Disruption awaits€¦ · Disruption awaits Storage in 2017 Scaling for web The enterprise...

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

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The enterprise technologies and trends that will drive disruption, transform businesses and define innovation in 2017

Disruption awaits

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3November/December 16 information-age.com

editor’s letter

Disrupting through data leadership

he data leaders of today are finding themselves very much in the

driving seat when in comes to the innovations disrupting businesses and industries.

In our role chronicling the major technology disruptions and innovations facing the enterprise, we are committed to identifying and celebrating the highest-achieving data leaders, as well as providing prominent platforms for knowledge and education.

With that in mind, I’m delighted to announce the return of our prestigious Data Summit, now in its fifth year, and the second year of our Data 50 induction programme.

The Data Summit is our flagship data conference and the UK’s leading event for the use of data in the enterprise. It’s the thinking person’s big data event – for IT pros who are not drawn into hype but do recognise opportunities. They don’t want another hype-fuelled event telling them what big data is – they want to become leaders in generating business value from data.

Doing this involves looking at the subject not just from an analytics and intelligence angle, but also from an infrastructure and transformation, strategy and innovation, and security and governance perspective.

The summit’s 25+ renowned speakers are the cream of the crop when it comes to demonstrating real business value from deploying data technology and strategies in large organisations. They include leaders at Network Rail, State Street, HMRC, Santander, Waitrose, Channel 4 and the Department for Work and Pensions.

A number of the speakers are also alumni of the Data 50 Awards, a prominent programme in association with the Data Summit that reveals and celebrates the UK’s top data leaders each year. Both events take place on 18 May – summit in the day and awards in the evening – forming an important date in the data community’s calendar.

Nominations are now open for the Data 50 Awards (closing on 16 Dec) and registrations are open for the Data Summit. Find out more about both events and register your participation at dataleadership.co.uk.

Ben Rossi, Editorial Director

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contents NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

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Disruption awaits

SMART NATION BY 2025: SINGAPORE'S MASTERPLAN

WHY BUSINESSES MUST GET SERIOUS ABOUT PRIVACY

2017 STORAGE LANDSCAPE: NEW YEAR, NEW INNOVATION

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 l information-age.com

Mobile evolution

Gas and energy infrastructure distributor SGN is transforming its business operations and improving how it serves over 5.5 million UK households. Information Age discusses the company’s mobile-backend-as-a-service strategy with its director of IT, Andrew Quail

‘The two-year project will be fairly transformational in terms of how we manage, maintain and run our own network’

Disruption awaits Storage in 2017 Scaling for web


innovationage

The storage landscape in 2017: from the technologies businesses will implement to the new challenges they will face

storageage

Trends like big data and the IoT mean organisations want to be able to scale like cloud providers – but are they ready for it?

networkage

22 26 30

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November/December 16 information-age.com 5

Protecting data is more important than ever in an era of stricter regulations, where businesses have an obligation to honour the privacy of customers

securityage

NEWS FLASH

ANALYST EYE

INSIDER

PRODUCT CORNER

DEPLOYMENT WATCH

COLUMN

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Rounding up the top industry news and trends of the past month

Gartner reveals its predictions for IT organisations and users

IA previews Singapore’s plan to be a smart nation by 2025

Microsoft introduces its augmented reality offering, HoloLens

A look at some of the latest deployments throughout the UK

How big data has influenced the ‘little Britain’ politics of 2016

Privacy in the digital age

EDITORIALEditorial Director Ben Rossi (020 7250 7961)

Reporter Nicholas Ismail (020 7250 7956)Group Sub-Editor Alan DobieResearcher Stephen Grainger

Senior Designer Alex Smith

COMMERCIALSales Manager Joe Aspis (020 7250 7950)

SUBSCRIPTIONS – INFORMATION AGEAbigail Appiagyei (020 7250 7010)

VITESSE EVENTSEvents Manager Jenna Read (020 7250 7050)

VITESSE MEDIA PLCExecutive Chairman Chris Ingram (020 7250 7010)Chief Executive Officer Niki Baker (020 7250 7010)Commercial Director Tim Griffiths (020 7250 7032)

Director of Digital and Social MediaJonathan Sumner (020 7250 7039)

Online Sales Manager (SME titles)John Bromley (020 7250 7954)

Sales Manager (What Investment)Gordon Sockett (020 7250 7033)Accounts/Admin AssistantAjith Benjamin (020 7250 7046)

Email All email addresses are of the [email protected]

Reprints & Licensing 020 7501 1086Information Age is published by Vitesse Media Plc,

14 Bonhill Street, London EC2A 4BXISSN: 1359-4214

Printed by Stephens & George Magazines Ltd© Vitesse Media Plc. All rights reserved.

Contents may not be reproduced in whole or partwithout the written consent of the publishers.

IN THE BOARDROOM

IA talks robots with the CEO of the UK’s most funded AI firm

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INSIDER 10

How to get digital right in an age of start-up disruption


newsflashNEWS / TRENDS / EVENTS @informationage

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winners losersIBMIBM tripled its cloud data centre

capacity in the UK in November. This expansion will also triple IBM’s data centre footprint in the UK, and will effectively create the largest footprint of cloud data centres in Europe. The investment expands the number of IBM cloud data centres to six in the UK and 16 across Europe in total.

POLANDSmart technology, specifically

smart cameras, is making Poland a safer place to live. The city of Gliwice has installed intelligent video systems. The technology supports people’s work while eliminating human mistakes through algorithms and alarms. The system can analyse real-time footage and is able to detect multiple events from various cameras.

TESCO BANK40,000 Tesco Bank accounts reported

suspicious transactions last month and 20,000 of them had money taken out. This led to Tesco Bank halting online payments until the situation was under control. The bank confirmed some accounts ‘have been subject to online criminal activity, in some cases resulting in money being withdrawn fraudulently’.

FRIENDFINDER NETWORKSFriendFinder Networks

was hit by a massive data breach. The parent company of sites including AdultFriendFinder, Cams.com, Penthouse and Stripshow was hacked via a local file inclusion (LFI), exposing the details of 412 million accounts. According to leakedsource.com, 99% of all available passwords are now visible in plaintext.

TECHNOLOGY AT CENTRE OFAUTUMN STATEMENTPhilip Hammond put technology at the centre of his first Autumn Statement as chancellor of the exchequer. He made clear that the continued growth of the economy will rely on investment in technology infrastructure and innovation.

The accelerated growth of the UK’s tech hub will act as the country’s economic saviour post-Brexit. As part of his speech to the House of Commons, Hammond pledged to invest £23 billion in innovation and

infrastructure over the next five years as part of the new National Productivity Investment Fund.

On top of this, he announced plans to invest £1 billion in digital infrastructure, £390 million in future transport technology and £2 billion more per year in R&D funding by 2020/21. ‘As the pace of technology advances and competition from the rest of the world increases,’ said Hammond, ‘we must build on our strengths in science and tech innovation to ensure the next generation of discoveries is made, developed and produced in Britain.’

TEENAGER ADMITS HACKING TALKTALKA 17-year-old boy admitted that he hacked TalkTalk last October, but claimed he was ‘just showing off’ to friends.

The boy told magistrates, ‘I didn’t think of the consequences at the time. I was just showing off to my mates. It was a passion; not any more. I won’t let it happen again. I have grown up.’

He was in attendance at Norwich Youth Court, where he will be sentenced after pleading guilty to seven hacking-related charges.


Sentencing will fall under breaching the Computer Misuse Act.

The teenager told the court that he had used hacking tool software to identify vulnerabilities on target websites.

A further six people were arrested in connection with the attack, and the boy’s solicitor, Chris Brown, stressed that he had played a small part in the scam, adding that his behaviour had been that of an immature 16-year-old.

SAMSUNG ACQUIRES HARMANSamsung Electronics will acquire Harman International Industries for around $8 billion (£6.4 billion) in order to accelerate growth in the automotive and connected technology industry.

After acquiring the automotive electronics-maker for $112 per share (or $8 billion in cash), Samsung will make great strides into the growing addressable connected car market.

The deal will be concluded by

mid-2017, and Harman’s chief executive, Dinesh Paliwal, will continue to run the company.

Samsung called this move a ‘strategic priority’ for the company, and it will help create end-to-end solutions by combining Harman’s leadership in infotainment, telematics and sound management with Samsung’s connected mobility solutions, semiconductors, user experience (UX) and displays.

The month in numbersTwo-thirds of London’s councils suffered a data breach in the past four years, according to a freedom of information (FOI) request by Secure Cloudlink

A report from the Internet Society revealed that 40% of the internet users surveyed would not do business with a company that had suffered a data breach

RMB 121 billion ($18 billion) of gross merchandise volume was settled through Alipay on Alibaba’s China and international retail marketplaces on China’s Singles Day

33%

40%

$18BN

£2BN

500 mph

34%

Enterprise software firm Infor has received a $2 billion investment by Koch Equity Development (KED) in a

deal that values the company at over $10 billion

US company Hyperloop One has agreed to build a new train

in Dubai that could travel at speeds of up to 500 mph and

would connect Dubai and Abu Dhabi

Large companies will allocate 34% of their IT budgets to

hosting and cloud services in 2017, up from 28% this year,

according to 451 Research

VISIT US ONLINEInformation Age doesn’t just exist as a magazine – information-age.com is one of the UK’s most visited websites for IT leaders, and it continues to grow at a rapid pace.

For all the latest news, analysis, features and thought leadership in the world of business technology and innovation, visit information-age.com today.

Novemeber/December 16 information-age.com 9

deployment watch

IPSAWHERE? Bristol

WHAT’S THE BUSINESS CASE? The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), the body created to independently oversee and regulate MPs’ business costs and expenses, required an easier approach to carrying out its duties for the government. The body is subject to significant levels of public scrutiny and so needed a system that would provide accurate near-real-time data.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING ABOUT IT?Deploying a cloud-based ERP solution that will automate much of the process MPs must go through when carrying out administrative tasks.

WHO’S HELPING? Unit4’s Business World On ERP solution for finance, expenses, human resources and payroll, based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, will make back-office finance and human resources collaboration easier for IPSA’s 4,000 stakeholders, including MPs, their staff and volunteers.

Royal Bank of ScotlandWHERE? London

WHAT’S THE BUSINESS CASE? Growth through acquisitions meant that RBS’s IT environment had become increasingly complex and difficult to manage, and as a result 14,000 RBS employees were using 13 different IT service management (ITSM) tools and multiple configuration management databases.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING ABOUT IT?Automated critical IT processes for users across its offices and branches in Europe, North America and Asia with a cloud solution that reduces complexity and eliminates outdated processes.

WHO’S HELPING? ServiceNow’s ITSM solution has helped RBS transform customer service by significantly improving the time to raise a change by 75%, a task that traditionally took employees an average of seven hours and required using five or more different tools. The average time to raise an incident has also been reduced by 60%.

Travis PerkinsWHERE? London

WHAT’S THE BUSINESS CASE? Builders’ merchant and home improvement retailer Travis Perkins lacked visibility of change requests and data validation, which is required to ensure its customers get the best possible data to inform their shopping experience.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING ABOUT IT?Travis Perkins’s ‘Highway to Cloud’ initiative aims to move all key applications to the cloud within the next three years. By improving data quality and connecting multiple, diverse sets of product information, the retailer can better manage and optimise its data collection in order to be more efficient and agile.

WHO’S HELPING? The retailer is using IBM Business Process Manager (iBPM) via an IBM cloud data centre in London to better manage multiple data governance processes for data collection, coordination and approvals. This provides more flexibility, scalability and performance options when supporting in-store colleagues.


omptel is arguably Finland’s reigning software giant.

Working with telecommunications service providers across the globe, it manages more than 20% of the world’s mobile data.

The 30-year-old company wasn’t always on the front foot. Current CEO and president Juhani Hintikka took over the reins in 2011, tasked with transforming the company for the digital age.

‘About five years ago, we realised that while we had a good international customer base in telecoms, we hadn’t really been investing in growth,’ Hintikka tells Information Age at the sidelines of the Nexterday North conference in Finland. ‘That started a process that we later started calling “Operation Nexterday”, which included a few key ingredients over time.

‘We started talking about what kind of company we wanted to build – the values and the culture. Then, of course, we thought about practical decisions about where to invest.’

Know when to pivotAccording to Hintikka, Comptel

didn’t pivot in its offerings, but did in the way it operates, which is how it

tapped into its growth potential. ‘Rather than being in the IT engine

room, all of a sudden we found ourselves having business discussions with our customers,’ he says. ‘I think that was a big, big change. It wasn’t about just serving customers; it was about solving problems.’

This change required Comptel to develop new competencies and bring new people in, which got the firm back onto a growth track.

By 2015, Comptel had grown its top line by 14%, increased profitability and become the best-performing listed company in the Helsinki NASDAQ.

The company’s market cap is now five times more than it was back in 2011, which Hintikka believes is proof of how a digital-first approach can shake sleeping giants in an age when challengers are waiting in wings.

Innovate and automateTwo years ago, Comptel set up

an internal start-up incubator to bridge the innovation chasm that many larger organisations face.

The incubator identifies tech talent early on, brings them into the fold and lets them function as a standalone team, experimenting with new ways of working and solving

macro-level problems. Reporting directly to the

CEO, these start-ups within the company

make their own decisions and focus on execution while Comptel provides the funding, technical

expertise and customer access. ‘From the day [we

had the first start-up on board], it took us 12 months

to get a working solution into production with the live customer,’ says Hintikka.

‘We had never done anything that quickly before. In our industry, innovation is typically a two- or three-year cycle. Getting a working solution up and running in less than a year, including hiring all the key people, require agility.’

As the company’s growth escalated, other markers of success grew proportionally, including employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and, more importantly, innovation.

14%

Between 2011 and 2015,

Comptel grew its top line by

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Playing to winFive lessons on getting digital transformation right in an age where start-ups steal the innovation spotlight

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‘You could literally split the company into two parts,’ says Hintikka. ‘We predict and understand what the market needs are, and how digital services can address those needs. The other part of the company focuses on developing the technology, whether through artificial intelligence or automation, to deliver those services.’

Solve a global problemWith the company firmly on the

growth track, Hintikka’s key focus now is a global concern: connecting the unconnected to the internet.

While there are 7.2 billion people on Earth, only 3 billion are connected to the internet, and Comptel’s goal is to connect the 2 billion users out there who have the technology but lack the access.

Last year, the company launched a platform for telcos to reach this untapped market through their own apps by quantifying internet data packages into units of time.

Instead of selling megabytes of data to a demographic with little

or no digital knowledge, Comptel’s strategy is to sell customers internet access in units of time. The operator gets to price it dynamically through targeted deals.

Ultimately, Comptel is trying to serve a usually underserved demographic, while educating people who may otherwise be ignored.

Find solutions, not clichés While an increasing number

of vendors have been leaping head-first onto the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon, Comptel has been quietly plugging away with its innovations.

At Nexterday North this year, the company launched Fastermind, which, on a basic level, is the Siri for telcos. On a deeper level, the product launch is tied to the company’s growth strategy and vision for getting the 2 billion underserved smartphone users of the world online.

Most of the analytics tools in the market, regardless of sector, require analysts. Hintikka sees a future

where there won’t be enough analysts in the world to cater for the demand for data sifting. This will require software that is clever enough to evolve and take on more analytical positions as the data landscape changes.

Fastermind combines data collection and integration, which itself sounds trivial, Hintikka says, but is actually very time-consuming for analysts. The solution integrates, cleans, analyses and processes structured and unstructured data sources, and provides that as a platform for further usage, such as responding in real time.

Using AI technology in a sector that has been slow to evolve on a global scale means that telcos will be able to differentiate people – knowing the difference between an airport employee and a business traveller, for example.

Prepare for the futureWith so many developments

going on, Hintikka admits it can be easier to just work on the present. But it’s equally important to analyse current trends to predict challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Comptel is betting on a couple of transformations. One is that all services will be contextual and personalised. ‘That is almost a kind of market disruption the way you approach the customers,’ says Hintikka.

The second is that networks will be virtualised. A mobile telecom network will look no different from an IT data centre.

Keeping an eye out for emerging trends can open up entirely new revenue streams and opportunities for collaboration. For Hintikka, Comptel can only go from strength to strength if it identifies these disruptions.

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information-age.com November/December 1612

igital strategies are fast becoming the preferred method of driving

businesses forward across a range of industries. Implementing an effective mobile or digital process into business operations can drastically reduce costs and improve timings surrounding product or service delivery. This all lends to the desire to engage the customer and better the relationship as hungry competitors wait in the wings.

SGN is a gas and energy infrastructure distributor that operates in Scotland and the south of England. It covers around 5.5 million households.

As a company it directly employs 3,500 people, and including contract staff about 6,000. The business has a UK focus on energy distribution. ‘Safety and customer efficiency are at the heart of what we do,’ says Andrew Quail, SGN’s director of IT.

SGN saw an opportunity to digitally orientate its service with the aim of transforming its operations and improving the customer relationship.

In order to achieve this, the distributor implemented a mobile-backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) strategy that, according to Quail, ‘fundamentally makes our operations more efficient and ultimately provides a better customer experience and satisfaction

to the end user of our network’.MBaaS enables the convergence of

mobile app backend services so that they sit on top of a cloud-based infrastructure like that of Amazon or Rackspace.

‘For developers this means that they can enable once-proprietary environments that house backend integration and functionality to be placed in an open environment like the cloud so that any development tool can leverage that backend functionality,’ explains Burley Kawasaki, SVP products at Kony.

Keeping mobileKony has provided SGN with an enterprise mobility platform called MobileFabric 7 to help invigorate and enable its highly mobile workforce, comprising 3,000 engineers who are out on the road.

Kawasaki goes on to suggest that this type of enterprise-grade mobile infrastructure service strategy makes it easier to build apps that integrate and support all backend systems, like an engineer customer review system.

‘The new version enables developers to define or automatically generate application data models and then map them to a set of backend content sources for rapid data integration, modelling and object development.’

SGN rolled out this mobile strategy in March this year. Quail explains that they have already rolled out a customer satisfaction mobile app, as an example of just one way that the mobile strategy can serve the business.

‘We’ve introduced the customer service app to our field force, and that’s given us real-time analysis of individuals’ performance, and almost forces the customer into interaction with our staff, which technically didn’t happen in the past.’

Another solution that SGN is looking to launch on the Kony platform is the digitalisation of engineers’ time sheets as they drive between depot locations.

‘That’s being rolled out as we speak,’ says Quail. ‘So, in a relatively short period of time, we’ve been able to scale up to enterprise-grade mobile services and essentially bring a development function in-house, where the capability wasn’t there before.

‘It’s a relatively new service, but something that we’ve seen bring value very quickly into the organisation.’

The overall goal in implementing a digital-first strategy is to introduce flexibility, agility and efficiency into the organisation’s daily operations.

‘The key differentiator,’ says Quail, ‘is that this gives us a scalable yet flexible way of providing solutions to our end users that are relatively low cost’.

A mobile evolutionGas and energy infrastructure distributor SGN has implemented a mobile-first strategy that is transforming its business operations and improving how it serves over 5.5 million UK households

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The mobile strategy requires minimal commitment and can be integrated far more quickly into SGN’s enterprise systems than was the case with its legacy estate, says Quail.

‘This isn’t a technology vanity project. This is absolutely about driving value into our business by making the operational workforce more efficient and providing solutions that enable us to engage better with our customers.’

Implementing any new digital strategy requires time, acceptance (by employees, and consumers to a lesser extent) and, of course, money. So it had better deliver results. Referring specifically to the digitalisation of time sheets, Quail explains that SGN has seen direct cost savings in terms of travel time and fuel.

In terms of figures, Quail says that this specific initiative has saved roughly £250,000. While this isn’t ‘stellar’, it does demonstrate that SGN is now working on minimal costs to deliver the app.

Equally, this represents a return after only a few months, which is impressive. Previously, the company had been dependent on ERP-type solutions for every single service. The mobile strategy allows SGN to integrate individual services into other legacy applications, ‘on a case-by-case basis’.

‘This is absolutely benefit-led, and there’s loads more to go for in terms of some of the paper processes that we’ve got out in the field.’

In the name of flexibilityUltimately, this system has provided what open source software does for many businesses: flexibility.

Before integrating the Kony platform into business operations, SGN was using an SAP mobile platform, ‘which was kind of one-size-fits-all’, says Quail.

Any tinkering on that platform, he explains, could have potentially knocked the systems offline. When safety-critical processes like gas escape

response, the perils are evident.This platform, however, enables SGN

to stand individual services down or amend them as we see fit, far more easily than we previously could.

Integrating a fully functional MBaaS strategy that has delivered pretty instantaneous results can’t have been without its challenges – or can it?

While getting the network connectivity into Amazon Web Services (AWS) did take a couple of weeks longer than SGN expected, other than that ‘there really haven’t been any huge challenges’, says Quail. ‘It has been a breath of fresh air compared to other enterprise platforms that I’ve initiated previously.’

He owes the ease of this transition to Kony’s mobile service. ‘We’re able to leverage a wider community of people who specialise in development – that was a key feature of selecting Kony’s platform. We have standards, and we have the ability to go to market for other vendors to help us if the demand is too much for our small team, or indeed Kony themselves.’

It became evident that implementing the mobile service was part of a much wider IT strategy. SGN is currently undergoing a much broader change of programme, according to Quail.

‘We do have a broader mobile strategy in using other services – some really niche services around map-based solutions. We’re updating maps directly with our assets on the ground, and that will save around £2.5 million over five years.’

SGN is undergoing something of a digital transformation, with the aim of making its workforce more collaborative and, in turn, improving the efficiency of its operation.

This transformation is leading the company into new territory: real-time networks. This is, says Quail, ‘essentially a censor-based network management that will, using analytics, help us to manage our networks better’.

‘The two-year project will be fairly transformational in terms of how we manage, maintain and run our own network,’ he adds.

Innovation doesn’t stop there, and Quail reveals that part of his team is working on pipe robotics and general analytics around business modelling and predictive modelling in planning SGN’s workflows going forward.

It is clear that the mobile service SGN has just begun to roll out is only the start of the revised IT strategy that underpins the digital transformation going on at the energy distributor.

on the case

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insider

he news coming from the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona in October

was that the open-source software platform has expanded significantly, with a range of industries running it at scale for production workloads.

OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace and NASA, amongst others. It is now managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community.

The platform runs on the open-source platform, meaning the source code is available to everyone. OpenStack, therefore, promotes collaboration from its foundation.

Effectively, the software acts as a cloud service provider, offering multi-tenant infrastructure-as- a-service (IaaS). The findings of rigorous analysis of OpenStack, by 451 Research’s Market Monitor service, revealed to what extent the cloud provider has grown.

This was expressed in one way to Information Age by Dr Angel Diaz, vice president of cloud architecture and technology at IBM, at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona.

‘We have come from a conference

where 75 people attended,’ he said, ‘to one where we have 8,000 in Austin [Texas] and 4,000 to 6,000 in Barcelona (exact numbers are not yet known)’.

OpenStack’s riseStatistically, OpenStack’s growth can be displayed by the revenue for its OpenStack business models, which 451 Research expects to exceed $5 billion by 2020 and grow at a 35% CAGR.

Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, addressed the software’s progress in his keynote speech at the OpenStack Summit.

He elaborated on the findings of the research carried out by 451 Group, which produced a general notion that OpenStack had become more inclusive, diverse and expansive for businesses of all sizes across the globe.

OpenStack-powered clouds have moved beyond small-scale deployments, with approximately 72% of OpenStack enterprise deployments ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 cores.

Workload transformationThe research showed that OpenStack users are adopting containers at a faster rate than the rest of the

Open goalOpenStack is making strides into enterprise with business-critical workloads running on larger deployments across diverse industries

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enterprise market, with 55% of OpenStack users also using containers, compared with 17% across all respondents.

Containers reflect ‘the transformation of application workloads’, said Bryan Thompson, general manager of OpenStack private cloud at Rackspace. They provide a solution to the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another.

This could be from a physical machine in a data centre to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.

OpenStack supports workloads that matter to enterprises, not just test and development, and ‘allows people to do things that matter’, said Collier.

These include infrastructure services (66%), business applications and big data (60% and 59% respectively), and web services and e-commerce (57%). OpenStack users can be found in a diverse cross section of industries, according to 451’s research.

‘80% of users are not in the technology industry,’ said Collier. ‘OpenStack’s maturity works over all kinds of industries and all kinds of sizes.’

Indeed, 20% of respondents did cite the technology industry, while the rest expanded over a variety of industries.

The majority came from manufacturing (15%), retail/hospitality (11%), professional services (10%), healthcare (7%), insurance (6%), transportation (5%),

communications/media (5%), wholesale trade (5%), energy and utilities (4%), education (3%), financial services (3%) and government (3%).

OpenStack is inclusive by nature, by running on open-source software, and the range of industries utilising the platform reflects this.

New and improvedA number of industry experts revealed to Information Age a range of benefits that have grown in line

with OpenStack.Economics was cited as a

major benefit. Simply, using OpenStack

saves money. Indeed, 50% of those surveyed said reducing costs was a factor in using the cloud

enabler.Mark Shuttleworth,

founder of Canonical, remarked that OpenStack,

used in the right way, provides a cost-effective and fast-moving experience.

‘Ultimately, the goal has to be to provide an internal cloud that has the same economics per VM as your public cloud options,’ Shuttleworth said. However, he did warn that there are ‘lots of expensive vendor distractions that can take you off course’.

The research suggests that increased operational efficiency was the main driver for enterprises adopting OpenStack, with 76% responding to this effect. Accelerating innovation and increased deployment speed was a close second business driver for those surveyed, with 75%.

John Engates, CTO at Rackspace, told Information Age that this driver, due

to the liquid nature of OpenStack, allows organisations to stay competitive and even disrupt the disruptors, such as Uber and Airbnb.

69% of respondents said supporting DevOps was a crucial factor in their adoption of OpenStack.

‘Our research in aggregate indicates that enterprises globally are moving beyond using OpenStack for science projects and basic test and development towards workloads that impact the bottom line,’ said Al Sadowski, research vice president at 451 Research.

‘This is supported by our OpenStack Market Monitor, which projects an overall market size of over $5 billion in 2020, with APAC, namely China, leading the way in terms of growth.’

Cornerstone technologyThe research, said Collier, gives an unbiased look into the plans of enterprises using private cloud.

‘They’re telling us that OpenStack is not merely an interesting technology, but it’s a cornerstone technology.’

‘Companies are using OpenStack to do work that matters to their businesses, and they’re using it to support their journey through a changing landscape in which rapid development and deployment of software is the primary means of competitive advantage.’

Members of the OpenStack community have joined forces to take advantage of the momentum in enterprise adoption.

The collaborative effort, dubbed The World Runs on OpenStack, was launched at OpenStack Summit. The cornerstone of the campaign is a collection of OpenStack enterprise user success stories that feature many industries, workloads and organisations using the software around the world.

$5BN

By 2020, revenue for OpenStack business models

is expected to exceed


n October, Information Age was invited to the official launch of the

Singapore government’s new media and technology agency, the IMDA (Info-communications Media Development Authority).

The IMDA is a combination of two previous government departments: the Media Development Authority (MDA) and the Info-communication Development Authority (IDA).

The newly formed organisation’s plan is to lead Singapore into the digital future by addressing the skills gap and transforming the public sector by enabling technology. In order to achieve this, the IMDA is launching a whole host of initiatives, which are designed to equip the public with digital skills and help Singapore further transform its status as a ‘smart nation’.

The goal, according to IMDA, by 2025 is to establish a Singapore transformed for the better by infocomm media: this has been dubbed ‘the masterplan’.

A better lifeThe formation of the IMDA aims to enable a better quality of life for Singaporeans through world-class connectivity, compelling local content and technologies to make everyday life smoother and more convenient.

Gabriel Lim, CEO of the newly formed department, discussed with Information Age the reasons behind the merger, and specifically how combining the infocomm media (ICM) sectors of government could help realise a fairer, more sustainable, smarter Singapore.

‘We saw this trend of convergence [between media and infocomm] growing in the future,’ he said. ‘There are increasing areas where you see tech companies using content and media as a way to engage customers, by building more loyalty among clients, and more importantly to effectively display the branding, services and offerings provided by the company.’

Lim also hopes the merger will help address the digital divide: ‘Segments of the population enabled by technology are running ahead of a segment that is left behind with no internet connection.’

Instead, the hope is to create digital multipliers where every Singaporean ‘is connected and part of this journey’.

‘At the same time, we also see from media’s perspective the increasing role that digitisation plays,’ Lim added.

The digitisation of media, with the integration of technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), has applications for a variety of sectors, including education and healthcare.

Angeline Poh, assistant CEO for the IMDA’s content and innovation group, explained that the merger was born out of a desire to ‘create and nurture digital natives’. Effectively, the IMDA believes that developing a strong ICM sector will power and transform the economy.

Poh described ICM poignantly as Singaporeans’ third language, after their mother tongue and English. There is a big belief that the IMDA will drive business growth and present opportunities for workers in Singapore.

Combining the two departments also allows the new agency to simplify the regulatory process, with everyone on the same page.

Smart catalystIn October, a number of new smart initiatives were launched with the hope of transforming Singapore and its people’s lives. During the IMDA launch press conference, Khoong Hock Yun, assistant CEO of development at IMDA, revealed some of the most significant schemes that they hope will prove a catalyst in developing talent, spur innovation and create a vibrant ICM sector filled with job opportunities.

The first project he discussed was the urban logistics scheme, which aims to improve delivery and logistics processing for shopping malls. The aim

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Digital masterplanIn October, two Singapore government departments merged to enable the completion of the 2025 masterplan: to create a competitive infocomm media ecosystem that enables and complements the country’s smart nation ambitions

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is to disrupt the supply chain by sharing logistical resources such as vehicles, drivers and warehouses. While the initiative is currently running at just two shopping malls, the objective is to scale the process for widespread use.

At Tampines Mall, one of the two trial malls, Yun said that delivery waiting time had been reduced from 24 minutes to seven minutes, and he suggested that in time this would result in a 25% increase in truck utilisation, a 14.8 million tonne reduction in CO2 and S$65 million of savings.

Smart facilities managementImplementing smart technologies can transform the way a city operates, and this facility maintenance (FM) initiative aims to transform the cleaning, security guarding, landscaping and FM sectors.

Tech-augmented security guarding can be achieved by using video analytics to reduce reliance on security personnel. It is more effective and less prone to human error.

Similarly, Aerolion Technologies has developed enhanced drone and image analytic technologies to help monitor state land and properties as part of the IMDA drive. Drones are also being used to deliver mail to Pulau Ubin, an island off the Singaporean coast.

In addition, cleaning robots are being tasked with solving the lack of manpower in the cleaning and landscape industry, in partnership with Muratec and V3 Teletech.

Some might argue that these machines are taking precious sources of income from residents, but job vacancies in security, cleaning and landscaping have risen since March 2016.

Equally, tasking smart technologies to these more mundane jobs frees up opportunities for citizens to pursue more digitally creative professions.

While robots take care of the more

mundane jobs, the TechSkills Accelerator initiative will seek to upskill ICT workers – from both ICT and non-ICT backgrounds – in pace with technological advancements.

This streamlining and development of ICT skills is meant to align with the current requirements of the market.

The aim is to drive professional development and improve employability within the tech sector.

Yun told reporters that in the three months it had been active the programme has helped 1,000 workers upskill and gain employment.

VR in schools and healthcareThe government initiative doesn’t begin at graduate level, however – there is a real impetus on getting children ready for the digital future that Singapore hopes to embody as a smart nation.

In association with Beach House

Pictures, the IMDA is aiming to deliver VR in schools to produce an active learning experience and acclimatise the children to the future they will be facing.

The design of this programme is also intended to illustrate how the media industry is able to harness VR and AR for a diversification of their business model into the sphere of education and training. This ability extends to VR applications in healthcare training. Here, the integration of technology and media will allow medical trainees to engage in more immersive situations for improved training.

‘We will be able to bring together what we call a stronger depth of learning and better retention of skills in responding to scenarios, especially in an emergency setting,’ commented TK Ng, Asia Pacific representative for Side Effects Software, a Singaporean tech startup.

The challenge, Ng went on, is that it is not going to happen overnight. As with many of these initiatives, they are using cutting-edge technology that they hope will be refined enough to realise the 2025 masterplan.

Following the masterplanIn Dr Yaacob Ibrahim’s speech at the IMDA launch, he described the development of the masterplan as a route to follow in harnessing the convergence of infocomm and media and ‘creating new opportunities for Singapore and our people’.

The masterplan gives the IMDA a target to aim for in the digital future, where smart technologies (surrounding infocomm and media) will hopefully transform the already smart nation into a smarter one.

Singapore’s smart nation status is not unjustified, and the initiatives rolled out along with IMDA’s launch should be an example for other countries looking to take the leap forward into the digital future.

>> Gabriel Lim, CEO, IMDA

‘Segments of the population enabled by

technology are running ahead of a segment that

is left behind with no internet connection’


pache is a public charity based in the US that facilitates the

development of open source projects for the public good in a vendor-neutral environment.

In November, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) hosted ApacheCon in Seville, Spain, not only to celebrate its 17th ‘birthday’ but to further instil this open source community’s core principles that have been with it since the beginning: the ‘Apache way’.

The Apache way has been firmly ingrained into the running of the open source community over the past two decades. It is the fundamental reason, according to people that Information Age spoke to at ApacheCon, for the success and growth that Apache has experienced over the years.

Unprecedented growthThere have been no signs that Apache will stop growing. The open source software has expanded at an unprecedented rate and is currently running on 67% of all web servers in the world.

What is behind this growth? Jim Jagielski, a member of the ASF board of directors, suggested some reasons during his keynote speech at

ApacheCon. One reason is the fact that the software is not defined by a temporary alliance of business leaders. ‘Business interests and strategies change, and it is not good to be dependent on this,’ he said.

Of course, the community still values the resources and infrastructure that businesses give to ASF, but there is no

undue influence or ulterior motives on the platform.

‘We are defined by the people who do the work, not by the people who pay their salary,’ said Jagielski. ‘Community matters at the ASF.’

Apache is a 501(c)(3), which is defined as a ‘public charity’, while most other foundations are 501(c)(6), which is defined as a ‘business league’.

As a result, the board of Apache does not get involved. ‘It represents a legal shell around Apache projects,’ said Jagielski.

Indeed, Mark Thomas, a recently appointed member of the ASF board of directors and Tomcat Project Management Committees, told Information Age, ‘The board does not have a say on the technical direction of projects.’

The idea of everyone being a leader where a consensus rules is very much the Apache way.

Honest approachThe Apache way is based on an idea of merit and honesty. It promotes a ‘virtuous cycle’, or sustainable community that brings in more people.

Thomas defined Apache’s ethos as ‘community over code’, adding, ‘A good community can always

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The Apache way17 November marked the 17th year of the Apache Software Foundation. During that time, the platform has seen remarkable growth while maintaining its core principles

>> Jim Jagielski, member of the ASF board of directors

‘We are defined by the people who do the work,

not by the people who pay their salary. Community

matters at the ASF’

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overcome bad code – over time they can always fix the code. But great code will not save a bad community.’

It is this sense of community and collaboration that has seen Apache grow from working on one project to 294. It now has ten project committees and 175 committees.

Seven projects have retired, which Jagielski said ‘is not a bad thing’.

It is very in keeping with Apache’s culture – a cycle of innovation and creativity. Sometimes projects have their day, while others rise through the community’s incubator programme.

A nurturing handThe incubator programme is designed for new projects that want to become an Apache project.

There are currently 59 active projects enrolled on the incubator programme, with 30 new ‘podlings’ set to join.

The point of the Apache incubator is to learn the Apache way and then graduate to a top-level project. Again, this idea of inclusion through a ‘graduate programme’ is representative of the community ties that are embedded within the philosophy of Apache.

Of those in the incubator programme, however, only seven have graduated. Compared with the number enrolled this is low, and not an issue that either Jagielski or Thomas skirted over during their speeches or interviews.

Jagielski highlighted that it is a concern that good projects are ‘getting stuck in this incubation phase’.

Thomas suggested that because the course is so popular there is a problem of scale. ‘Can we actually manage that many in the incubator?’ he asked. The solution, he went on to say, lies in finding more experienced Apache people to help mentor those projects.

Language labApache’s language is not a monoculture. While 59.4% of the projects are associated with Java – which is simply ‘the nature of the beast’, as Jagielski put it – there are blends of other languages that make up the other 40%, such as Ruby and Python.

Nor is it a topic monoculture – there are a variety of categories. 22.3% of ASF projects are categorised under library (a collection of pre-compiled routines that a program can use).

Network servers make up 9.3% of ASF projects and big data 8.6% (‘surprisingly’, said Jagielski).

The whole ethos boils down to investing in resources, not cash: ‘We are defined by people doing work, so we invest in people to improve a project,’ said Jagielski.

Moving forwardThomas made clear that the way Apache is run, from its ethos to its management processes, has remained the same over the past 20 years. What has evolved over time, however, is the scale of growth.

‘Things have changed in terms of how we manage that moving forward and how we organise things. For example, when I joined, infrastructure was a handful of volunteers; now we have paid full-time infrastructure staff. I used to be able to name every single server we owned and what services were running on them; now I can just about name the data centres we’ve got our servers in.’

In terms of moving forward, it is an interesting proposition because the board doesn’t set the direction for the projects. What both Thomas and Jagielski stressed was that expansion and growth are the way forward.

‘On the board, therefore, we are thinking about what structures we need to put in place to support that growth,’ remarked Jagielski.

Ultimately, Apache’s survival and continued success lies in its open source foundation. It naturally self-preserves and is business friendly.

ASF certainly acts as a catalyst for innovation through collaboration, by building communities that focus on common problems. This, combined with the Apache way, differentiates the open source software in the marketplace.


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Digital transformationIn a number of companies,

digital management and strategy is now more important than information management, with some CIOs even reporting to the CDO.

The new concerns of digital transformation, such as a brand focus and coordinating relationships, rather than operations, are often very alien for some verticals.

‘Manufacturing and logistics are two strong examples,’ says Phil Lewis, EMEA VP for solution consulting at Infor. ‘These types of businesses are realising that they need more than just technology.’

A complete framework – from the establishment of strategy to the design, assembly and running of the digitally enabled offerings – is required in 2017.

‘That is a huge shift in mindset,’ says Lewis, ‘but one that is very close indeed.’

The Internet of ThingsThe Internet of Things (IoT)

will finally come into its own in 2017. Organisations will move from exploring ideas around what it means for them in theory to rolling out sensors across key opportunity areas to gather data from what were previously ‘dark’ assets.

The ‘things’ will generate copious amounts of data that will provide organisations with a plethora of new

insights, from physical asset utilisation and optimisation to proactive maintenance.

Organisations that take IoT seriously will see customers, data and subsequent opportunities in completely new ways, and having more and more data sources available ensures all decisions are backed by fact.

‘It’s Metcalfe’s Law,’ says Richard Alexander, CTO at Logicalis UK. ‘The value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users. Data is the network, and each thing is another user.’

However, really exploiting the IoT opportunity, especially at scale, will take proper planning and investment. Organisations will need a strategy to address IoT, identifying quick wins that further the business case for future initiatives.

‘The correct platform is key – an infrastructure for “things”,’ says Alexander. ‘The platform that forms the basis for the connectivity of the things to the network will need to be robust – it is likely to be a mix of wired and wireless.

‘And because it’s unlikely to be a separate infrastructure, it needs to have the required visibility and control to ensure data is correctly identified, classified and prioritised.’

Security too will be fundamental. Today the things are built for user

convenience, with security a secondary concern. Consequently, IoT represents a massively increased attack surface that is particularly vulnerable to unsophisticated attack.

Cloud2017 will bring an autonomic

approach to cloud computing whereby workloads and resources are intelligently and automatically allocated.

In the same way that humans don’t need to think about breathing, IT won’t need to think about lower-level decisions like workload placement, sizing or configuration, so they can focus on higher-level ways to deliver business value.

Organisations will begin using autonomic, economic-based intelligence to manage multi-cloud environments, with workloads always in the best possible place to provide peak performance.

‘We heard a lot of discussion about hybrid cloud in 2016,’ says Turbonomic CTO Charles Crouchman. ‘But the truth is that the majority of organisations aren’t there yet.’

A truly hybrid cloud allows workloads to be switched seamlessly between cloud environments, whether public or private, depending on the needs of the organisation.

However, most organisations have

Information Age rounds up the enterprise technologies and trends that will drive disruption, transform businesses and define innovation in 2017

Disruption awaits

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‘multi-cloud’ environments in which, barring exceptional circumstances, workloads stay where they were first placed.

An organisation’s private and public clouds have, in most cases, come from separate vendors – each working differently, with their own management tools and interfaces. This adds extra complexity to an already potent mix of challenges.

‘To deliver hybrid cloud, today’s multi-cloud environments need to be treated as an economy in their own right,’ says Crouchman, ‘with resources bought and traded depending on real-time needs, while obeying budgetary rules.’

By ensuring that workloads are placed to deliver the best possible performance at the best possible price, businesses will be able to drive greater value from the cloud, which could, in turn, transform business models.

SDN/NFZThe digital age is forcing

enterprises to be more innovative and agile if they want to stay ahead. At the same time, legacy networks have become increasingly complex and operationally difficult to manage as demand for capacity has soared.

This challenge will only become more difficult over time as technology such as IoT becomes more mainstream. IDC predicts that connectivity levels will rise by 50% this year alone.

In this context, enterprises are moving towards software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) to

balance agility, responsiveness, scalability, cost and security requirements, while simplifying network management.

‘This shift will become far more dramatic in 2017,’ says Tony Judd, MD, UK&I and Nordics at Verizon, ‘as businesses transition from building and managing their own network infrastructure, to a new model of consuming the network as a service through a technology partner.’

In much the same way that businesses have moved towards virtualised data centres and cloud services, more businesses will adopt virtualised network services in 2017 as they seek to capitalise on the capabilities provided by the full range of best-of-breed network technologies.

‘This transition will see the way in which network services are delivered going through an unprecedented shift,’ says Judd. ‘The biggest we’ve seen since the broad adoption of MPLS.’

Cyber securityCyber attacks are becoming

more frequent and costly, and it seems that no organisation size, type or industry is immune.

The latest UK government Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that more than two-thirds of British businesses have experienced a cyber security breach or attack in the past year alone.

Being breached is no longer a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. In order to prepare for the inevitability of a breach, organisations must understand where important data is stored, and regularly

monitor the data to make sure it is safe. ‘2017 will be the year of protecting

the crown jewels of enterprise data,’ says Stuart Clarke, CTO, cyber security at Nuix. ‘Up until recently, companies were forced to cobble together several overlapping tools that were never intended to work with each other, creating a sort of security Frankenstein, hoping that the connections between their various tools would work with minimal difficulties.’

The next 12 months will see a change in the way security technology helps organisations defend against and detect potential attacks.

The security infrastructure and ecosystem has become so complex that security teams are spending a lot of their time just maintaining security products, rather than focusing on actually securing the business.

Automating security actions will become a key weapon in the fight against threats.

‘The increased use of context and machine learning will help automate security operations,’ says Matt Davies, senior director at Splunk. ‘For example, automatically disabling a user account if it is performing certain actions, as well as highlighting the incidents that security professionals and SOC teams really need to focus on from the noise of everyday alerts.’

Machine learningMachine learning will be a key

driver of value for businesses that are able to truly embed it in their daily

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operations, particularly in the area of security.

There have already been impressive advancements in resource efficiency, as talented researchers have more time to tackle the most complex threats, rather than spend time on mundane tasks.

By enabling them to spend most of their time on challenging and interesting work, companies can attract the best researchers – a critical point given the shortage of skilled researchers and the costs associated with hiring them.

‘Machine learning will no doubt continue to grow in importance in many different fields, as companies start to adopt and really understand how to integrate it into their operations,’ says Hal Lonas, CTO at Webroot. ‘The explosion of data, and the associated boom in analytics used for everything from marketing to epidemiology, will surely find ways to deploy machine learning technologies.’

Machine learning is paving the way for ever more sophisticated security analysis, with a wealth of data now being gathered over time to hone and refine results.

Consequently, 2017 will see a wider adoption of tools that enable the organisation to conduct anomaly analysis.

This will see behavioural analytics applied to network activity to decrease the number of false positives and allow suspicious activity to be more accurately flagged.

‘Such an approach is going to bring real benefits in helping organisations

detect the early steps in the cyber killchain, so that initial probing and reconnaissance behaviours will be easier to spot,’ says James Parry, technical director at Auriga. ‘Earlier detection makes earlier response possible, preventing these attacks from moving from the initial attack stages to a full-blown realisation of the threat.’

Cognitive systemsUntil now, computers have

been programmed by humans to perform pretty specific tasks. Cognitive systems will now ‘learn’ what to do not only from human interaction, but from the data they generate themselves, and data from other machines.

Cognitive systems will be continually reprogramming themselves, each time getting better at what they do. Computers help humans to do things faster, but cognitive systems will expand their ability to make informed decisions.

This extends to being able to predict outcomes based on current information and the consequences of actions. And because it’s a computer, humans can use a far greater base of information from which to draw insight.

‘We humans are really bad at remembering a lot of information at the same time, but computers are only constrained by the amount of data they can hold in memory,’ says Logicalis UK’s Alexander. ‘Just like the IoT, we’re at somewhat of a tipping point with autonomous technologies. If you consider the sheer number of devices

or “things” that will be connected to the internet, it will become a necessity for devices to operate autonomously and with cognition.’

The networked enterpriseIn early 2016, the collaboration

marketplace became increasingly overcrowded and, despite an irreversible shift to the cloud, the enterprise stack still trailed behind consumer adoption. The market is now going beyond tipping point.

Organisations are now developing serious cloud strategies for enterprise collaboration. With this in mind, in 2017 a new concept will need to be considered.

The networked enterprise defines how organisations start to connect and integrate their cloud collaboration investments and strategies together in a way that drives not only productivity gains but better insight and, ultimately, automation.

It will see cloud being used to its full potential, disrupting more traditional and clunky collaboration methods, and helping to transform business models and operations.

‘As an industry, we’ve worked through the art of simple email exchanges, internal networking and file syncing,’ says Rasmus Holst, COO at Huddle. ‘Collaboration within the networked enterprise will instead be about harnessing the ecosystem – connecting not only content, but people and applications in a predictive way. This will give people back the time to focus on the more important things.’

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storageage

Information Age previews the storage landscape in 2017 – from the technologies that businesses will implement to the new challenges they will face

Storage in 2017

he enthusiastic outsourcing to the cloud by enterprise

CIOs in 2016 will start to tail off in 2017, as finance directors discover that the high costs are not viable long-term. Board-level management will try to reconcile the alluring simplicity they bought into against the lack of visibility into hardware and operations.

As enterprises attempt to solve the issue of maximising a return for using the cloud, many will realise that the arrangement they are in may not be suitable across the board and seek to bring some of their data back in-house.

It will sink in that using cloud for small data sets can work really well in the enterprise, but as soon as the volume of data grows to a sizeable amount, the outsourced model becomes extremely costly.

Enterprises will extract the most value from their IT infrastructures through hybrid cloud in 2017, keeping a large amount of data on-premise using private cloud and leveraging key aspects of public cloud for distribution, crunching numbers and cloud compute, for example.

‘The combined cost of managing all storage from people, software and

full infrastructure is getting very expensive as retention rates on varying storage systems differ,’ says Matt Starr, CTO at Spectra Logic. ‘There is also the added pressure of legislation and compliance as more people want or need to keep everything forever.

‘Throughout 2017, disk will struggle to keep up with capacity for the enterprise, and here we expect to see tape taking a leadership position, specifically for companies looking to keep their data long-term.’

Turning up the heatAway from cloud, a major advancement that will bring change to the storage industry in 2017 is heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).

This method uses lasers to heat the high-stability media before magnetically recording data, and is predicted to increase the limit of magnetic recording by more than a factor of 100.

To put this in perspective, a digital library of all books written in the world could conceivably be stored on as few as 20 HAMR drives.

After innovation and evolution over several years, current

prototypes of HAMR-based HDDs bear

witness to the potential and feasibility of the technology.

Next year will be a critical stage in the process

of testing and evaluating the ways

in which it can be incorporated into data

centres and other existing infrastructure environments.

‘With strong potential for wider rollout in the next couple of years, HAMR is currently one of the most exciting and viable technologies facing the storage market,’ says Seagate’s senior director for EMEA cloud initiatives, Joe Fagan.

Another interesting emerging technology is DNA storage, which is currently gaining in popularity. However, though its durability and density make it a very plausible data

of new data centres to be hybrid

by 2020

70%

T

Fagan expects

medium, for now it’s too expensive and doesn’t scale well.

‘I don’t think it’s likely to become a mainstream storage option for a good few years yet,’ says Fagan. ‘But there is a great deal of potential there.’

The issue with DNA isn’t storing the data – it’s how to get it back in a reproducible manner. To get the data back and be able to read it, users may need an expensive reader or microscope.

The same issues occurred with optical tape and holographic storage. The reader and costs are the last hurdles to jump and typically put this type of exploratory research on hold.

‘We predict no significant uptick on storage spend in 2017, and certainly no drastic doubling of spend,’ says Starr. ‘You will see the transition from rotational to flash. Budgets aren’t keeping up with the rates that data is increasing.’

The prospect of a hybrid data centre will, however, trigger more investment eventually. The model is a more efficient capacity tier based on pure object storage at the drive level and above this a combination of high-performance HDD (hard disk drives) and SSD (solid state drives).

Hybrid technology has been used successfully in laptops and desktop computers for years, but it’s only just beginning to be considered for enterprise-scale data centres.

While the industry is in the very early stages of implementing this new method for enterprise, Fagan expects 70% of new data centres to be hybrid by 2020.

‘This is a trend that I expect to briskly pick up pace,’ he says. ‘As the need for faster and more efficient storage becomes more pressing, we must all look to make smart plans for the inevitable data deluge.’

The data landscapeOn the vendor side, storage firms will have to look at producing even higher density solutions in 2017 as big data use continues to grow within businesses. The winners will be those that bring new technologies to market quickly.

Storage companies will also begin to shift from simply providing hardware to offering businesses the level of service they need. The storage that supports this will take a back seat as IT becomes a line-of-business conversation.

‘Data management and protection are the biggest issues in the world of data at the moment,’ says Laurence James, products, alliances and solutions manager for NEMEA at NetApp. ‘Providers must ensure that they are equipping businesses with everything they need to be agile as new regulations are introduced.’

The most significant regulation facing businesses is the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force in 2018 and will subject businesses to fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover if they don’t implement a comprehensive data governance policy.

And there’s no getting around GDPR with Brexit. The Information Commissioner’s Office has made it


>> Joe Fagan, senior director for EMEA cloud initiatives, Seagate

‘With strong potential for wider rollout in the next couple of years, HAMR is currently one of the most

exciting and viable technologies facing the

storage market’

storageage


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clear that data protection rules will follow those outlined in GDPR – and besides, the UK won’t be leaving the EU until 2019 at the earliest.

Companies must evaluate where they are right now, and how much work is needed. Marketers will be affected by new rules on opt-in acceptance, and IT teams will have to consider storage of customer data across the business. Collaboration across departments will be required to ensure compliance.

‘GDPR will be the big issue for companies in the UK,’ says Dave Packer, VP of corporate and product marketing at Druva. ‘While there’s a lot of awareness of GDPR in general, I don’t think most IT professionals currently understand quite how much they will have to change in how companies work with data. There will be so much more emphasis on data across the organisation as a whole.’

Young loyaltyUnsurprisingly, the biggest pain point for IT professionals is cost of management, automation and optimisation. This is why the storage industry is pivoting to focus on service delivery rather than how storage operates.

By ensuring that storage offers additional services that exactly meet the needs of the business that’s using it, providers can ensure that their customers are getting the best possible return on their investment.

Meanwhile, with younger customers increasingly loyal to an experience rather than a brand, IT professionals

are having to look at how they address this.

Data is a valuable business tool for providing the level of insight required to create these experiences, but companies need to be able to access this insight quickly or risk losing both customers and sales.

‘If you’re going to go and buy a new system that will hold your customer-facing, revenue-generating website,’ says James, ‘it needs to be quick, reliable and efficient, and storage providers need to make sure that they’re producing the solutions to support this.’

The world is only just learning how to get the most out of mass digital information, and it will be some years yet before it can provide truly discerning business insights.

However, the companies that will succeed are those that accept that technological investment must be planned to ensure the reliable management and safeguarding of data, and that businesses ultimately get the most from the data they create and store.

On a business-by-business basis, the key success factor in navigating these waters will be in realising that storage considerations have an essential part to play in functional and cost-effective infrastructure planning.

‘They need to be as strategic and imperative as choosing the right CRM system or app development tool,’ says Fagan. ‘Making the right choice at the right time is a significant step in the direction of future-proofing the business in a fast-changing market.’

>> Dave Packer, VP of corporate and product marketing, Druva

‘While there’s a lot of awareness of GDPR in general, I don’t think most IT professionals currently understand quite how much they

will have to change in how companies work

with data’


networkage


networkage

Scaling for webWeb-scale IT refers to a global standard of computing that allows enterprise IT to deliver quick, innovative and personalised services to customers in a similar way to large cloud service providers. Are businesses ready for it?

artner introduced the term web-scale IT in 2013. A year

later, it predicted that by 2017 web-scale IT would be an architectural approach found operating in up to 50% of global enterprises.

Large cloud service providers like Amazon, Google and Facebook have changed how IT services can be delivered. Adopting this dynamic architectural approach in enterprise is what is web-scale IT in action: achieving the same incredible levels of agility and scalability found in cloud providers.

For global enterprises, achieving reduced costs, highly personalised offerings and a more secure infrastructure capability similar to global cloud providers is the promised land. Web-scale IT represents the route to a more flexible, agile and efficient operation that defines the large cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft’s Azure.

Web-scale IT reduces the time it takes IT departments to respond to business needs, and in this sense it is desirable. Efficiency and proficiency

are what enterprises strive for and is why more of them are looking to incorporate the strategy into their business operations.

But first it is important to understand exactly what constitutes web-scale IT, what the challenges are

in implementing it and what the cultural and technological shifts are that have to be adopted.

So what exactly is web-scale IT? There has been some confusion since the term was coined a few years ago.

Patrick Hubbard, technical product marketing director at SolarWinds, says, ‘Some advocates have suggested that hyper-converged systems are the same as web-scale IT, but that is not correct.’

Instead, suggests Hubbard, web- scale IT provides consistent service interfaces in a highly heterogeneous infrastructure, with many specialised components and software. ‘In contrast, hyper-converged infrastructure is based on extreme homogeneity, providing a modular scale-out but based on the familiar storage, virtualisation and compute management they already know.’

Effectively, web-scale IT is the process that describes an enterprise’s attempts to build its own data centre, like AWS or Azure, but on a significantly smaller scale.

Despite the smaller scale of the enterprise data centre, it still ‘requires the same expertise, investment and hardware’ of a bigger data centre, reinforces Hubbard. ‘It is

G

‘The internet is the transport of choice,

improving overall availability, access,

performance and end-user experience’

>> Andy Kennedy, senior engineering manager, Zscaler


networkage

not for the faint-hearted; nor is it as simple as moving to [open source cloud platform] OpenStack.’

Uber scalable The benefits of integrating web-scale IT into enterprise operations and applications are vast: uplifting revenue, reducing cost, improving IT control and mitigating risk. These buzzwords, however, are just that – buzzwords.

To appreciate the transformation that will follow a web-scale IT strategy it is necessary to have a case study to relate to.

Macquarie Bank is a good example of a business adopting such a strategy. It is an Australian bank that used the example of apps like Uber as a method of rating competition, rather than other banking apps. The bank uses DataStax Enterprise (DSE) to power things such as search and machine learning, so that customers can search for things like ‘how much did I spend in McDonald’s last month’ and get a result.

‘What entices customers to spend time on Spotify rather than on their banking app?’ asks Luis Uguina, chief digital officer for Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group. ‘What can we do to make the service so useful it will stay on their home screen? We looked at the technology used by leading digital companies such as Netflix and saw an opportunity to bring that level of personalised and intuitive customer experience to banking.’

The advantage of using web-scale IT is that it allows an enterprise

to introduce more succinct and innovative technologies in order to create a more personalised service.

In the case of Macquarie Bank, the integrated technologies, like machine learning, allowed it to focus on delivering a heightened experience to its customers, while adding value.

A good example of this is the soon-to-be-introduced graph technology on DSE, which will enhance the multi-model capability

of the platform. This will allow the bank to offer more sophisticated personalised recommendations, advice and experience faster and more efficiently than was possible before.

By moving architectures, businesses can ‘run real-time, high-volume applications on a high-IOPS, low-latency platform’, says Tom Wilde, head of solutions engineering at Cogeco Peer 1.

‘It’s not so much that customers are simply trying to replicate Facebook and Google, server by server. It’s more that they can see the direction that hardware is heading and, as software takes over storage and network, they realise that they can do more with fewer resources.’

The desire to introduce web-scale IT, restructuring a business’s IT foundation, is reflected by the array of business benefits it brings to enterprise operations. So how does an organisation go about instigating this widespread transformation?

Achieving web-scale ITHardware is key. ‘In previous years, organisations had a fairly limited number of vendors from which to source their hardware, whether the need was for servers, storage devices or network equipment,’ said Cameron Haight, research vice president at Gartner back in 2014.

Now the large cloud service providers have tipped that on its head. ‘Data centre design goes beyond redesigning facilities to be more energy efficient to also include in-house design of key hardware

‘Hyper-converged infrastructure is based

on extreme homogeneity, providing a modular

scale-out but based on the familiar storage,

virtualisation and compute management

they already know’

>> Patrick Hubbard, technical product marketing director, SolarWinds


components such as servers, storage and networks’, comments Haight. ‘Web-oriented architectures allow developers to build very flexible and resilient systems that recover from failure more quickly.’

While not on as large a scale, global enterprises require these similarly capable structures.

This is the transformation stage, where enterprises move to a platform where ‘the internet is the transport of choice, improving overall availability, access, performance and end-user experience’, remarks Andy Kennedy, senior engineering manager at Zscaler.

Initially, it is important to have a clear vision of how applying web-scale IT will impact a business’s objectives. It is important that everyone has a clear idea of the desired outcomes. Clarity is essential because it can be a long, arduous road.

Know your limitsBuilding your own infrastructure is costly, so it is essential that going down the path to web-scale IT is the right choice for a business considering its goals and capabilities.

Indeed, it is important to know your limits. For example, when considering an average mid-sized enterprise with, say, 2,000 employees and 400 servers, the cost of web-scale IT infrastructure just doesn’t make sense, suggests Jeremy Humphrey, technology practice director at Roc Technologies. Reviewing existing infrastructure is crucial.

Once the strategy is decided, however, it’s fairly easy to implement,

according to Jason Dance, managing director of BigTec. When the architecture is in place it is ‘extremely robust and has no single point of failure’, he says.

However, there are some challenges – both ethical and practical – that

surround delivering web-scale IT.Web-scale IT replaces the more

mundane jobs performed by the IT department. Storage managers within these departments could be at risk because they are no longer needed to deal with complications surrounding the hardware as the virtualisation layer is often abstracted from the underlying hardware.

Equally, network congestion can occur, according to Kennedy, with users from different offices around the world facing slow connectivity when trying to access office applications that rest within the cloud.

While there are challenges in delivering web-scale IT, it is evident that in reality the strategy’s significant benefits outweigh them. As mentioned, the real hindrance to adoption comes from the high in-house costs – it must be worth it.

The leap of faithMoving forward into 2017, there is likely to be a surge in enterprise adoption of web-scale IT. This is because the maturity of the hyper-converged, legacy infrastructure is increasing and, in turn, the price point of implementing web-scale IT will go down. It will become ‘somewhat mainstream’, suggests Humphrey.

While mid-size enterprises probably won’t envisage an immediate future involving web-scale IT, the agility, reliability and cost savings that this strategy offers make it a desirable option for those looking to expand their offerings.

networkage

‘It’s not so much that customers are simply

trying to replicate Facebook and Google,

server by server. It’s more that they can see

the direction that hardware is heading

and, as software takes over storage and

network, they realise that they can do more with fewer resources’

>> Tom Wilde, head of solutions engineering, Cogeco Peer 1


securityage

rotecting personal data should be a top priority for organisations

across a range of industries. Currently, data breaches are dominating headlines, and while companies suffer corporate embarrassment, financially the consequences are minimal.

From 25 May 2018, however, that will all change. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect from this date, and from that point organisations that don’t protect customer data adequately will be committing financial suicide.

At the moment fines are tame. TalkTalk was fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in October after 157,000 personal account details were stolen a year earlier.

If the same data breach occurs post-GDPR, the fine will be closer to £70 million. From a business standpoint, therefore, it will be crucial to protect personal data.

Robert Hoffmann, CEO of 1&1 Internet SE, suggests that Tesco Bank, after it was hacked in November this year, would be liable for a fine upwards of £1.94 billion if the regulation was in effect today.

The initial financial fallout,

however, is probably not even the worst part. In a world of fierce competition, with disruptors coming from all angles, maintaining customer loyalty is more important than ever.

Using TalkTalk as the example again, after the breach its share price fell and it was fined, but it also began to lose customers (and lots of them).

By May 2016, TalkTalk’s profits had halved and 98,000 broadband users had left the provider. The situation has steadied since then, and in August it added 48,000 mobile users to its books and 36,000 fibre customers. However, this was most likely a result of slashed deals and an expensive marketing campaign. The London Underground is lined with TalkTalk promotions.

The point is, protecting customer data should be a top business priority moving forward, because post-GDPR no prisoners will be taken.

However, financial fallouts aside, businesses have an ethical responsibility to protect customer data, and new regulations will ensure this.

The ethical challengeConsumer data is the figurative lifeblood of many organisations. It sustains them. A company must make a competitive return for its shareholders, but it should do so in an ethical way.

The same principles that guide an individual’s understanding of right and wrong should determine business practice. The line between using a customer’s data and abusing it is fine, but there is a distinction.

‘Fair use of customer data,’ defines Jocelyn Paulley, director of Gowling

Protecting data is more important than ever in an era of stricter regulations, where businesses have an obligation to honour the privacy of customers

Private eye

P

>> Jocelyn Paulley, director, Gowling WLG

‘Fair use of customer data is when the person

or business collecting the data has been open and transparent about what they intend to do

with that data’


WLG, ‘is when the person or business collecting the data has been open and transparent about what they intend to do with that data. Where there is transparency, there will be no exploitation.’

At the beginning of 2016, this issue was raised in the US. A group of privacy watchdogs called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to increase privacy regulations on broadband providers.

The groups argued that broadband providers, such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, would exploit the wide-ranging data they had access to in

order to target people with advertisements, according to Reuters. They added that the issue could ‘increase the potential for discriminatory practices derived from data use’.

This scenario is one example of how easy it would be to cross that invisible ethical line that resides within an individual’s mind and a business’s core of operations. If as an organisation you are using customer data for one thing, like providing broadband, and you then begin using that data to enhance revenues through other modes, like advertising, an ethical issue arises.

Drawing a lineUsing customer data in the right way but also to the benefit of the organisation is achievable. Personalising offers or customising promotions is not an abuse if a company is transparent about how it will use a person’s data. It shouldn’t be moving in the shadows.

The ICO highlights the necessity of transparency in complying with both the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and, even more so, the impending GDPR.

The most common way to provide this information to a customer is via a privacy notice. Under the current law of the DPA, an organisation must detail who they are, what they are going to do with a person’s information and who the information will be shared with.

These are the basic foundations on

which all privacy notices should be built. Post-GDPR, however, these basic moral principles, like the more stringent financial consequences, will be expanded and enhanced.

This is representative of the hyper-connected state of the world. As data has become increasingly accessible, so has the scope to abuse it.

‘The real challenge,’ says Paulley, ‘is how to tell people as clearly and simply as possible about how their data may be used without that information becoming an annoyance and ruining the user experience, and how to keep that information current when it constantly changes as companies adopt new plans and find new uses for data.’

GDPR is rising to this challenge.

Privacy post-GDPRGDPR includes rules on giving privacy information to data subjects in Articles 12, 13 and 14, according to the ICO. These are more detailed and specific than in the DPA and place an emphasis on making privacy notices

understandable and accessible. The GDPR says that the

information provided to people about

processing personal data must be concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible;

written in clear and plain language,

particularly if addressed to a child;

and free of charge.Indeed, in this new regulatory

landscape, ‘brands will need to be clear, unambiguous and precise as to what they will do with data, including

securityage

59%of data held by UK firms is dark, meaning no one

knows its contents or even where it is stored

‘The industry has failed to educate organisations

on how to manage their security and get the

basics right first. This has led to a complete

lack of understanding around the value of the

digital information held by most organisations’

>> Jamie Gallagher, general manager, RelianceACSN

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securityage

a separate permission to use data to “profile” an individual’, remarks Antony Humphreys, key account manager at Adestra.

‘An individual should have the right to access personal data held by the business and to have his or her personal data deleted. These are the requirements set forth in the EU’s GDPR,’ comments Carl Spataro, VP, deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer at MobileIron.

GDPR enforces stricter rules and is a response to the privacy needs of today, but even the best intentioned might fall at the first hurdle.

Securing the dataSecuring the data should be the first step in an organisation’s journey towards compliance, but is the most prone to risk and failure.

Readers will be aware of the daily battle that organisations face trying to stave off cyber attacks and subsequent data breaches. This constant fight against cybercriminals is where privacy in the digital age will be won or lost.

Identifying and locating the data that is at risk is the first challenge in securing it. In this regard, the ethical practice of a company could be regarded as a moot point.

‘No matter how honest a firm’s approach, there is often a technology issue – not an ethical one – that causes a lack of data visibility,’ says Tamzin Evershed, legal director at Veritas.

‘Over half (59%) of data held by UK companies is dark, meaning that no one, including senior management, knows its contents or even where it is stored. This problem is only set to get worse, with an expected 44 zettabytes of data in the world by 2020.’

It is true that at the moment the situation looks quite bleak – a view shared by Jamie Gallagher, general manager at RelianceACSN.

‘The security industry is broken. Companies employ a mix-and-match patchwork of tools that has lulled them into a false sense of security. But the industry has failed to educate organisations on how to manage their security and get the basics right first. This has led to a complete lack of understanding around the value of the digital information held by most organisations.’

However, there is a flip side. Before 2000, everyone was scared about the Millennium Bug, so they made lots of changes to their systems and used it

as an opportunity to modernise them. GDPR should have the same effect.

Currently, businesses are on the losing side of the cyber battle. But the impending GDPR has, to an extent, shaken board members, or the C-suite, out of their apathy.

Jes Breslaw, director of marketing and strategy, EMEA at Delphix, acknowledges this: ‘Data governance is coming to a head. Companies are going to be forced to have, from the top down, a data protection policy that seeks to put people, process and tools in place to deal with this.’

Privacy in the digital ageThe digital economy is becoming increasingly entwined with the traditional economy, and it is driving progress and innovation. Data is the essential cog in this machine, and GDPR goes some way to protect it.

Every organisation must have ethical codes in place when dealing with the privacy of customers’ personal data. The majority adheres to this, and for those that don’t the new chief data protection officer (CDPO) – a requirement for big enterprises under GDPR – would most likely find out and report them. These individuals will own a company’s data and are immune to whistle-blowing.

The biggest threat to privacy in the digital age comes from lacklustre cyber security defences.

As the 2018 GDPR deadline approaches, there will be a greater demand for more ferocious and effective security services and solutions – ones that can detect a threat as well as prevent it.

Advanced algorithms, AI and advanced machine learning will increasingly represent privacy in the digital age.

>> Carl Spataro, VP, deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer, MobileIron

‘An individual should have the right to access

personal data held by the business and to have his or her personal data

deleted. These are the requirements set forth

in the EU’s GDPR’

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in the boardroom

hat is the backstory of Darktrace and its technology?

The company was founded in 2013 by folk from GCHQ and MI5 along with mathematicians from the University of Cambridge – specialists in unsupervised learning.

The legacy approach to cyber security was to build walls around the outside of the network, and there were a lot of different approaches to securing the perimeter with the thought that you could keep the bad guys out.

The reality, and especially coming from the intelligence community, is that attackers can get into any network, given a number of approaches and an amount of time. Therefore, we turned the problem around to make light of what’s going on inside the network and to find threats early as people start to manoeuvre though the network in unusual ways.

We basically created an approach that worked very much like the human immune system, in that you can use machine learning to develop a sense of self – a normal pattern of life for every user and device in the network – and based on that find out when things are not normal.

How unique is Darktrace’s AI technology?It is very unique, and the world leaders in the unsupervised machine learning approach are based in the UK.

If you look at machine learning, there are two pools of thought. The most common is that you use data sets to train the machine learning. For example, in cyber security you would ask the computer to show all of the malware that ever existed, and you would use that as a training set. Then you’d ask the computer to show everything that looks kind of like that.

The reality is that there are a lot of unknown threats out there, and there is much besides malware – insider threats, IoT attacks and all kinds of unknown threats that those types of training methods would miss.

The other thing is, no matter how well you train something in a lab, it’s different from the real world. And if you look at how companies operate, even two global banks operate entirely differently from one another – their network architectures are completely different. So it really takes the unsupervised approach that Darktrace uses, which means we have no prior knowledge – we just use machine

learning to learn in real time from network traffic.

This approach of learning in the real world is a difficult problem to solve, especially when it comes to cyber, but Darktrace has been able to crack the code and get it to work. We’ve deployed it now more than 1,500 times, and it’s working in everything from large global banks and airlines to e-commerce.

How important is AI in the fight against cybercrime and cyber espionage?If you take a look back at where cyber threats started, we heard about credit cards being stolen and websites being defaced. After that, we started to evolve into what I call trust attacks, so not just for monetary gain but to actually try to get society to learn to lose trust.

The attack on the Democratic Party’s servers in the US was exactly that: something to try to get society to lose trust in democracy. There are other examples that we’ve seen in financial systems and legal markets.

I think this trust attack route was the next phase, and we’ll see them for some time to come. However, beyond that, about four months ago with a client in India, Darktrace saw a new novel attack

Robot warsInformation Age explores how robots are fighting other robots in the current cyber landscape with Nicole Eagan, CEO of the UK’s most funded artificial intelligence company

W

in the boardroom

that, once it got inside the network, used AI to try to learn to how that network and its users behaved. And it tried to blend into the background of the noisy network. Had we not used our own machine learning to spot it quickly, it would never have been detected.

It’s almost impossible for humans to spot these AI attacks, so it’s rapidly becoming an arms race of machines against machines – AI versus AI.

I think we’ll especially see that in state-sponsored attacks, where you can imagine countries using mathematicians and AI specialists to create these kinds of attacks. If the attackers start using AI, the logical way – probably the only way – to defend against that is for the good guys to use AI to get ahead.

How will the growing importance of AI influence the role of humans in cyber security?Humans are incredibly important in the cyber security world. Machine learning and AI technology is going to be used to detect the threats automatically, but you need humans to understand the business context of that and determine how worrying the threat is and what should be done about it.

After AI starts detecting the threats – which is what Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System does, automatically detecting and visualising those threats for humans to make a decision on what

to do about it – the next phase will be to automatically take action.

What we see right now is people wanting to have the AI make a suggestion about what a company should do regarding the attacks it has identified. Most importantly, what we see at the moment is the AI being used to slow down the attack, giving humans time to catch up and make decisions about what to do, how to

respond, what the business context is and what the implications would be.

What has been the secret of Darktrace’s fast growth? How have you scaled the company over the past three years?It’s been a great growth success story. In our three short years we’ve grown to 330 employees, with our headquarters in Cambridge and offices around the world. We have also raised a tremendous amount of money, including our Series C round back in July led by KKR, a global growth investor. To date, we have raised $91 million.

We now have a valuation of just under $500 million. Part of the reason for that is that we have over 350 large global customers and 1,500 deployments of the Darktrace appliance. We have now reached a total contract value through our SaaS subscription model of more than $100 million, which is virtually unheard of in a B2B business in this amount of time.

We’ve attracted investors because we’ve found a true market need – in our case cyber defence – and demonstrated how to apply AI to it. Another reason for the success is how we’ve got machine learning to work at scale without needing an army of consultants. That is really the huge win on the technology front – getting AI to work without humans having to manually support or tune it.

‘It’s almost impossible for humans to spot

these AI attacks, so it’s rapidly becoming an

arms race of machines against machines –

AI versus AI’

>> Nicole Eagan, CEO, Darktrace


hat is your role? What are your responsibilities

day-to-day? I’m the CIO for Canon

EMEA. My role involves running all the IT operations – all the IT we need to support our internal business processes, as well as how we interact with our customers in all elements.

It also involves labelling our key transformation processes when it comes to IT, because there is very little nowadays that we do without any information technologies.

How has your role changed, and what challenges have you come up against in implementing your IT strategy?The traditional role of IT has been to support the back-office processes, and indeed at Canon, like many other companies, we have been very involved in expanding the digital nature of work across departments. This has to do with how we interact with our customers, which of course has changed over time. Right now we are involved in various digital expansion projects in a number of areas.

There are several challenges. When you’re implementing technologies to support your interactions with customers, privacy is a very important matter – especially in Europe, where

there are strict regulations. Also, it is an increasingly changing

landscape compared with when you built the systems to support your financial or supply chain processes. So the way we work in those areas is much more agile. We need to be able to adapt much more quickly. It has had a profound effect on how we work.

What internal strategies are you changing?We are doing a few things there. One thing I would mention is that we have really put some effort into strengthening collaboration internally.

We’re using the whole suite of the Microsoft platform around Office 365 and Skype for Business. We are becoming digital internally, and that is a really important aspect for us as well because it is very difficult to interact more digitally with customers if we don’t have that in our DNA.

We’re taking strides in all kinds of directions. We’re using video much more than we did in the past, to hold video conferences and have quite big meetings with people in different locations. The use of Skype has now become a very common thing that people do several times a day, which of course is also a factor in productivity.

The other example I would mention is

‘The traditional role of IT for many years has

been to support the back-office processes, and indeed at Canon,

like many other companies, we have

been very involved in expanding the digital nature of work across

departments’

>> Caroline Serfass, CIO, Canon Europe

in the boardroom

Digital DNAAs departments across businesses implement their own digital strategies, the role of the CIO is changing. To understand this transition, Information Age spoke to Caroline Serfass, CIO at Canon Europe

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43 November/December 16 information-age.com

on the business process. We’re working on the business processes from the back office that support our finance and supply chain, and this is probably the biggest programme I’m leading right now.

We’re bringing together the different parts of the business, including a big company that Canon acquired a few years ago called Océ. We’re bringing everyone onto a single ERP landscape on a set of standardised properties with the same IT solutions. We call it One Template. We’re in the process of deploying it in our 19 major markets.

This is a multi-year project and we are just in the middle of it. We are in transition between the current landscape, which is quite fragmented for historical reasons, and bringing everyone together in a single solution. The benefits will be realised when we’ve completed.

In terms of adapting, have you overseen any new innovations?Yes, we are using bimodal IT. This involves two modes of working. The mode that is required in a more digital world involves agile methodologies.

This refers to a much closer relationship between the business units and IT. It is not your typical linear process with someone saying what they want and then IT developing it. It’s more a joint effort with very small iterations. So the whole process is

shorter. We’re talking about weeks, not months, to turn things around. We’re also introducing more automation in the delivery of the solutions.

What other technologies are you using to improve the business?If I think about our consumer business, I think about getting the consumer more directly involved. The types of technologies that will aid this are, for example, developing an e-commerce channel that allows our customers to leave reviews and, in turn, become more involved with the process.

We have also invested in a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, where basically you enable an omni-channel approach so that you build more knowledge about customers to be able to really respond to what they are interested in, in a much better

way. To really make them feel that we are an important part in how they take images, how they print images, how they digitalise images.

How will IT processes move forward at Canon?Our ambition for Canon in general is that we want to grow in our traditional areas: on one side cameras and imaging solutions, and on the other side the printing business.

But we’re also investing in new, very exciting areas to ensure that Canon moves forward by expanding our offering to our existing customers through areas like network visual solutions, where our ambition is to become number one in the world.

Mixed reality is another area where we have really exciting technology for the B2B area, and finally 3D printing.

in the boardroom

artner’s predictions examine three core areas of digital

innovation: experience and engagement, business innovation, and the secondary effects that result from increased digital capabilities.

Daryl Plummer, managing VP and chief of research at Gartner, said the predictions offer a ‘provocative look’ at some of the most critical areas of technology evolution.

‘At the core of future outcomes is the notion of digital disruption, which has moved from an infrequent inconvenience to a consistent stream of change that is redefining markets and entire industries,’ said Plummer. ‘Last year we said digital changes were coming fast. This year the acceleration continues and may cause secondary effects that have wide-ranging impact on people and technology.’

Gartner’s predictions are as follows.

By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality

The popularity of augmented reality (AR) applications, such as Pokémon GO, will help bring AR into the mainstream, prompting more retailers to incorporate it into the shopping experience.

As mobile device usage becomes an ingrained behaviour, further blurring

the lines between the physical and digital worlds, brands and their retail partners will need to develop mechanisms to leverage this behaviour to enhance the shopping experience.

Using AR applications to layer digital information — text, images, video and audio — on top of the physical world represents one such route to deeper engagement, both in-store and in other locations.

For example, a consumer pointing the IKEA catalogue app at a room in his home can ‘place’ furniture where he’d like it to go. This real-world element differentiates AR apps from those offering virtual reality (VR).

By 2020, 30% of web browsing will be done without a screen

New audio-centric technologies, such as Google Home and Amazon’s Echo, are making access to dialogue-based information ubiquitous and spawning new platforms based on ‘voice-first’ interactions.

By eliminating the need to use one’s hands and eyes for browsing, vocal interactions extend the utility of web sessions to contexts such as driving, cooking, walking, socialising, exercising and operating machinery.

As a result, the share of waking hours devoid of instant access to online resources will approach zero.

The digital future

analyst eye

Analyst firm Gartner has revealed its top ten predictions for IT organisations and users in 2017 and beyond

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analyst eye

By 2019, 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps

Many brands are finding that the level of adoption, customer engagement and return on investment delivered by their mobile applications is significantly less than the expectations that underpinned their app investment.

New approaches are emerging that have a lower barrier to discovery and install, and offer levels of engagement that approach those of applications at a fraction of the investment, support and marketing cost.

Many companies will evaluate these experiences against their underperforming applications and opt to reduce their losses by allowing their apps to expire.

By 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behaviour of

more than 1 billion global workersContextualisation algorithms have advanced exponentially to include a variety of behavioural interventions such as psychology, social neuroscience and cognitive science. Human beings tend to be emotionally charged and factually drained, causing them to act irrationally.

Algorithms can positively alter that behaviour by augmenting their intelligence with the large collective

memory bank containing knowledge that has been socialised and put to the test.

This will help workers ‘remember’ anything or be informed of just-in-time knowledge that they have never even experienced, leaving them to objectively complete the task at hand but also to better appreciate life as it unfolds.

Use of algorithms can raise alarms of ‘creepiness’; however, when used to effect positive outcomes it can bring about changes to multiple industries.

By 2022, a blockchain-based business will be worth $10 billion

Blockchain technology is established as the next revolution in transaction recording. A blockchain ledger provides an immutable, shared view of all transactions between engaging parties.

Parties can therefore act immediately on a committed blockchain record, secure in the knowledge that it cannot be changed. Any kind of value exchange can happen in minutes rather than days.

Blockchain applications can free up cash, reduce transaction costs and accelerate business processes. While blockchain development is still immature, it is attracting product and capital investment.

By 2021, 20% of all activities an individual engages in will

involve at least one of the top seven digital giantsThe current top seven digital giants by revenue and market capitalisation are Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. As the physical, financial and healthcare world becomes more digital, many of the activities an individual engages in will be connected. This convergence means that any activity could include one of the digital giants.

Mobile apps, payment, smart agents (e.g. Amazon Alexa) and digital ecosystems (e.g. Apple HomeKit, WeChat Utility and City Services) will make the digital giants part of many of the activities people undertake.

Through to 2019, every £1 that organisations invest in

innovation will require an additional £7 in core executionFor many organisations, adopting a bimodal IT style to jump-start innovation has been a priority and critical first step. Close alignment of Mode 1 and 2 teams is crucial to the realisation of digital business goals.

Unfortunately, the deployment costs of the Mode 2 ‘ideated solution’ are not necessarily considered during ideation, and for most the Mode 1 costs are not

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analyst eye

Nearly a third of chief data officers (CDOs) report directly to the CEO, and one in six will be a boardroom position by 2020, according to Gartner.

The analyst firm’s CDO survey found that early adopters of the role are pioneering a new organisational function to go alongside IT, business operations, HR and finance.

Organisations that have made the strategic decision to introduce the CDO role are looking to get as much new value as possible from this position.

CDOs are adding to the competitiveness of their companies by contributing to strategic planning and decision-making, and by leading digital business initiatives.

‘The office of the CDO is being established as an operational department with the appropriate staffing, budget and responsibilities,’ said Debra Logan, VP and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research.

More than half of the organisations Gartner surveyed said their CDO office was fully or partially implemented, with a further 20% already exploring, planning to explore or planning to implement one within the next year. Only 19% said they were unlikely to implement.

According to the survey, the main business objectives of the CDO office are to increase customer intimacy (62%), competitive advantage (60%) and efficiency (54%).

Respondents said that the main organisation-wide responsibilities are oversight of analytics initiatives (69%) and data governance (68%). Next come responsibilities for defining the analytics strategy for the organisation

and ensuring information reliability and value (64%).

As the use of data and analytics continues to rise, related crises will continue to plague businesses that fail to implement a CDO office, Gartner said.

‘While only 27% of those surveyed identified a specific data- or analytics-related crisis or problem as their reason for creating the CDO role, some of the other identified objectives point to this,’ said Gartner VP Jamie Popkin. ‘24% per cent of the respondents said that the board of directors wanted the role.

‘Whatever prompted a high degree of board-level involvement in the creation of the new operational function must have had a major operational impact, or been thought likely to have such an impact in the future.

‘The board’s involvement, together with the responses pointing to a specific crisis or problem, and the 41% of respondents who said that the CEO or CFO wanted the role, makes it safe to assume that this was a major strategic decision that

affected business operating models.’The CDO office accommodates a

wide range of roles emphasising data and information management, data quality, business analytics and information architecture.

Most CDOs surveyed said their role will focus on two key responsibilities. Two-thirds said they are acting as a champion or change agent in leading the organisational changes required to create and sustain enterprise data and analytics capabilities, while six in ten said they are leading the effort to ensure that data and analytics are integrated into the business strategy and roadmap.

Most respondents said they have developed positive working relationships with IT leaders. Most early holders of the CDO role said they treat the CIO as an ally or partner, and the relationship between CDO and CIO will remain crucial.

‘Strategy development, decision-making power and funding will be sources of contention between IT leaders and the CDO office as the role of the CDO becomes more broadly established,’ said Popkin.

CDOs move up the ranks

47September 16 information-age.com

analyst eye

factored into the initial funding.Designing, implementing, integrating,

operationalising and managing the ideated solution can be significantly more than the initial innovation costs. Thus, Gartner anticipates that for every £1 spent on the digital innovation/ideation phase, enterprises will spend on average £7 deploying the solution.

Through to 2020, IoT will increase data centre storage

demand by less than 3%The Internet of Things (IoT) has enormous potential for data generation across the 21 billion endpoints expected to be in use in 2020. Of the 900 exabytes of data centre hard-disk drive and solid-state drive capacity forecast to be shipped in 2020, IoT discrete sensor storage will represent only 0.4%, with storage from multimedia sensors consuming another 2%.

This indicates that IoT can scale and deliver important data-driven business value and insight, while remaining manageable from a storage infrastructure standpoint.

By 2022, IoT will save consumers and businesses $1 trillion per

year in maintenance, services and consumablesThe IoT holds enormous promise in reducing the cost of maintenance and consumables. The challenge lies in providing a secure, robust

implementation that can deliver savings over one or two decades, without driving management costs that absorb any savings made.

This could be an inexpensive monitoring system based on simple sensors that report defining characteristics to analytical servers. The analytics are used to spot patterns in the fleet data and recommend maintenance based on actual usage and condition, rather than on elapsed time or estimated condition.

At the other extreme there is the rise of the digital twin, which captures near-real-time data feeds from its sensor-enhanced real-world twin. It uses this along with other data sources (e.g. weather, historical data, algorithms and smart machine analysis) to update its simulation to reflect the physical state of the twin.

By 2020, 40% of employees will be able to cut their healthcare

costs by wearing a fitness trackerCompanies will increasingly appoint fitness programme managers to work closely with human resource leaders to include fitness trackers in wellness programmes as part of a broader employee engagement initiative.

Healthcare providers can save lives and downstream costs by acting on the data from wearable fitness trackers that highlight health risks to the user.

Wearables provide a wealth of data to be analysed, either in real time or in retrospect, with the potential for doctors and other healthcare professionals to have access to both contextual and historical information, if the patient agrees to share it.

8

9

10


Microsoft HoloLensPRODUCT OF THE MONTH

product corner

>> THE STORYThe Microsoft HoloLens is the latest product to try and tap into the commercial possibilities of augmented reality (or ‘mixed reality’). The device itself overlays holograms onto a user’s field of vision. The HoloLens can trace its lineage back to the Kinect, an add-on for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console that was introduced in 2010. The aim of this upgrade was to create a device that improved the efficiency and creativity of real-world business applications based, partially, in the virtual world. The HoloLens was discreetly launched earlier this year, with Microsoft perhaps wary of the mass media storm created by Google for the release of Google Glass, which was a failure. Instead of appealing to the media, HoloLens sought to impress software developers, who would be the ones inevitably using the AR device in transforming business processes.

>> THE FEATURESMicrosoft’s HoloLens produces some amazing visuals with real-world business applications. The device itself is fully equipped with everything needed to have a semi-immersive virtual experience. There is no need for headphones, for example – everything is built into the headset. The device contains the world’s first self-contained holographic computer, with two environment sensors and one depth sensor that allow it to process real-time information. The holographic processing unit (HPU) allows a detailed interaction between

the real world and holograms. It projects holograms into real-world environments so that the user and eventual consumer can achieve an artificial sensory experience unavailable in the physical world. While the visual graphics are impressive, there is some way to go. But for a first-generation AR product there is currently no better. The HoloLens, and AR technology in general, provides an opportunity to transform business processes. The benefits are varied. ‘Geography is no longer an inhibitor,’ says Leila Martine, director of product

marketing at Microsoft. It will save time and money, and reduce the manufacturing process. To pick just one practical example, out of many available, the HoloLens has allowed 24,000 lift service technicians working for ThyssenKrupp Elevator to visualise and identify problems ahead of a job. It also provides them with remote, hands-free access to technical and expert information when on-site. The Developer Edition costs £2,719. Businesses can add tailored apps to the device and be taught to optimise its use at Microsoft’s Holographic Academy.

49

product corner

Apple MacBook Pro 2016

>> THE STORYApple revealed that it had sold 10% fewer Macs in the year ending 24 September than over the prior 12 months. There has been growing interest from both business customers and consumers in Windows 10 computers. Users want PC-grade performance so this Mac refresh has been a necessity for the tech giant.

>> THE FEATURESThe new MacBook Pro will come in 13- and 15-inch size options, in a silver and space grey colour. It features a thin touch-sensitive display above the keyboard and a fingerprint scanner. The interactive Touch Bar is used for software-specific commands such as to display and select bookmarks when using an internet browser and to swipe through photos, while improving the photo editing experience. The Pro has new processors that improve handling of 3D graphics. Both versions of the laptop include four Thunderbolt 3 ports, but there are no longer separate power, HDMI, SD card and USB 3 ports. The 13-inch model is priced at £1,449.

Huawei Nova

>> THE STORYHuawei Nova is the embodiment of the mid-tier mobile phone – those priced in the £300 to £400 range. In recent years it is this area of the mobile market that has experienced the most innovation, offering well-made mobiles at more competitive prices. The Huawei Nova and Nova Plus were made with particular focus on camera quality and long-lasting battery life.

>> THE FEATURESThe Huawei Nova comes in three colours: prestige silver, mystic silver and titanium grey. It supports Android’s Marshmallow OS. The phone’s features include a fingerprint sensor, an accelerometer, a gyro and a compass. The screen’s resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels is particularly impressive, and the camera has a generous 12 megapixels. In terms of memory, it has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. The external microSD card can hold up to 256GB, which is also handy. Other features include a fast battery charging capacity and a photo/video editor, as well as a document editor, making it useful for work on the move. For a mid-tier phone, the Huawei Nova excels.

Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Base>> THE STORYThe Surface Book was Microsoft’s first fully fledged laptop and represents Microsoft’s journey to what it calls the ‘ultimate laptop’: a notebook. The new model is fast and responsive, with a touchscreen display that lifts off the base to become a tablet. The new model with Performance Base has more power and a much longer battery life, at around 16 hours.

>> THE FEATURESThe Surface Book has a 13.5-inch screen, available in a variety of configurations, and all models have between 8GB and 16GB of RAM. The Performance Base model has 256GB of hard drive space, although this and all other models can be increased to 1TB. This model also boasts an Intel Core i7 processor. This notebook’s graphic capabilities are impressive, and it runs an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. An interesting feature is that the Surface Book has two batteries: one for the tablet and one for the keyboard base. The top-of-the-line Performance Base models start at $2,400.

November/December 16 information-age.com


column

Big data and little Britain

heresa May’s post-Brexit government has already left a lasting mark on

the UK and its role in the global economy during its short time in power.

In spite of the circumstances of her appointment, the prime minister absolutely believes she has a mandate to not just exit the European Union but entirely change the UK forever.

Her vision reflects a rigid ideology for a little Britain whose residents become much more homogeneous, monitored constantly by the state and financially worse off.

The rise of nationalistic fever around the globe has been fuelled by both rigid ideologies and the use of data, big and small, to gain insights into the public, as well as to control any opposition.

Much of this has been conducted under the auspices of being for ‘the public good’ or in the name of ‘national security’, but all efforts are specifically intended to concentrate more power, insights and control into the hands of governments.

The result is a long line of Western governments that are a lot less democratic and much more authoritarian than they were pre-9/11 and 7/7. Many of us have foreseen these issues and spoken up, but the media and press have been co-opted by these same governments to act as their pit bulls in stifling any opposition as well as reporting of the truth.

This toxic mix of rigid ideologies, the concentration of power, the limitation of human rights and the muting of dissent has reduced the principles of democracy to more of a notion, if not a source of ridicule by those now in power.

Examples of these endeavours in recent months in the UK – both before and after the EU referendum – include the Investigatory Powers Act (otherwise known as the Snooper’s Charter), the Digital Economy Bill, the Department for Education’s National Pupil Database and the Home Office’s foreign workers’ database.

Surveillance toolsAll of these are tools of control and surveillance that leverage the same big data capabilities that have been touted by so many as virtuous and beneficial to society, but in ways that few were willing to discuss publicly.

However, there have been some recent discussions in the UK and the US on managing the vision and scope of artificial intelligence for the public good, as well as getting ahead of the tide of discrimination that big data-driven insights into citizens’ behaviours have brought.

In all cases these efforts were designed to distract attention away from the government’s own behaviour with respect to these and other emerging applications of big data and advanced analytics.

In essence, the fears about the nefarious use of big data to harm or control the public are a form of psychological projection with respect to the government shifting its own blame onto others, while standing in judgement against the public and not-for-profit sectors. It would all seem so laughable if it were not so serious.

The movement away from democratic government to one based on rigid ideologies, along with the exploitation of big data and advanced analytics by these same governments has become a clear and present danger to all citizens under their control.

The accumulation of knowledge about each citizen’s behaviour and activities by the state is a bell that cannot be ‘unrung’. Massive databases, predictive analytics and machine learning are all tools of the big data paradigm and can be used as a force for good in the right hands or as an unbounded force for evil in the wrong ones.

To imagine the scope of this potential evil, one only needs to look back a short time in history to see how such information, albeit at a much more primitive level of sophistication, was used to discriminate, enslave and control entire populations across the world.

The efficiencies brought by big data to this type of behaviour control are limitless and should be feared by all that cherish the beliefs of liberty, equality and fraternity.

IA’s resident thought leader Richard Lee cracks the whip on the latest IT issues

T

Tomorrow’s

TodayTech Leaders

2017

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Working in the technology industry is a rewarding, interesting and vibrant career to embark upon – full of opportunities and progression. So why aren’t more young women pursuing such jobs?

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Determined to help change that ghastly figure, Tomorrow’s Tech Leaders Today connects hundreds of the UK’s brightest female talent – on both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees – with the organisations that are eager to create a more balanced workforce.

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The Women in IT Awards is the world’s largest event aimed at improving the IT industry’s dire gender balance. It is a high-profile platform for recognising the achievements of female technology leaders and identifying new role models for women to aspire to.

Now in its third year, the awards programme will return on 25 January 2017 at The Great Room - Grosvenor House, Park Lane attended by 900 of the UK’s top IT leaders. Book now to secure your place at this influential and inspiring ceremony.

For bookings, contact Jenna Read on 020 7250 7050 or [email protected] sponsorship, contact Joe Aspis on 020 7250 7950 or [email protected].

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