Archivo de la categoría: Enterprise IT

Big Data, Camden Council, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

Camden Council uses big data to help reduce fraud, save money

Camden Council is using big data to tackle fraud and save cash as its budgets slim

Camden Council is using big data to tackle fraud and save cash as its budgets slim

Camden Council is using a big data platform to create a ‘Residents Index’ to help tackle debt collection, illegal subletting and fraud.

The service, based on IBM’s InfoSphere platform, centrally stores and manages citizen data collected from 16 different systems across London – including data from Electoral Services, Housing and Council Tax Services – to help give a single view of local residents.

Authorised users can access the platform to search relevant data and highlight discrepancies in the information given to the Council by residents to help reduce fraud and save money on over-procurement of public services.

It’s also using the Index to improve the accuracy of its electoral register. Using the platform, it said it was able to fast track the registration of more than 80 per cent of its residents and identify new residents who need to vote.

“Big data is revolutionising the way we work across the borough, reducing crime and saving money just when public services are facing huge funding cuts,” said Camden councillor Theo Blackwell.

“Take School admission fraud; parents complain about people gaming the system by pretending to reside in the borough to get their kids into the most sought-after schools. Now with the Residents Index in place, Council staff can carry out detailed checks and identify previously hidden discrepancies in the information supplied to the Council to prove residency. We have already withdrawn five school places from fraudulent applicants making sure that school places fairly go to those who are entitled to them.”

“The Resident Index has proven its worth, helping the Council to become more efficient, and now contains over one million relevant records. This is just one example and we have other plans to use the benefits of data technology to improve public services and balance the books.”

Early last year Camden Borough laid out its 3 year plan to use more digital services in a bid to save money and improve the services it offers to local residents, which includes using cloud services to save on infrastructure cost and big data platforms to inform decision making at the Council.

Accenture, Aimie Chapple, Avanade, Enterprise IT, Europe, Healthcare, News & Analysis, NHS

UK Department of Health taps Accenture, Avanade for cloud deployment

The UK Department of Health is overhauling its comms technology

The UK Department of Health is overhauling its comms technology

Department of Health in England and NHS National Services Scotland have selected Accenture and Avanade to implement a range of cloud-based communications service across England and Scotland.

The NHSmail service is being developed and deployed to enable secure communication to users of less secure systems such as non-NHS partners and patients.

“Almost 700,000 doctors, clinicians and other health and care employees already use NHSmail to communicate securely,” said Aimie Chapple, managing director for Accenture’s UK health business.

“The new improved NHSmail service will provide significant digital technology improvements to help NHS staff drive even more effective collaboration at all points of patient care. This will be one of the largest mailbox migrations ever delivered and will bring significant benefits to the way NHS employees exchange information, communicate and interact across healthcare,” she said.

The five-year deal will also see Accenture and Avanade help overhaul the department’s internal email service and deploy other cloud-based communications services across the NHS including an enterprise-wide directory and Microsoft Lync for enabling instant messaging, VOIP, audio and video communication in a bid to enhance collaboration among NHS healthcare workers across the UK.

Over the past few years the NHS has sought to lean more heavily on cloud services in a bid to improve the care services offered to patients and to reduce the cost of provision, though by its own admission it has struggled.

In the NHS’s five year plan released in November 2014 the department said past failures to successfully adopt more robust IT infrastructure and make its digital services more effective is because it hasn’t changed how it procures those technologies and services, which is where the UK government hopes programmes like G-Cloud will play a leading role, and the lack of attention paid to standards.

“Part of why progress has not been as fast as it should have been is that the NHS has oscillated between two opposite approaches to information technology adoption – neither of which now makes sense. At times we have tried highly centralised national procurements and implementations. When they have failed due to lack of local engagement and lack of sensitivity to local circumstances, we have veered to the opposite extreme of ‘letting a thousand flowers bloom’,” the Five Year Forward View reads. “The result has been systems that don’t talk to each other, and a failure to harness the shared benefits that come from interoperable systems.”

Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

IBM talks cloud innovation at CWF 2015

IBM CWFEnterprise tech giant IBM used its keynote presentation at Cloud World Forum 2015 to talk up the role of the digital economy, especially cloud tech, to drive innovation and disruption.

The speaker was Sandy Carter, GM of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. The premise of her keynote was that the digital economy is driving innovation and chose five specific illustrations of this.

The first was the use of real-time data by Wimbledon.com, which for 50 weeks of the year is quiet, but then explodes when the tennis tournament is underway – 65 million page views last year. The point Carter wanted to make is that with the help of cloud solutions such as IBM’s Bluemix, which inevitably got frequent mentions, Wimbledon is able to not just scale up its resources but use analytics and even social media cues to anticipate demand in real-time.

The second example concerned IoT, via the example of German company Diabetizer, which uses wearables and the cloud to help people manage diabetes and to communicate with health professionals. The significance in this context was the point that IoT is essentially about data and what you do with it.

The remaining examples of cloud-enabled innovation focused on mobile, the hybrid cloud and a final rallying call for the Bluemix ecosystem. The general thread was that the flexibility, analytics and collaboration power (there was a nod to yesterday’s Box announcement) afforded by the cloud is the foundation of innovation today.

Box, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM and Box announce global enterprise cloud partnership

US enterprise tech giant IBM has revealed a new global partnership with cloud storage outfit Box to integrate their products and sell into vertically targeted enterprise markets.

More specifically the strategic alliance will combine Box’s cloud collaboration platform with a number of IBM solutions, including analytics, cloud and security. Both companies will sell the combined products.

“Today’s digital enterprises demand world-class technologies that transform how their organizations operate both internally and externally,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “This extensive alliance between Box and IBM opens up an exciting opportunity for both companies to reach new markets and deliver unified solutions and services that can redefine industries, advance secure collaboration and revolutionize enterprise mobility.”

“This partnership will transform the way work is done in industries and professions that shape our experience every day,” said Bob Picciano, SVP of IBM Analytics. “The impact will be felt by experts and professionals in industries such as healthcare, financial services, law, and engineering who are overwhelmed by today’s digital data and seek better solutions to manage large volumes of information more intelligently and securely. The integration of IBM and Box technologies, combined with our global cloud capabilities and the ability to enrich content with analytics, will help unlock actionable insights for use across the enterprise.”

The alliance will focus on three main areas: content management and social collaboration; enterprise cloud, security and consulting; and custom app development for industries. The general thread of the announcement seems to be a desire to bring cloud applications to regions and industries that are not currently making the most of them and is just the latest in a sequence of collaborations by both Box and IBM.

Enterprise IT, HP Helion, hybrid cloud, Interviews, OpenStack, Orlando Bayter, Ormuco

Living in a hybrid world: From public to private cloud and back again

Orlando Bayter, chief exec and founder of Ormuco

Orlando Bayter, chief exec and founder of Ormuco

The view often propagated by IT vendors is that public cloud is already capable of delivering a seamless extension between on-premise private cloud platforms and public, shared infrastructure. But Orlando Bayter, chief executive and founder of Ormuco, says the industry is only at the outset of delivering a deeply interwoven fabric of private and public cloud services.

Demand for that kind of seamlessness hasn’t been around for very long, admittedly. It’s no great secret that in the early days of cloud demand for public cloud services was spurred largely by the slow-moving pace traditional IT organisations are often set. As a result every time a developer wanted to build an application they would simply swipe the credit card and go, billing back to IT at some later point. So the first big use case for hybrid cloud emerged when developers then needed to bring their apps back in-house, where they would live and probably die.

But as the security practices of cloud service providers continue to improve, along with enterprise confidence in cloud more broadly, cloud bursting – the ability to use a mix of public and private cloud resources to fit the utilisation needs of an app – became more widely talked about. It’s usually cost prohibitive and far too time consuming to scale private cloud resources quick enough to meet the changing demands of today’s increasingly web-based apps, so cloud bursting has become the natural next step in the hybrid cloud world.

Orlando will be speaking at the Cloud World Forum in London June 24-25. Click here to register.

There are, however, still preciously few platforms that offer this kind of capability in a fast and dynamic way. Open source projects like OpenStack or more proprietary variants like VMware’s vCloud or Microsoft’s Azure Stack (and all the tooling around these platforms or architectures) are at the end of the day all being developed with a view towards supporting the deployment and management of workloads that can exist in as many places as possible, whether on-premise or in a cloud vendor’s datacentre.

“Let’s say as a developer you want to take an application you’ve developed in a private cloud in Germany and move it onto a public cloud platform in the US. Even for the more monolithic migration jobs you’re still going to have to do all sorts of re-coding, re-mapping and security upgrades, to make the move,” Bayter says.

“Then when you actually go live, and have apps running in both the private and public cloud, the harsh reality is most enterprises have multiple management and orchestration tools – usually one for the public cloud and one for the private; it’s redundant, and inefficient.”

Ormuco is one company trying to solve these challenges. It has built a platform based on HP Helion OpenStack and offers both private and public instances, which can both be managed in a single pane of glass; it has built its own layer in between to abstract resources underneath).

It has multiple datacentres in the US and Europe from which it offers both private and public instances, as well as the ability to burst into its cloud platform using on-premise OpenStack-based clouds. The company is also a member of the HP Helion Network, which Bayter says gives it a growing channel and the ability to offer more granular data protection tools to customers.

“The OpenStack community has been trying to bake some of these capabilities into the core open source code, but the reality is it only achieved a sliver of these capabilities by May this year,” he said, alluding to the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver where new capabilities around federated cloud identity were announced and demoed.

“The other issue is simplicity. A year and a half ago, everyone was talking about OpenStack but nobody was buying it. Now service providers are buying but enterprises are not. Specifically with enterprises, the belief is that OpenStack will be easier and easier as time goes on, but I don’t think that’s necessarily going to be the case,” he explains.

“The core features may become a bit easier but the whole solution may not, but there are so many things going into it that it’s likely going to get clunkier, more complex, and more difficult to manage. It could become prohibitively complex.”

That’s not to say federated identity or cloud federation is a lost cause – on the contrary, Bayter says it’s the next horizon for cloud. The company is currently working a set of technologies that would enable any organisation with infrastructure that lies significantly underutilised for long periods to rent out their infrastructure in a federated model.

Ormuco would verify and certify the infrastructure, and allocate a performance rating that would change dynamically along with the demands being placed on that infrastructure – like an AirBnB for OpenStack cloud users. Customers renting cloud resources in this market could also choose where their data is hosted.

“Imagine a university or a science lab that scales and uses its infrastructure at very particular times; the rest of the time that infrastructure is fairly underused. What if they could make money from that?”

There are still many unanswered questions – like whether the returns for renting organisations would justify the extra costs (i.e. energy) associate with running that infrastructure, or where the burden of support lies (enterprises need solid SLAs for production workloads) and how that influences what kinds of workloads ends up on rented kit, but the idea is interesting and definitely consistent with the line of thinking being promoted by the OpenStack community among others in open source cloud.

“Imagine the power, the size of that cloud,” says Bayter . “That’s the cloud that will win out.”

This interview was produced in partnership with Ormuco

Alex Hilton, APM Group, Cloud Industry Forum, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Richard Pharro

CIF: ‘Lack of trust holding back cloud adoption’

CIF: 'Cloud users are still citing the same inhibitors'

CIF: ‘Cloud users are still citing the same inhibitors’

Security, privacy and lack of control are still the leading inhibitors holding enterprises back from adopting cloud services, according to the Cloud Industry Forum’s latest research.

The CIF, which polled 250 senior IT decision-makers in the UK earlier this year to better understand where cloud services fit into their overall IT strategies, said when asked about their biggest concerns during the decision-making process to move to the cloud, 70 per cent cited data security and 61 per cent data privacy.

Both are up from the 2014 figures of 61 per cent and 54 per cent, respectively.

“Hybrid will be the modus operandi for the majority of organisations for the foreseeable future, being either not yet ready to move everything to the cloud, or unwilling to. There are a number of contributing factors here: fear of losing control of IT systems, security and privacy concerns, and lack of budget currently stand in the way of greater adoption of cloud by businesses,” said Alex Hilton, chief executive of the CIF.

“The primary issue relates to trust: trust that cloud-based data will be appropriately secured, that it won’t be compromised or inadvertently accessed, and that businesses will be able to retrieve and migrate their data when a contract terminates.”

About 40 per cent of respondents were also concerned they would lose control/manageability of their IT systems when moving to cloud, up from 24 per cent last year.

Richard Pharro, chief executive of APM Group, the CIF’s independent certification partner said cloud providers need to improve how to disclose their privacy and security practices in order to inspire more confidence among current and potential users.

“Some Cloud providers are opaque in the way that they operate. The prevalence of click-through licenses, some of which are littered with unrealistic terms and conditions,” Pharro said, adding that improving public disclosure in cloud contracts could go some way towards improving trust and confidence among customers.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Honest Café, IBM, Mark Summerill, News & Analysis

IBM, Revive Vending set up London Café that brews analytics-based insights

Honest Café is an unmanned coffee shop powered by Watson analytics

Honest Café is an unmanned coffee shop powered by Watson analytics

IBM is working with Revive Vending on London-based cafés that use Watson analytics to help improve customer service and form a better understanding of its customers.

The ‘Honest Café’ – there are three in London, with four more planned – are all unmanned; instead, the company deploys high-end vending machines at each location, which all serve a mix of health-conscious snacks, juices, food and beverages.

The company is using Watson analytics to compensate for the lack of wait staff, with the cognitive compute platform being deployed to troll through sales data in a bid to unearth buying patterns and improve its marketing effectiveness.

“Because Honest is unmanned, it’s tough going observing what our customers are saying and doing in our cafes,” said Mark Summerill, head of product development at Honest Café. “We don’t know what our customers are into or what they look like. And as a start-up it’s crucial we know what sells and what areas we should push into.”

“We lacked an effective way of analyzing the data,” Summerill said. “We don’t have dedicated people on this and the data is sometimes hard pull to together to form a picture.”

“Watson Analytics could help us make sure we offer the right customers the right drink, possibly their favorite drink,” he said.

It can leverage the buying patterns by launching promotional offers on various goods to help improve sales, and it can also correlate the data with social media information to better inform its understanding of Honest Café customers.

“We identified that people who buy as a social experience have different reasons than those who dash in and out grabbing just the one drink,” Summerill said. “They also have a different payment method, the time of the day differs and the day of the week. Knowing this, we can now correctly time promotions and give them an offer or introduce a product that is actually relevant to them.”

“Having direct access to Twitter data for insights into what our buyers are talking about is going to help augment our view and understanding of our customers even further,” he added.

cloud backup, Disaster Recovery, DRaaS, Enterprise IT, Opinion

Lessons from the Holborn fire: how disaster recovery as a service helps with business continuity

Disaster recovery is creeping up on the priority list for enterprises

Disaster recovery is creeping up on the priority list for enterprises

The recent fire in Holborn highlighted an important lesson in business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning: when a prompt evacuation is necessary ‒ whether because of a fire, flood or other disaster ‒ you need to be able to relocate operations without advance notice.

The fire, which was caused by a ruptured gas main, led to the evacuation of 5,000 people from nearby buildings, and nearly 2,000 customers experienced power outages. Some people lost Internet and mobile connectivity as well.

While firefighters worked to stifle the flames, restaurants and theatres were forced to turn away patrons and cancel performances, with no way to preserve their revenue streams. The numerous legal and financial firms in the area, at least, had the option to relocate their business operations. Some did, relying on cloud-based services to resume their operations remotely. But those who depended on physical resources on-site were, like the restaurants and theatres, forced to bide their time while the fire was extinguished.

These organisations’ disparate experiences reveals the increasing role of cloud-based solutions ‒ particularly disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions ‒ in BC/DR strategies.

The benefits of DRaaS

Today, an increasing number of businesses are turning to the cloud for disaster recovery. The DRaaS market is expected to experience a compounded annual growth rate of 55.2 per cent from 2013 to 2018, according to global research company MarketsandMarkets.

The appeal of DRaaS solutions is that they provide the ability to recover key IT systems and data quickly, which is crucial to meeting your customers’ expectations for high availability. To meet these demands within the context of a realistic recovery time frame, you should establish two recovery time objectives (RTOs): one for operational issues that are specific to your individual environment (e.g., a server outage) and another for regional disasters (e.g., a fire). RTOs for operational issues are typically the most aggressive (0-4 hours). You have a bit more leeway when dealing with disasters affecting your facility, but RTOs should ideally remain under 24 hours.

DRaaS solutions’ centralised management capabilities allow the provider to assist with restoring not only data but your entire IT environment, including applications, operating systems and systems configurations. Typically systems can be restored to physical hardware, virtual machines or another cloud environment. This service enables faster recovery times and eases the burden on your in-house IT staff by eliminating the need to reconfigure your servers, PCs and other hardware when restoring data and applications. In addition, it allows your employees to resume operations quickly, since you can access the environment from anywhere with a suitable Internet connection.

Scalability is another key benefit of DRaaS solutions. According to a survey by 451 Research, the amount of data storage professionals manage has grown from 215 TB in 2012 to 285 TB in 2014. To accommodate this storage growth, companies storing backups in physical servers have to purchase and configure additional servers. Unfortunately, increasing storage capacity can be hindered by companies’ shrinking storage budgets and, in some cases, lack of available rack space.

DRaaS addresses this issue by allowing you to scale your storage space as needed. For some businesses, the solution is more cost-effective than dedicated on-premise data centres or colocation solutions, because cloud providers typically charge only for the capacity used. Redundant data elimination and compression maximise storage space and further minimise cost.

When data needs to be maintained on-site

Standard DRaaS delivery models are able to help many businesses meet their BC/DR goals, but what if your organisation needs to keep data or applications on-site? Perhaps you have rigorous RTOs for specific data sets, and meeting those recovery time frames requires an on-premise backup solution. Or maybe you have unique applications that are difficult to run in a mixture of physical and virtual environments. In these cases, your business can leverage a hybrid DRaaS strategy which allows you to store critical data in an on-site appliance, offloading data to the cloud as needed.

You might be wondering, though, what happens to the data stored in an appliance in the event that you have to evacuate your facility. The answer depends on the type of service the vendor provides for the appliance. If you’re unable to access the appliance, recovering the data would require you to either access an alternate backup stored at an off-site location or wait until you regain access to your facility, assuming it’s still intact. For this reason, it’s important to carefully evaluate potential hybrid-infrastructure DRaaS providers.

DRaaS as part of a comprehensive BC/DR strategy

In order for DRaaS to be most effective for remote recovery, the solution must be part of a comprehensive BC/DR strategy. After all, what good is restored data if employees don’t have the rest of the tools and information they need to do their jobs? These additional resources could include the following:

•         Alternate workspace arrangements

•         Provisions for backup Internet connectivity

•         Remote network access solutions

•         Guidelines for using personal devices

•         Backup telephony solution

The Holborn fire was finally extinguished 36 hours after it erupted, but not before landing a blow on the local economy to the tune of £40 million. Businesses using cloud services as part of a larger business continuity strategy, however, were able to maintain continuity of operations and minimise their lost revenue. With the right resources in place, evacuating your building doesn’t have to mean abandoning your business.

By Matt Kingswood, head of managed services, IT Specialists (ITS)

citizens bank, Enterprise IT, IBM, Ken Starkey, Managed services, News & Analysis, Philip Guido

Citizens Bank signs 5-year managed services deal with IBM

Citizens Bank has tapped IBM for a managed services deal

Citizens Bank has tapped IBM in a managed services deal

Citizens Bank is moving its back-end technology infrastructure to a managed services environment following the signing of  a five-year IT services agreement with IBM.

Using a hybrid IT approach, IBM will optimise the bank’s existing IT infrastructure by integrating automation and predictive analytics technologies to standardise and streamline many of its internal IT systems and processes, including core banking applications, branch operations and online and mobile banking.

“Information technology plays a key role in our ability to anticipate and meet the needs of every customer, across every channel,” said Ken Starkey, chief technology officer, infrastructure services, Citizens Bank. “This agreement with IBM will provide immediate access to new technologies and capabilities, enabling us to create greater efficiencies in support of Citizens’ growth objectives.”

Under the contract, IBM will operate Citizens’ existing and future IT systems located in the bank’s data centres in Rhode Island and North Carolina. The bank already uses IBM systems and technologies. IBM also will support Citizens’ voice and data networks and provide IT support for all Citizens colleagues.

Philip Guido, general manager, IBM Global Technology Services, North America, said: “This is part of a multi-stage transformation of Citizen’s IT environment that lays the foundation for integrating additional IBM solutions in the future, making the bank more agile and responsive to the growing needs of its customers.”

Enterprise IT, Jennifer Stroud, Joanne Marshall, News & Analysis, ServiceNow

University of Bradford deploys ServiceNow for HR

The University of Bradford is deploying ServiceNow to modernise its HR function

The University of Bradford is deploying ServiceNow to modernise its HR function

The University of Bradford is deploying ServiceNow in a bid to transform its human resources function.

The university said it is deploying the platform to increase the HR department’s efficiency and responsiveness, and give it stronger technical capabilities to facilitate recruitment. It said it previously relied on a range of manual techniques, with little reporting, prioritisation capabilities or unified visibility on the day to day activities in HR.

“We are seeing increased demand for easy access to HR services and information,” said Joanne Marshall, director of HR at the University of Bradford. “Our old way of working was no longer fit for purpose. ServiceNow has facilitated a new model where employees can complete their own transactions and find answers to a wide range of questions. As a result, we now have the ability to redirect strategic HR resources to other areas within the business.”

Jennifer Stroud, general manager, HR service management business unit, ServiceNow: “We are increasingly seeing organisations adopting a service management approach across the workplace with HR leading the way. As the University of Bradford demonstrated, organisations can see fast transformations and dramatic improvements in the overall service experience.”

While ServiceNow is primarily deployed as an IT service management platform it’s clear the company is keen to refocus its offering on other central functions like HR and finance. Earlier this year the company launched its own application marketplace so customers can buy third-party apps built on the ServiceNow platform including a range of HR, legal and financial services apps.