News Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives Editor’s comment Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal Downtime computerweekly.com RICCARDO NIELS MAYER/FOTOLIA Transformational touch Save the Children CIO explains charity’s digital ambition Home 20-26 SEPTEMBER 2016
Transcript
computerweekly.com 20-26 September 2016 1
Home
News
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
computerweekly.com
RIC
CA
RDO
NIE
LS M
AYER
/FO
TOLI
A
Transformational touchSave the Children CIO explains charity’s digital ambition
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
MPs split on BT Openreach and proposed USO for broadbandAt the second reading of the Digital Economy Bill on 13 September, MPs were divided on matters such as the future relationship between BT and its infrastructure arm, Openreach, and the scope of the proposed universal service obliga-tion (USO) for broadband. Culture secretary Karen Bradley reiterated the government’s commitment to secure the right result in the future relationship between BT and Openreach.
Dell kicks HPE off top spot for server shipmentsDell has taken over the top spot from HPE in server shipments, according to Gartner’s latest sta-tistics. But the analyst noted that although Dell shipped more servers, HPE still led in terms of revenue. According to Gartner, worldwide server revenue declined by 0.8% in the second quarter of 2016, while shipments increased by 2%.
Wada condemns Russian hackers for leaking athletes’ dataThe World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has confirmed that a spear phishing attack allowed Russian hackers to access and leak medi-cal data belonging to high-profile Olympic athletes. A group of Russian cyber hackers, dubbed Fancy Bear, has claimed responsi-bility for breaching Wada’s data-base, which is used to keep tabs on prescription medications athletes consume and check they are per-mitted under anti-doping laws.
Datacentre fire system test knocks banking services offlineING Bank has apologised to cus-tomers in Romania after a fire suppression system test knocked out its datacentre for 10 hours, leaving them unable to access their accounts and make payments. Daniel Llano, head of ING Bank’s retail division, said the test caused unforeseen problems for the data-centre’s servers and storage kit.
RSC targets groundlings with Progress CMSThe Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has revamped its website as part of a digital drive to capture bigger audiences, making its interactions with custom-ers and prospects more personal, with access available on any device. Richard Adams, consultant digital programme manager at the RSC, and his web team use a content management system from Progress called Sitefinity.
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
NEWS IN BRIEF
NHS trusts and suppliers not ready for end of N3 networkTime is running out for NHS trusts and networking suppliers to pre-pare for the final termination of the current NHS N3 data and voice net-working contracts in March 2017, infrastructure supplier Updata has warned. The N3 network is to be replaced with the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).
HP Inc to pay more than $1bn to acquire Samsung printersHP Inc is to acquire Samsung’s printer division for just over $1bn as it targets the copier sector, which it believes is worth $55bn in revenue. This is the largest print acquisition in HP’s history.
Banks and fintech firms respect each other, says HSBC bossHSBC’s head of retail banking and wealth management, John Flint, has said mutual respect now exists between fintech firms and banks, with more collaboration expected.
University ditches NetApp for Zadara on-premise private cloudEindhoven University of Technology has replaced all its in-house stor-age arrays with on-premise private cloud storage capacity from Zadara – a managed private cloud. It now pays for the storage it uses rather than existing in a state of feast or famine, as with its previous largely NetApp storage infrastructure.
Aberdeen rolls out Swan networkA year after signing up to the Capita IT Services-led Scottish Wide Area Network (Swan), Aberdeen City Council has begun work on a city-wide fibre network to offer enhanced digital services to residents, businesses and visitors.
Yorkshire Bank to invest in online banking to support cost cuttingThe Clydesdale and Yorkshire bank-ing group is investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the online banking and technology platforms at its Yorkshire Bank business. n
Council links up with IBM to employ WatsonIBM has signed a 10-year contract with Harrow Council to provide its cognitive software-as-a-service (SaaS) system, Watson Care Manager, to the local authority’s health service. This is the first implementation of Watson Care Manager outside the US, according to IBM.
❯ National Cyber Security Centre to scale up DNS filters.
❯ Violin pins hopes on FSP 7650 and 7450 all-flash arrays.
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outageBrokers hit out at disaster recovery arrangements for platform after two-week downtime. Caroline Donnelly reports
SSP Worldwide stands accused of misleading users about the robustness of its disaster recovery regime, as insurance brokers await details of how its two-week cloud platform
outage will be viewed by industry regulators.A large number of UK brokers, which rely on SSP Worldwide’s
Pure Broking platform to issue quotes and track renewals, were struggling to trade for a fortnight after a datacentre power outage knocked the cloud-based service offline on 26 August.
The situation has prompted concern over whether brokers’ ina-bility to work during the downtime puts them at risk of enforce-ment action from regulators, despite SSP’s systems being at fault.
The broker community is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), but the third-party providers whose services they use to run their organisations are not.
Matt Hodges-Long, managing director of business continu-ity provider Continuity Partner, said the FCA may seek clarifica-tion from brokers about whether their disaster recovery plans were sufficient to mitigate the risk SSP’s problems posed to cus-tomers. “If this situation leads them to discover that X number
of consumers were going around uninsured as a result of this, and they deem that to be unacceptable, then the FCA has the power to take enforcement against the firms it regulates,” he told Computer Weekly.
“They cannot abdicate their responsibility, as the FCA regulates them to do their job, not one of their suppliers.”
According to a report in Insurance Age magazine, the FCA asked SSP for a list of those affected by the outage, with brokers given the opportunity to have their names removed from the list.
‘Hit list’ fearedThe FCA’s request angered some brokers, who told Computer Weekly they feared the regulator could use it as a “hit list” of firms to take punitive action against in the wake of the outage.
“What the FCA, as the regulator, might do about this is a source of uncertainty, along with what the repercussions of what all this might be,” said Hodges-Long.
Computer Weekly contacted the FCA for details on what action, if any, it could take in this case, but it declined to comment.
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
The SSP incident could constitute the first major test of the FCA’s guidance, published in July this year, on how the firms it regulates should approach their use of cloud. This includes seeking assur-ances from suppliers before signing up to use their services.
Under the guidance, FCA-regulated companies are expected to conduct due diligence before moving any part of their business to the cloud. As such, the guidance advises firms to have a clear business continuity strategy in place to cater for any downtime their supplier may experience.
“Firms should document their strategy for maintaining continu-ity of operations, including recovery from an event, and their plans for communicating and regularly testing the adequacy and effec-tiveness of this strategy,” the FCA guidance states.
Hodges-Lane pointed out that such a strategy should not render a company unable to cope when its chosen cloud provider runs into technical difficulties.
“Companies need to make sure they have adequate infrastruc-ture in place to support their operations, but they also must be able to stand on their own two feet and find a workaround regard-less of what processes a provider has in place,” he said. “If both the supplier’s and the company’s backup plans fail and they end up losing business, they need to ensure they can recover any money lost through an insurance policy that is structured correctly.”
A number of brokers contacted by Computer Weekly follow-ing the outage claimed they had performed due diligence, but the information SSP had given them was not all it seemed.
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
The Solihull datacentre where the outage occurred is owned and operated by SSP, which also relies on two colocation facilities in Acton, west London, and Northampton to provide its services to customers.
According to several brokers, who spoke to Computer Weekly on condition of anonymity, their contracts with SSP only reference the use of two such facilities, and state that one will failover to the other if the primary site is unavailable. “It also mentions that they will restore the service within three business days once the deci-sion has been taken to move sites,” said one broker.
‘Seamless’ processAnother broker, quoting SSP’s own marketing materials, said the company had given the impression that switching between the two sites would be a relatively “seamless” process, when in real-ity it took the company two weeks to restore its services.
“SSP has two datacentres, one in southern England, the sec-ond in the Midlands,” SSP’s website says. “Our disaster recovery options include the ability to copy all your data between the two datacentres every 15 minutes via a dedicated high-speed connec-tion. Each datacentre acts as a backup for the other, ensuring that if one datacentre is unavailable, the other can take over.”
However, an SSP spokesperson confirmed that the Solihull data-centre was backed up on a daily basis, but was not one of the two sites referred to on its website – much to the dismay of many brokers which had assumed it was.
Computer Weekly asked SSP Worldwide for its response to brokers which felt misled over its disaster recovery statements,
and was told that it could not comment on the specific details of customer contracts.
SSP said its focus remained on restoring services to all custom-ers and, once that was complete, launching a full internal investi-gation into the fallout from the outage.
In a follow-up statement to Computer Weekly, the company confirmed that more than 90% of its customers were either oper-ational again or close to going live again on the platform.
“We will be writing to each [affected customer] to reiterate our apologies for the inconvenience caused by the outage and pro-vide a rebate of service fees,” said SSP CEO Lawrence Walker in the statement.
While brokers are likely to welcome the offer of a rebate, it is unclear at this point whether this sum will cover the costs incurred by being unable to trade since SSP Pure Broking went offline, in terms of lost business and staff overtime costs.
Post-mortem planThe British Insurance Brokers’ Association (Biba), which repre-sents about 2,000 general insurance brokers across the UK, will hold a post-mortem into the outage with SSP and ascertain the robustness of its disaster recovery setup.
Biba CEO Steve White told Computer Weekly brokers would be free to discuss compensation terms during its proposed meet-ing. “Brokers were affected in a number of ways, to differing time frames,” he said. “We also believe there is a variety of different contractual terms in place dealing with outages, but nevertheless brokers will be free to discuss whatever they wish with SSP.” n
ANALYSIS
❯Power supply issues at Docklands datacentre could be behind internet access loss.
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
Research into SAP Hana implementation pattern produces contradictory resultsFindings on the user adoption of SAP’s Hana database platform and its S/4 Hana ERP system present a confusing pattern. Storming ahead or running aground? Brian McKenna reports
SAP’s in-memory, columnar database platform Hana has emerged from some recent UK research as cheaper, faster to deploy and more comprehensive than its detractors
have said.But the findings seem to contradict a Nucleus Research report,
published in June 2016, that showed 60% of SAP reference cus-tomers – mostly in the US – would not buy SAP technology again.
Centiq, a reseller of SAP and other enterprise IT, commissioned the UK report from market research firm Coleman Parks, and the study was carried out among 250 SAP Hana licence holders in April and May 2016.
When asked which claims for Hana were credible, 92% of respondents said it reduced IT infrastructure costs, and 87% said it saved business costs. Some 98% of Hana projects came in on-budget, and 65% yet to roll out were confident of hitting budget.
SAP technology is often deemed too complex, and its CEO, Bill McDermott, has been waging a public war against this complex-ity for the past few years, using the mantra Run Simple.
The Centiq research seems to show that Hana can go live quickly – 72% went live within six months. However, the speed of implementation varied across industries.
While manufacturing (79%), technology and telecoms (75%), and retail and distribution (62%) were able to implement the database within half a year, 67% of public sector respondents took seven to 12 months to implement Hana.
Beyond analyticsThe study seems to confirm Hana’s use cases go beyond ana-lytics. It is used equally for data warehousing and transaction processing. The research showed that 96% of licence holders are using Hana for online transactional processing, while 92% are using it for online analytical processing.
“The first versions of Hana were focused on analytics, and were used for big data ‘edge cases’ that required extreme speed,” said an SAP executive who was quoted in the Centiq research. “These typically involved large companies adding an additional
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
Hana server to existing infrastructure to do things that were not previously feasible.”
The study also seems to have revealed that Hana is being used by small and medium-sized enterprises as well as large organisa-tions. Some 83% of the small companies surveyed said Hana let them design and deploy “innovative applications”.
“We were surprised how satisfied the Hana licence holders were,” said Centiq director of technology and services Robin Webster. “SAP has done a good job in making sure these projects work, and the rate at which it has got Hana out is amazing for such a large organisation. We had heard a lot about Hana as shelfware, so we were surprised at the number saying they were live.”
The research put SAP’s full enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, S/4 Hana, together with the earlier SAP technology, Business Suite on Hana. Some 88% of respondents were planning to put Business Suite on Hana or were moving to S/4 Hana.
Diametrically contradicted This rosy view of Hana adoption – among UK users who may have avoided the teething problems of early adopters in the US and in SAP’s German home country – would seem to be diamet-rically contradicted by research published earlier this summer by Nucleus Research. This showed 60% of SAP reference cus-tomers would not buy from the supplier again – and 90% would not consider S/4 Hana at all.
Nucleus Research senior analyst Rebecca Wettemann spoke to Computer Weekly about the controversial research note this summer. “There is a disconnect between customer expectations
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
and what SAP is trying to do with Hana,” she said. “We found cus-tomers who, given the complexity of early deployments, were not at all excited at taking on a new S/4 Hana venture.”
The impetus for the research was to find out “what the real value was from Hana” in the context of SAP’s strong marketing of the technology in recent years, said Wettemann.
“It is important to point out that the customers we spoke to were the poster children of success for SAP. Many said that once you are in, you are in. They are more looking at how they can make their investments more effective.
“There is clearly a lot of great technology there. But customers look at the tagline ‘Run Simple’ and they know that nothing is sim-ple with SAP. There is a lot SAP could do to make S/4 Hana more adoptable, less risky.”
Rimini Street and ColorSpot on SAPRimini Street, a supplier that offers to take over the maintenance of SAP and Oracle technology for half the price of the original suppliers, welcomed the Nucleus report when it came out.
“Doing an S4/Hana rip and replace of ECC6 [SAP’s earlier gen-eration of ERP] is just not possible yet,” said Rimini Street presi-dent Sebastian Grady in an interview with Computer Weekly. “And even if the software was there, it is still costly. People have been very burnt by SAP implementations in the past.”
Grady said he had never seen the degree of scepticism about enterprise software as there is now among CIOs. “If the IT indus-try keeps allowing greed to get the better of them, they will go the way of financial services when it was over leveraged,” he said.
But one Rimini Street customer who has moved maintenance of an older version of SAP’s ERP software away from SAP itself is ColorSpot CIO Eric Robinson, who remains a “big fan of SAP”.
ColorSpot Nurseries is a Californian company that supplies bedding plants, vegetables, herbs, shrubs, and other greenery to retail and commercial customers in the US.
End maintenance contractRobinson said he was in the 40% of customers who would buy again from SAP, even though he decided to end his maintenance contract with the supplier in the summer of 2010.
He said maintenance of his SAP estate had been taking up 20% of his IT budget, “and the online support was fairly poor”.
“ColorSpot is one of those rare entities where SAP is everything, so it was a big decision to move to third-party maintenance,” said Robinson. “If SAP goes down, we can’t supply products to the stores. Rimini Street is an extension of my IT team. It supports our custom modifications of SAP, for instance.
“The Nucleus report was quite damaging for SAP, but I’m still a big fan. The technology is our lifeblood. I would definitely buy it again. But if I were to implement another ERP system, say from Oracle or Microsoft, I’d adopt the same strategy of ‘thank you for your software, but we’ll take it from here’, and cut maintenance.”
Robinson concluded: “The software is so robust and evolved that it makes no sense to wait for the supplier to provide you with new functionality. It’s not like back in the 1990s when every upgrade was a huge step up. It’s just not like that any more with ERP soft-ware, any more than it is with browsers or Microsoft Office.” n
ANALYSIS
❯Strategies to use when deciding which SAP Hana enterprise application to run.
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
INTERVIEW
Transforming IT to improve children’s livesSave the Children’s global CIO, Andy Williams, talks to Mark Samuels about building an effective IT team to deliver on the charity’s ambition to introduce digital technology that offers value for everyone
Andy Williams, global CIO at Save the Children, sits in a breakout area of the charity’s London head office, near Trafalgar Square.
The area is festooned with flags in celebration of the summer’s European Football Championship in France.
Williams tells me he drew Switzerland in the office sweepstake, meaning his participation drew to a close at an early stage. His IT career, however, is very much on an upward trajectory.
Williams spent more than 20 years on the consultancy side of the IT industry. He worked for Accenture for 15 years and subse-quently spent time with KPMG, IBM and Wipro.
Williams was head-hunted by consumer giant Unilever in 2007, where he spent five years running IT transformation. He held two key roles at Unilever – vice-president of IT global services and head of IT for Europe. The latter involved getting agreement to move a significant chunk of European IT services to Bangalore.
He considered moving to India for a couple of years to help run the project, but chose to stay in Britain due to family commitments.
Williams recognised he had been involved in some heavy trans-formation work at Unilever and was keen to apply this knowledge in a different environment. He joined Save The Children in October
Andy Williams: “We need to provide
tiered services and have convergence towards common platforms”
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
2012. The opportunity to drive change was a key attraction.“The recruiters were looking for a CIO who could come in and
create a global IT organisation,” he says. “I recognised the ambi-tion. The organisation is almost 100 years old and has tradition-ally been run as distinct national charities. The chance to be involved with a leadership team that was creating an internal development organisation was too good to ignore.”
Getting startedHowever, Williams also recognised the size of the challenge. Save the Children had matured without taking full advantage of the capabilities of IT.
The board had identified the potential of digital technology, though, and knew transformation was a key priority. Williams’ appointment in 2012 was a key move in that direction. He holds direct accountability for IT across the 120 countries to which the organisation delivers its services to children. Williams also chairs the IT steering group through which the charity decides how technology is used to help complete fundraising operations.
The global CIO role is one he relishes, both in terms of leading people and setting strategy.
“Leadership is one of my core passions,” says Williams. “To have the opportunity to form such an important IT team almost from scratch is very rare. I’ve had the chance to structure that team, coach the individuals and bring in some experienced leadership.”
Williams has also enjoyed the opportunity to join an organi-sation at the genesis of its next strategic cycle. He created an interim IT strategy after joining the charity, and was then part
of a small team that updated the wider business strategy. More recently, Williams has updated the IT strategy again to align with the broader business approach.
“We don’t really have a separate IT strategy now. My goal in 2015 was to infuse our organisational strategy with a much greater level of ambition. I felt more than anything else that was
the key thing that needed to change,” he says. “We’ve done that now and the focus is all about execution, building capability and gradually delivering the things we’ve promised.”
Improving systemsWilliams arrived halfway through a roll-out of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. As well as completing the transformation, he turned his attention to a grant management platform, which was implemented globally within 15 months.
It was the first time Save the Children had introduced a com-mon platform for a key part of its business across all countries.
INTERVIEW
“I’ve had the chance to structure an Important It team, coach the IndIvIduals and brIng In some experIenced leadershIp”
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
Other key projects followed quickly. Williams and his team moved the whole organisation to Microsoft Office 365. The implementation helped sponsor wider cultural change. Moving to Office 365 meant each worker was given a digital identity.
Williams says the transition provided a sense of empowerment as workers around the globe could communicate and collaborate.
The project continues apace. Williams and his colleagues are currently bringing individuals in some of the smaller fundraising countries into the shared environment. He says the diversity in
the types of office across the charity is remarkable. Larger centres might employ close to 1,000 people, but the organisation also runs smaller offices that employ 10 to 20 people.
“The maturity of operations in these countries can be very dif-ferent,” says Williams. “We use a phrase here, which is that ‘one
size never fits all’. While that’s the case, we should always look to aggressively pursue standardisation. We need to provide tiered services and have convergence towards common platforms.”
Williams also focused on the core capabilities of the IT team. Alongside his ongoing work on technology and business strat-egy, he has sought to professionalise internal IT. Williams cre-ated a small enterprise architecture (EA) team and a project management office (PMO), which operates on behalf of the international organisation.
“Neither of those functions existed before,” he says. “When I joined, IT was mainly concerned with operations. We weren’t as ambitious about delivering value back to the business. We weren’t able to articulate the role of some of those other parts of IT, such as EA and the PMO. We’ve made great progress now, but there’s still more to do.”
Setting prioritiesWilliams has three key priorities for the next 12 to 24 months. The number one objective relates to the ongoing delivery of core technology systems.
He says the IT team needs to integrate the grant management platform with the ERP system. The IT team will also upgrade the ERP platform so the technology provides information on supply chain capability, as well as finance data.
The second set of priorities covers human resources (HR) tech-nology. The charity has selected Oracle as its strategic cloud plat-form for HR. Williams and his colleagues will push the platform across the wider organisation during the next few years.
“When I joIned the charIty, It Was maInly concerned WIth
operatIons. We Weren’t as ambItIous about delIverIng value
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
The final set of priorities relates to defining and designing a platform for project managers in the field. The charity is currently exploring how to make the most of business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Dynamics and Power BI.
“That will give employees the ability to capture information about children and programmes in real time,” he says. “The infor-mation will be uploaded safely and securely into global cloud databases. The approach will completely transform the way we are able to measure the impact of the work we do.”
Williams says impact measurement is a key challenge. Charity organisations, such as Save the Children, work hard to analyse and explain how money is being spent and leading to a posi-tive result in the field. “Being able to directly attribute one of our interventions to improved learning outcomes or a reduction in child abuse is tough,” he says. “But that’s the goal – to be able to deliver auditable impact information back to our donors. To do that, we have to use digital, real-time technology. That means we have to take advantage of the huge advances in mobile con-nectivity, particularly around GSM. We need to focus on the upskilling of workers in the field, so they are comfortable using these tools. It’s an exciting point in time.”
Moving towards digital innovationThe building blocks for transformation, therefore, are in place.
“We’re working through the projects we’ve promised to deliver in the business strategy,” says Williams. “Business demands can change, of course. But we’ve got the roadmap and this work will keep the IT team busy for at least the next three years.”
However, Williams is not just focused on current priorities. “The scope of the work I’ve just described is, in many ways, defined,” he says. “My key aim is to look beyond current objectives and to think about innovation, and the kinds of partners we can work with to deliver change.”
The developments made by local IT suppliers can be crucial. The charity works closely with mobile operators, for example. However, the scope of Williams’ ambitions in terms of partner-ships is actually much wider. “I really want to change the way we design programmes so that we create with digital in mind,” he says.
Williams says the IT team must look for ways to use digital tech-nology to help programme leaders change the way they deliver services. One key area of change could be in terms of finance dis-tribution. Williams is exploring how local partners could provide a secure, electronic platform for cash distribution.
“We must strive to work out how we work best as part of a value chain,” he says, suggesting that a key role can also be played by large enterprises with corporate social responsibilities and local non-government organisations, such as education and healthcare bodies. “Building capacity on the ground is one step towards self-sufficiency and sustainability,” he says.
Digital innovation is not just restricted to work in the field. Williams says Save the Children must take advantage of the fact that current and future fundraisers will want to connect through mobile devices and social media platforms.
“We want to use technology to help provide a consistent experi-ence of our great work around the world,” he concludes. n
❯Action for Children rolls out Citrix remote access on tablets.
Amajority of the UK may have decided through the Brexit referendum that we don’t like the European Union, but as we work out what leaving it means, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for our digital economy to keep hold of a few European goals.
The European Commission last week set out plans for a “gigabit society” – laying down objectives for every EU household to have 100Mbps broadband, 5G mobile networks in at least one city in every EU state by 2020, and 1Gbps connectivity for schools, busi-ness and the public sector by 2025.
The plans are part of the proposed Digital Single Market, a policy for which, ironically, the UK has been one of the main champions.While Europe was setting out its ambitions, MPs at Westminster were debating the Digital Economy Bill, discussing – among other
things – a universal service obligation for broadband that would guarantee a whopping 10Mbps to every household by 2020.“I have been clear that we will not stop or cease until we get the right result,” said the new culture secretary Karen Bradley, on the vexed
issue of BT’s relationship with its Openreach subsidiary. “Ofcom has made some recommendations. We are looking carefully at them, and Ofcom is consulting on them.”
So we’ll do some more talking, and we’ll keep on not stopping and eventually we’ll get a result. And then we’ll probably debate some more whether it was the right result or not. The UK government has shouted loudly that it believes we have the best broadband among leading European economies – a somewhat questionable claim – but, more importantly, do we still have the same ambition as Europe for where our telecoms infrastructure will be in 2020 and beyond?
Mobile operator O2 Telefónica’s CTO, Brendan O’Reilly, recently warned that the UK’s mobile networking infrastructure needs a radi-cal overhaul to be ready for 5G. “If the number of cars on Britain’s roads was doubling every year, we would be talking in terms of a crisis,” he told Computer Weekly. “We need to start treating digital infrastructure similarly.”
If the UK tech sector was given the choice, it would almost certainly opt in to the Digital Single Market and support the sort of ambi-tions laid out by the Commission. The obvious danger is that the wider distraction of Brexit dilutes focus on developing our digital economy. Theresa May has promised a new industrial strategy for the UK – but it’s time we had an ambitious, fully funded, long-term plan to create the best telecoms infrastructure in Europe before we get left behind. n
Most IT departments face the occasional spike in computing demand. Sometimes they are pre-dictable (a sports betting site knows what to expect when the cup final is on, for example),
and sometimes not.Buying enough equipment to handle those demand peaks
internally isn’t always cost-effective, and one oft-touted solu-tion to this is cloud bursting. In this scenario, applications can automatically offload work to a public cloud service provider when their on-premise resources get stretched.
The appeal of this approach is not difficult to see, as it means enterprises are not footing the bill for surplus, on-premise computing power during periods of normal operation. This emerged as a key marketing tactic a few years ago for suppliers intent on selling the concept of hybrid cloud to the enterprise
Andrew Reichman, research director for cloud data at ana-lyst group 451 Research, was one of those people, having tried to market the idea in his previous job at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “While I was at Amazon, I was looking for examples of cloud bursting that we might be able to use as a reference in some marketing, but I could never find one,” he admits.
Reichman isn’t bullish that enterprises will suddenly catch the cloud bursting bug. Why? “The top line: it’s complicated.”
Technical challengesClive Longbottom, founder of tech advisory firm Quocirca, backs this view and says the time it takes to send a query to the cloud and back again can rule out the use of cloud bursting
Why more people aren’t cloud burstingThe appeal of cloud bursting is easy to see, but the level of complexity involved negates its benefits – at least for now, writes Danny Bradbury
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
for applications built to expect local network response times.
“It tends not to work well because you are try-ing to use remote resource against local appli-cations on local data,” he says, arguing that this builds a half-second of latency into your system. “Any gains you’re getting from the bursting are negated by that latency.”
To give remote applications fast access to data, IT teams may need to replicate entire datasets there. Then, if the data is used for real-time operations, they face the challenge of constantly updating the remote copy of the data to keep it concurrent with what they have locally.
The problems continue to mount when attempting to cloud burst applications at the data layer. If the application is a relational database that relies on atomicity, consistency, isola-tion and durability (Acid) in trans-actions, cloud bursting gets even hairier. The remote application’s transactions must stay in sync with the on-premise one while avoiding any inconsistencies in the transac-tion processing.
None of this makes cloud burst-ing applications impossible, but it does make it far more complex unless the functionality has been designed in at the application layer,
says Dante Orsini, senior vice-president of busi-ness development at cloud services and hosting company iLand.
“We’re not seeing on-premise environments with applications that are intelligent enough to understand what’s happening with load and pro-grammatically instantiate additional workloads in a cloud environment,” he says.
Divide and conquerThere are some more niche applications that make sense for cloud bursting, says James Butler, CTO at managed IT ser-vices firm Trustmarque. Applications that can divide jobs into lots of smaller workloads and then wait for the results are good candidates.
“It’s a distributed computing challenge,” he says. “Applications that can deal with those scale-out, distributed computing scenarios are naturally good for cloud burst-ing without a lot of changes.”
What kinds of applications are those? Just 10 years ago, the IT world was agog over grid comput-ing, in which applications would divide computing tasks between computers across the company, using spare CPU cycles wherever they could get it.
“We’re not seeIng on-premIse envIronments WIth
applIcatIons that are IntellIgent enough to understand What’s
happenIng WIth load”dAnte Orsini, ilAnd
BUYER’S GUIDE
❯Cloud bursting sounds good in theory, but there are a lot of holes in the idea of bursting
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
Number-crunching applications such as SETI@Home pushed this into the consumer space, using vast swathes of spare computing power on home PCs to analyse data from outer space. It’s these kinds of easily divisible, high-latency tasks that Butler is talk-ing about. Historically, high-performance computing applica-tions were the primary ones to divide tasks this way, processing data for statistical models or climate simulations, but things are changing. Analytics is becoming a focal point for businesses, and it is a candidate workload for cloud bursting.
“I’ve seen it among insurance companies doing data model-ling analytics and wanting to burst this to the cloud,” says Butler. Software platforms designed to support parallel processing in analytics, such as Hadoop, are well-suited to dividing workloads between on-premise and cloud environments, as are Apache’s Cassandra and other NoSQL products such as CouchDB.
Organising your workDividing up the work isn’t enough, however. True cloud burst-ing needs an administrative layer that manages how backup resources are created and allocated in the public cloud.
“It’s not really about physical infrastructure. It’s more about the management and orchestration layers that you have in place to detect the spikes and drive the automation through into the public cloud,” says Butler. This could be scripted manually if an
administrator needed to, such as if they notice a spike in demand, or they could schedule it through a Cron job in anticipation of a demand spike occurring. For example, if the admin worked for a retailer and Black Friday was coming.
The scripts might be quite com-plex unless other tools were bought in to help. In a more sophis-ticated environment, modern application performance man-agement software would typically be able to kick-off a cloud instance programmatically when a peak in demand occurs. It would communicate with a tool that configured cloud workloads automatically, such as Puppet, Chef or SaltStack, which could fire up the necessary virtual machine in the cloud and configure it for the right workload.
Simple to say, difficult to doEven with the appropriate tools in place, none of this is as simple as it sounds, warns Dan Jablonski, director of cloud and IT solu-tions product management at Verizon.
The orchestration system has to create the server, configure its IP address, install the appropriate application and pull down the correct configuration files. If the virtual machine is to be an appli-cation server, it must register itself to download the right con-tent. The machine must connect itself to the pool of load balanc-ers that will allocate its jobs, ensure the correct ports are open to it on the firewall, and then connect to the monitoring system.
BUYER’S GUIDE
analytIcs Is becomIng a focal poInt for busInesses, and It
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
“That’s a challenge. Even though the scripts are doing the work, it could be 30 minutes before the system is ready,” says Jablonski. When the peak is over, he adds, the whole thing needs to be unpicked and powered down to avoid paying for services that are not being used.
The point of cloud bursting is to have that ad hoc resource ready when needed, not to waste time waiting for it, so some healthy capacity planning and predictive provisioning is also a good idea, but this adds yet more complexity. In light of these challenges, it is little wonder that 451 Research’s Reichman could not find a good cloud bursting story to tell.
A lot of this will be out of reach for smaller companies and they may be better off looking at alternatives. These include using workload scheduling to smooth out peaks in demand for tasks that are not time-sensitive. As early as 2010, eBay was cutting its application server count from 6,000 to 2,000
using simple methods before reducing it further with cloud bursting techniques.
Why not go all-in on cloud?There’s a simpler alternative to cloud bursting, says iLand’s Orsini. “If someone is really building an application designed to burst across certain geographies based on certain thresh-olds, why wouldn’t they just put the whole thing in the cloud to begin with?”
Most of it comes down to economics, says Jablonski. “A lot of enterprises have an incredible amount of cost sunk into soft-ware licences for WebLogic, WebSphere and other products,” he says, and it makes financial sense to keep using legacy kit until it depreciates to the point of decommissioning.
In time, he sees those systems retiring, and companies mov-ing further towards the cloud. “As long as they are able to build a path to not having everything running on top of an enter-prise cost-based e-commerce platform or expensive database licences or infrastructure that is difficult to contain and man-age, then it’s all good,” he says.
Cloud bursting is a niche practice for most companies. The closest many will get is manual provisioning of cloud resources for tasks such as development and testing, but this doesn’t really fit the definition. Many companies simply will not have the resources or the expertise to make this work, but for those running the kinds of applications for which cloud bursting is realistic, they must go into this with their eyes open and their senior architect handy. n
BUYER’S GUIDE
the poInt of cloud burstIng Is to have that ad hoc resource
ready When needed, not to Waste tIme WaItIng for It
Whether it’s the internet of things (IoT), cloud com-puting, mobility, big data, analytics or something else, there is always a new technology for CIOs to grapple with.
The pace of change in IT has increased over the past decade, and, as Cisco pointed out at this year’s Cisco Live event in Las Vegas, IT departments risk being left behind if they can’t keep up with business demands.
Cisco, of course, presented this as an opportunity, a chance for IT departments to lead the changes that can increase productiv-ity and drive revenue growth. According to the company‘s CEO, Chuck Robbins, IT has moved from the basement to the board-room, and is now a strategic part of every company’s business.
Drive genuine changeThe challenge for CIOs is to make sure they are implementing technologies that can drive genuine change for their business.
“Whatever the hype of IoT is, it means nothing if it is not solving what your business needs solving,” Sandy Hogan, vice-president of digital transformation at Cisco, told the Cisco Live audience. “A year ago, most customer conversations were about independent technology decisions – bringing wireless to stores, for example.
“Today, every single customer wants to understand how to use technologies to transform their business – and not just small, pro-gressive steps. The opportunity for CIOs, who are now agents of change, is to lead those discussions. We all see a reality in front of us where the business is moving, whether we are part of that process or not.”
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
IT leaders should lead their organisations’ digital transformation, delegates were told at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. Steve Evans reports
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
At the centre of this change, according to Cisco, is the network, which is what underpins an organi-sation’s processes. As the business becomes more digital, so should the network, so it can be flexible and support the needs of the business.
Jeff Reed, senior vice-president of Cisco’s enter-prise infrastructure and solutions group (EISG), said progress is a journey to get the network from where it has been to where it needs to be to drive that digitisation.
“It cuts across people, training, processes, services and more,” said Reed. “The network has never been more important. There are opportunities to add value to the line of business. But at the same time, we have seen vast amounts of capabilities added where we can now do things at the network level that we have never done before, but which are critical to enabling this architectural shift.”
Errors and security problemsThis has added complexity to many networks, which can lead to errors and security problems, said Reed. Citing Cisco research, he said 95% of network changes were made manually, and 70% of network errors were due to human error – a lack of automation.
“These networks are big, complex – they have been around for years,” he added. “Most of the network operating expense goes on monitoring and troubleshooting. These are things we want to change. The heart of it – Cisco DNA – is a set of core fundamen-tal architectural changes, such as hardware to software-driven, manual to automated.”
Yet conspicuous by its absence at the conference was any real mention of software-defined network-ing (SDN), one of the industry’s most disruptive shifts. Cisco has said many times that it considers SDN an opportunity rather than a threat, and much of its messaging has been around the role that soft-ware will play in the network of the future.
In fact, Reed spoke about “decoupling the net-work functions from the hardware”, which sounds very much like SDN. Talks around automation, single panes of glass for network management and security, and data analytics revealed Cisco’s dedication to the software side of things.
Important role for hardwareBut that is not to say Cisco is going all-in on software. Robbins reiterated the company’s position on networking hardware: “Nobody wakes up and thinks ‘I can’t wait to buy a router today’, but there is still an important role for hardware in networks.
“There is a massive, global internet that is getting bigger. It will have more traffic, more connections, more video, more content, and I don’t think you’re going to replace all that high-powered performance with software.
“So it’s a balance. We need to solve problems with software when it is appropriate, such as we have done with security, where 47% of our security portfolio is delivered as software, or as a service.”
That mention of security, delivered during the conference’s opening keynote speech, was the start of a heavy emphasis on
CISCO LIVE
❯Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says customers should expect a much higher percentage of
future products to be delivered as Cisco applications or
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
keeping customers secure, bridging what Cisco calls the “security effectiveness gap”.
The problem CIOs face is that as users and applications head to the cloud, the IT function is experiencing a loss of control.
Traditionally, the way to deal with that was to put another box onto the network; new threats equalled a new security product. Scott Harrell, vice-president of product management in Cisco’s security business group, described this as a “fundamental flaw” in the way enterprises and the industry approached security.
“As you add incremental devices, customers start to get dimin-ishing returns,” he said. “A new service is added, but the customer doesn’t realise the full capabilities.
“As you add more capabilities, the effectiveness flatlines. The complexity of threats and security is rising. You can keep adding things to deal with new problems, but you’re not going to get any incremental security protection because the complexity will out-weigh the benefits. That is the security effectiveness gap.”
Security productsAs part of its efforts to bridge that gap, Cisco released a number of security products at Cisco Live. A recurring product theme was that of automation, removing as much manual intervention from security as possible.
This Cisco Live marked the end of Robbins’ first year as Cisco CEO. The message was clear: technology is changing, and net-works have to keep up to satisfy the growing and changing needs of the business. Cisco’s vision for the software-driven network of the future is one that sits at the heart of the organisation. n
Over the course of four days at the end of July, three barristers from Blackstone Chambers and a small army of solicitors represented Privacy International in a case against the intelligence services at the
Investigatory Powers Tribunal.Privacy International claims the intelligence agencies – MI5,
GCHQ, the Secret Intelligence Service, as well as the home sec-retary and the foreign secretary – have been using loopholes to indulge in limitless snooping on the citizens of the UK, and pos-sibly everywhere else.
Secretive courtThe Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) is the most secretive court in the land. It pronounces on matters of national security and the treatment of people under anti-terrorism legislation. It is the only avenue available for anyone wishing to make a com-plaint about the behaviour of the intelligence services and gov-ernment surveillance.
Yet it manages to combine the deadly serious with the surreal. The final day’s session began with a short judgement delivered by the vice-president of the tribunal, John Mitting, in an unre-lated case.
The judgement, delivered to an almost empty court, revealed a degree of ineptitude by a pair of Islamist schemers – EF and EB – that might be comical, were it not so scary.
They wanted to buy a live firearm, but they agreed that, as it only cost “a grand”, it probably wasn’t going to be any good. In fact, it might not fire at all. “Better than nothing,” they said,
A day in the life of the Investigatory
Powers TribunalBritain’s most secretive court combined the surreal with the
deadly serious as it debated the legality of bulk data collection by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Fiona O’Cleirigh reports
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
before deciding that the safest place to hide it would be in one of their own homes. A probe inserted in EF’s car recorded the following exchange:
EF: “Do you understand? Making contact? So basically update me at every stage and just say ‘yeah the sausage is nice’, erm, ‘there’s enough sauce in it’.”
EB: “What’s the sausage?”EF: “Bullets. If there’s not enough sauce in it, you will have to make
that decision if we’re gonna take it or not. [Unclear] If it’s less than five [?] it’s not worth it bruv. Understand? I mean that, big time.”
The rather odd tone of the day was set, however, and segued neatly into Yes Minister. Perhaps it is no surprise that much of the press coverage of this hearing has been taken from documents shared by Privacy International on its website.
James Eadie QC, representing the government and the intelligence agencies, is clearly an outstanding lawyer – and probably a very nice man – but it was certainly not in his interest to make his remarks quot-able by reporters or, indeed, intelli-gible at all. At least, not to anyone without full access to the legal bundles and, ideally, a degree in law, if not jurisprudence.
In contrast, the ebullient Thomas de la Mare QC, representing Privacy International, and great-grandson of the poet Walter
de la Mare, had made a grand impression on the assembly. So comprehensive was his schoolboy, as well as legal, Latin that, on the opening of the third day, the president of the IPT, Michael Burton, strode to his seat and addressed the court with a cheery “Salvete”.
How intelligence agencies avoided oversightPrivacy International’s core argument is that the intelligence agencies have neatly avoided the safeguards and oversight mechanisms required by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) 2000. They have done this, it says, through the long-
undisclosed and, some would say, ungentlemanly reliance on section 94 of the Telecommunications Act of 1984. The act has enabled them to gather, store and access “bulk personal datasets” containing pri-vate data about citizens, including financial information.
Section 94 gives the intelligence agencies snooping rights author-ised by a secretary of state, just so long as they act in the interests of national security. Once they have
the information, said Eadie, they can use it for many other pur-poses, but they have to have got it fair and square. No cheating.
It would, indeed, be possible for MI5 to get a surveillance access sign-off from foreign secretary Boris Johnson, for instance, in
DATA PRIVACY
sectIon 94 of the telecommunIcatIons act gIves
the IntellIgence agencIes snoopIng rIghts, just so long as they act In the Interests of
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
the interest of national security, but not in the interest of the nation’s economic wellbeing. That might sound like a joke, but, amazingly, it’s not.
Eadie’s high-altitude cruise through the government’s argu-ments was a combination of bundle-hopping and a mode of speech that was reminiscent of Humphrey Appleby at his best. One of Privacy International’s people – a lawyer – tweeted to that effect, which was both reassuring and disturbing.
Focusing on the notion of “bulk” collection completely misses the whole point, said Mitting, with some feeling. Eadie, in full agree-ment, pointed out that the sheer volume of the data collected effec-tively anonymises anything interest-ing that might be located within it, by making it difficult to find.
Exactly so, suggested Richard McLaughlin, another of the judges. “Every time this is interrogated,” he said, “there is more and more information about fewer and fewer subjects … you have more and more about less and less.”
What about the rights of ordinary people?A plaintive note came from Susan O’Brien QC, the only female judge on the tribunal panel.
Listening to de la Mare outline the proportionality test inherent in Ripa, she suddenly interjected: “There’s never a thought for the rights of the citizen in any of this, is there?”
Burton voiced a long-standing worry of campaigners. What about the Stasi in Germany, he asked, and the abuse of arbitrary powers? Citizens’ personal data acquired now might be abused by a sinister regime in the future. Bill Binney, the NSA whistle-blower, has been particularly vociferous on this issue, in the US.
“Foreseeability is designed to ensure sufficient visibility of those things that control the exercise of power by the execu-tive,” said Eadie. It is built into much of the legislation, including the Telecommunications Act of 1984.
But Burton said there had been no external oversight at all of the agen-cies’ work with bulk personal data-sets until 2010, and even that over-sight had not been audited.
Was Eadie suggesting that the agencies had a better record on the foreseeability than on the use of safeguards, because, from then on, the public at least thought that
adequate protection was in place? “No,” said Eadie, “that would make an impertinent submission.”
After this surreal circus, the court pronounced that judge-ment should be delivered before 1 December 2016, by which time the results of an another court hearing on surveillance legislation, on 16 December, would make the tribunal findings purely academic.
“They’re just leaving it until it’s irrelevant,” said one of the law-yers after the case. n
DATA PRIVACY
“there’s never a thought for the rIghts of the cItIzen
Insurance brokers fear regulatory action over SSP Worldwide cloud service outage
Contradictory results from research into SAP Hana implementation
Computer Weekly celebrates its 50th anniversary
How Save the Children is transforming IT to improve children’s lives
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to cloud bursting
CIOs must seize chance to be agents of change
A day in the life of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Downtime
Newts move home in search of faster broadbandFrustrated at the slow state of broadband in their area, a family of newts has moved house to take advantage of the opportuni-ties provided by superfast fibre.
A BT Openreach engineer found the newts getting com-fortable among the telephone cables down a manhole in Coldingham, Scotland.
Steve Jones, who is a reptile and amphibian enthusiast, recognised the manhole’s new occupants immediately as great crested newts – a protected species. It is illegal to disturb, hurt or kill them.
The species is uncommon in Scotland, and unknown in the area where they were found, so it remains something of mystery as to how they got there.
With help from an environmental consultant, the Amphibian and Reptile Trust and a local herpetolo-
gist, the manhole was drained of water, and a more suitable pond was found nearby for the slippery little critters to move into.
For the sake of the newts’ ability to fully participate in the UK’s burgeoning digital economy, Downtime hopes the pond is close to a fibre cabinet. n
