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November 2012
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Disaster recovery is an
essential part of any
business strategy
The importance
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Did IT problems
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editors comment
Disaster recovery:
Would you survive?
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Cloud disaster
recovery
explained
Disaster recovery
boosts business
continuity for
recruitment firm
The importance
of European
datacentres
UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
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Editorial
Editor, CW Europe; Special projects editor,
Computer Weekly: Kayleigh Bateman
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Editor in chief, Computer Weekly: Bryan Glick
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Special projects editor for Computer Weekly
Disaster Recovery
Cloud disaster recovery can be complicated to get your head around. This
breakdown of the technology offers advice for working with cloud providers
and a short case study. Manek Dubash reports
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strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
efore server virtualisation, the standard approach to implementing disaster recovery (DR) was to establish a
secondary site that duplicated the primary
datacentres hardware and software. But,
with such duplication of infrastructure came
a doubling of operating and capital expenditure (opex and capex), so only the very largest organisations opted for this route.
Now, virtualisation has made servers and
applications independent of hardware so
there is no need for the duplicate iron. Add
the ability to run apps from someone elses
servers and even the need to own the hosts
disappears. This is cloud disaster recovery.
Many cloud DR services use a hybrid
model. An on-site appliance provided by the
cloud provider receives your data and stages
it to the cloud. Should disaster strike, you
Disaster Recovery
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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Did IT problems
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Disaster Recovery
Cloud DR providers
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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UK broadband
strategy lacks
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uniform supplier
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Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
A key benefit of
cloud DR services
is that they can
reduce your physical
infrastructure and so
save on capex and opex
Plan B recovers individual servers every
night, just in case they are needed, tests
recovered systems overnight, and promises
to repay a years fees if it misses its guaranteed recovery time. n
Manek Dubash is a business and technology journalist with
more than 25 years experience.
case study
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Cloud disaster
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review of disaster recovery capabilities has made multinational specialist recruitment firm Hudson more
resilient in its day-to-day business.
We have improved Hudsons business
continuity by modifying our disaster recovery
strategy, said Bas Alblas, IT director Europe
at Hudson.
The back-office IT infrastructure of all our
offices across Europe has been consolidated
into a London datacentre, and we plan to
build a mirrored datacentre for complete
redundancy, he said.
Once this project is finished, the European
datacentre will be fully redundant and
Hudsons infrastructure will be able to survive a complete outage of one of the datacentres, said Alblas.
The disaster recovery review was conducted in the light of a couple of datacentre
outages in the past 10 years as a result of
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case study
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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recruitment firm
The importance
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datacentres
UK broadband
strategy lacks
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uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
Virtualising all
our physical servers
onto HP ProLiant
blade servers has cut
Hudsons datacentre
power usage and
floorspace in half
Datacentres
nterprises have long lived in a world where storage meant buying in bulk, preparing for possible influxes of data and signing cheques to make even the wealthiest of
businesses wince. However, with the growth of cloud computing, a shift has been
occurring where rather than stockpiling terabytes of hard drives just in case, a more
flexible option of utilising other peoples datacentres on demand and paying only for what
you use has emerged.
Box is one of the companies that have been driving this change. Based in California,
with humble beginnings in a dorm room like many of the best Silicon Valley start-ups, its
founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, has regularly been voted one of the upcoming techies to
keep an eye on. The company was founded in 2005 and has raised over $265m in venture
capitalist funding, with analysts now valuing it at around $1.5bn.
It started as a predominantly consumer-focused business, enabling individuals to upload
their files and share them with family and friends around the world. But that world is changing, and now enterprises want to get a slice of the action.
If you think about how enterprises traditionally bought technology, it was very much a
process where a CIO or somebody at the top of the organisation would decide what
technology is going to be applicable for the entire organisation, said Levie.
They would purchase it and spend years implementing the technology into your organisation, only to eventually find out that either the technology doesnt get used or that they need
some new update to be far more relevant for how their organisation works. This was the
paradigm that the enterprise lived off and thrived on for decades.
Yet, employees were using the likes of Box and its rivals Dropbox, Google, Facebook, etc
in their personal lives and wanting to make the change at work to use these simpler tools to
boost productivity.
What has finally happened is users are having a much better time with technology in their
personal lives and they are starting to bring that technology into the workplace, said Levie.
It is changing the demand and the needs for the enterprise and the enterprise can no longer
ignore it and adopt technology that does not give all users an amazing experience.
The CEO also claimed these circumstances put pressure on the more traditional suppliers
to up their game and give better-performing technology to their customers.
The natural trait of the technology ecosystem is if you are a really big company, you dont
have a lot of incentive to break the status quo, said Levie. In fact, you make the vast majority of your money on the status quo, so there are not many reasons why an enterprise software company would want to deliver cloud sharing of information if it was making billions of
dollars from on-premise collaboration software.
So finally there is demand from within the enterprise. Suppliers have to change, and that
means they are looking at what we are doing.
And that they are. From old incumbents such as Oracle and HP, to the newer enterprise
CW Europe November 2012 9
datacentres
firms of Salesforce.com, it seems every technology firm wants to offer cloud storage to keep
their customers signing up. But is that not frustrating for a company such as Box which was
doing it first?
Box is not the only one. They are looking at what Workday is doing, looking at what a
bunch of companies are doing, and realising that they have to build better software for
enterprises and that is whats so exciting, he said. Ultimately, enterprises are going to win
because they are going to get much better technology and it is going to make them much
more productive and that is a good thing for the market in general.
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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recruitment firm
The importance
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datacentres
UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
and it is going to
But one thing that is still an issue for compamake them much
nies in Europe is Boxs lack of a European datacentre. The company has introduced a feature
more productive
called Box Accelerator to speed up the data
transfer in countries around the world, but the
Aaron Levie, Box
fact remains, data is stored in a datacentre in
California, and many enterprises will not be
happy with that from a security and regulatory point of view.
Levie said some data, such as marketing files or product brochures, did not need to be held
within the boundaries of the European Union, but he did concede his firm would have to
address this issue to make real headway in the enterprise market.
Ultimately, to be successful, we do think our technology will have to be resident in Europe
somewhere, he said. I would say that on the long-term roadmap, you are going to see it
happen with that technology footprint of storing data in a global way.
In the near term, we can get tremendous growth opportunity for how we do things today,
but in the long run you will see us solve that problem in a much broader way. n
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networking
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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The importance
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UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
UK lacks ambition in
fibre broadband strategy
With less than 1% of UK households served with fibre-to-the-home
broadband, the FTTH Council is calling on the government to be more
ambitious with its schemes. Jennifer Scott reports
networking
operators then the incumbents have to switch technologies, but we do not see this situation
too much yet in the UK, so there is no drive from the competition, she added.
Babaali claimed the projects that were going ahead were local ones which, although on a
small scale, showed the desire for FTTH broadband in the UK.
It shows there is demand and in places where local communities have a say on what technologies they get, then they will go for FTTH, she added. In most cases, people dont have a
say, they just buy whatever the operator is offering.
Another element to blame is the regulatory nature of the industry in the UK. Babaali said
a large incumbent operator in the UKs case BT will be reluctant to invest millions into
FTTH if the regulations are just going to open this up to other companies to take advantage
of the money it has poured in.
If the regulatory environment is not stable and is not clear, and the incumbent operator
does not know what will happen to the infrastructure it has deployed, then this also slows
[deployment] down because no company would want to make an investment and not be
sure whether it would keep the competitive advantage, she said. In countries where the
regulatory environment is clear, you can see the incumbent is more willing because it knows
it has time to make a business case and to make it work.
The president of the FTTH Council of Europe, Karin Ahl, sought to offer reassurance that
progress was being made and that the UK was on the right path.
The development we see in the UK right now is the same that we saw in the Scandinavian
countries 10 years ago. It starts the same way, and that is positive. It is something we should
highlight and talk about much more than the negative side, she said.
The framework of other countries was the same, and the history and beginning of other
countries was the same, so I think the development we see now is the start of something
good. It is also clear that the market is there because there are consumers that take this into
their own hands and there is a really big risk and investment, so that clearly shows there is
business to be done.
But Babaali concluded for all of this to come
together, there needed to be more will and pressure
from central government to accelerate the deploye should be
ments and technologies used across the UK for
better connections.
talking gigabits
You cannot ignore that the ambition of the govnot adding two or
ernment is also quite important and we see a big
gap between the so-called ambition of the UK govthree megabits to
ernment to be the leading internet infrastructure in
Europe and the actual targets of the plan, she said.
download speeds
We should be talking gigabits, not adding two or
Nadia Babaali, FTTH
three megabits to download speeds. We are talking about a revolution, not just about speed. We are
Council of Europe
talking about enabling services, such as e-health.
These are all long-term goals that the European
Commission has really understood.
Babaali concluded that the investment needed to be made now, not 10 years down the line
which according to current trends and predictions will be when the UK finally starts ranking
in the FTTH league tables.
All this infrastructure needs to be deployed and ready now because it takes time for people
to connect and also for the applications and services to be developed and these businesses
to grow, she said. Lets be ambitious, because this is our future. n
Business intelligence
Swedish mining and construction giant Sandvik has simplified its interface with
thousands of suppliers using an enterprise resource planning data integration
web portal from Liaison. Brian McKenna reports
andvik, a global Swedish mining and construction engineering company, has simplified its supply chain with a single purchase order portal. This has created information
not previously available to make decisions about supplier relations, such as renegotiating contracts.
Dubbed SupplierConnect internally, the
system, from Finland-based data integration
supplier Liaison Technologies, has saved Sandvik
nderlying
a lot of time and money, according to prothe need for a
gramme manager Lars Holmstrm. Individual
buyers are now dealing with 20,000 purchase
unified supplier
lines per month, and it was previously a fraction
of that.
procurement portal
The engineering company, founded in 1862 and
is andvik s organic
employing 50,000, has many thousands of suppliers with dozens of enterprise resource planning
and acquisitive
(ERP) systems and instances. SupplierConnect
covers 750 suppliers in 22 countries, and encomgrowth pattern
passes 13 Sandvik ERP systems.
Mikko Soirola, vice-president of sales at Liaison,
stressed that being ERP supplier-agnostic was
crucial to Sandvik Mining and Construction at the beginning of the engagement in 2009.
In the existing system, when Liaison receives purchase orders from Sandviks ERP systems,
it sends them to suppliers via electronic data interchange (EDI), or using SupplierConnect. To
suppliers, the portal looks the same; the Sandvik buyers work in their own ERP.
Business intelligence
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uniform supplier
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Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
Holmstrm confirmed that a need to cut costs in the wake of the 2008 crash was the initial
impetus for the project, but that this gave way to a need to support business growth, as its
mining and construction markets picked up sharply.
Underlying the need for a unified supplier procurement portal is Sandviks growth pattern
organic but also by frequent acquisition, said Holmstrm. The company has a variety of
different processes and multiple ERP systems throughout its dozens of global locations.
Our supply chain was fragmented around the world. Some areas were really good, others
were not, said Holmstrm. That put us in an awkward situation. It got to the point where we
really needed a better way to conduct business with our suppliers.
Previously, the company had used a lot of manual processes, including fax and email. Our
choices were either to go for unique implementations for each location or a standardised
shared process, he said.
The selection of Liaison was as much to do
with established advisory relationship as with
technology, said Holmstrm, referring to a relationship with Sandvik, in Finland, since 2000.
ur supply chain
After the 2009 pilot programme focused on
the initial cost-saving phase Sandvik Mining
was fragmented
and Constructions senior business leadership
approved a plan to implement SupplierConnect
around the world
globally within 18 months.
we really needed
Sandvik and Liaison chose a roll-out approach
in which basic functionality would be implea better way to
mented in multiple locations while, at the same
time, developing and implementing additional
conduct business
functionality such as advance shipping notices
and electronic invoicing in pilot locations.
with our suppliers
A key component of each roll-out is what is
Lars Holmstrm, Sandvik
called an acceptance test, performed in each
location to prove that the integration solution is
extremely stable, said Holmstrm. I am very
calm with every go-live. We can focus on our
business, which is mining and construction, not data integration.
Holmstrms advice to others considering similar projects to streamline a global corporations transactions with its supplier base is to keep things simple and focus on the process,
not the ERP. His teams procedure was to identify lowest common denominators in the
procurement business processes at 10 locations and go from there.
Now that the system is established, the company has seen unintended benefits.
For example, we have one Australian supplier which delivers to three locations there,
but also to Singapore and China. There are four different ERP systems on our side,
but they see one interface. And they are pushing our other locations to adopt the portal,
he said.
Having one uniform supplier portal makes new common and shared key performance
indicators (KPIs) possible, which are starting to reveal the best or worst suppliers, said
Holmstrm. We can also see how our sites and factories are performing.
This means business decision-makers in the sourcing function at Sandvik have
new decision material to use in sacking suppliers, renegotiating contracts, and the
rest, he said.
And since the corporation as a whole is committed to a One-Sandvik ethos, the
SupplierConnect portal is a good fit, he said. n
outsourcing
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
panish bank Banco Santander has pulled out of its multibillion pound agreement to
take over 316 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) branches, and the customers associated
with them, because of IT integration problems.
But sources say that IT problems can always be sorted out and suggest the claims
might be an excuse to pull out of the deal.
Partly nationalised RBS has been forced to sell assets by the government, after being saved
from collapse during the bank rescue package in 2008.
Banco Santander is no stranger to huge projects to migrate customers to its system. It has
gained huge advantages by standardising its operations on its Partenon core banking platform. Acquisitions in the UK including Abbey and Alliance & Leicester were migrated to
the platform.
Chris Skinner, chairman of the Financial Services Club, said that RBS has claimed all the
data has been separated and it is a case of putting it on Banco Santanders core banking
platform Partenon.
CW Europe November 2012 15
outsourcing
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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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recruitment firm
The importance
of European
datacentres
UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain
Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?
He said an Accenture report has revealed that the migration of the retail customer details
will take until 2014 and business customers 2015. They could be making excuses not to go
ahead with the deal, said Skinner.
The banks made the agreement in August 2010. A year later, a new target completion
date for the final quarter of 2012 was set.
While not commenting on IT directly, Banco Santander said in a statement that
integration targets would not be met: It is now apparent that this revised target will not
be achieved. Santander UK confirms that
it has therefore notified RBS that it does
not believe the conditions to the transfer
he banks made the
of the business from RBS to Santander
UK will be satisfied by the agreed final
agreement in ugust
deadline of February 2013, and that it is
not willing to agree a further extension to
year
that deadline.
later a new target
In that case, the agreement will automatically
terminate in accordance with its terms and the
completion date for
transfer of the business to Santander UK will
not take place.
the final quarter of
2010. A
,
Partenon integration
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