three Singapore facilities. The company now has a presence in four major regions, including a strong footprint in two of Asia’s fastest growing economies, India and China.

Tata will retain a 26% share of the joint venture, but will focus on advanced services within the data centre that enable digital transformation. Tata highlighted the new partnership will enable the business to refocus investments on area such as cloud enablement and unified communications.

“This partnership marks another key milestone in STT GDC’s growth,” saod Sio Tat Hiang, Executive Director at ST Telemedia. “Since ST Telemedia’s initial investment in the data centre business in mid-2014, we have made remarkable progress in building a formidable data centre footprint internationally with strategic presence in key economic hubs to capture industry demand.

“The latest addition of India to the STT GDC network will be a major impetus to advance the company’s ambition to be a significant global data centre service provider. We are pleased to partner with an established company like Tata Communications, to pursue opportunities in the growing data centre market.”

ST Telemedia’s data centre market portfolio currently contains a number of organizations including GDS Services, MediaHub, Level 3 Communications and Virtus Data Centres, the latter of which has doubled in size for two consecutive years, making it one of the largest data centre providers in the London area. The company ambitions are to develop the largest global platform of advanced, integrated and carrier-neutral data centres in every major economic centre.

While ST Telemedia has seemingly prioritized the data centre market, the team have made a number of investments additional growth areas including IoT, with an investment in software and managed services company Greenwave, and also big data following its investment in Datameer, an analytics and visualisation company earlier this year.

Big Data, Data Driven Decision Making, data science, DNV GL, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

Organizations struggling to capitalize on benefits of big data

Laptop Screen with Big Data Concept.Big data is now considered one of the more significant priorities of businesses through 2016 however research from DNV GL has highlighted only 23% of organizations have a defined strategy moving forward.

According to research from the business assurance arm of DNV GL, while the majority (52%) of companies have outlined the importance of big data for future operations, roughly only a quarter have the capabilities to fulfil the promise and capitalize fully on the benefits. The interest increases significantly for larger organizations, those of 1000 or more employees, as 70% highlighted it as a priority.

“Big data is changing the game in a number of industries, representing new opportunities and challenges,” says Luca Crisciotti, CEO of DNV GL – Business Assurance. “I believe that companies that recognize and implement strategies and plans to leverage the information in their data pools have increased opportunities to become more efficient and meet their market and stakeholders better.”

One of the larger concerns for big data which have been voiced in conference and articles in recent months is an organizations ability to act upon the potential of the information now available. The volume of data is growing at a notable rate, though one concern is few organizations have the current technological capabilities or adequately trained employees to realize the potential.

BCN has been told during numerous conversations many organizations current capabilities can only analyse a small proportion, between 5-25% dependent on who you speak to, of the data collected. Until organizations are capable of analysing and actioning larger proportions of the data, the potential of big data or the promised ROI will not be achieved. DNV GL claim 16% of organizations are viewing better business decision making and 11% for financial savings, are the aims of big data, while 16% have prioritised an improved user experience.

“The ability to use data to obtain actionable knowledge and insights is inevitable for companies that want to keep growing and profiting,” said Crisciotti. “The data analyst or scientist will be crucial in most organizations in the near future.”

DNV GL believe more has to be done to enable and prepare the organization for utilizing big data to the full extent. The team claims only 28% have improved information management and 25% have implemented new technologies and methods. From an employee perspective, only 16% have addressed the internal culture and 15% the company’s business model.

Big data has been championed as a means to drive efficiency within organizations, but also as an opportunity to create a more personalized experience for customers in the digital era. It is also a prelude to artificial intelligence, another area which has been dominating headlines in recent months, neither of which will be achievable until investments have been made in technology and personnel to increase the proportion of data which can be understood and actioned.

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What does the role of the CIO look like in 2016?

(c)iStock.com/nomadsoul1

It is a question which carries more resonance as technology matures: what is the major role of the CIO today?

The usual responses range from improving business efficiency, to spearheading the organisation’s technological revolution. At the MIT Sloan CIO Conference earlier this month, the answer was simple. “The perfect CIO is enabling the perfectly friction-less business,” argued Steve Rosenbush, the editor of CIO Journal.

Yet there are many layers to uncover to get to the heart of this statement.

The role of the CIO is becoming more strategic – the CIO’s future career opportunities are broadening out

Harvey Nash and KPMG have today released a report on ‘the creative CIO’. The authors, Harvey Nash chief executive Albert Ellis and KPMG International global CIO advisory service network lead Lisa Heneghan, conclude that despite an increasing examination of security, the CIOs with a creative mindset are winning out over those with an operational focus.

Moving up the stack

The report shows that CIOs are, on the whole, moving away from the ‘keep the lights on’ mentality – simply because there is enough stuff going on elsewhere. Four out of 10 CIOs surveyed said they spend at least one day a week outside IT, while the vast majority of core IT priorities that fall under a CIO’s remit, such as managing operational risk and compliance, business intelligence and analytics, and delivering stable IT performance to the business, are not seen as important as they were.

Heneghan tells CloudTech: “We have seen from the survey that the proportion of time the CIO is spending actually internally focused on managing IT is reducing. There is an increasing amount of time being spent working with colleagues outside of IT and in smaller organisations also working with customers.

“This supports the view that the role of the CIO is becoming more strategic – there is a need for CIOs to talk business strategy and provide a platform to enable this. The CIO’s future career opportunities are broadening out,” she adds.

Too many cooks?

Adam Woodhouse is director of CIO advisory at KPMG. He argues that the rise of job roles such as the CDO (chief digital officer) and the CTO has given CIOs ‘a jolt to recognise that to be relevant and support growth they cannot focus on their own world in isolation’ – 84% of CIOs surveyed said they do not fully own the company’s digital strategy. Also key to this change is the rise in IT budget not being provisioned by IT. “It is therefore not a surprise that CIOs now need to influence more effectively, and building relationships with customers is a key element of this,” he tells CloudTech.

Despite not spending as much time in the boiler room of IT anymore, the CIO’s technical expertise needs to be sharper than ever. Big data and analytics was cited by 39% of survey respondents as a function which suffers from a skills shortage, up from 36% the year before. Woodhouse explains the cloud is a ‘core element’ of driving an agile methodology – the principle of failing fast and learning from your errors.

“It is a given that the lights must be kept on, but we have seen from the survey an increasing emphasis on supporting business growth, and agility is fundamental to this,” he says. “When we asked what steps CIOs are taking to make their business more agile, there was the obvious top answer of implementing agile methodologies, but a clear second place was given to implementing SaaS solutions.” 69% of large organisations polled expect to make a ‘significant’ investment across infrastructure, platform, and software as a service in the next three years as a result.

More dialogue

Any thoughts however that the job role of the CIO is diminishing, with more C-suite executives in the company, is a misnomer. The report reveals that the proportion of CIOs sitting on the executive board or senior leadership committee is at its highest level in 11 years of tracking. More than two thirds (67%) of respondents expect the strategic influence of the CIO to go up in 2016.

Cloud adoption will continue to develop – and this needs to be integrated with business strategy to truly drive differentiation

Increasingly, the CIO is more likely to report directly to the CEO, with more than a third (34%) confirming this is the case, compared to 12% who report to the CFO and COO respectively. The report argues this is due to the growing strategic influence of the CIO; Heneghan argues that with CEOs needing to understand more about technology and CIOs needing to understand more about business, the boundaries are blurring.

“The role of the CIO is becoming less defensive and more proactive in stimulating debate on what technology can bring to the organisation and benefit its customers,” Heneghan says. “Therefore I see the relationship becoming more balanced and the dialogue two way, rather than the CIO always responding to requests or issues.”

As for what 2017 will bring, Woodhouse expects more of the same. “I expect the strategic importance of the role to continue to increase, and as such we will see CIOs spending even greater amounts of their time outside of the traditional fortress [of] IT,” he says.

“We know that cloud adoption will continue to develop and this needs to be integrated with business strategy to truly drive differentiation – I will be interested if skill shortages in this area hamper CIOs delivering,” he adds. “We also absolutely expect to see an increase in the adoption of digital labour strategies which may displace the broader ‘digital’ strategy question.”

Parallels Remote Application Server

Hyper-Converged Storage – What is it?

Hyper-Converged Storage Hyper-converged storage is the latest buzz in the datacenter infrastructure segment. It is a software-defined architecture that combines storage, network, computing, and virtualization resources into a single entity. By combining storage and computing resources with applications and data in a single entity, hyper-converged storage delivers highly optimized datacenter solutions for target workloads. Hyper-converged […]

The post Hyper-Converged Storage – What is it? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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Adobe Bronze Sponsor of @CloudExpo | @Adobe #AdobeB2B #DigitalMarketing

SYS-CON Events announced today that Adobe has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York, New York.
Adobe is changing the world though digital experiences. Adobe helps customers develop and deliver high-impact experiences that differentiate brands, build loyalty, and drive revenue across every screen, including smartphones, computers, tablets and TVs. Adobe content solutions are used daily by millions of companies worldwide-from publishers and broadcasters, to enterprises, marketing agencies and household-name brands. Building on its established design leadership, Adobe enables customers not only to make great content, but to manage, measure and monetize it for maximum impact.

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Juniper, News & Analysis, SDN, Software Defined Data Centre, Software Defined Networking

What is the role of SDN in data centre security?

Door to new opportunitySoftware Defined Networking (SDN) is a breakthrough which is seemingly in everyone’s technology roadmap, but not ‘sexy’ enough to command column inches in recent months. At Telco Cloud, Juniper Cloud Automation Architect Scott Alexander argued the use case for security.

Companies who are striving towards 100% secure are likely to be disappointed as most within the industry now accept this is not achievable. Irrelevant of how many advances are made to secure the data centre, there will always be a collection of individuals who dedicate time to find new weaknesses. The new objective for the majority is to remain as secure as possible, consistently, reacting as quickly as possible to new threats which may emerge.

One of the main challenges for the data centre is the traditional defence. A number of data centres have one large firewall around the perimeter, which can be effective at keeping out threats, but on the occasion one breaches defences, traditional data centres are very linear, allowing the threat to roam freely. Larger segments of the data centre will be ring fenced, however the same principle applies here; once you crack that defence you are once again free to roam.

Alexander highlighted once you write various SDN policies, you can define which applications can ‘talk’ to each other. Until this is defined through an effective SDN policy, an application can talk to any other application, create the free roaming problem. Once a threat is in the data centre damage control becomes very difficult.

If every application is a room with several doors, Alexander said though implementing SDN you can keep relevant doors open and close doors to areas a given applications has no need to have access to. Spinning up various applications allows you to retain internal perimeters and create a policy of damage control.

Virtualizing a company’s assets can be a painful process, as it has to be done application by application. This however can be an advantage as Alexander highlighted to understand what doors are open and closed, you have to analyse the applications individually; there isn’t currently a method to do a blanket risk assessment of your applications. As you are migrating the applications individually any case during the virtualization efforts, it shouldn’t be too much of a task to understand what doors are open.

For the most part, the concept of 100% secure has seemingly been irradiated from the industry; most have accepted it is almost impossible. However, segmented security can aid a team in driving towards the objective of remaining secure as possible, consistently.

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[session] Network-Aware Orchestration By @GlueNetworks | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Enterprise networks are complex. Moreover, they were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. But, the adoption of cloud services, new business applications and intensifying security policies, among other factors, require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks while still leveraging existing capabilities, optimizing performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.

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[session] Secure Solutions for Storing and Moving Sensitive Data | @CloudExpo #Cloud

As cloud and storage projections continue to rise, the number of organizations moving to the cloud is escalating and it is clear cloud storage is here to stay. However, is it secure?
Data is the lifeblood for government entities, countries, cloud service providers and enterprises alike and losing or exposing that data can have disastrous results.
There are new concepts for data storage on the horizon that will deliver secure solutions for storing and moving sensitive data around the world.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Sobhani, CEO and cofounder of Cloud Constellation Corporation and the SpaceBelt, Information Ultra-Highway, attendees will learn about new best practices to bypass the Internet.

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data protection, EU, Europe, Opinion, Policy and Regulation, regulation

What happens to EU General Data Protection Regulation if the UK votes for a Brexit?

EuropeBusinesses warned not to give up on data reforms just because UK could quit Europe

As the UK prepares to vote on whether to leave the European Union, businesses are being warned not to give up on data reforms inspired by the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Businesses across the country have been studying implications of the new Regulation, due to be in force in May 2018, which aims to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for data protection across the European Union.

Some of the key aspects of the bill include huge fines for data breaches, new rules around the collection of personal data and new rights for European citizens to ask for data be deleted or edited. Many businesses will also be required to appoint a Data Protection Officer.

However, the Brexit vote opens up the possibility that the UK could be out of the EU by the time it comes into force.

John Culkin, Director of Information Management at Crown Records Management, said: “It would be tempting for businesses to think that if the UK leaves the EU this regulation would not apply. In fact, that isn’t the case. Although an independent Britain would not be a signatory of the Regulation, in reality it would still be impossible to avoid its implications.

“The Regulation governs the personal data of all European citizens, providing them with greater control and more rights over information held about them. So any company holding identifiable information of an EU citizen, no matter where it is based, needs to be aware. With millions of EU citizens living in the UK, too, it’s hard to imagine that many businesses here would be unaffected.

“The same applies to data breaches involving the personal data of European citizens. So it will still be vital to have a watertight information management system in place which allows businesses to know what information they have, where it is, how it can be edited and who is responsible for it.”

Even if the UK votes to leave the EU, data in Great Britain & Northern Ireland will continue to be regulated by the current Data Protection Act, which was passed in 1998.

A spokesperson for the Information Commissioners’ Office (ICO), an independent body set up to uphold information rights, said: “Although derived from an EU Directive, the Data Protection Act was passed by the UK Parliament and will remain in place after any exit, until Parliament decides to introduce a new law or amend it.

“The UK has a history of providing legal protection to consumers around their personal data. Our data protection laws precede EU legislation by more than a decade, and go beyond the current requirements set out by the EU, for instance with the power given to the ICO to issue fines.

“Having clear laws with safeguards in place is more important than ever given the growing digital economy, and is also central to the sharing of data that international trade relies on. The UK will continue to need clear and effective data protection laws, whether or not the country remains part of the EU.”

Culkin believes there is a real danger that UK businesses will defer crucial reforms of their information management systems – just in case the Brexit vote in June changes the agenda. But he warns it is a big risk.

He said: “Businesses should be thinking about the benefits of good information governance rather than hesitating because of what could happen in the future.

“There is no point putting in place systems that ignore privacy by design, for instance, when that is good procedure – no matter what happens in Europe in June. The same is true of measures to protect a business from data breaches, which have reputational as well as financial implications – no matter who imposes the fine.

“As for personal data, citizens, in the UK are only going to be more demanding about how their data is collected, stored and edited in future – the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not sensible to think that leaving the EU will change it. Preparing for a modern data world is not only about the GDPR.”

This a view shared by the ICO which will continue to ensure organisations meet their information rights obligations no matter how the UK votes.

A spokesperson said: “Ultimately, this is a decision for organisations based on their own particular circumstances. Revisiting and reassessing your data protection practices will serve you well whatever the outcome of the referendum. Investing in GDPR compliance will ensure an organisation has a high standard of data protection compliance that will enable the building of consumer trust.”

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