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.

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.

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.

The 4-stage Approach to Adopting Cloud Solutions

Despite the general maturity, dependability and demonstrated utility of the cloud – the modern form of which has been around since about 2002, with the start of Amazon Web Services – some organisations appear to still have lingering doubts about storing data and cloud security.

These concerns are hangovers from the early days of cloud computing and are also fanned whenever their is a major data breach, whether or not the security of the cloud was a factor.

Of course, the big research houses, like Gartner, have few doubts about the cloud and its future. In a recent report (January 2015), Gartner forecast that the public cloud services market in the mature Asia Pacific and Japan region, is set to grow 14.2% in 2015, to total US$7.4 billion. They predict “consistent and stable cloud growth through to 2018”.

Fastest growing public cloud services

Gartner’s big picture view is that “Cloud management, storage and SaaS will be among the faster growing public cloud services through 2018, as more enterprise and government users jump onto cloud services”. And they’ve even broken down the popularity of the most popular different forms of cloud services up to 2018.

Gartner forecasts that:

• Business process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) cloud services will make up 9.2% of the overall public cloud services market in the Asia Pacific and Japan;

• Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will represent 3% of the market;

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will be at 21.5%;

• Cloud management – security services will take up 4%;

• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will be at 9.8%, and;

• The remaining 52.5% will come from cloud advertising.

International IT solutions and managed services providers, like Logicalis, are experienced cloud services providers accustomed to answering a broad range of questions from clients relating to cloud computing.

Four stage approach to cloud adoption

In their experience, there is a common four-stage approach that can help ease the concerns of organisations and boost the confidence of their CIOs relating to storing data and running applications in the cloud.

1. Develop the Right Strategy

Consulting with the experts to develop the best strategy and plan for optimum use of cloud services is the first step. This process involves choosing a proven cloud strategy and properly accounting for the many compliance issues. It also should determine how to achieve the best return on investment, balancing capital and operational expenses. How to best use automation in this plan is another key consideration. The outcome should be a dependable service model based on the company’s budget and particular requirements.

2. Asses the Status Quo

A thorough understanding of the company’s IT structure, using a broad range of tools to inventory devices in the physical and virtual environments plus the application layer, is vital before making changes. Expert consultants can advise on which particular tools are best. This detailed process enables CIOs to determine whether systems are under-utilised or over-used, generating costly inefficiencies, and can point to issues such as any server sprawl.

3.  Examine Data Centre Conditions

Special attention should be given to the condition of the data centre facilities which house the virtual infrastructures. This will determine whether they are energy efficient and point to any overcrowding or overheating. Too often CIOs have data centres which are crammed full of devices, with limited awareness of whether they are turned on. A better strategy is to have a proactive approach to IT management instead of continually reacting to issues.

4.  Update Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) Plans

Familiarity with DR and BC can breed contempt in CIOs who do not regularly update their plans, instead relying on sending tapes off to a storage facility in the belief they are protected. A fresh look at the availability of mission critical data may find some surprises. Expert consultants can also advise on advances such as DRaaS (Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service) which has been shown to be able to recover data in hours, instead of days. Any initial cloud assessment should specifically consider DR and BC and re-evaluate currently available services.

Do your pre-cloud homework

So as demonstrated here, appropriate cloud adoption depends on doing the homework and planning. Any concerns about cloud adoption can be discussed with external experts who, no doubt, will have heard similar questions before.

The Cloud has matured to become a pivotal part of the 3rd platform, which includes big data and analytics, mobility and social media. Research House IDC believes the 3rd Platform “will forever change how control, management, and security of the IT environment, are delivered”.

To find out how Logicalis can support you with moving to the cloud, head to the Solutions & Services section.

What’s new from Citrix

The story that Citrix was telling this year at their annual summit was compelling: here are a few of the highlights from the sessions.

Citrix Workspace Cloud

This is how the future is going to look, a single pane of glass management across multiple clouds. Engineers, Consultants, Nuns or IT admins will use this Citrix-based cloud platform which will automate, design and complete the delivery of desktops, apps and data as services.

http://www.citrix.com/products/workspace-cloud/overview.html

Citrix WorkspacePod (Powered by HP)

Citrix WorkspacePod is a complete, integrated solution for delivering modern workspaces, which leverages the recent Citrix acquisition of Sanbolic.

http://www.citrix.com/news/announcements/jan-2015/citrix-acquires-sanbolic.html

ShareFile

ShareFile has added in some cool new features, making it an even more compelling Dropbox-replacement for organisations looking to enable enterprise file sharing:

• Office 365 Connector enables secure mobile access and editing for documents stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Businesses which allows users to:
  • Link your ShareFile account to your Office 365 account
  • Access SharePoint Online document libraries from the ShareFile mobile app
  • Access OneDrive for Business files and folders from the ShareFile mobile app
  • Check in and out documents from a SharePoint team folder
• Personal Cloud Connectors allow users to access their Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive accounts from ShareFile. You can see the Citrix YouTube demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc_XjDuGdf4
• Mobile document creation and editing – previously only available to enterprise customers but now extended to all ShareFile users – offers users the ability to create, review and edit Microsoft Office documents and annotate Adobe PDF files within ShareFile on mobile devices.

The overall theme of Citrix Summit 2015 is that the promise of mobility and freeing people from a 9 to 5, chained-to-a-desk doctrine that has been for so long ingrained into society is here, and available today.

– Frank Hutchinson, Technical Team Lead for Data Centre and Virtualisation

Latest IT Trends force CIOs To Become Service Integration Experts

Outsourcing and managed services are cementing their place in the global business environment. Recent surveys clearly indicate that CIOs now acknowledge that they need to become experts in service integration.

One survey, of 177 CIOs spanning 24 countries, the second annual Optimal Services Study from Logicalis, found strong support for outsourcing. The survey involved CIOs and IT Directors from mid-market organisations across 24 countries spanning Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

The survey found that almost half (47%) want the majority (50% or more) of their IT services to be provided or managed by external service providers, including cloud (IaaS/PaaS & SaaS).

Over half the respondents agreed that by 2016, 80% of IT budgets will be based on providing service integration for a broad portfolio of internal and external sources of IT and business services.

A change in IT recruiting

The survey results pointed to a strong need to transform organisations’ IT skills base. This means they will have to recruit specialists with broader, business IT orientated skills.

They must actively reduce the level of technology their teams maintain in-house, and they must succeed where they have so far failed – in refocusing the CIO role on strategic activities.

This latest Optimal Services survey also found that CIOs recognise the need for them to become experts in service integration.

In a key pointer to the growing presence of outsourcing, the survey found that: “Line of Business will now want access to a growing number of market offerings delivering transformational line of business applications making the selection, integration, governance and management of ‘as a service’ as important as maintaining in-house technologies.”

Cloud deployments grow

Separate recent research by IDC pointed to the growing prevalence of the use of the cloud, both outsourced and internally. IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, for the third quarter of 2014 found that cloud deployments made up almost one third of combined worldwide server, disk storage and ethernet switch infrastructure spending.

The total cloud revenue grew 16% on the previous year, to US$6.5 billion.

“Public and private clouds represent the ‘compute factories’ and ‘digital content depots’ of the 3rd Platform era,” noted Richard Villars, Vice President, Datacentre and Cloud research at IDC.

“Whether internally owned or ‘rented’ from a service provider, cloud environments are strategic assets that organisations of all types must rely upon to quickly introduce new services of unprecedented scale, speed, and scope. Their effective use will garner first –mover advantage to any organisation in a hyper-competitive market.”

Managed service providers

The survey results and the positive future for outsourcing bode well for organisations such as Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration; data centre and cloud services; and managed services.

Logicalis is now seeing managed services extend into the Cloud, where they manage a customer’s Cloud-based application environment.

Logicalis, with an average customer tenure of 5.3 years, deploys and manages secure, converged infrastructure that can increase agility, reduce risk for clients through a consistent and repeatable framework, with a record showing it can cut operating costs by 20-50%.

Range of managed services

Logicalis offers ‘traditional’ managed services around IT infrastructure, covering networks, data centre (compute, storage) and voice/collaboration. They can provide full management where the customer can’t make changes to their infrastructure; typically it’s co-management where the customer retains full visibility and control of their IT infrastruture, but rely on Logicalis to keep it all running.

In some cases, Logicalis has the flexibility to provide ‘out of hours’ management to augment a customer’s IT department, where they want to manage their environment during business hours.

Logicalis says that their advice to customers is not to focus on the technology, but to determine what service levels are required and what technical – technology skills are needed in-house (for example, for a business-critical application). Then to benchmark internal costs and investigate a managed service to take care of ‘keeping the lights on’. Watch our latest managed services video to learn what it takes to support business critical operations with mature managed services.

What to Ask Before Signing Up for a Service Desk

There are some important questions that should be asked of providers by organisations considering signing up for a full-equipped Service Desk solution. After all, this is an important decision with considerable ramifications.

Any organisation’s Service Desk provides a single point of contact and interface for both users and IT employees: it’s a window into the organisation’s entire IT environment, actively monitoring incidents and user questions and it should work to maximise service availability.

The Service Desk performance is a clear demonstration of competency, efficiency and professionalism. If it doesn’t leave customers satisfied, the organisation has a major problem.

Far from being a gloried help desk, the Service Desk should be measured, monitored and controlled within the discipline of IT Service Management, as defined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Disruptive trends

Research House IDC says:” The rapid proliferation of disruptive trends such as the consumerisation of IT, BYOD, mobility, and virtualisation is driving increasingly heterogeneous and hybrid IT environments that, in turn, are adding significant complexity to IT service delivery and support within the enterprise.

“As IT environments become ever more hybrid, Service Desk management solutions that offer advanced integration with both on-premises and cloud-based technologies will increasingly gain traction in the enterprise. Likewise, the need for better change control, discovery, software license management, and compliance tracking is also helping drive demand in this market,” says Robert Young, Research Manager, Client Device and IT Service Management Software.

“In addition, Service Desk software delivered through SaaS will also continue to be a growth driver as customers continue to seek solutions that reduce up-front capital expenditures as well as ongoing maintenance costs. What’s more, SaaS-based solutions can often offer faster procurement and delivery time frames than on-premises implementations.”

Questions to ask

• Relevant questions that should be asked of potential providers include:
• Is their Service Desk is dedicated to the task, or is it comprised on shared resources?
• Is an ITSM tool used, such as Remember or ServiceNow and are they properly configured?
• Is there a formal process in place for the Service Desk to use?
• Are any processes in place based on a methodology like ITIL?

Properly monitoring and reporting on the performance of the Service Desk is also important.

• Does the business have a clear understanding of what the Service Desk will deliver?
• Is there a Service Catalogue in place. Are there agreed service levels established and do they get regularly reported to the business?
• Do regular meetings happen with the business to discuss the Service Desk performance?

Another key indicator and predictor of Service Desk performance is staff satisfaction and contentment.

• What is the staff turnover of the Service Desk?
• Is there a career path available to the analysts?
• Do the staff receive proper on-going training in ITIL and CompTIA+?
• Does the provider have adequate strategies to cope with staff absences?

The best time to ask all these questions is before any agreement is signed, not after.

Staff turnover

Staff turnover has a direct relationship to Service Desk user satisfaction. Does the provider do regular customer satisfaction surveys and what are the results? A high level of customer satisfaction points to a well operating Service Desk.

Organisations seeking a Service Desk now have a variety of options and flexibility available, for example, Logicalis offers on-premise Service Desks for larger customers who want it outsourced, but in-house.

Customers can opt for a leveraged, on-shore Australian based Service Desk, located in a Logicalis office, or some form of hybrid using some or all of the options. Logicalis has a record of service excellence having deliver 1,000 project over the past decade, plus more than 100 managed services customers.

As to the overall future of the Service Desk and overall customer service, Research firm Gartner predicts that “By 2016, 35% of IT operations organisations will have 75% of IT service desk contacts from the business resolved by virtual assistants.”

To find out more about Logicalis’ Service Desk offering, go here.

The Partner Strategy for 3rd Platform Success

The IT tide seems to be turning away from organisations taking on the challenge of owning and operating their own internal data centres – they are turning instead to outsourcing to expert service providers and taking up outside managed services.

New research by KPMG concludes that outsourcing has become a key part of a broader enterprise operations strategy and that shared services and outsourcing are on the increase.

KPMG has found that: “One in four enterprise buyers are reinvesting heavily in their global shared services operations, while 70% are continuing to make (largely moderate) investments in their outsourcing delivery,” the KPMG report says. “This is driven by technology advancements and automation and the rampant globalization of enterprise supply chains and business ecosystems.

“There is a clear move towards integrated global services models that incorporate both shared services and outsourcing. The long and short of this is that 93% of enterprises today have shared services and 96% are outsourcing some element of their back office IT and business operations, while 27% are actually reducing their investments in their own internal business units. ”

It seems the vast and varied challenges of catering for the 3rd platform are becoming just too daunting for organisations – seeking to focus on their core business and profits – to manage internally. Of course, the outsourcing – partnering trend is easy to understand in the context of the glacial issues currently confronting today’s infrastructure and operations (I&O) managers. The 3rd platform has its foundation in the hugely disruptive forces of mobile computing, social networking, cloud services, and Big Data analytics technologies.

Research house IDC forecasts that today’s unprecedented pace of technological change means that, within five years – by 2020 – most organisations will simply stop managing their own infrastructure. They will turn instead to on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets. For new services, they will increasingly turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider data centres.

These are some of the key findings of new IDC research which has also forecast that by 2018, the construction of ‘service provider mega-data centres’ – the primary server location for large collocation and cloud service providers – will take up nearly three-quarters of global data centre construction, based on space.

The IDC Report highlights the evolution of the datacentre: “Data centre and server rooms – closets are no longer just the places where organisations house their IT assets. The datacenter must serve as the primary point of engagement and information exchange with employees, partners, and customers in today’s interconnected world. The datacenter is also the foundation for new business models where leveraging large volumes of data and highly elastic compute resources are critical to delivering better insight and a superior product/user experience. This requires that data centres reliably deliver large and highly variable amounts of transaction, content serving, and analytic capacity on time, with no delays and no excuses.”

And this line in the report outlines why the (near) future role of the CIO and the IT department will likely be very different from today: “In this environment, building and running data centres as well as managing IT assets at the edge can no longer be a part-time or occasional job”.

Separate Gartner research hammers home the current challenging environment and why enterprise IT approaches must change: “Mobile and the proliferation of data are having dramatic impact and pressure on the supporting I&O infrastructure. The number of devices that need to be supported, and the amount of data being created everyday are growing exponentially. All this data is having a dramatic impact upstream on servers, storage, networking, facilities and IT operations, not to mention creating new security challenges. Just extending what I&O has done the last five to 10 years will no longer work, as many organizations cannot continue to scale doing business as usual.”

The trend towards ‘service provider mega-datacentres’ is not the only one pointing to the importance of enterprises partnering with the best expert service provider. IDC points to the growing popularity of ‘aaS’ (As-A-Service) offerings. In a November 2014 report, IDC says: “software as a service (SaaS) will continue to dominate public IT cloud services spending, accounting for 70% of 2014 cloud services expenditures. This is largely because most customer demand is at the application level.

“The second largest public IT cloud services category will be infrastructure as a service (IaaS), boosted by cloud storage’s 31% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the forecast period. Platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud storage services will be the fastest growing categories, driven by major upticks in developer cloud services adoption and big data-driven solutions, respectively.”

So the overall message seems to be that the traditional ‘do-it-yourself’ and ‘go-it-alone’ approach to IT and infrastructure management is no longer a feasible success strategy. Only by drawing on the expertise, experience and professionalism of expert external service providers, can organisations hope to be able to thrive and prosper on the 3rd platform and beyond.

Preparing for ‘The Internet of Things’

While the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) may sound like an exciting approaching future where everything is blissfully connected, it may be a bad dream for infrastructure and operations managers struggling to keep their data centres relevant.

The IoT is just one of the unstoppable trends impacting CIOs and enterprises, along with the cloud, mobility social networking and Big Data. Other potentially disruptive technologies include software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage, network function virtualisation, plus extreme low-energy processors and webscale-integrated infrastructure.

All of these demand an overhaul of past data centre infrastructure, design and management practices. If CIOs are not already involved in modernising their data centre, they may already be falling behind their competitors.

The IoT is part of the impending ‘big picture’ disruption for IT and it’s forecast to be a very powerful transformative influence for society overall and for most industries. It can mean many things, from web-connected refrigerators, to in-built GPS systems for motor vehicles and huge driverless mining trucks piloted from thousands of kilometres away. Huge, driveless, automated haul trucks, for example, are already being used by Rio Tinto in the Western Australian mining industry.

Research house Gartner defines IoT as ” the network of dedicated physical objects (things) that contain embedded technology to sense or interact with their internal state or external environment. The IoT comprises an ecosystem that includes things, communication, applications and data analysis”.

Gartner forecasts that the top three industry verticals being hit by the IoT will be manufacturing, utilities and transportation, which, by 2015, will have 736 million connected things being used. By 2015, Gartner says the consumer sector will have 2.9 billion connected things, increasing to 13 billion by 2020. They believe the automotive sector will show the highest IoT growth rate (96%) by 2015.

No enterprise can dodge the IoT bullet train and Gartner declares that business has no choice but to pursue it just like they’ve done with the consumerisation of IT. They have some advice for IT departments on how data centres need to adapt to today’s unstoppable trends, like IoT.

• Enterprises now need to think beyond traditional data centre models around build, lease or refurbishment to options such as colocation or outsourcing.
• There needs to be a more holistic approach to data centre modernisation, encompassing the overall facility, which has not been a priority for too many businesses.
• Enterprises need to plan and implement a data centre modernisation strategy whether that involves building and populating a new data centre, modernising an existing one or sourcing externally. They should focus on sourcing data centre capacity, follow best practices in building a new data centre, and revamp their data centre infrastructure management.

While today’s technology users – consumers and employees – expect user-friendliness and simplicity when interacting with business, the back end is becoming ever more complicated and the IoT will only makes things worse. CIOs must deal with this conundrum and many are finding that the best strategy is to partner with an experienced external service provider, like Logicalis. The DIY approach has been proven to be dangerous.

IDC forecasts that by 1919, most organisations will stop managing their own infrastructure: “They will make greater use of on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets, and turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider data centres for new services. This will result in the consolidation and retirement of some existing internal datacenters, particularly at the low end. At the same time, service providers will continue their race to build, remodel, and acquire data centres to meet the growing demand for capacity.”

The goal for modernising data centre infrastructure to have it thrive in the looming IoT environment, is to transition it from the traditional, consolidated and virtualised environment which is already struggling to cope. Logicalis has strategies to develop data centres that are efficient, automated and service oriented. The end result can be reduced management complexity, cost reduction and growth.

It is all too easy to succumb to the uncertainty and fear of historic IT trends such as the IoT, but there is experienced, professional help available to ensure that enterprises can capitalise on these trends, rather than be intimidated by them.