Avaya has escalated its efforts to get customers to fast-track to the cloud with the first of several sweeping initiatives that will optimize solutions and processes for delivery of collaboration as a service (CaaS) via the Avaya Collaborative Cloud. Strong demand for Avaya communications and collaboration applications from large and midsize enterprises is driving a focus on expanded scale and reach as well as simpler, faster provisioning that requires fewer resources.
Avaya collaboration solutions, including unified communications, video and contact center via the cloud, offer a new path to greater business agility. While many other areas of IT have successfully adopted cloud-based solutions, the communications infrastructure is one of the last remaining hold-outs due to complexity and concerns around reliability, security and privacy. As the business environment changes, however, new communications solutions and delivery models must support a mobile, flexible workforce that characterizes today’s rapidly changing economic landscape. The Avaya Collaborative Cloud fills this need.

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The cloud has hit the mainstream. Businesses in the United States currently spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services, and Gartner projects that by 2015, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion worldwide. It is estimated that 50 percent of organizations will require employees to use their own devices by 2017, which will depend on shared cloud storage. All of this requires encryption.
Organizational deployment of encryption has increased significantly in recent years. Its use spans everything from encrypting data in databases and file systems, in storage networks, on back-up tapes, and while being transferred over a public and internal networks. Although this might seem that we are moving in the right direction when it comes to enterprise data protection, there’s a real risk of creating fragmentation and inconsistency – referred to as encryption sprawl – as different organizations deploy diverse technologies in different places to secure different types of data. Adding fuel to the fire, the cloud poses its own unique threats and challenges. With an undeniable value proposition, it seems clear that the cloud is inevitable and that protecting data within it will be a top priority.

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Nick Razey, CEO and Co-founder of Next Generation Data

Although recognised as important, the absolute criticality of the data centre is often underestimated and this is possibly due to its relative cost in comparison to other elements of the IT stack. While a rack footprint might cost £10K pa, the hardware might cost over £50K and the managed service £100K.

However, if the data centre fails the lost business can reach millions of pounds per day. So, while the data centre is considered the least important element when it is working, it immediately becomes the most important element if it fails.

While this is of course recognised by data centre designers who are focused on building a resilient mechanical and electrical infrastructure – normally with the objective of achieving “concurrent maintainability” – ensuring a comparable focus on security measures is being overlooked.

Targeting physical infrastructure is commonplace in time of war. Ports, airports and road arteries have been the traditional targets of those seeking to disrupt and destroy.

While the data centre is considered the least important element when it is working, it immediately become the most important if it fails

In today’s world, where data is the oxygen that drives almost everything we do and there is hardly a business in the land without some form of information technology at its core, it is unsurprising that the locations which store active data, the data centres, have become recognised as threatened.

In their research paper Predicts 2013: Infrastructure Services Threatened as New Structural, Political, Competitive and Commercial Challenges Emerge, Gartner note that the flip side of greatly enhanced cyber security through the use of mind-bending algorithms is that it pushes those with an axe to grind to consider a plan B where a physical assault makes the most sense. The London riots of 2011 might have created just such a spark had the rioters wished to target a particular company or government department on which to vent their frustration.

Gartner’s report forewarns senior IT decision makers that by 2016 it is likely government regulation will dictate minimum physical levels of security for data centre infrastructure. No longer will it be acceptable to store data in facilities that do not have rigorous security protocols so executives must prepare now for this change.

In the current world this lack of focus on the physical aspects of security is somewhat surprising as not only have we seen the destruction of the World Trade Center (which housed many data centres) and the London bombings of 2005, but as Gartner point out, going back further there is an even more pertinent example:

The bombing of the financial district of London’s Docklands in February 1996 demonstrated the vulnerability of data centre buildings and surrounding areas to major disruption caused by a terrorist bomb.

The emphasis that most data centre operators have placed on London is understandable. The vast majority of companies have their headquarters in London and the financial sector is almost exclusively based there. In the days when IT was unreliable and communication links were expensive it made sense to house equipment close to the main office – to be a “server hugger”.  The focus on maintain cheaper communications links meant that companies’ IT equipment began to cluster together in a few mega data centres in London’s Docklands. However, this clustering has created a concentration of risk as Gartner point out:

As large data centers serve more and more enduser organizations, their potential as a target for criminal and terrorist activity increases.

And according to Gartner it is also the risk to critical infrastructure that means the Government might be required to legislate:

“Targeting critical infrastructure is a well-established strategy in times of war, and by terrorists (international and domestic alike). Data centers are critical infrastructure for the effective operations of most world economies. Information security measures continue to make «getting inside» harder for those with malicious intentions, thus requiring a reversion to the oldest form of gaining access — kick down the door!

The emphasis that most data centre operators have placed on London is understandable

“Such actions could be taken by disenfranchised domestic groups, contracted corporate espionage agents, or even the result of international conflict. Although the actual success of such efforts may be limited, the mere attempt will be enough to cause many governments to recognize data centers as being vital critical infrastructure requiring regulations potentially on par with those found in nuclear facilities.”

Fortunately, thanks to increasingly sophisticated remote control and monitoring, and cheap fibre, the data centre no longer needs to be tightly shackled to the Head Office.  Responsible CIOs should therefore focus on priorities other than convenience and consider data centre locations which are more secure than central London.

So why is a more remote out of town location more secure? Firstly, good security requires space – space enough for double layer fencing, space enough for the data centre building to be at least 25m from the road. In congested and expensive London this is very difficult to achieve whereas NGD’s facility in South Wales, for example, has a 25 acre site with military grade fences. Secondly, a secure site should have a low footfall – remote from highly populated focal points for crowd unrest or riots, a location where unwanted strangers are easy to spot. And of course, the data centre should not be in the vicinity of natural terrorist targets such as Canary Wharf, flight paths or flood plains.

In summary, the UK government has already begun to recognise the growing security threat facing data centres. In order to minimise risk, buyers will in turn need to assess physical security capabilities far more rigorously than at present and look toward the selection of redundant delivery centres that are more geographically dispersed.

By Kenneth N Rashbaum Esq. and Jason M. Tenenbaum of Barton, LLP.

This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only. Any legal information provided in this post should not be relied upon as legal advice. It is not intended to create, and does not create, an attorney-client relationship and readers should not act upon the information presented without first seeking legal counsel.

In light of the disclosures by Edward Snowden, there has been a push towards transparency both from governments and from technology companies that have amassed data about the personal lives of citizens. While the call for increased transparency has been worldwide, the European Union has been at the forefront of advocating for change.

In addition to revising its Data Protection Directive, a topic that will be discussed in more detail in a future post, the EU also tasked a group of industry experts from companies like Amazon, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle with standardizing the language of cloud computing contracts to make them more consistent and easier to understand.

As a result, on June 6, 2014, the European Commission’s Cloud Select Industry Group – Subgroup on Service Level Agreement (“C-SIG-SLA”) released its Cloud Service Level Agreement Standardization Guidelines (“Guidelines”). Part of the larger Digital Agenda for Europe, the stated goal of the Guidelines is to “improve[] the clarity and increase[] the understanding of SLAs for cloud services in the market, in particular by highlighting and providing information on the concepts usually covered by SLAs.”

As such, the Guidelines are a “set of principles that can assist organisations[] through the development of standards and guidelines for cloud SLAs and other governing documents.”

The Guidelines propose that SLAs should be drafted with an eye towards consistency across companies in a manner that is “business model  and technologically neutral,” with unambiguously defined terms and with a broad variety of users in mind. In addition to these guiding concepts, the Guidelines suggest that topics such as encryption, logging and monitoring,  privacy,  availability (“up time”), termination processes, and breach response be addressed in sufficient detail to allow customers to make informed decisions about the cloud service providers and their services.

Neelie Kroes, the European Commission Vice-President, hailed the Guidelines as a step in the right direction, stating that “small businesses in particular will benefit from having these guidelines at hand when searching for cloud services.” As the initiative to standardize SLAs is based in the European Union, it remains to be seen what effect these Guidelines will have on American companies and their agreements.  

Currently, the C-SIG-SLA is working with ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) to present the “European position at the international level.” As such, the Guidelines, in whole or in part, may ultimately become international standards and will find their way into SLAs for engagements with hosting providers and their customers within U.S. This is only logical in that many U.S. cloud engagements in this age of globalization comprise data from beyond the United States.

Accordingly, if the Guidelines have the effect that the European Commission Vice-President believes that they will have, American companies will most probably conform to the principles established by the Guidelines for business reasons.

The post Standardization of Cloud Contracts In Europe: Coming Soon to the U.S.? appeared first on Cloud Computing News.

The prognosticators have been at the tea leaves and crystal balls again. This time, an IDC study has found that cloud hardware spending will break $4bn (£2.34bn) across EMEA in 2014.

The report, entitled EMEA IT Infrastructure Hardware for Public and Private Cloud 2011-2018 Forecast, saw year on year growth of 19% and “confirmed that cloud is the major disruption factor in the EMEA infrastructure hardware market”, according to a press release.

According to the researchers 15% of infrastructure spend in EMEA will be related to cloud environments in 2014. This went up from a miserly 8% in 2011 and will grow to more than 22% by 2018.

$3.4bn (£1.99bn) was spent on hardware going to cloud environments in EMEA through 2013, with the majority of it (42%) going on public cloud environments. 38% of spend went to on-premise private clouds, and 20% by hosted dedicated private clouds, showing a relatively even mix.

This won’t last though, with figures showing that public cloud spend will accelerate to the point of contributing almost $3bn in spend alone by 2018, as can be seen in the graph below:

Credit: IDC

Perhaps less surprisingly, strongest growth in EMEA is driven by Western Europe.

“In the longer term, IDC expects greater adoption of hybrid cloud with benefits for both private and public consumption”, said Monhammed Hefny, senior research analyst at IDC EMEA. “Hybrid cloud allows customers to retain sensitive data behind a corporate firewall while still taking advantage of cloud-related lower costs.”

Recent cloudy IDC predictions include a report from David Tapper on the state of the IaaS market which concluded that IBM was the vendor of choice for the US enterprise market, whilst the analyst house’s emphasis on big data, social, mobility and cloud for the future of IT is remarkably similar to Gartner’s Nexus of Forces – remember analyst firms usually like to disagree with one another, of course.

What do you make of this?

Like most maturing industries, standards are required to achieve broad adoption and maximum value. For the cloud, in particular cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, it’s time for a standard method for presenting these services so buyers can reasonably compare and contrast and make better buying decisions.
At the moment, purchasing IaaS is similar to how groceries were bought decades ago – very difficult to compare – both the product contents and the price/value vary from one vendor to another. A recent study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) – involving Intel, Appnomic Systems and a number of other ODCA enterprise members – illustrates just how difficult the situation is today.

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Cloudy ERP and CRM provider NetSuite has snapped up London-based e-commerce provider Venda in a move which signals a concerted effort by both companies for omnichannel commerce in the cloud.

The two companies told CloudTech they had first met about four years ago, with the deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – coming about as both firms “share the same DNA”, according to Venda CTO and co-founder James Cronin.

Pete Daffern, president EMEA at NetSuite, told CloudTech: “We’ve been talking to Venda for a number of years because if somebody doesn’t want our backend capabilities, and they’re using one of the competitive ERP solutions, it’s really giving them another solution to plug in to that as they might evolve to the next solution over time.

“That’s very much part of what this is about, as well as acquiring a company with a great set of customers and a great set of technicians to allow us to further enhance the e-commerce capabilities,” he added.

“It’s just us doubling down on our European investment.”

Cronin added: “What we’re going to be doing in the short term is further enhancing the integration that we have between the Venda platform and the NetSuite platform, continuing to sell both products, and allowing our customers the choice of an upgraded end to end solution as and when the time’s right.”

There are two technology plays here: firstly, it’s about companies moving more of their core business systems to the cloud, as well as omnichannel commerce, across devices and across all parts of the customer experience, from EPOS and order management to inventory and customer support.

For Venda, whose customers include Tesco, TK Maxx and Arsenal Football Club, there was a noticeable trend of becoming more integrated into their customers’ business as e-commerce became more important.

“It’s clear that businesses succeed now by having fully integrated business systems,” Cronin said. “Some retailers are running on business systems that were built maybe 10 or 20 years ago, so now almost all of those systems need upgrading and enhancing.

“NetSuite’s vision of being able to deliver all that capability in the cloud, in a way that upgrades are managed for you, that security’s managed for you, that availability is managed for you, is really exactly the same idea we had for e-commerce. They just have a more complete product set.”

NetSuite will discuss the financial implications of this deal on July 24. Find out more information here.

In a post Snowden world it is clear that for cloud data security, we need strong encryption. When properly implemented, encryption in the cloud reduces risk to levels acceptable for sensitive data.

There is no doubt data protection in the cloud computing era is never going to be a ‘one size fits all’ kind of a solution. It requires a 360-degree view of the company with 365-days a year dedication.

The best place to start is with a risk analysis so you know what kind of data you have, its levels of sensitivity, who’s using it, where it’s used and stored, and how and where and over what technologies it’s going to ‘commute’. You need to understand your company’s data – in terms of technology and human weaknesses. Data should be unreadable to an attacker. It must be incoherent at all times to anyone other than you and your trusted personnel: while it’s travelling – or you are; whether it’s in transit, storage, stopping, or resting, data is safest in encrypted form.

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If your organization’s got a lot riding on the continued security of its confidential or proprietary data, then you need to stay informed on the threats and how to address them. One of the most worrying threats of late, especially when it comes to cloud data security, is government spying – both foreign and domestic.
Foreign spying and corporate and economic espionage are, of course, not new concepts, but the enterprise’s increasing reliance on the Internet and cloud computing make them more of a concern than ever before. Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Justice Department has indicted five officers of the Chinese military on charges that they “hacked U.S. companies’ computers to steal trade secrets” from firms including U.S. Steel Corp. and Westinghouse Electric Co. Wang Dong, Gu Chunhui, Sun Kailiang, Huang Zhenyu, and Wen Xinyu are the first “employees of a foreign power [to be charged] with cybercrimes against American firms,” according to the WSJ, but they won’t be the last.

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