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Top 10 UK business disasters revealed: Is your business ready for the worst?

(c)iStock.com/P_Wei

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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Opinion: How to achieve a solid business continuity strategy

(c)iStock.com/natthawon

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.

Cisco, Collaboration, data centre, Financial Results, IoT, News & Analysis, software

Cisco reports 3% growth for Q3 and sets targets on IoT market

Cisco corporateCisco has reported 3% year-on-year growth for Q3, topping $12 billion for the quarter, with its security business leading the charge, though the team have reconfirmed IOT, software cloud and collaboration markets are priorities for the future.

The security portfolio demonstrated revenue growth of 17% while deferred revenue grew 31% driven by the ongoing shift from hardware to more software and subscription services. The Collaboration portfolio grew 16%, while the team were also confident in the performance of its next generation data centre portfolio. The ACI platform grew revenues approximately 100%, exceeding a $2 billion annualized run-rate.

“We delivered strong Q3 results against the backdrop of the Macro environment that continues to be uncertain,” said CEO Charles Robbins. “Despite this uncertainty we executed very well, with revenue growth of 3%. The operational changes we continued to make will further enable our customers to leverage strategic role to network as they transform their businesses to become digital.”

Regionally, the America’s accounted for a 4% lift, whereas EMEA and APJ were slightly less at 2% and 1% respectively. The emerging markets demonstrated healthy results for the business, as BRICs increased by 4%, Mexico by 4%, China up 22% and India up 18%. The team highlighted while there was good growth in the public and service provider segments, the enterprise was not as positive as the team pointed towards pressure driven by macro uncertainty as the reasoning.

The quarter also saw Cisco as one of the more active players in the M&A market, completing five acquisitions over the course of the quarter. The $1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper Technologies now makes Cisco the largest cloud based IOT service platform in the industry, the team claims. Cisco also completed the acquisitions of Acano, Synata, Leaba and CliQr during the period, the latter a $260 million orchestration platform to help customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployment. Cisco had already integrated CliQr with its Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing systems (UCS) prior to acquisition.

“These acquisitions are clearly focused on our key growth areas including IOT, software cloud and collaboration as well as continuing to strengthen our core,” said Robbins.

The IoT market has been a long time target of Cisco, with the Jasper deal adding to the ParStream acquisition last year. The acquisition offered the opportunity for instant analysis of masses of data at the network edge with minimal infrastructural or OPEX repercussions, the company claimed.

Business Transformation, Cloud Enablement, Cost Reduction, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, SDN, Software Defined Networking

SDN on the rise and cloud still not understood – survey

Dollar SignsResearch from Viavi Solutions has indicated SDN technologies are on the rise within enterprise organizations, but there also might be a number of organizations who are implementing the cloud for the wrong reasons.

In its ninth annual State of the Network study, the team highlighted enterprise organizations are increasing deployment of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE), public and private cloud, and software-defined networking technologies. Two thirds of respondents indicated they had some kind of deployment in the production environment, and 35% have implemented SDN underlay.

“There is a growing trend of enterprise customers realizing how they can improve the operations of their network,” said Steve Brown, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Viavi. “It’s been a slow burner, but SDN is beginning to break through into the mainstream. While encouraging, the statistics are a little higher than we expected. After comparing the adoption rates from the last couple of years, we expected SDN to be around 50%, but the survey does highlight some real momentum in the industry on the whole.”

The findings also highlighted that while cloud adoption is continuing to rise, 90% have at least one application in the cloud and 28% said they have the majority, there is still a level of immaturity in understanding the perceived and realized benefits of cloud computing. Lower operating costs was listed as the top reason for the transition at 63%, while the faster delivery of new services and the ability to dynamically adapt to changes in business demands were the least popular reasons, both accounting for 39%.

“If you look at what the chief benefits which people are seeing, we’re seeing a lot of feedback on the CAPEX/OPEX reductions,” said Brown. “This is great, but that’s not really what the point of cloud is. Expenditure reduction is something which the top decision makers in the business want to see, it’s more of a tactical play. If this is the end objective these companies are not really seeing the promise of cloud and what makes me excited about cloud.

Deploying cloud

Top reasons for adopting the cloud

“The areas which I see the key benefits are the ones which are lowest on the results, delivering services faster and dynamically changing to meet the needs of the business. I found it quite surprising that these were quite low. The results show that the decision to enter the cloud for the majority of consumers is more tactical than a strategic decision.”

One conclusion that can be drawn from the findings is a lack of understanding of what the cloud can offer. Gartner’s ‘Cost Optimization Secrets’ highlighted the average cost reduction for companies implementing cloud propositions was just over 14%. While this is encouraging, whether cloud adoption would remain an attractive option for organizations if they knew expenditure would be reduced by just 14% remains to be seen.

“There’s more than just cost saving when adopting the cloud,” said Brown. “Are there savings, absolutely, but the majority don’t come upfront. If you’re going to be running applications which could see aggressive spikes, the flexibility of and agility of the cloud will reduce the cost. But at the same time it’s difficult to justify the cost savings because you may be taking on new projects due to the fact you have the ability to scale your capacity at a moment’s notice.

“Rather than thinking about it as a cost saver, hybrid cloud should be seen as an initiative enabler. Until this idea is recognised by the industry, adoption may continue to struggle to penetrate the mainstream.”

For Brown and the team at Viavi, the benefits of cloud computing are focused around the business capabilities which are enabled in the medium and long-term. Cloud offers companies the opportunity to react to diversifying market conditions faster and ensure products remain relevant on an on-going basis.

“In my own personal opinion, I would like to see people embrace a hybrid cloud model because it enables them to develop competitive edges,” said Brown. “This also justifies future investment in technology, it moves these new concepts and implementations from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ as technology will then be one of the supporting pillars of the business strategy. Cloud has the ability to do this and to be a competitive enabler.”

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Colocation market update: Equinix, Digital Realty, NTT see further growth

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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.”

AI, Artificial intelligence, CRM, Financial Results, Marc Benioff, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Marc Benioff backs AI as Salesforce reports 28% growth

Marc Benioff

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Salesforce reported healthy results over the course of Q1, growing 28%, as CEO Marc Benioff backed AI as the next major growth driver, during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

While social and mobile has facilitated Salesforce growth in recent years, the team are backing artificial intelligence as the next major trend to take the company through the targeted $10 billion annual revenue target. Benioff highlighted that in the same way the company is now known for being a social and mobility brand, the ambition is for Salesforce to be perceived as “an AI first company”.

“When I look at kind of the next major trend for Salesforce and our industry that will drive tremendous growth is got to be artificial intelligence,” said Benioff. “And as we look out into the future and we start to look at extreme improvement and advances in artificial intelligence whether it’s machine learning, whether it’s deep learning, whether it’s machine intelligence itself, I think that those kind of capabilities appearing inside our applications that is going to be a major growth capability going forward.”

One of the newest product launches for the company, Salesforce Inbox, uses these AI and machine intelligence opportunities to gives companies a perspective on how they can be more efficient in the sales, service, and marketing processes. SalesforceIQ is another offering which uses the same capabilities as it has an artificial intelligence front end, whereas Benioff also highlighted Sales Cloud has a machine learning front end.

While others in the industry have been very vocal about their progress within the AI field, Salesforce has seemingly been sneaking in under the radar with additional acquisitions including Tempo AI and PredictionIO. SalesforceIQ, an AI-driven calendar app which can prioritize work schedules for sales employees, was incorporated into the product portfolio following the $390 million acquisition of RelateIQ in 2014. These acquisitions, as well as organic development, are aiding the company in adapting to what Benioff described as “an AI first world”.

Salesforce’s new efforts will focus on the new, digitally enabled customers and consumers, who could be seen to driving the transformation worldwide. This new generation is defined by technology and speed, as Benioff highlighted they want services faster and easier than ever before, as well as being ever more reliant on social and mobile technologies. Companies who do not adapt themselves to this new proposition but remain in a more traditional model are those who will struggle to remain competitive.

“We’re in the midst of a massive generational shift; a new generation of customers and consumers is clearly emerging,” said Benioff. “We have been calling them here at Salesforce C generation customers. I mean this is really part of a huge shift that’s happening in computing. We’ve gone from the first generation of computing which was very much about systems of record to the second generation which was systems of engagement we talked about that on these calls many times over the last 10 years.

“And we are clearly moving into this incredible world that the system of intelligence that’s all yielding these incredible systems of customers or C generation customers that are — that our customers are connecting to. And that’s we’re so excited about.”

In terms of financials, revenues for Q1 grew to nearly $2 billion, up 28% in constant currency. Sales Cloud demonstrated 15% year-over-year growth, Service Cloud grew 32%, Marketing Cloud grew 29%, whereas Apps Cloud and other business units grew 45%. Growth in Sales Cloud was the highest recorded in the five previous quarters, which Benioff attributing to a number of new innovations including its Lightning platform, where the team have recently released an updated government edition, as well as Pardot and SteelBrick capabilities.

The team are also raising 2017 revenue guidance to $8.16 billion to $8.2 billion, and are expecting revenues of between $2.005 billion to $2.015 billion in Q2.

“I’m also thrilled to announce we’re raising full-year revenue guidance $80 million raising the guidance we feel really excited about that, $8.2 billion is the high-end of our range and our current outlook puts us on its square path, look we are going to see now that we’re going to realize very shortly our $10 billion dream,” said Benioff. “This is amazing I think that one of the reasons that we are doing so well is because Oracle and SAP are doing so poorly in the cloud”

Big Data, BusinessObjects, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, SAP

SAP updates BusinessObjects offering at SAPPHIRE NOW conference

SAP sailingSAP has announced a number of new updates for its analytics solutions portfolio at the 28th annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

The company’s business intelligence portfolio, BusinessObjects, will continue to offer solutions on premise and in the cloud, as well as incorporating a number of new features for visualizations and storytelling, data wrangling and blending, geospatial, trend analysis, custom filters, linked stories, notifications and chat.

“SAP is enabling companies to lead in the digital economy by significantly simplifying the platform, providing best-in-class analytics and a superior user experience,” said Stefan Sigg, SVP for SAP Analytics. “SAP BusinessObjects remains the most relevant analytics in the industry — and we offer the best end-to-end capabilities both on premise and in the cloud in the market today.”

One enhancement has focused more on the integration and collaboration efforts of the business, as the offering can now connect and blend existing data sources such as the SAP ERP, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, Salesforce, and Google Drive (amongst others), on a single platform without having to move data into the cloud environment. The offering now also includes predictive analytics capabilities leveraging powerful built-in algorithmic models, to enhance data-driven decision making capabilities.

SAP also updated its BusinessObjects Enterprise offering, which has been mainly designed for on premise analytics. Enterprise organizations have a choice of premium, professional and standard editions, which offer a variety of services including enhancements which make the platform Internet of Things–ready.

The company also launched one of its newest cloud offerings, the Digital Boardroom (see below), which has been built on the BusinessObjects platform. The Digital Boardroom is real-time business intelligence and ad hoc analysis portal, which provides executives with information sourced from all SAP S/4HANA Lines of Business data to provide a “single source of truth for the company”.

Digital Boardroom

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TeamForge Supports DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #ContinuousDelivery

Creating a unified toolchain is increasingly important for today’s modern software delivery approaches. Providing context, visibility and compliance around the growing number of tools and processes being used today is core to our mission of connecting the world of software delivery. Today, we are pleased to announce a new version of TeamForge that extends your ability to integrate activity data from the cloud hosted version of JIRA Software and, for DevOps, Chef, into a centralized platform. In addition, we’ve strengthened our capabilities for enterprise Git by supporting both commit- and pull-based code review and collaboration workflows.

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Announcing @HanuSoftware to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York | #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today that Hanu Software will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Leveraging best-in-class people, processes, and technologies, Hanu provides high-quality, high-value software development and business process outsourcing services to independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprises.

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[session] Disaster Recovery Planning Simplified By @Peak_Ten | @CloudExpo #Cloud

In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Cole, Director of Solutions Engineering at Peak 10, will discuss how the newest technology advances are reducing the cost and complexity of traditional business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.
Attendees will:
Learn why having a full disaster recovery strategy is more important now than ever before
Explore the key drivers of a successful disaster recovery solution
Achieve measurable operational and business value from a disaster recovery solution

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