Top Tips for Secure Hybrid Cloud Networking

If, as many enterprises do, you choose a hybrid cloud strategy for your organisation, there are some key issues of which you should be aware, to ensure your public cloud services are secure, simple and effective.

These are important because a potential downside to temporarily shifting workloads to third party clouds can sometimes mean significantly limited performance (latency) and weaker security due to reliance on any simple, untested internet connection.

The beauty of infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings and their typical pay-as-you-go arrangements, such as those offered through international IT solutions and managed services providers, is extra agility and cost effectiveness but you should not have to decide between the security and performance of on-premise IT and the agility of a third-party cloud.

Popular in the cloud

Logicalis research has found that “Storage, Disaster Recovery and non-core business applications (e.g. email) are the main functions already migrated to the cloud, while core business applications (e.g. ERP) and communications (voice & unified comms) and testing & development, are the least likely to be moved externally in the future.” The research found that 46% of enterprises surveyed use software-as-a-service, 26% use infrastructure-as-a-service, closely followed by platform-as-a-service (25%). Data sovereignty remains a key concern for 70% of respondents.

The Logicalis research revealed that “most people host relatively few applications in the cloud, indeed two-thirds host less than 10% in a public cloud. At the other end of the spectrum, just 12% of respondents currently host more than half of their applications in a public cloud, however, it’s a more positive look at the future with the number planning to host more than half of their applications rising to 30%”.

Gartner defines Iaas as: “… a standardised, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand. Customers are able to self-provision this infrastructure, using a web-based graphical user interface that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment. API access to the infrastructure may also be offered as an option.”

Key hybrid cloud networking elements

IT giant Citrix says the following key elements are worth bearing in mind to ensure your hybrid cloud strategy is appropriately robust.

End to End Security: There is security risk attached to simply relying on the basic VPNs offered by traditional cloud protection because it can open new, vulnerable entry points to your network. Enterprises should go a step further and apply advanced encryption to ‘data in motion’ content to keep it safe as it moves between the enterprise and the cloud. This should also prevent any threats from entering your network and will also assist with your compliance requirements.

Optimised Application Delivery: Having a hybrid cloud set-up relies on increased agility, but if performance is compromised, your enterprise’s ability to meet service level agreements, and to keep your users productive, this can be negated. Enterprises need to consider appropriate techniques such as TCP optimisation, compression and data de-duplication as methods to help maintain acceptable performance across WAN links.

Deep Application Visibility: An Achilles heel of some hybrid cloud deployments is complicating the effective management, maintenance and control of enterprise applications. No matter how complex and dynamic your applications become, it’s important to maintain deep visibility into how they are being used. There are added benefits to application-level visibility and monitoring which can help you isolate problems more quickly and also to capture greater business intelligence to help tweak your strategy.

On-Demand Provisioning: To be most effective, hybrid cloud arrangements need to provide a simple way for your people to tap into the cloud services they need, when they want them. One of the strengths of third-party clouds is providing valuable, on-demand resources for your users to ensure they can deal with time-sensitive or temporary needs. One successful strategy is to use L2 bridging to ensure the cloud network becomes a natural extension of your enterprise’s L2 network, making it simple to shift workloads to the cloud without re-architecting applications.

Increasingly, it is being shown that to achieve success in cloud deployment, whether it be public, private or hybrid, enterprises are well advised to partner with appropriate external, experienced and best qualified IaaS external providers, to guide them on the journey.

Logicalis is such a provider, to find out more about how Logicalis can support you, head to the solutions and services page.

The Journey to Converged Infrastructure Via Prevalidated Designs

To effectively architect your system to take advantage of the cloud in your data centre requires a solid, well-considered strategy in consultation with the appropriate outside experts. When you get this right, the result is a transformation of an enterprise’s service delivery with all the competitive advantages your business needs.

The first step is usually to partner with an appropriate managed services and outsourcing provider with the experience, expertise and top-level industry partnerships (all important boxes to tick) to work with your enterprise to get the best job done. It is well worth doing you proper due diligence and homework before you commit to a service provider, because cloud implementation can have its issues.

When evaluating a service provider, it’s important to consider its technical, operational and financial skills. You need to thoroughly evaluate exactly where you are currently at, to plan for where you want to be. A good question to ask is what pre-scoping facilities does the partner offer. Logicalis Australia, for example, offers a Cloud Advisory Workshop, a Cloud Readiness Assessment and Cloud Implementation and Migration Planning workshop.

A 24/7 friend

A good provider will also monitor and manage a cloud environment around the clock so your enterprise has the maximum operational efficiency, freeing your staff from complex data centre duties, to focus on core profit-generating business.

Such a partner can combine its proven systems and data centre methodology to reduce costs and accelerate the deployment of a cloud system for your organisation – be it public, private or hybrid – so it can be implemented in an effective and rapid timeframe to ensure your success.

Of course, the top service providers in turn partner with other major technology players, like VMware, Netapp, and Cisco to name just a few. The quality of these partnerships is in itself a good measure of the dependability and value of any particular outside service provider – the big technology companies don’t agree to such partnerships lightly.

Of course, in its enterprise cloud strategy, your ideal service provider partner should also combine the technical staff as well as the best technologies to deliver the most effective IT cloud services to your organisation. Logicalis offers the Logicalis Private Virtual Data Centre (LPVDC) providing a complete infrastructure solution and the Logicalis Virtual Workspace Cloud Edition, a complete hosted desktop offering.

Prevalidated design advantage

Top service providers typically offer prevalidated designs, such as VSPEX or Flexpod, for very good reasons, so your enterprise benefits from the accumulated knowledge and cloud wisdom of past years. These facilitate the journey to converged infrastructure, enabling enterprises to buy applications, servers, networking and storage together as pre-integrated or validated solutions rather than as individual components.

In a recent report, Gartner found that converged infrastructure is “a 3.5% slice of the total IT infrastructure business, but one growing at over 50% annually, hitting $83 billion this year”.

IT giant Cisco says that prevalidated designs are based on common use cases and current engineering system priorities. These “incorporate a broad set of technologies, features and applications, all which have been thoroughly tested and document with the aim of ensuring a faster, more reliable and fully predictable deployment for your enterprise”.

Popular prevalidated solutions

VSPEX is a virtualisation solution offered by Cisco and EMC, that helps deploy virtual machines in a range of sizes, to meet application needs. Cisco says that EMC VSPEX, with Cisco Unified Data Center is “a validated reference configuration which delivers a virtualised data center in a rack composed of leading computing, networking, storage, and infrastructure software components”.

FlexPod is a integrated computing, networking, and storage solution developed by Cisco and NetApp and there are versions for large enterprises, high capacity performance for specialized workloads, and even for small to medium sized enterprises. NetApp says that “The unique appeal of the FlexPod is how it can deliver these benefits of Converged Infrastructure while still being flexible.  It starts with the combination of best of breed components from VMware, Netapp, Cisco, along with a pre-validated design that still accommodates flexibility in scale and configuration.”

So, it can be a great comfort to enterprises who partner with external experts to draw on such expertise and experience as evidenced by prevalidated designs and big-end of town partnerships themselves. The journey towards converged infrastructure is much safe and more secure when an enterprise has an appropriate, forward-thinking professional guide.

To find out more how Logicalis can help you transform your data centre, click here.

What Does It Mean to Successfully Operate in “The Cloud Era”?

We have entered “The Cloud Era”. But what precisely does this mean and how can enterprises adapt and maximise the benefits of this?

In a nutshell, the Cloud Era enterprises now face is revolutionising service delivery and it’s not an optional shift. It won’t just go away, it’s an irreversible series of trends. Competition demands that enterprises keep up with what consumers want, or they will fall behind their competitors.

The Cloud Era encompasses elements such as mobile over fixed computing, personal devices being used for work, rather than provided by the enterprises, wireless rather than wired, cloud hosting rather than on-premises models and applications, or ‘apps’ rather than program suites. The pace of change today is rapid; tablets did not exist until 2010, but now they are being used by growing number of employees for work across various of industries.

All of these contrast starkly with the traditional computing approach of even the mid to late 1990s.

Desktop shipments declining

Recent research by Gartner found that Worldwide PC shipments (particularly enterprise desktop PCs) totaled 71.7 million units in the first quarter of 2015, a 5.2% fall from the first quarter of 2014. At the same time, shipments of mobile PCs, including notebooks, hybrid and Windows tablets, grew compared with a year ago. Gartner forecasts that PC replacements will be driven by thin and light notebooks with tablet functionality. Their early study suggests strong growth of hybrid notebooks, especially in mature markets, in 1Q15.

Research house IDC found that in the US PC market shrank by about one percent from the previous year, with shipments totaling 14.2 million PCs in 1Q 2015. Again any growth centred on mobility devices, portables, particularly around emerging product categories such as Chromebooks, Bing, Ultraslims and Convertibles. IDC said desktop shipments were also relatively sluggish this quarter.

The push for organisations to encompass “The Cloud Era” is coming from consumers not businesses.

A recent article on the Citrix website puts it quite well: “The consumerisation of IT is letting today’s users connect to IT services using an array of devices — from desktops, to tablets, to mobile phones. Pervasive network connectivity, both wired and wireless, is driving anywhere access for mobile and remote workers. Multi-tenant data centres are more efficient and are powering entirely new business models. Elastic compute architectures are enabling web-like applications that automatically scale in response to fluctuations in demand.”

Consumers demanding more

So, highly tech-savvy consumers are now demanding that organisations cater for their mobile, connected lifestyles. They expect the same service responses from your business that they would get from Cloud giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google and eBay. If they are in any way disappointed, it is too easy to switch their business somewhere else. Forget consumer loyalty, ‘it’s the technology, stupid’. Organisations are now primarily measured on how successfully and easily they deliver their products and services to whatever personal device a consumer may choose to use.

The Cloud today offers many faces – public, private or hybrid – and it has become a very specialised and somewhat complicated IT aspect, explaining why organisations are turning to external service provides, expert in cloud management for enterprises, to ensure they keep up with the pack. It could be argued that the days are fading fast where enterprises, particularly large ones, could rely on internal IT departments and experts to configure and manage their complex IT diaspora.

Outsource providers popular

Just like organisations would not consider drilling for their own oil to power their equipment, or installing their own power stations [Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) aside, because this is another story] or necessarily building, operating and maintaining their own data centres, they now routinely outsource key IT services and facilities to external service providers, whose business it is to keep systems up to date and effectively operating.

Such outsourcing is popular because there are so many opportunities to benefit from ‘The Cloud Era’, particularly in partnership with expert outsourcers and managed service providers who know the market and thoroughly track the changes and trends.

It could be argued that only qualified and experienced external IT service providers have the skills, knowledge and expertise to properly enable enterprises to thrive in ‘The Cloud Era’. So, solid advice is to do your homework and find an outsourcing partner who can help you make the journey.

Logicalis is such a partner, to find out how Logicalis can support you and your business head to the Solutions and Services page.

De-mystifying the Complex IT Lexicon

We are in such a rapidly advancing and maturing technology state that the IT world is adapting its lexicon at a rate that can be breathtaking. New terms such as Web Scale, Hyper-convergence, and DevOps are evolving at a time when enterprise data centres have become increasingly complex.

It’s worth attempting to de-mystify these terms and to explain how calling on the services of appropriate external managed service providers can take the fear, mystery and uncertainty out of some of today’s technology advances.

So let’s start with some definitions. Research House Gartner says “Web-scale IT is a pattern of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting by re-thinking positions across several dimensions”. The researcher maintains that big cloud service providers like Amazon, Google and Facebook are “reinventing the way in which IT services can be delivered”. They say that to remain competitive and keep pace, “enterprises need to emulate the big boys’ architectures, processes and practices”. Who wouldn’t want to mirror the outstanding success of these cloud giants?

An industrial engineering perspective

Advising enterprises on how to do this, Gartner recommends that they design data centres “with an industrial engineering perspective that looks for every opportunity to reduce cost and waste”. This, says Gartner, “goes beyond redesigning facilities to be more energy efficient, to also include in-house design of key hardware components such as servers, storage and networks”. The pay-off is that web oriented architectures enable developers to build very flexible and resilient systems capable of recovering from failure more quickly.

Again, data centres can be complex beasts, but, through external service providers or even elsewhere, Gartner says “open and freely available blueprints of data centre facilities and associated server, storage and networking hardware are lowering costs and disrupting the traditional IT vendor landscape”.

And, if you have doubts about the future of web-scale IT, Gartner forecasts that it will be an architectural approach found operating in 50% of global enterprises by 2017, up from less than 10% in 2013. So what are your plans? Have you thought about emulating web-scale IT?

Beware the obstacles

It all sounds so obvious, simple and direct but there are many obstacles blocking some enterprises from adapting to web-scale IT and that’s why it is so important to consult with professional and experienced outside experts to determine the most value-adding and cost-effective path for transformation.

Then there’s ‘hyper-convergence’ for which Margaret Rouse, of WhatIs.com, has this definition: “Hyper-convergence is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualisation resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box, usually supported by a single vendor”. And it’s here we enter the work of SDX, Software Defined Networking and the like, where basic parts of an enterprise system are automated through software, leaving the decision makes to focus more on innovation and core profit-generating activities.

DevOps, which is a term combining ’development’ and ‘operations’, is basically a philosophy that believes both software development and delivery can be dramatically improved by the application of a combination of appropriate technology and a forward thinking attitude. This philosophy seeks to bring together two worlds that have traditional operated separately, encouraging communication, cooperation and team work.

The Cloud underpins all

Of course, The Cloud, and its current maturity, is what facilitates these evolving philosophies and can bring together previously divergent systems and approaches. It could be said that we are now in the cloud generation. As Nutanix describes in their Web-scale 101 From Hyper-Convergence to Cloud Infrastructure ebook says, the holy grail for the future is “a breakdown of boundaries between the public and private cloud, and between different hypervisor platforms, enabling complete mobility of virtual machines and data. Public cloud services such as those from Amazon and Google have set the bar for ease of use and rapid self-service, and enterprise IT users expect private infrastructure to step up to the challenge and to provide a seamless experience”.

Transforming to web scale, hyper-covergence and discovering the benefits of DevOps can be a challenging journey and that’s why there are expert outside providers to partner with for success in these complex areas. To find out more about how Logicalis can support you and your business, head to our Solutions and Services section.

2015 – A Tipping Point for Work Model Changes

Changes to the world of work, which have been gaining momentum in recent years, are forecast to reach a tipping point in 2015. Enterprises need to prepare for, and take account of, these shifts away from the 9-5, Monday to Friday work model and away from the central city based office.

Telecommuting, working from home or even from cafes, job hopping based on how technology friendly organisations are and generation clashes in the work place, are all set to be increasing features of the work world. But how prepared is your enterprise to capitalise on these growing trends?

These tectonic shifts point to the need for organisations to at least have policies in place to account for workplace changes, even if they don’t enthusiastically adopt them. The popularity of new workplace approaches come on top of recent Australian political discussion about changes to penalty rates, the dominance of part-time and casual work, plus the increasing enterprise hunger for workplace flexibility.

IT leads the way

And, of course, IT enterprises, service providers and technology focused organisations have been at the forefront of work place changes, long pushing for outsourcing, managed services and resource sharing, which all pursue greater agility, flexibility and efficiency.

A recent article in Business Insider Magazine, by IT commentator Michael McQueen, highlights six key areas of work place change that are worth revisiting here.

1. Third space working environments – McQueen postulates that 2015 is the year in which flexible working arrangements and telecommuting will become mainstream. Research by IT giant Cisco has found that 89% of their employees across the globe telecommute at least once a week. At the financial benefits are considerable – a saving of some three million commuting hours per year, equating to some US$370 million in extra productive worktime. Cisco calculated that this telecommuting also save about one billion dollars in real estate costs over two-and-a-half years. In Australia, the Federal Government has set a target of 12% of the public service to be working from home on high speed broadband by 2020.And it’s not just working from home. In Germany, a company called Regus is already offering specialised workplaces, co-located with Shell service stations, where mobile workers can access the web, print and scan documents, while occupying workspaces paid for by time used.

2. Increasing job hopping – Today’s employees certainly have itchy feet and will switch jobs for better pay, and even for better technology and company access to social media as part of their work. A survey by Fortune Magazine has found that 86% of employees are looking for work outside their current occupations. A US survey by CareerBuilder found that nearly one third of employers even expect their staff to job hop. It’s important for organisations to pander to their employee’s hunger for technology, like social media, and to be engaged in their work and to consider colleagues as friends.

3. Generation Ys are running the show – Another study by CareerBuilder discovered that 38% of the workforce is now being run by Generation-Y) individuals (born in in the 1980s or early 2000s), who often have been thrust into managerial positions by necessity, without adequate training. These managers tend to favor fellow workers in their own age group and believe their demographic knows much more about technology than older workers.

4. The Generation Z challenge – Born from 1999 – 2012, Generation Zs are moving into the workplace and are far more technology immersed, better educated and confident than even the Generation Ys. The downside is they are also lack resilience, interpersonal skills and can have low attention spans.

5. Employer branding is increasingly important – Social media policies have been shown to be a valued factor when employees consider a job. Research has shown that 58% of people are more likely to want to work at a company if they are using social media and more than 20% are more likely to stay at their company if they are using social media. The Gen-Xs measure the technology friendliness of organisations and if they are dissatisfied, are happy to immediately spread their discontent via the web. They want more from their enterprises that just corporate announcements and press releases; something more real like social media commentary.

6. The Freelance Economy – A recent study by Elance-oDesk found that 53 million Americans are now freelancers – 34% of the US workforce. In Australia 30% of Australians now undertake some form of flexible, freelance work with this forecast to increase to 50% by 2020. Companies are now looking to hire more temp works and consultants to save costs, such as holiday pay and sickness benefits.

This year 2015 could be remembered for the time when older, traditional companies, reluctant to adapt, are left behind by smaller, more forward thinking organisations which grasp the changed workplace trends and become more competitive.

Logicalis can help you survive in this ever-changing world of workplace trends, to find out more check out our Solutions and Services section or head straight to the Logicalis People page to see how flexible resourcing could possibly save your IT company.

Revealing Project Management Success Secrets

With Project Management (PM) such a key function for any external service provider, just what are the secrets to good PM delivery that could differentiate one from another?

To determine these secrets, we picked the brains of Daryl Yeo, from the National Project Management Office at IT Infrastructure and Managed Services provider, Logicalis Australia. What we found showed that Logicalis has a complex system that takes Project Management very seriously.

Yeo revealed the two key secrets to good PM delivery – accountability and governance – plus appropriate PM enablement for the organisation.

 

Weekly PM review

On the accountability and governance front, Yeo said that Logicalis has a Project Management Office that reviews all projects weekly (regardless of their value) against the key performance indicators of schedule, scope, budget and customer satisfaction.

“If any of these indicators are flagged as in risk, an action plan/mitigation strategy is formed immediately,” he said. “In addition to this, we have executive support and buy in by our CEO and CFO. Every month we hold an internal Project Board Review where the project managers report on the health of their projects to the CFO and CEO. All projects are reviewed to ensure they adhere to the Logicalis PMO Standard Practice.”

Yeo said that Logicalis also had an ‘Enablement Model’ for their Project Management.

“In addition to our governance practice, we understand that the success and health of a project is often in the hands of a project manager,” he said. “The purpose of the PMO in this regard is to ensure that the project managers have the correct support or environment to manage their projects in accordance to the Logicalis standard.”

 

Project manager enablement

The Logicalis Enablement Model has several aspects. Firstly, project managers are coached in the company’s professional services vision so they develop the values to guide them to deliver amazing customer experiences and to aid with decision-making.

The next fundamental building block of the Enablement Model has been designed to ensure project managers have the appropriate tools and templates in place to deliver consistency and effectiveness for the benefit of customers.

Next, the project managers are armed with a set of goals and objectives that align with their department’s strategic and organisational objectives. These are broken down to engender meaningful and clear understanding.

With the Logicalis management philosophy that ‘the carrot is mightier than the stick’ there is a rewards and recognition scheme attached to the project manager’s goals and objectives to make success worth their while.

 

The Logicalis Academy

To ensure that project managers are qualified and appropriately experienced, the company has established a Logicalis Academy where they can build their capabilities and help their careers grow.

Yeo said that Logicalis has a set of processes and procedures, based on industry best practice. Each project manager is taken through Logicalis’ practices and standards to ensure consistency and increased likelihood of successful projects for their customers.

So with all this coaching, training, checking and double-checking, we asked Yeo: ‘What can Logicalis clients expect relating to Project Management through Logicalis? What can clients learn from good Project Management?’

 

Risk and issues assessment

“Logicalis clients can expect their projects to run on time, budget and scope through Project Management,” he said. “To have their projects fully owned by Logicalis includes a full risk and issues assessment of their project – this is a proactive way to mitigate potential problems that may impact the success of your project and to ensure that if a problem does eventuate, the most effective solution is collaborated and approved before implementation.”

Yeo said that clients can also expect to receive project schedules that consist of timelines and planning to aid future decisions.

“In addition to this, clients will also receive full project reporting and progress reports through the right communication and engagement model throughout the customer’s organisation,” he said.

And, perhaps the cherry on top of the Logicalis Project Management ice cream sundae: “Clients can expect organisational change management with their projects too,” said Yeo.

“Organisational change is about effective people management by taking them through, and on, the journey when introducing a change, regardless of how big or small the project impact is perceived to be on its people.”

To find out more about Logicalis’ Project Management offering, head to last week’s post or to read more on how Logicalis can support your business, visit our Solutions and Services page.

Project Management Critical for 3rd Platform Implementations

To the layperson, Project Management (PM) may appear to be dry, administrative and boring, but to the IT world, it is critical to success.

With enterprises now seeking to take advantage of the new 3rd Platform revolution which is underway, the adoption and implementation of Cloud, Big Data and Analytics and Mobility must be properly measured and tracked by a professional project management.

When you scratch the ‘surface paint’, you will find that PM is the fundamental skillset offered by managed service providers, consultants and external IT experts of all labels and persuasions.

Research House Gartner sees PM as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements”. They say the primary value of PM goes beyond just delivering on-time and on-budget projects, but is ensuring expected business outcomes and realised value.

 

PM a culture measure

Gartner rightly regards PM as so important because the biggest changes from project activities are actually people-oriented, influencing culture and mind-sets across the whole enterprise. The way an organisation approaches one particular project, will likely be the template they apply to all projects and to the way they generally do business.

Successful PM, say Gartner, “is characterised by the ongoing development and refinement of methods and practices and ensuring that any software tools deployed meet the needs without becoming a burden”.

A solid way of determining the ability and expertise of a service provider is to check their project management approach and to grill them on their overall philosophy.

Daryl Yeo, from the National Project Management Office at IT Infrastructure and Managed Services provider, Logicalis Australia, says his firm believes that the success of a project is determined by the ability to manage and control the project.

 

Strategic and tactical investments

“We understand that each project from our customer is more than just another IT integration or implementation – they are business investments that are tactical and strategic to help achieve a business outcome,” Yeo said. “So we take pride when our customers trust us to deliver and we make it our goal to ensure that they see the realisation of their investments in the time required by the business, that the investment delivers what they need and, most of all, fits within their budget.”

Yeo shared the most common project management issues that Logicalis encounters. Misaligned expectations between project delivery – and what is in the scope to be delivered – stands out as number one.

“This occurs frequently because often the time when a solution is presented, to when the project commences, can be months or a year. In this time requirements may have changed or the environment has shifted,” he said.

 

Customer Consultation

“To avoid this, we facilitate a project kick-off with the customer that runs through the scope and covers the project objectives. This normally allows us to clarify 80 to 90% of assumptions regarding scope. Typically for larger and complex projects, where the outcome is so far to conceive in detail, a miss-aligned assumption or expectation can often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in unforeseeable costs to the project. In these scenarios, experience has taught us to break up larger more complex projects into smaller more manageable projects,” Yeo said.

Tightening IT budgets have highlighted a specific PM danger of which enterprises should be aware of.

Yeo said that, unfortunately due to many IT budget constraints customers are adopting the lean approach to services by solely selecting proposals that are the most cost effective.

 

Dangerous PM trend

“As a result, we are starting to see a trend where some customers don’t see the value of effective project management and are requesting that it be removed from the services quote,” he said. “As a result of this, we have several customer-managed projects that have exceeded deadlines and budget. We’ve had cases where an implementation should take 3 months but is still open after 12 months.”

“A common misconception is the lack of visibility and understanding in unforseen cost to their business as a result of delays and budget overruns. For example, an organisation may save an extra $5,000 on project services, but as a result of delays the actual cost of impact to their business (in not being able to manage change effectively) is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Project Management (PM) is a complex and involved subject (Frost & Sullivan offers more than 40 distinct PM courses) so the next blog in our series will also take on this examination of PM.

In the meantime, have a look at how Logicalis can help you and your business stay afloat.

 

Satisfying Digital Natives with Two-Speed IT Architecture

Since the turn of this century enterprises have been struggling to keep up with the expectations and demands of ‘digital natives” – those citizens either born or raised during the age of connected technology.

With today’s exponential rate of technology change, digital natives – who have come to think the world has always had computers and the Internet – have inevitably developed a short attention span, shorter patience with getting results, and little tolerance for technology delays.

This has put traditional, long-standing enterprises, burdened with legacy, siloed technology, in a tight spot. Up to the late 20th century, such enterprises had enjoyed leading society with their innovations and keeping a firm hand on the controls. Then, within decades, they found themselves struggling to keep with the insatiable appetite of digital natives for rapid innovation, rapid outcomes from technology and rapid satisfaction of their needs. These techno-aware citizens now demand speed, agility and user-friendliness and they want it now.

Comfortable IT silos are passé

Until this sea change swamped them, many enterprises were quite comfortable with building technology silos in their own good time, bolting on new features and systems as they went along, sometimes creating complex ‘Frankenstein’ structures. They accepted that their IT architecture, for example, running the supply chain and operations systems responsible for executing online product orders, was somewhat slow and inflexible. Now, the digital natives want much more and won’t hesitate to change suppliers if they are not satisfied. They want results and they want them now.

A recent article by research house McKinsey, puts forward a strategy that could resolve this enterprise dilemma – that of adopting a ‘two-speed IT architecture’ where “companies develop their customer-facing capabilities at high-speed, while de-coupling legacy systems for which release cycles of new functionality stay at a slower pace”. Gartner calls this ‘bimodal IT’ and forecasts that by 2017, 75% of organisations will be bimodal in some way.

The McKinsey experts argue that to deliver “an enriched customer experience requires a new digital architecture running alongside legacy systems”.

Consumer-centric front end

McKinsey postulates that: “This (two-speed architecture) implies a fast-speed, customer-centric front end running alongside a slow-speed, transaction-focused legacy back-end.

For software-release cycles and deployment mechanisms, the customer-facing part should be modular, to enable quick deployment of new software by avoiding time-consuming integration work.

In contrast, the transactional core systems of record must be designed for stability and high-quality data management, which leads to longer release cycles.”

Four key recommendations

In their article, the McKinsey experts put forward four recommendations for enterprises to use to become effective digital enterprises.

1. The digital business model enables the creation and speedy time to market of digital products and services. This demands that companies get skilled at digital product innovation that meets snowballing customer expectations.

2. To satisfy customer expectations to be able to move from one channel to another, companies should develop a seamless multi-channel (physical and digital) experience. McKinsey’s article gives the example of shoppers using smartphones to reserve a product online, then collect it in a store.

3. Using big data and advanced analytics, is vital to better understanding consumer behaviour. McKinsey says that “gaining insight into customers’ buying habits – with their consent of course – can lead to an improved customer experience and increased sales through more effective cross-selling”. Experienced tech companies such as Logicalis have vast resources to partner with enterprises to help them capitalise on Big Data and Advanced Analytics.

4. Automating operations and digitising business processes enables faster customer response time and can also minimise operating waste and costs.

A substantial IT challenge

McKinsey acknowledges that each of these four recommendations pose a “substantial challenge for IT”. They say, for example, that enterprise IT channels “are often managed and tracked independently, complicating maters for customers who wish to use multiple channels as they pursue a transaction”. The ideal outcome is that customers can purchase individually tailored products across multiple channels.

The McKinsey experts also acknowledge that “analytics capabilities are especially difficult to integrate with operational process flows. Any manual steps n there processes, such as re-keying and transferring information, present major obstacles to both analytics and automation of processes. Although the McKinsey article doesn’t specifically say it, reading between the lines, it is obvious that consulting with professional outside experts on Big Data and Analytics is a very sensible strategy.

An important competitive factor

And here’s a valuable nugget that jumps out from the article: “The ability (of an enterprise) to offer new products on a timely basis has become an important competitive factor; this might require weekly software releases for an e-commerce platform”.

McKinsey says: “That kind of speed can only be achieved with an inherently error-prone software-development approach of testing, failing, learning, adapting, and iterating rapidly. It’s hard to imagine that experimental approach applied to legacy systems”.

So, it’s time for organisations to consider shifting gear to a two-speed IT architecture and a valuable first step would be to consult the outside experts – such as Logicalis – to achieve this important transformation.

To get a better understanding of how Logicalis can help you during this time of transformation, head to the Services and Solutions page.

The Emerging IoT Threat to Information Security

CIOs are facing a huge impact from the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) on their digital and information security.

With enterprises beginning to realise the importance of handling Big Data and incorporating Smart Analytics in their ITC systems, IoT is now forecast to add vast mountains of extra data to the already incredible avalanche with which business now has to cope.

So, the key question is: how well is an organisation (yours) prepared for this IoT impact? What is your strategy for developing ‘Next Generation Security’?

In December 2014, IDC came out with some frightening IoT predictions from their ‘FutureScape: Worldwide Internet of Things 2015 Predictions’ web conference. Among these they concluded that “within two years, 90% of IT networks will have an IoT-based security breach and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) will be forced to adopt new IoT policies”.

Complex IoT challenges

Gartner said that “the requirements for securing the IoT will be complex, forcing CISOs to use a blend of approaches from mobile and cloud architectures, combined with industrial control, automation and physical security.”

Perhaps even more startling, IDC predicts that “within three years, 50% of IT networks will transition from having excess capacity to handle the additional IoT devices to being network-constrained with nearly 10% of sites being overwhelmed”.

Gartner predicts that “by 2020, the installed base of ‘things’ – excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones – will grow to 26 billion units”.

Historic Anthem hack attack

In February this year, cyber-criminals, thought to be based in China, obtained the unencrypted information – including names, addresses, social security numbers – of some 80 million customers of US health insurer Anthem.

Ed Simcox, Logicalis’s Healthcare Practice Leader, gave this advice relating to the Anthem attack, thought to be one of the biggest in history to date:

“Given heightened attacks such as this one, it’s an important reminder that CIOs must maintain the necessary security posture,” Simcox said. “They need to do so even in the face of declining IT budgets and important, competing priorities by evaluating security against these other priorities.

“CIOs need to be comfortable communicating the business value of security initiatives to boards of directors and senior leadership. Only then can they acquire the proper funding levels and organisational support necessary to properly care for security.”

A range of Australian attitudes

Logicalis Australia Solutions Architect, Dr Greg Daley said that, in parts of Australia there is still a focus on controlling the ‘pipes’ data is accessed through.

“But I think that is becoming table stakes now: threats arrive through diverse sources, including paths independent of the corporate Internet service,” he said. “I think the focus in IT security will start shifting to control and management of breaches as organisations aim to trace and mitigate business impacts from attack.”

Dr Daley said that digital security threats are almost always worse from internal sources. Productivity relies on staff members having ready and flexible access to data. Internal security controls need to be robust to prevent such incidents, also because user level privileges are a significant vector for exterior attackers.

Changing security effectiveness

He highlighted recent trends towards encryption and said they have altered the effectiveness of perimeter security measures, such as web proxies.

“This means that threat mitigation needs to move to the end-systems, which embeds security in the end applications,” he said.

Dr Daley said that as a business-focused technology infrastructure vendor, Logicalis has always placed security as a key enabler for its customers.  Their philosophy is that security is a function that has to be “baked into infrastructure and services”, and has to be considered from the business requirements and design stages through to implementation and operation.

There has been a movement in recent years towards operational technology which means organisations are leveraging computing and network technologies for productivity.

Security ‘baked into the system’

“The risks that come along with this are that security breaches no longer impact the back-of-house operations: they can literally stop a road, a machine or a transaction,” he said. ” This means that the digital security of the environment has to be considered in the operational risk assessment, and once again this needs to be baked into the system from its inception.”

Dr Daley had this valuable advice: “Organisations which seek to integrate best security practice into their organisation’s processes from inception onward will limit the scope and damage of attacks,” he said. “Where they have systematic plans to defend, identify, remediate and recover from attack, they will be able to focus on core business with some certainty.”

To find out more about how Logicalis can help you and your business, head to the Solutions & Services page.

The Overlooked Deep Impact of Mobile App Data

Just when CIOs and business executives were coming to terms with the concept of Big Data and Smart analytics, another important data source, currently mostly being overlooked, has been highlighted.

Research house Gartner has warned in a recent report that data from mobile apps, will have a deep impact on organisations’ information infrastructure.

The researcher advises that, whether deployed on the premises or in the cloud, data from mobile apps is generally not currently managed as part of an organisation’s information infrastructure, and data collected from mobile apps is often siloed.

Because digital business is now blurring the line between the physical and the digital worlds, and consumer-centric mobile apps are playing an increasingly important role. Gartner forecasts that by the end of this year, most mobile apps will sync, collect and analyse deep data about users and their social graphs.

Despite this growing consumer trend, most IT leaders are failing to consider the significant impact that mobile apps have on their information infrastructure.

Wearable devices and apps

And, as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains traction, the researchers maintain that by 2017, wearable devices will drive 50% of total interactions with apps, including desktop-based app interactions and mobile apps.

The punchline of the Gartner report is this: IT leaders should ensure they have infrastructure in place that takes into account data collected, not only via mobile apps, but also from apps running on wearable devices.

Researcher IDC also has some strong predictions about IoT. They say that within five years, 40% of wearables will have evolved into a viable consumer mass market alternative to smartphones. IDC says that by 2018, 16% of the population will be ‘Millennials’ and will be accelerating IoT adoption due to their reality of living in a connected world.

Under-used asset

“Personal data is often collected solely in support of a mobile app’s requirements and not considered an asset within an organisation’s overall information infrastructure,” said Roxane Edjlali, research director at Gartner. “Consequently, although this data is accessed and potentially stored in support of an app, it is not managed as a full ‘citizen’ of an enterprise’s information infrastructure.”

“Organisations should plan to manage information across cloud and on-premises implementations, as combining all data on the premises or on a single repository is no longer viable. It is important to understand the service-level agreements (SLAs) for various use cases that access mobile app data, and adapt the information capability accordingly,” said Ms Edjlali.

Gartner’s report has these tips relating to mobile app data:

• Co-location of data from mobile apps with other application data on the premises, can be a better option for use cases such as offline and near-line analyis.
• Using data virtualisation, to combine data in the cloud with data on the premises, can be a better option if co-location does not suit the governance or SLAs of a use case.
• Using integration-platform-as-a-service capabilities for cloud service integration can complement existing data integration strategies by moving data from the cloud to the premises, or from cloud to cloud as needed.

Personal data dangers

The report also warns of risks in over-enthusiastically collecting and distributing personal data because the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable use of consumer data can be very thin. It gets even thinner as the data collected becomes more detailed and personal. For example, organisations collecting biometric data through mobile apps, linked to wearable devices, could be tempted to monetise this data by reselling it.

“Even if personal or biometric data is anonymous, it could have a major impact on a person’s ability to get adequate health insurance, if they are identified as belonging to a risk category,” said Ms. Edjlali. “In addition, mobile apps that use third parties for authentication deliver data on customer behaviour to those third parties.”

These risks, relating to data collected from mobile apps, require organisations to rethink their governance policies and adjust their information infrastructure.

Gartner recommends that such organisations should:

• Manage the persistency and perishability of data collected from mobile apps.
• Monitor access to and control of this data. It is important to ensure that personal data collected from mobile apps remains private, and that it is secured, anonymised and accessed according to the organisation’s governance policies. Proper management of user agreements and opt-ins are important aspects of this.
• Control the sharing and reuse of mobile app data for other purposes.

It seems that data from mobile apps should now be considered as a carefully monitored and valuable asset in an enterprises information infrastructure.

To find out how Logicalis can support you and your business in this ever-evolving tech world, head to the Solutions & Services page.