Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

data protection, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Policy and Regulation

Microsoft files lawsuit against US government and secret snooping orders

Lady Justice On The Old Bailey, LondonMicrosoft has filed a new lawsuit in federal court against the United States government arguing the right that customers should have the right to know when the state accesses their emails or records.

Under current law, the government has the right to demand access to customer information, while also issuing orders to companies such as Microsoft to keep these types of legal demands secret. Microsoft claim these orders are becoming too often common place; rather than common routine, these secrecy issues should be the exception not the rule.

“We believe that with rare exceptions consumers and businesses have a right to know when the government accesses their emails or records,” said Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft on the company blog. “Yet it’s becoming routine for the U.S. government to issue orders that require email providers to keep these types of legal demands secret. We believe that this goes too far and we are asking the courts to address the situation.

“Cloud computing has spurred a profound change in the storage of private information. Today, individuals increasingly keep their emails and documents on remote servers in data centres – in short, in the cloud. But the transition to the cloud does not alter people’s expectations of privacy and should not alter the fundamental constitutional requirement that the government must – with few exceptions – give notice when it searches and seizes private information or communications.”

While the company recognizes there are certain circumstances where secrecy would be required, it would appear the US government is using the legal demands to keep secrecy as a default setting. Microsoft has claimed the demands violates the company’s First Amendment right to free speech, as well as the customers Fourth Amendment right, which gives people and businesses the right to know if the government searches or seizes their property.

“Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has required that we maintain secrecy regarding 2,576 legal demands, effectively silencing Microsoft from speaking to customers about warrants or other legal process seeking their data,” said Smith. “Notably and even surprisingly, 1,752 of these secrecy orders, or 68% of the total, contained no fixed end date at all. This means that we effectively are prohibited forever from telling our customers that the government has obtained their data.”

Microsoft’s case is built on the perception the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is currently being abused by US officials, but also the fact the act is dated and no longer relevant. The act, which is seemingly unpopular with technology firms, has been in place since 1986. Microsoft argues the time period between the act being written and the widespread use of the internet is too long for the legislation to be relevant to today’s world.

“While today’s lawsuit is important, we believe there’s an opportunity for the Department of Justice to adopt a new policy that sets reasonable limitations on the use of these types of secrecy orders,” said Smith. “Congress also has a role to play in finding and passing solutions that both protect people’s rights and meet law enforcement’s needs. If the Department of Justice doesn’t act, then we hope that Congress will amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to implement reasonable rules.”

The company believes the act should be updated in three areas. Firstly, from a transparency perspective, the government should be held accountable when it snoops through customer data, and in the majority of cases the customer should be informed. Second, there should be a focus on digital neutrality as customers should not receive less notice of government activities simply because emails are stored in the cloud. Finally, there should be a necessity clause which would limit what the government can keep secret. In these circumstances, Microsoft wants the right to tell its customers what has been seen outside of the necessity clause.

Google, News & Analysis, Outage, Public Cloud

Google cloud team launches damage control mission

Close up of an astronaut in outer space, planet Mars in the background. Elements of the image are furnished by NASAGoogle will offer all customers who were affected by the Google Compute Engine outage with service credits, in what would appear to be a damage control exercise as the company looks to gain ground on AWS and Microsoft Azure in the public cloud market segment.

On Monday, 11 April, Google Compute Engine instances in all regions lost external connectivity for a total of 18 minutes. The outage has been blamed on two separate bugs, which separately would not have caused any major problems, though the combined result was a service outage. Although the outage has seemingly caused embarrassment for the company, it did not impact other more visible, consumer services such as Google Maps or Gmail.

“We recognize the severity of this outage, and we apologize to all of our customers for allowing it to occur,” said Benjamin Treynor Sloss, VP of Engineering at Google, in a statement on the company’s blog. “As of this writing, the root cause of the outage is fully understood and GCE is not at risk of a recurrence. Additionally, our engineering teams will be working over the next several weeks on a broad array of prevention, detection and mitigation systems intended to add additional defence in depth to our existing production safeguards.

“We take all outages seriously, but we are particularly concerned with outages which affect multiple zones simultaneously because it is difficult for our customers to mitigate the effect of such outages. It is our hope that, by being transparent and providing considerable detail, we both help you to build more reliable services and we demonstrate our ongoing commitment to offering you a reliable Google Cloud platform.”

While the outage would not appear to have caused any major damage for the company, competitors in the space may secretly be pleased with the level of publicity the incident has received. Google has been ramping up efforts in recent months to bolster its cloud computing capabilities to tackle the public cloud market segment with hires of industry hard-hitters, for instance Diane Greene, rumoured acquisitions, as well as announcing plans to open 12 new data centres by the end of 2017.

The company currently sits in third place in the public cloud market segment, behind AWS and Microsoft Azure, though has been demonstrating healthy growth in recent months prior to the outage.

Intel, News & Analysis

Only 13% trust public cloud with sensitive data – Intel survey

Solving problems. Business conceptA survey from Intel has highlighted companies are now becoming more trusting of cloud propositions, though public cloud platforms are still not trusted to secure sensitive data.

The Blue Skies Ahead? The State of Cloud Adoption report stated 77% of the respondents believe their company trusts cloud platforms more than 12 months ago, though only 13% would utilize public offerings for sensitive data. 72% point to compliance as the biggest concern with cloud adoption.

“This is a new era for cloud providers,” said Raj Samani, CTO at Intel Security EMEA. “We are at the tipping point of investment and adoption, expanding rapidly as trust in cloud computing and cloud providers grows. As we enter a phase of wide-scale adoption of cloud computing to support critical applications and services, the question of trust within the cloud becomes imperative. This will become integral into realising the benefits cloud computing can truly offer.”

One area of the survey which could be perceived as a concern is only 35% of the respondents believe C-level executives and senior management understand security risks of the cloud. Industry insiders have told BCN that executives are almost using cloud security as a sound-bite to demonstrate to investors that the board prioritizes technology as a means of driving business innovation, though few could be considered technology orientated or competent.

“The key to secure cloud adoption is ensuring sufficient security controls are integrated from the start so the business can maintain their trust in the cloud,” said Samani. “There is a growing awareness amongst the C-suite of the potential consequences of a data breach. Yet IT must take steps to educate senior management further on the enabling capabilities of the cloud, underlining the importance of always keeping security considerations front of mind.”

“Securing the cloud is a top-down process but getting every employee to follow best practice and behave in a secure manner requires company-wide participation. For example, when faced with many of the cloud threats defined by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), IT will absolutely require employee support to ensure data remains secure.”

Contemplate. Business concept illustrationFrom an investment perspective, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) continues to lead the way with 81% of respondents highlighting their organization is planning to invest in this area. Security-as-a-Service followed closely with 79%, whereas Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) accounted for 69% and 60% respectively. The survey also highlighted respondents expect 80% percent of their IT budgets to be dedicated to cloud computing services in the next 16 months.

While the increased trust in cloud platforms is a positive, it would appear in some circumstances it is a case of blind trust. More than a fifth of IT decision makers are not sure whether unauthorized cloud services are being used within the organization and 13% cannot account for what is currently being stored in the cloud. Shadow IT continues to distress IT departments throughout the industry and the most popular means of dealing with it would appear to be database activity monitoring according to 49% of the respondents.

Shadow IT maybe a concern for the vast majority of companies in the journey to cloud security, but it does lead to the question as to whether conquering shadow IT is possible, and whether 100% secure can ever be a realistic goal. “Faced with a rapidly expanding threat landscape, IT should never consider their infrastructure to be 100% secure,” said Samani. “Attack methods are constantly updated: there is no room for complacency. IT departments must ensure they regularly update and check their security measures, undertaking their due diligence to ensure corporate data remains secure.”

The concept of secure IT would appear to be a growing conversation throughout the ranks within enterprise, though the concrete understanding and commitment behind the sound-bites from executives remains unclear. 100% may well be an unattainable goal however until the concept of secure IT is appreciated completely throughout the organization, from top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, it would appear companies will be unlikely to utilise cloud platforms for any sensitive data.

AI, Artificial intelligence, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, News & Analysis

AI forms backbone of Facebook’s 10 year plan

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has seemingly positioned artificial intelligence as one of the catalysts for innovation for the company over the next 10 years.

Outlining its technology roadmap for the next 10 years, the company highlighted artificial intelligence, as well as virtual and augmented reality, as technologies to drive new features and user experience. New features highlighted include translation, photo image searches, ‘talking pictures’ and real-time video classification.

“Artificial Intelligence will power all kinds of different services with better than human level perception and we’ll see the emergence of the next major computing platform in virtual and augmented reality,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg during his opening keynote at F8. “These are all elements of our 10 year roadmap to connect the world and each of these elements is in service of our mission. It’s about bringing people together, that’s what we do here.”

The company has been making efforts in recent months to bolster its position in the artificial intelligence space. Recently, the company announced a string of new hires for its artificial intelligence research team, including a number of acquisitions from Microsoft’s R&D team, another company who have been making strides to perfect AI. The new staff members bring experience to the team in the fields of causal inference in learning systems, computer vision, cost-sensitive learning, speech recognition and syntactic parsing with approximate inference.

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook

On the company blog, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook outlined a number of use cases which are a reality today. “We built an AI backbone that powers much of the Facebook experience and is used actively by more than 25 percent of all engineers across the company. Powered by a massive 40 PFLOPS GPU cluster that teams are using to train really large models with billions of parameters on huge data sets of trillions of examples, teams across the company ae running 50x more AI experiments per day than a year ago, which means that research is going into production faster than ever.”

The company has already applied an AI-based automatic translation system, claiming that an off-the-shelf translation program would not be adequate as they trained on a general corpus like appliance manuals. As language on Facebook is far more colloquial, the systems would not be effective. The company claims that its AI capabilities have the ability to learn and recognize new expressions, regional differences and the various uses of emojis.

In terms of pictures, Facebook claim its AI can understand the content of the image at a pixel level to make classification and searching of image simpler. “This is called image segmentation, and it allows us to recognize individual objects in the image as well as their relation,” said Candela. “Using image segmentation we will be able to build more immersive experiences for the visually impaired with “talking images” you can read with your fingertips, as well as more powerful ways to search images. In one case here, we have the ability to search for ‘a photo of us five on skis on the snow, with a lake in the background and trees on both sides’.

“AI is central to today’s Facebook experience, and, with our research pushing the state of the art, we’re just getting started on this journey. I’m excited to see where it takes us next.”

AI, Bot, DropBox, Facebook, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce and Dropbox launch on Facebook’s messenger platform

facebook botSalesforce and Dropbox are two of the first to launch service offerings on Facebook’s new messenger platform.

According to Facebook, Messenger is one of the industry’s fastest growing apps, increasing user rates from 500 million in 2014 to 900 million today. The company have now introduced a number of bot services on the app, allowing businesses to communicate with their customers providing anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages.

“Using Salesforce, businesses are now able to engage with their customers on Facebook Messenger in a whole new way – in fact, Salesforce enables each Messenger interaction to be specifically tailored, based on the context of the entire customer relationship,” said Paul Smith, GM of Salesforce Marketing Cloud in EMEA. “When you remember that most companies are now competing primarily on the customer experience they can deliver, you can begin to see the massive impact of opening up this new channel to businesses: brands will be able to create deeper, more personal 1-to-1 customer journeys within chat. It’s another way in which we’re helping companies to succeed in the Age of the Customer.”

Powered by Salesforce Lightning, the platform will enable customers to deliver personalized engagement at scale with CRM data. The company claims that each message can be linked directly to a customer’s history in the Salesforce CRM platform, enabling brands to deliver personalized messages to customers. The news builds on trends within the industry as vendors aim to create increasingly personalized experiences for customers as a means of meeting the expectations of increasing demanding consumers.

“Now with Messenger, Facebook is inviting companies to engage their customers in new ways on its platform at scale,” said Alex Dayon, Chief Product Officer at Salesforce. “With Salesforce for Messenger companies will be able to easily connect their businesses to Messenger, creating deeper, more personalized and 1-to-1 customer journeys within the chat experience.”

Dropbox has also taken advantage of Facebook’s new platform to increase its own offering. As part of the proposition, users can share files stored on Dropbox’s cloud-storage service directly through Facebook’s messenger app.

“We want people to communicate just the way they want to on Messenger, with everyone they care about,” said Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messenger at Dropbox on the company’s blog. “Giving our users the ability to share their Dropbox videos and images in Messenger threads with just a few taps will help them bring more style and personality to those conversations.”

While the news has grabbed headlines in a very effective manner, it remains to be seen whether Facebook can police the platform in a way that satisfies consumers. The platform could essentially be seen as an upgrade on SMS advertising which was received coldly by consumers after the initial enthusiasm declined.

Enterprise IT, Intranet, MyHub, News & Analysis

6 Benefits of a Cloud-Based Intranet

BenefitsAs cloud technology continues to enter business operations, services and platforms that were formerly strictly on-site solutions are developing new opportunities for businesses looking to expand into internet-based computing. Intranets are the perfect example: rather than having to install and maintain a comprehensive platform on your servers, businesses looking to enhance their employee communication can now take advantage of cloud solutions instead.

Especially for larger enterprises looking for internal marketing and employee collaboration tools, intranets continue to gain popularity. If your business can is looking to establish an internal presence, here are 6 benefits of a cloud-based intranet you should consider.

1) Intranet Benefits For Your Business

First, let’s examine the general benefits of intranet platforms as they relate to your business. Cloud-based or on-premise, these platforms help businesses of all sizes improve their internal communication and collaboration.

Increasingly, organizations are realizing just how important internal marketing is to succeed in a competitive market place. By treating employees as a valuable marketing audience, organizations can grow workers into brand advocates that will spread positive messages about the business to their family and friends.

In addition, intranets help to engage employees and create a connection between workers and their daily tasks through enhancing collaboration and providing productivity tools. Studies show that employees who are happy at their jobs are significantly more productive than their counterparts, ultimately driving business growth.

2) Accessibility of Cloud-Based Intranets

Many of the general benefits of intranets are amplified in cloud-based platforms. For example, a platform that is not hosted on your internal servers is accessible from anywhere in the world. Particularly if your employees travel frequently or work from a variety of locations, they may require access to collaboration tools or the internal company blog regardless of location. Cloud-based intranet enables that access, increasing both use of the platform and the resulting collaboration.

As millennials are beginning to enter the workforce, global accessibility will continue to rise in importance. Recent research has shown that younger generations are more likely to believe that working remotely increases their productivity and motivation, increasing the need for collaboration software that is accessible in locations other than company headquarters.

Experienced users in cloud technology will be familiar with this argument. Global accessibility remains one of the core benefits of cloud computing as a whole, and naturally extends to cloud intranets. Accessibility regardless of location means increased flexibility and convenience, which are both crucial parts in helping your employees conduct their work and collaborate successfully and efficiently.

NECSupp_2012_OFC_e13660222445253) Scalability of Operations

No business is stagnant. Ideally, your goal in establishing an intranet system within your company is to increase employee productivity, which will in turn result in business growth. But can your intranet handle larger operations?

The answer to that question, of course, depends. An on-premise solution may only be configured for a certain number of users and storage capacity. Increasing each variable is most likely possible, but will require additional resources, time commitment, or both.

A cloud-based solution, on the other hand, is more easily scalable. Designed to grow with the company for which it runs, a cloud-based intranet generally offers unlimited users and storage that could not be supported by limited on-site servers. If and when your business grows, its intranet will grow alongside it.

4) Existing IT Constraints

Anyone who has experienced a major software implementation knows just how time and resource-intensive the process is. That is no different for on-premise intranet software, which will require both expertise and extensive work hours to install, secure, and maintain. Many companies simply do not have an IT department ready and willing to take on that work.

Unless your IT division is willing to take on and take lead for your intranet, both during implementation and for continuous maintenance, your options are limited. Many companies hire an intranet specialist specifically for this task, which will both lengthen the implementation phase and put a further strain on your resources. A cloud-based solution, on the other hand, eliminates the need for dedicated IT resources and frees your technical department up for other aspects of your business.

5) Low Set Up Costs

Any potential intranet buyer or influencer should understand the differences in pricing models between the two alternatives. Cloud-based intranet relies on an SaaS model, meaning that it will cost a contracted monthly fee to maintain and update. On-premise software, on the other hand, usually comes with a high upfront cost to buy the software license, train employees, and any overhead caused by the implementation process.

Which of the two alternatives can your business afford? Especially if only limited resources are available, the answer is most likely to be the SaaS model. Our clients tend to think of it as a payment plan: no one has the money to buy their house up front, so a mortgage is a natural solution. Similarly, cloud-based intranet will enable you to implement the software without coming up with a large chunk of budget immediately.

Running in the country6) Streamlined Training Opportunities

With on-premise software, ownership and responsibility lies with you. Either marketing or IT will need to train employees, ensuring software adoption and maximum functionality as early as possible. That can be especially difficult given that the leads in charge of training are only learning the software themselves.

A cloud-based intranet, on the other hand, offers more streamlined training opportunities. Because the software is used by many other businesses, your provider likely has an established library or knowledge base of tutorials and training modules available for your use. That, in turn, enables you to streamline your training, ensuring that your employees will learn the software comprehensively and successfully.

Understanding the Drawbacks of Cloud-Based Intranets

At the same time, businesses looking to establish an intranet powered by cloud computing should understand that while the benefits are undeniable, certain disadvantages do exist. When compared to on-site solutions, it’s important to keep the following drawbacks in mind:

  • Continuous Costs. While the initial set up costs are much lower than for on-premise intranet solutions, you will need to plan in costs after the initial deployment. Cloud-based intranet is an SaaS solution, meaning that you will be paying a monthly fee for storage, maintenance, and upkeep.
  • Less Control. You will rely on software used by other companies, rather than a custom solution for your business. That means you rely on external service, rather than internal professionals for any maintenance and trouble shooting. Software updates will be initiated by the provider, rather than your IT department.

Is a Cloud-Based Intranet Right For Your Business?

Ultimately, that question depends on your individual business situation. You may have a robust IT team that is happy and eager to take on management and maintenance of your on-premise solution. Or you may prefer paying a large sum up front for more flexibility later. But in reality, most businesses with tight budgets, limited IT capabilities, and a mobile workforce should at least consider the thought of a cloud-based intranet solution. The benefits are undeniable, and can help you improve your employee productivity significantly.

Through partnering with MyHub, your business can take advantage of the many opportunities provided by intranets without the requirements necessary to install and maintain an on-premise solution.

Written by Frederik Schrader Search Engine Marketer at MyHub Intranet

Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid, News & Analysis, SMB

HPE targets SMB hybrid cloud market

cloud-hubHPE has launched ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid, a new offering designed for small and mid-sized businesses, educational institutions and branch offices.

As part of the offering, customers will receive an on premise server, as well as public cloud computing capabilities through HPE. The proposition is the first from the company’s Easy Connect portfolio, which will eventually be a collection of product offerings with the aim of making cloud adoption easier for smaller organizations.

“Small businesses want to focus on growing their core businesses, not spending their limited resources on deploying and managing IT,” said McLeod Glass, GM for SMB solutions at HPE. “This new solution is part of a broad HPE initiative, inspired by the unique needs of small and mid-sized businesses, to deliver innovative solutions that are easy for our channel partners to sell and easy for our customers to use.”

While the cloud market has to date focused on implementation in enterprise size organizations, there have been a number of plays for the SMB market in recent weeks, including from Go Daddy and Microsoft. Although the SMB market does not offer the same level of contracts as those in enterprise scale organizations, it could turn into a potentially lucrative segment. Research from BCSG highlighted that adoption levels are rising healthily.

SMB statsThe finding stated 64% of SMB’s are currently using at least one cloud solution to help them run their business, though the average number of cloud services was in fact three. 78% of the market is considering increasing the number of services they currently consume and by 2017, BCSG estimate that 88% will be using at least one service, and the average number of services consumed per company will be seven.

The ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid is marketed on the idea of simplicity of use for the customers, through it is not clear how large or significant the Easy Connect portfolio will be on the whole.

“Organizations of all sizes are transforming their IT to a hybrid mix of private and cloud technology,” said Nick East, co-founder and CEO of Zynstra, who’s virtualisation and cloud management software will be used in the offering.

“Together with HPE, we’ve done the heavy lifting for SMBs and their IT partners. This small form factor solution delivers the right business value without compromise or complexity, and is integrated with and managed centrally from the cloud. It’s how IT should be.”

Big Data, cognitive computing, IBM, News & Analysis

Are decision makers thinking too short-term for cloud benefits?

Career ChoicesWhile cloud adoption maybe hitting the mainstream, the majority of projects are focused primarily around increasing productivity of employees through automation as opposed to the greater benefits of cloud computing.

Speaking at Cloud World Expo, Rashik Parmar, IBM’s Lead Cloud Advisor, highlighted that the benefits of cloud maybe currently underplayed by some organizations, as projects are initially too focused on productivity advantages. While automation could build an effective business case for cloud implementation, benefits such as performance and business predictability are often overlooked until projects are more mature.

“With performance we talk about speed. It’s the timing in which it takes to change, drive innovation in the market place and accelerate the way you deliver value to you customers,” said Parmar. “Predictability is one we often don’t think about. With the cloud you start to be able to understand the kind of outcomes you can achieve well before you put them out there. It’s that ability to be able to predict those outcomes and be confident that this particular journey is going to deliver value that gives people the inspiration and the ability to invest in cloud projects.”

Parmar highlighted that cloud is more than simply a tool for automation of software, but also the access to data, which has been healthily increased by the wider adoption of IoT technologies. Advances in cognitive computing are now enabling businesses to drive decision making through automation, taking time consuming tasks away from employees to ensure they can concentrate on core tasks.

“What we’re now starting to get into is a stage of machine learning, a stage of cognitive computing which allows us to see some of the broader patterns and automate further,” said Parmar. “Tasks which were being handed to humans are being replaced by automation. Radiography is a good example. A radiographer looks at an x-ray and decides whether there is a crack or a hairline fracture, and these are quite hard to automate without human skills. With the new cognitive capabilities and picture recognition analytics, we can use machine learning to pick out these anomalies and automate these tasks.”

While the initial benefits of cloud will always be automation and therefore and increase in productivity, as organizations mature through their cloud journey’s the long-term potential of cloud becomes more apparent.

IBM’s position would appear to be on the advanced side of cloud computing, seemingly wanted to accelerate customers through the adoption process and through to the performance and predictability benefits sooner rather than later. Though this does leave the question of how many organizations would be in a position digitally to capitalize on such concepts currently. Can organizations be fast-tracked to the advanced stages of cloud computing or does there have to be an internal learning curve? Could this be a case of IBM trying to encourage customers to walk before they can crawl?

EMC, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Transformation

UK businesses at threat of losing IT talent

Weg - Zukunft - Entscheidung - Neuanfang - KonzeptEMC has released a new study highlighting UK businesses are at risk of losing IT talent due to underappreciation of technology in the business on the whole.

The Great Skills Exodus report claims decision makers are failing to prioritise IT as a business enabler, while 88% of IT workers believe the growth and success of their organisation is fundamentally reliant on technology. Frustrations from the IT department can be linked to a lack of transformation in the company they work for as 26% has witnessed an unwillingness to change the way ‘things have always been done’ from the management team.

“IT has got to become a key aspect of the business strategy, not merely a function of the overall business,” said Ross Fraser, UK&I Country Manager at EMC. “Technology is potentially the definitive aspect of any business but it can be seen as a supportive function by a substantial amount of organizations at the moment. Decision makers now have to rethink what they are doing as the process of IT and move with the times.”

While there has been encouraging progress in the adoption of cloud technologies in recent months, it would appear board level decision makers are not realizing the full potential of the technology itself. Cloud as a technology could be perceived as now penetrating the mass market, though the digitally enabled business model, required to activate cloud for its greatest potential, could be seen as lagging.

“If you want to modernize, automate and transform your infrastructure, whether than means on premise or off premise, you have to embrace the idea of new IT,” said Fraser. “There are a few companies where their future probably depends on how well they embrace future IT and I think that there is also a lack of understanding that if they don’t embrace it they will come under huge amounts of pressure and competitive threats because they are not competitive enough as a business.”

Among the concerns put forward by respondents in the survey, 20% feel held back by their organisation’s restrictions on implementing new technologies, 30% feel they have few opportunities to demonstrate their ability, and less than 20% believe their organization has a significant focus on IT as a means of driving innovation.

“The worst case scenario could be that they won’t exist, think about Kodak or Blockbuster,” said Fraser. “Now this is on an extreme level but it does demonstrate how disruptive the digital business model is. It could mean death by a thousand cuts, but if you don’t get the technology question right it could mean major problems in the long run. Every business has the digital challenge, but if they get it right from a technology perspective it creates a workforce which sees where they are working is an important aspect of the business, they start to see career progression and new opportunities.”

EMC believe a stronger and more consistent message throughout the organization on technology, would not only provide the organization with a more competitive position in the market, but also highlight the importance of IT as a function to the on-going success, ensuring employee retention would be increased.

“Technology is at the heart of business transformation and the IT team is ideally placed to help any organisation navigate new opportunities and threats in the market,” said Fraser. “With employment of IT professionals forecast to grow at 1.62 percent per year by 2020, businesses must ensure that they offer the most compelling career opportunities in order to retain the best staff, or risk losing as many as three quarters of their IT team in the coming months – something which would have a hugely detrimental impact on any organisation.”

Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Open Cloud

Huawei’s enterprise business unit grows 44% to $4.5 billion

Maintaining ProfitsHuawei’s Enterprise Business Group (EPG) has reported healthy growth over the last 12 months generating $4.5 billion over the period, an increase of 44% year-on-year.

Speaking at Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit 2016, the company highlighted growth was fuelled by customer demand for new ICT solutions, and outlined it strategy for 2016 under the tagline “Leading new ICT, building a better connected world”. The new proposition is focused around developing open, flexible and secure platforms for customers worldwide.

“In 2015, Huawei EBG experienced rapid growth in the public safety, finance, transportation, and energy sectors,” said David He, President of Marketing and Solution Sales at Huawei EBG. “With the development of innovative ICT including cloud computing, big data, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT), customers’ business models, enterprises’ IT architectures, and industry ecosystems are changing profoundly. To address our customers’ challenges and strategic demands, Huawei works closely with our partners to develop joint innovations, through which we provide our clients with differentiated and leading products and solutions to help them thrive in the new ICT era.”

The announcement comes after Huawei launched its All-Cloud strategy at the event this week, as a means to capitalize on digital capitalization trends. Building on the ROADS experience model, All-Cloud centres on network modernization and aims to enable digital transformation within enterprise.

The enterprise group’s focus to date has been on the traditionally high-value contracts, though it is not clear what industries have been prioritized for the next 12 months. 76% of Huawei EBG’s 2015 sales revenue was generated from channels and partners, an increase of 47% year-over-year, owing to the fact that the company has now developed partnerships with more than 300 distributors and value-added partners, as well as more than 8000 tier-2 channel partners.

“In line with our ‘being integrated’ strategy, Huawei will continue to support our partners and help them succeed in the new ICT era by enhancing our products, brands, logistics, services, businesses, and IT systems,” said Raymond Lau, President of Global Partners and Alliances at Huawei EBG.