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Enterprise cloud software provider Box is working with cloud communications provider RingCentral to unify its global enterprise communications in order to save up to $900,000 per year.

Box will deploy RingCentral Office, the comms vendor’s flagship UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platform, as well as planning to utilise RingCentral products which integrate with both Google for Work and Salesforce. RingCentral notes that the openness of its platform, as well as its ‘robust’ set of APIs, helped Box come to its decision.

“As we add more employees and offices in different locations, we require a solution that consolidates our entire enterprise communications in the cloud for voice and web meetings and offers the agility to grow. RingCentral addresses this while delivering a very high standard of reliability, security and quality to successfully run our global business,” said Paul Chapman, Box CIO.

“Not only have we reduce the operational headaches of managing multiple, single point communication solutions, but we’ve also cut costs by 80% since moving to RingCentral, and we’re on track to save $800,000 to $900,000 per year,” he added.

Last month RingCentral announced a strategic partnership with Google in order to target medium to large enterprises’ productivity needs. The target for the two companies’ fire, as the press release clearly notes, is Microsoft’s collaboration ecosystem, which naturally encompasses Outlook, Office 365, Skype for Business, and much more.

Speaking to this reporter, RingCentral senior manager of product marketing David Van Der Steen argued the unified comms landscape is still lacking in technology to really gain buy-in. “Vendors need to focus on a robust, elegant and delightful to use application that allows users to seamlessly transition between various communication channels and devices at will,” he said. “The first vendor to execute on this vision will realise massive rewards through viral user adoption and the resulting increased demand from IT buyers.”

Is your aging software platform suffering from technical debt while the market changes and demands new solutions at a faster clip?
It’s a bold move, but you might consider walking away from your core platform and starting fresh. ReadyTalk did exactly that.
In his General Session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Chambliss, Head of Engineering at ReadyTalk, will discuss why and how ReadyTalk diverted from healthy revenue and over a decade of audio conferencing product development to start an innovative project that reflects shifts in cloud, dev tools, web standards, enterprise mobility and video. Lessons learned could help your company take a similar plunge that will reshape your product portfolio and culture for years to come.

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Using new techniques of information modeling, indexing, and processing, new cloud-based systems can support cloud-based workloads previously not possible for high-throughput insurance, banking, and case-based applications.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, John Newton, CTO, Founder and Chairman of Alfresco, described how to scale cloud-based content management repositories to store, manage, and retrieve billions of documents and related information with fast and linear scalability.
He addressed the challenges of scaling document repositories to this level; architectural approaches for coordinating data; search and storage technologies, Solr, and Amazon storage and database technologies; the breadth of use cases that modern content systems need to support; how to support user applications that require subsecond response times.

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The competitive landscape of the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry is crowded due to the presence of a large number of players. The large number of participants has led to the fragmented nature of the market. Some of the major players operating in the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry are Cisco Systems Inc., Carestream Health Inc., Carecloud Corp., AGFA Healthcare, IBM Corp., Cleardata Networks, Merge Healthcare Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Oracle Corp.

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A short research note from analyst house IDC argues how enterprise acceptance and adoption rates are driving strong growth of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

According to IDC forecasts, public cloud IaaS revenues are set to more than triple, from $12.6 billion (£9.5bn) in 2015 to $43.6bn in 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 28.2% over that period. The public cloud IaaS market grew 51% in 2015, according to IDC, with that growth expecting to slow after 2017 as enterprises get over the hump and move towards cloud ‘optimisation’ rather than exploration.

IDC also predicts that four in five IT organisations will be committed to hybrid architectures by 2018, arguing hybrid represents the ‘optimal path to public cloud IaaS adoption’. Previous research, from Veritas Technologies last month, argued the need for greater security and information management in hybrid cloud is vital, as almost three quarters of enterprises are adopting multiple cloud strategies.

“Public cloud services are increasingly being seen as an enabler of business agility and speed,” said Deepark Mohan, IDC research director of public cloud storage and infrastructure. “This is bringing about a shift in IT infrastructure spending, with implications for the incumbent leaders in enterprise infrastructure technologies.

“Growth of public cloud IaaS has also created new service opportunities around adoption and usage of public cloud resources,” Mohan added. “With changes at the infrastructure, architectural, and operational layers, public cloud IaaS is slowly transforming the enterprise IT value chain.”

In terms of vendors, IDC not surprisingly advocates Amazon as the leader by some distance, followed by a long tail of rivals. Their figures argue that more than half (56%) of overall revenue figures in 2015 went to the top 10 providers.

Identity is in everything and customers are looking to their providers to ensure the security of their identities, transactions and data. With the increased reliance on cloud-based services, service providers must build security and trust into their offerings, adding value to customers and improving the user experience. Making identity, security and privacy easy for customers provides a unique advantage over the competition.

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More and more organisations are looking to move to cloud to benefit from scalability, cost reduction and the ability to launch new service offerings fast.

The dynamic nature of cloud however necessitates security and compliance controls that frankly can be daunting. Issues around mobility and multi-tenancy, identity and access management, data protection and incident response and assessment all need to be addressed. And with multiple modes – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, public, private, hybrid – creating added complexity in how security and compliance is carried out and by whom, this can lead IT leaders to think twice about leveraging cloud. 

Organisations already in the processes of implementing ISO 27001 to audit and report on the state of controls within their environment will know the immense amount of work required.  However, while addressing compliance in the cloud is undoubtedly tough, it doesn’t have to be an obstacle.

What is ISO 27001 and why is it important?

ISO 27001 is a widely adopted global security standard and framework that sets out requirements and best practices for a comprehensive approach to managing company and customer information. Proving IT security practices is an important element of achieving ISO 27001.  The business benefits of ISO 27001 certification are many. ISO 27001 is an effective way to reduce the risk of your organisation suffering a data breach, satisfies audit requirements and establishes trust both internally and externally that security controls are properly managed, providing customers with greater confidence in doing business with you.  

What does it take to implement ISO 27001 successfully?

As companies race to combat security threats and address evolving compliance requirements they often struggle to implement and demonstrate the consistent security management that is core to ISO 27001. ISO 27001 is not for the feint of heart and does require significant organisational commitment.

Here are six key recommendations to help you achieve successful accreditation and maintain compliance in the cloud with ISO ISO27001:

• Engage with senior management from the outset and work with your leaders to drive standards. Buy-in is essential – and it’s not just directors and VPs – CFOs, CEOs and business owners all need to be on board.  Clear communication from the top is key as the whole organisation will need to align to make the initiative a success.
• Review the standards that need to be put in place – think beyond process. Many organisations will attempt to put policies and procedures in place without realising that cultural changes need to happen to make those policies and procedures stick. Without the proper alignment it can be difficult to make the changes needed to achieve on-going compliance.
• Perform a gap analysis to understand any deficiencies. Conduct an honest assessment of where you are today and where the organisation needs to get to.
• Aggressively work to educate your employees. Put a plan in place and communicate with staff that ISO is a full organisation activity and is in everyone’s job description going forward.  It’s not a one off.
• Always be cognitive of risk. The organisation needs to objectively evaluate all levels of risk as you go through the process, including the risk that you generate yourself. A successful outcome is dependent on this and may well change the way you operate and structure your services.
• Document, document, document. As you go through you’ll find that there are many pieces that need to be secured be that patching, remediation of events or incident controls. If you don’t leave a record it becomes difficult to prove the path you took to compliance. Your customers will also want to know what you’ve been doing and how you’ve been doing it.

How to ensure your cloud service provider supports ISO compliance

When working with third party cloud providers it’s your responsibility to ensure that all parties involved are compliant.  Don’t just take a certificate at face value, you must validate an organisation’s claims when reviewing their ISO certifications, otherwise you are putting your organisation at risk.

Questions to ask include: What does the certification actually cover in terms of services and geo-locations? Is the certification for the entire company or only a segment of their operation? Who issued the certification and do they have an online database for validation? Is the issuer accredited to issue an ISO certification? Is the vendor willing to show you the auditor report behind the certification?

With the right people, processes and technology in place, IT leaders can actually leverage cloud service providers to help achieve ISO 27001 compliance – even more easily than they could achieve it with on-premise infrastructure. IT needs to ensure their cloud service provider has the security capability in place as well as the compliance reporting capabilities and, even more importantly, the willingness to help them maintain ISO compliance for their cloud workloads.

In conclusion, organisations should care a great deal about ISO compliance in the cloud and ensure their partners and providers care as well. ISO compliance in the cloud doesn’t have to be a nightmare, but you do need to approach the process with the level of rigour that the standard demands.