(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Maxiphoto)

During the UK referendum campaign, the Leave camp spoke ardently about the importance of protecting our sovereignty and making our own laws. Now we’re coming out of the EU and the single market, sovereignty is top of the agenda again, for the opposite reason. Rather than solving our right to sovereignty, Brexit threatens to destabilise it.

Right now, data holders are worried about the sovereignty of their information and the onus of complying with international laws that are not our own. For instance, company directors are wondering what their obligations will be if their organisation’s data is stored abroad and subject to the laws of the country in which the data resides? How do they comply with the country’s privacy regulations and keep foreign countries from being able to subpoena their data?

In the Autumn of 2016 4D surveyed 200 UK decision-makers in small-to-medium sized businesses. We discovered that 72% of the respondents are under pressure to demonstrate data protection compliance for customer data and 63% say Brexit has intensified their concerns surrounding data location and sovereignty even further – suggesting matters of sovereignty may not have been the best reason for exiting the EU.

Brexit’s impact on General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) is a case in point. The UK authorities played a significant role in developing and refining the new EU framework, that comes into force on 25th May 2018.

Contrary to wanting to shake off the European enforced legislation, 69% of businesses want to keep GDPR. Nearly half (46%) of these businesses are fully prepared to absorb additional costs incurred through direct marketing – which the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) estimates will come to an additional £76,000 a year. Just 23% would like to scrap GDPR to avoid extra operating costs. While the majority (59%) think GDPR should be compulsory for all large businesses.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that businesses are happy to embrace all European legislation. Data protection is a minefield and proper governance is desperately needed. For many, protecting one’s data is a major factor in a company’s decision-making. One in two businesses in the UK decide where data is stored based on matters of data security alone.

However, on the flip side, this means the other half aren’t thinking about data residency issues. We also know that only 28% think about data sovereignty in terms of how local laws will impact the way they store their data and 87% of IT decision-makers confess to not looking at data location and sovereignty issues post-referendum.

This lack of consideration could be a ticking time-bomb. If the UK’s data flows become pawns in a messy divorce, with Theresa May reiterating recently that the government is pushing a hard Brexit as opposed to soft, businesses will need to get to grips with where their data lies, what laws their data is subject to, and who owns the data centers in which their data resides. As amorphous as cloud computing sounds, company data hosted in the cloud is not an ethereal mass of zeros and ones. It has a home and this home may become a bone of contention.

Yesteryear, a European data center could have served UK and European customers. In just over two years’ time, companies may need a European data center for European customers and a UK data center for UK customers. If this comes to fruition, expect multinational companies, serving a European population to move the bulk of their servers from London to a European data center (i.e. in Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt etc.). This would represent a mass exodus of investment.

However, it also stands to reason that SMEs in the UK that don’t intend to trade with the EU would gain far more certainty and simplicity by placing their physical servers in a UK owned and located data center, on a co-location basis. This is reflected in the 64% of respondents who believe that in the current climate, the assurance of colocation and flexibility of cloud infrastructure strikes a good balance.

We also have to consider the recently published (10th January) European Commission’s Free Flow of Data Initiative (FFDI) Communications proposal. Up until then, the position of the European Commission was that member states (with the exception of certain specific classes of data) need not require data to be located within nation-state boundaries – by law. Companies would have the right to choose where to locate their data within the EU. To add to the confusion, they are also proposing to introduce new legal concepts and policy measures targeted at business-to-business transactions.

The only silver lining to this is that these proposals are still in the consultation phase and there may be opportunities for trade associations such as TechUK to push for reform.

So where does this leave software, cloud and hosting companies that want to enter the UK market over the next couple of years? Until very recently, data sovereignty has been a bit of a misnomer in the US and Europe as we’ve all become used to storing and transferring private citizen data across borders without much fuss. The only certainty emerging from all this uncertainty is that if you are looking to expand into the UK market, the safest long-term bet is to put your servers and data into British-based data centers. By doing so, you will automatically be aligning the data security needs of your British clients with current and future UK data protection legislation – whatever that may be. Britain is also likely to adhere to the very strict data privacy rules it (ironically) helped craft in the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018. If the data center or hosting provider happens to be British owned, even better, as it won’t be subject to outside meddling from US agencies, as Microsoft has found out with some of its Irish-based data centers.

Taking a home-grown approach would certainly insulate SMEs them from the negotiations’ changing winds.  This awareness is starting to dawn. Almost one-third of companies using an international public cloud for company data intend to stop doing so in two years’ time, following Brexit. While the proportion of companies using a UK public cloud for company data are expected to increase by almost a third in two years’ time, in the wake of the UK’s exit from the European Union.

While the wholesale movement of company data would be premature at this stage, the thinking certainly needs to be done over the next 12 months, in terms of the connotations of a business’s current cloud mix and the ins and outs of transitioning to a UK-based data center. 

The sovereignty of their data will only be one small piece of the jigsaw but it’s an important one. In the digital era, data is a company’s crown jewels and the way businesses treat and protect their data will govern their reputations.

Are you concerned about Brexit disruption? Share your thoughts in the comments.

(c)iStock.com/Radachynskyi

Updated Jan 25 Blockchain has serious potential to disrupt a multitude of industries, but a lot of barriers – not least confusion – still need to be ironed out.

That’s one of the verdicts from a recent research report from analyst firm Tractica on how the database technology, defined as a ‘distributed data verification technology wherein financial and operational transactions are recorded and validated across a network, rather than through a central authority’, can move away from its Bitcoin roots.

The report, titled ‘Blockchain for Enterprise Applications’, details that while Bitcoin was blockchain’s first ‘killer app’, it is “blossoming beyond cryptocurrency and the transfer of money, to an architecture that can support many times of transactions, from logging an event, to signing a document, to allocating energy between parties, and far beyond.”

Jessica Groopman is a principal analyst at Tractica, and author of the report. Having covered the Internet of Things (IoT) for years before looking more seriously at blockchain several months ago, she notes that “blockchain makes IoT look like a toy store» in terms of the technology’s complexity. More importantly from her employer’s perspective however, this represents the first time to her knowledge a technology analyst, rather than a pure consulting or investment firm, had explored this specific topic.

Blockchain makes IoT look like a toy store

“The real light switch for us was thinking about this as a new way to really unite, or, if nothing else, shorten the time between financial transactions and operational execution,” she tells CloudTech. “Those two processes – that is, paying for something and the event you are paying for, or the operation that you’re paying for happening, are somewhat disconnected.

“That’s the way I try and explain it to people,” Groopman adds. “It helps bridge that gap between a process occurring and payment for transaction or currency exchange for that process – although it’s not always currency.”

With this background, Groopman discusses the “painful hours” spent – jokingly, of course – assessing how far beyond currency blockchain can go. With a bit of lateral thinking, the possibilities are vast and varied. Digital and music rights can be transformed, for instance; in September a startup called Revelator raised $2.5 million to tackle this very task, with the theory being that the public, secure nature of the ledger and the immediacy of the record-keeping could enable much more efficient payments.

Groopman argues that while there are plenty of “interesting, eyebrow-raising opportunities”, the industries where the biggest impact will be found will be healthcare, government, logistics, and energy, for two reasons; one, they have the most dollars riding on them; and two, they will cause a domino effect for the more ‘tangential’ industries to follow.

“If this becomes a pervasive part of the transportation industry, smart trucks or smart cars, that’s going to ripple outwards into media, into telecoms, potentially even hospitality,” says Groopman. “If your car or truck is beginning to act and transact as an autonomous agent, that’s going to run on the blockchain most securely, and so you can see how one industry picking this up would begin to open up that opportunity to other outlets.”

It may be the most secure long term, but there are still some gremlins that can get into the system. At the Blockchain Expo conference in London, panellists discussed the risks alongside the rewards. Susan Furnell of Furnell Consult, who was moderating the session, told delegates of the issues when transferring from the blockchain to a traditional server architecture, such as moving Bitcoin onto another currency exchange. Aldo Lo Castro, head of research and development at AliasLab, noted the importance of who can see the data on a blockchain – “once it’s there, it stays there” – while Dimitri De Jonghe, core developer at BigchainDB, warned of potential problems in a consensus system, such as bad actors duplicating their identity and who could gain more votes.

At the heart of blockchain technology however, and the development of it, lies a paradox, and it goes a step further to explaining how it can be used in enterprise services. While the original development of Bitcoin as a public blockchain was, as Groopman puts it, ‘anarchic’ in nature, hoping to subvert centralisation altogether, there are many stakeholders in this particular game. “The corporations that are developing and investing in this technology don’t necessarily feel that way,” she says, understatedly.

You can see how one industry picking blockchain up would begin to open up the opportunity to other outlets

Of the players who need to be singing from the same page are developers, startups, and miners, not to mention consortia, banks, governments, and regulators. Groopman argues that this is where the ‘philosophical difference’ is playing out in the development of the technology. “Getting everybody on the same page is a much more complicated, tricky task, in the private enterprise blockchain space than any other technology space I’ve ever looked at,” she admits.

This complexity is borne out in ‘blockchain as a service’ (BaaS) solutions – Microsoft, who was also at the Expo, has an offering in this space alongside IBM – which aims to make things easier from an infrastructure and development perspective. As for whether there is room for both public and private blockchains, Groopman says that a hybrid approach, utilising public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and private, may be the best long-term play. “There’s definitely a role for private blockchain, because this is not something that we’re going to be able to turn on a switch overnight and completely change the dominant organisational structure of business and government,” she says, laughing. “That’s not going to happen.”

Ultimately, while the potential is vast, the report sounds a cautionary note, saying the space today ‘desperately’ needs definition. “The only in-production example of blockchain at scale today is Bitcoin,” says Groopman. “We’re still extremely early. There’s a tremendous amount of hype, and lots of frenetic energy, but when you get down to it it’s extremely early, and there are many, many barriers in place between this technology blooming into the mainstream and where we are today.”

You can find out more about the report here.

Blockchain and IoT will be explored in more detail at Blockchain Expo in Berlin and Santa Clara in 2017. Find out more at www.blockchain-expo.com

(c)iStock.com/Radachynskyi

Blockchain has serious potential to disrupt a multitude of industries, but a lot of barriers – not least confusion – still need to be ironed out.

That’s one of the verdicts from a recent research report from analyst firm Tractica on how the database technology, defined as a ‘distributed data verification technology wherein financial and operational transactions are recorded and validated across a network, rather than through a central authority’, can move away from its Bitcoin roots.

The report, titled ‘Blockchain for Enterprise Applications’, details that while Bitcoin was blockchain’s first ‘killer app’, it is “blossoming beyond cryptocurrency and the transfer of money, to an architecture that can support many times of transactions, from logging an event, to signing a document, to allocating energy between parties, and far beyond.”

Jessica Groopman is a principal analyst at Tractica, and author of the report. Having covered the Internet of Things (IoT) for years before looking more seriously at blockchain several months ago, she notes that “blockchain makes IoT look like a toy store.” More importantly from her employer’s perspective however, this represents the first time to her knowledge a technology analyst, rather than a consulting firm, had explored this specific topic.

Blockchain makes IoT look like a toy store

“The real light switch for us was thinking about this as a new way to really unite, or, if nothing else, shorten the time between financial transactions and operational execution,” she tells CloudTech. “Those two processes – that is, paying for something and the event you are paying for, or the operation that you’re paying for happening, are somewhat disconnected.

“That’s the way I try and explain it to people,” Groopman adds. “It helps bridge that gap between a process occurring and payment for transaction or currency exchange for that process – although it’s not always currency.”

With this background, Groopman discusses the “painful hours” spent – jokingly, of course – assessing how far beyond currency blockchain can go. With a bit of lateral thinking, the possibilities are vast and varied. Digital and music rights can be transformed, for instance; in September a startup called Revelator raised $2.5 million to tackle this very task, with the theory being that the public, secure nature of the ledger and the immediacy of the record-keeping could enable much more efficient payments.

Groopman argues that while there are plenty of “interesting, eyebrow-raising opportunities”, the industries where the biggest impact will be found will be healthcare, government, logistics, and energy, for two reasons; one, they have the most dollars riding on them; and two, they will cause a domino effect for the more ‘tangential’ industries to follow.

“If this becomes a pervasive part of the transportation industry, smart trucks or smart cars, that’s going to ripple outwards into media, into telecoms, potentially even hospitality,” says Groopman. “If your car or truck is beginning to act and transact as an autonomous agent, that’s going to run on the blockchain most securely, and so you can see how one industry picking this up would begin to open up that opportunity to other outlets.”

At the heart of blockchain technology however, and the development of it, lies a paradox, and it goes a step further to explaining how it can be used in enterprise services. While the original development of Bitcoin as a public blockchain was, as Groopman puts it, ‘anarchic’ in nature, hoping to subvert centralisation altogether, there are many stakeholders in this particular game. “The corporations that are developing and investing in this technology don’t necessarily feel that way,” she says, understatedly.

You can see how one industry picking blockchain up would begin to open up the opportunity to other outlets

Of the players who need to be singing from the same page are developers, startups, and miners, not to mention consortia, banks, and governments. Groopman argues that this is where the ‘philosophical difference’ is playing out in the development of the technology. “Getting everybody on the same page is a much more complicated, tricky task, in the private enterprise blockchain space than any other technology space I’ve ever looked at,” she admits.

As for whether there is room for both public and private blockchains, Groopman says that a hybrid approach, utilising public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and private, may be the best long-term play. “There’s definitely a role for private blockchain, because this is not something that we’re going to be able to turn on a switch overnight and completely change the dominant organisational structure of business and government,” she says, laughing. “That’s not going to happen.”

Ultimately, while the potential is vast, the report sounds a cautionary note, saying the space today ‘desperately’ needs definition. “The only in-production example of blockchain at scale today is Bitcoin,” says Groopman. “We’re still extremely early. There’s a tremendous amount of hype, and lots of frenetic energy, but when you get down to it it’s extremely early, and there are many, many barriers in place between this technology blooming into the mainstream and where we are today.”

You can find out more about the report here.

Recently I had to design the backup infrastructure for cloud workloads for a client in order to ensure that we comply with the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery standards they have set. However, following traditional IT practices in the cloud quite often poses certain challenges. The scenario that we had to satisfy is best shown in the […]

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Even though DevOps and automation methodologies are increasingly being used to deliver apps more frequently, only one in five respondents to a survey from F5 say DevOps has a strategic impact on their organisation.

The study, which polled almost 2,200 IT executives and industry professionals, found that among executive roles only 17% identified DevOps as key, well below software as a service (42%), big data (41%) and public cloud infrastructure as a service (39%).

VMware was the most popular framework among those polled, cited by more than half (54%) and well ahead of Cisco (37%), OpenStack (24%), Python (20%), Puppet (13%), and Chef (9%), while 47% of those who rely on only one framework opt for VMware. Comparatively, the overall trend was for more variety in framework use when compared to the number of applications deployed.

The report also explored the key drivers of automation and orchestration frameworks. The majority of respondents cite greater scalability and reduced OpEx as the primary reasons for automation, while use of software defined networking (SDN) was driven by similar trends; reducing OpEx (62%), reducing CapEx (36%), and improving time to market (33%).

“Despite being traditionally tied to increased speed to market, the key drivers for the use of DevOps-related frameworks and toolsets remain scalability and reduction of operational expenses,” the report notes. “As organisations continue to focus on automation and orchestration, programmability becomes even more important, especially for respondents who use containers or virtual machines for app services.”

According to research from Redgate Software earlier this month, organisations with 10,000 or more employees are more likely than smaller businesses to introduce DevOps initiatives with IT services and retail the most forward-looking industries. Writing for this publication Peter Waterhouse, senior strategist at CA Technologies, offered 11 methods for amplifying DevOps output, including integrating application performance management (APM) within continuous integration, to check software builds against pass/fail conditions, and automating test data generation to speed up the test bed preparation process.

You can read the full F5 report here.