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The DIGITAL magazine for European IT leaders FROM Computer Weekly

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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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November 2012

Are you
prepared
for disaster?
Disaster recovery is an
essential part of any
business strategy

The importance
of European
datacentres
UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition
uniform supplier
portal simplifies
supply chain

CW Europe November 2012 1

istockphoto/Thinkstock

Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?

European news

Cyber attacks launched


at London 2012 Olympic
Games every day

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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?

The IT supporting the London 2012


Olympics was hit by cyber attacks every
day during the Games, according to
London 2012 CIO Gerry Pennell. He said
some attacks were well organised and
automated and there was one in particular that was a major assault.

EU advises Google to
rethink privacy policy

The EU is to tell Google to change the way


it gathers information on users to reduce
the risk of infringing on their privacy. An
investigation into Google follows concerns raised by the regulators earlier this
year when the company consolidated 60
privacy policies into one.

Austrian hospital improves


access to patient data
with Imprivata

Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen hospital in


Austria has improved speed of access
and security of its workstations with the
help of Imprivata. Hospital staff now gain
access to workstations through keycards
and face recognition technology.

Hexal is purchasing
a new home for its IT

After extensive renovations to its premises, the availability of Hexals datacentre


rose to Tier III (Uptime Institute) and the
power usage effectiveness (PUE) is now
persisting between 1.3 and 1.5.

Swedish government sites


targeted by Anonymous

The websites of several Swedish government agencies were knocked offline after
being targeted by hacktivist collective

Additional resources
VMworld Europe 2012 Coverage
RSA Conference Europe coverage 2012
IP Expo 2012 coverage
Citrix Synergy 2012 coverage
SNW Europe 2012 coverage
EMC Momentum 2012 coverage
Spotlight on women in UK IT
How to comply with the EU cookie law
guide: EU Data Protection Regulation

Anonymous. Affected sites included


Riksbank, the Riksdag, the Swedish
Institute, the Svea Court of Appeal, the
Swedish police and security service Spo.

2,500W/m2 and KyotoCooling


datacentre delivers ROI

The datacentre of German company


Noris Network was in need of more processing power, but this meant more heat
would be generated. The firm decided to
use water cooling for a better return on
investment.

From document management


to the cloud via TNT

Paul Ballabene, IT director of the Italian


branch of TNT, said the demands for
managing social media are growing within
Italian companies. He said despite the
headaches that come with data security,
consumer solutions enable better business processes. n

Winners of Best of VMworld Europe 2012


user awards announced
Six European IT projects have won the Best of VMworld Europe 2012 user awards at the
VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona. Find out the winners and
read all the news coverage from VMworld Europe 2012.
CW Europe November 2012 2

editors comment

Disaster recovery:
Would you survive?
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european
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comment
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?

T systems and company data are the lifeblood of


any business, so it is crucial to have a plan B in
place in case of a disaster. There are numerous
causes of IT disruption natural disaster, human
error, hardware failure, criminal behaviour each of
which present challenges to businesses.
European IT managers are taking no risks when
it comes to their companys data and business
continuity, according to research from the Service
Desk Institute. In a survey of more than 15,000
European IT directors recently, the study found that
80% of service desks now have a business continuity plan in place. Of these, 61% test their plans
every six months this figure was just 9% in 2011.
Despite these encouraging figures many European businesses are still stuck in a time warp when
it comes to protecting their company against data
loss or systems downtime. Analysts have been
known to predict that a business could fail if it
suffered a major outage for more than 24 hours
would your business survive a disaster?
Regardless of how you choose to implement a
disaster recovery strategy it is important that you
have measures in place preventive, detective
and corrective instead of these becoming an
afterthought.
In this issue of CW Europe we examine cloud
disaster recovery and what questions to ask a cloud
provider. For example, ensuring you have enough
bandwidth and network capacity to redirect your
users to the cloud, in case of a disaster, and how to
make sure your plan clearly shows how to restore
your data if it is lost this includes expected recovery times too.
In addition, find out how disaster recovery
boosted business continuity at multinational
recruitment firm Hudson after it consolidated the
back-office IT infrastructure of all its European
offices into its London datacentre. n

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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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Production editor: Claire Cormack
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Kayleigh Bateman
Editor of CW Europe
Special projects editor for Computer Weekly

with peers and experts.

CW Europe November 2012 3

Disaster Recovery

Cloud disaster recovery explained


istockphoto/Thinkstock

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

Home
european
News
editors
comment
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?

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

could work from servers and data held on the


appliance or work from the cloud, depending
on the severity of the outage. The key advantage of the hybrid model is that it overcomes
a key limitation of working in the cloud lack
of bandwidth.
There are also pure cloud DR services that
see data transferred immediately to the cloud
without the intermediate staging appliance.
Restoration in this model can be by remote
working from the providers cloud or by
receipt of a data disk from which servers are
rebuilt. Pure cloud models will incur smaller
upfront and ongoing costs, but are only really
suited to the smallest organisations.
All cloud disaster recovery services are
priced on a per-use basis, with rates varying
according to your recovery point and time
objectives (RPO and RTO).
CW Europe November 2012 4

Disaster Recovery

Home
european
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comment
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?

Like the cloud storage model, in which you


store data in the cloud and pay for what you
use, a key benefit of cloud DR services is that
they can reduce your physical infrastructure
and so save on capex and opex.
But there are key questions to ask your DR
provider. You will need to be sure the service
provider will transfer data securely in the
event of a disaster, authenticate users properly, and ensure compliance with any applicable regulatory requirements.

You also need to ensure you have enough


bandwidth and network capacity to redirect
users to the cloud. A DR plan should also
detail how you will restore data, including
expected recovery times.
Your due diligence should include research
into reference sites, case studies of realworld disasters and the providers response.
Contact the providers customers to find out
what happened. Your DR plan must also be
regularly tested.

TIP: How to develop a disaster recovery strategy


Regarding disaster recovery strategies, ISO/IEC 27031, the global standard for IT disaster recovery, states: Strategies should define the approaches to implement the required resilience so the
principles of incident prevention, detection, response, recovery and restoration are put in place.
Strategies define what you plan to do when responding to an incident, while plans describe
how you will do it. Once you have identified your critical systems, you should create a table to
help you formulate the disaster recovery strategies you will use to protect them.
You will need to consider issues such as budgets, managements position with regard to risks,
the availability of resources, costs versus benefits, human constraints, technological constraints
and regulatory obligations. There are also some additional factors in strategy definition.
n People. Availability of staff/contractors, training needs of staff/contractors, duplication of critical skills so there can be a primary and at least one back-up person, available documentation to be
used by staff, and follow-up to ensure staff and contractor retention of knowledge.
n Physical facilities. Look at availability of alternate work areas within the same site, at a different company location, at a third-party-provided location, at employees homes or at a transportable work facility. Then consider site security, staff access procedures, ID badges and the
location of the alternate space relative to the primary site.
n Technology. Consider access to equipment space that is properly configured for IT systems;
suitable heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) for IT systems; sufficient primary
electrical power; suitable voice and data infrastructure; the distance of the alternate technology
area from the primary site; provision for staffing at an alternate technology site; availability of
failover (to a back-up system) and failback (return to normal operations) technologies to facilitate recovery; support for legacy systems; and physical and information security capabilities at
the alternate site.
n Data. Areas to look at include timely back-up of critical data to a secure storage area, methods of data storage (disk, tape, optical, etc), connectivity and bandwidth requirements to ensure
all critical data can be backed up, data protection capabilities at the alternate storage site, and
availability of technical support from qualified third-party service providers.
n Suppliers. Identify and contract primary and alternate suppliers for all critical systems and
processes, and even the sourcing of people. Areas where alternate suppliers will be important
include hardware, power, networks, repair and replacement of components, and delivery firms.
n Policies and procedures. Define policies for IT disaster recovery and have them approved by
senior management. Then define step-by-step procedures to, for example, initiate data back-up
to secure alternate locations, relocate operations to an alternate space, recover systems and
data at the alternate sites, and resume operations at either the original site or at a new location.
Finally, be sure to obtain management sign-off for your strategies. Be prepared to
demonstrate that your strategies align with the organisations business goals and business
continuity strategies.
CW Europe November 2012 5

Disaster Recovery

Cloud DR providers

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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
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strategy lacks
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uniform supplier
portal simplifies
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Did IT problems
Make Santander
exit RBS deal?

Key cloud DR service providers include:


Rackspace, which offers host-based replication services and support for physical and
virtualised environments at the low-cost end
of its price range, and datacentre-to-datacentre replication for mission-critical data on
storage arrays.
Amazon Web Services underpins the
cloud DR services of a number of providers,
and offers its systems as the basis for a DIY
approach to cloud DR.
Cloud and managed services provider
Savvis offers a cloud DR service that includes
cold, warm and/or hot site provision.
Phoenix offers geographically dispersed
workplace as well as IT DR services, the latter including a ship-to-site service for when
the building is intact but equipment has been
lost through damage or theft.

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.

SURVEY RESULTS: Virtual machine back-up and


disaster recovery top European storage priorities
The two joint highest priorities in storage and back-up among European IT departments this
year have been virtual machine back-up and disaster recovery. With a score of 39% each from
225 European IT professionals in the TechTarget worldwide IT Priorities Survey conducted in late
2011, these two fields emerged as top of the storage to-do list for 2012.
Third in the list of storage-related IT department priorities was storage virtualisation, which
28% of those questioned said they would deploy in 2012. Next on the list of priorities were cloud
storage or back-up (21%), data deduplication for back-up (20%), and data reduction for primary storage (17%).
Cloud computing also emerged as a broad initiative for a significant portion of those
questioned (27%). Of those, 28% said they would use the cloud for storage and 30% for disaster recovery. By way of perspective, 58% said they would use the cloud for application provision.
When questioned on their main reservations about working with external cloud service providers, security was ranked highest, with reliability and protection of data behind that.
So what is driving these priorities? There are two key constraints in play: the need to cut costs
and the need for legal and regulatory compliance.
Those questioned admitted they were feeling the recessionary pinch. A majority of respondents
said they were in recession (28%) or slowly recovering from it (40%). Compliance was also a
driver. Just under a quarter of respondents (24.5%) said complying with legal and industry regulation large chunks of which dictate data protection and disaster recovery standards was a priority.
Server virtualisation was also a high priority for those questioned (58%). This too is arguably
ultimately an exercise in cost cutting as it aims to vastly reduce numbers of physical servers in the
datacentre. But, once embarked upon, server virtualisation brings the need for a number of associated projects that cost money, such as optimising storage and back-up for virtual machines.
Some questions must be raised regarding storage virtualisation, which emerged as the third
highest storage priority among respondents. Storage virtualisation is where heterogeneous storage capacity is pooled to provide one shared reservoir of capacity. Interest in it has been spurred
by server virtualisation, but take-up has not yet been very widespread.
CW Europe November 2012 6

case study

Disaster recovery boosts business


continuity for recruitment firm
A review of disaster recovery capabilities has made multinational specialist
recruitment company Hudson more resilient in its day-to-day business.
Warwick Ashford reports

european
News
editors
comment
Cloud disaster
recovery
explained
Disaster recovery
boosts business
continuity for
recruitment firm
The importance
of European
datacentres
UK broadband
strategy lacks
ambition

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

external factors. These included a wide area


network (WAN) outage as a result of local
construction works, a cooling system failure
in a datacentre, and a water leakage.
Hudson, which operates in around 20
countries, has chosen HP servers and storage to ensure full recovery of all applications,
expanding the firms existing relationship
with the IT supplier beyond printers and
desktops.
Asked why Hudson had chosen HP, Alblas
said it had offered the best value for money.
A simple but working solution, preventing
Hudson from paying for functionality we do
not need or would not use, he said.
HP storage ensures uninterrupted availability for all our users, and virtualising
all our physical servers onto HP ProLiant
blade servers has cut Hudsons datacentre
power usage and floorspace in half,
said Alblas.
alexsl/istockphoto

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CW Europe November 2012 7

case study

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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
boosts business
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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?

A single unified storage pool now supports


Hudsons virtualised environment, business
applications and services, at a lower cost and
with greater flexibility.
The total percentage of cost savings is
hard to calculate as it includes simplified
management, better server usage with more
VMs [virtual machines] per host and datacentre costs as a result of lower footprint and
power, said Alblas.
Using a second datacentre is an increase
in costs, obviously. However, basic analysis
convinced Hudson this solution would be
cheaper or cost neutral in the long term, providing more power, disk space and resiliency
at the same time, he said.
One other advantage is that were much
more flexible in choosing datacentres and
WAN suppliers because we can easily move
one datacentre to another location without
scheduling an outage as during the relocation
of one datacentre the other will take over.
According to Alblas, a storage area network (SAN) based on an HP LeftHand
Storage system provides 61TB of secure, easily managed storage for Hudsons businesscritical data.
Thin provisioning has already saved 43TB
of physical disk space, and performance can
be scaled linearly to grow with Hudsons
business, he said.
HP Virtual Connect simplifies the connection of the SAN to a virtualised server
platform of HP ProLiant BladeSystem c7000
enclosures with 26 HP ProLiant BL490c
server blades running VMware 4.1.

HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) makes it


possible to manage the HP servers remotely,
Alblas said.
Hudsons IT environment is centrally managed through HP Systems Insight Manager.
Hardware-level management and automated remote support for the HP servers
and storage enable the IT team to maximise system uptime. HP Snapshot software
maintains system performance by allowing
I/O-intensive applications such as zero-

Virtualising all
our physical servers
onto HP ProLiant
blade servers has cut

Hudsons datacentre
power usage and
floorspace in half

Bas Alblas, Hudson


downtime back-up to run concurrently without affecting the performance of Hudsons
primary applications.
Alblas said HP partner Softcat provided
advice and testing for the HP system prior to
deployment. n
Warwick Ashford is security editor for Computer Weekly.

Hudsons view on disaster recovery


As Hudson migrated all local server infrastructure to one central datacentre in the past five
years, a disaster recovery (DR) solution for that datacentre started to make sense to mitigate
the single point of failure. Initially the scope was to have a DR solution for the most critical
applications, covering a maximum of 50% of the total user base.
During the investigation we found out we would be able to create a DR set-up covering all applications, able to accommodate all European users, said Bas Alblas, IT director Europe at Hudson. As a
result, we were able to get project buy-in/budget without much effort. HPs solution allowed us to do
much more than originally required, with little budget increase. The project also involved replacing all
existing servers and network equipment with the newest technology, offering more central processor
unit power, three times more disk space and an upgrade from a 1Gbps network to a 10Gbps network.
Virtualising all physical servers also allowed Hudson to address its back-up strategy, improving
back-up and restore times by moving from tape-based back-up to disk-based back-up and backing
up virtual machines using agentless technology instead of agent-based file level back-ups to tape.
CW Europe November 2012 8

Datacentres

European datacentres key to


enterprise success, says Box CEO
Founder and CEO of cloud storage firm Box talks to Jennifer Scott about
why enterprises are embracing this type of technology
Home
european
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comment
Cloud disaster
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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?

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.

Consumers driving business technology advances

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.

Suppliers must rise to customer demand

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.
Home
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Cloud disaster
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explained
Disaster recovery
boosts business
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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?

Greater awareness means business opportunities

Recently, Salesforce.com launched its own enterprise cloud storage/collaboration system


called Chatterbox, meaning Box has yet another competitor with a similar name, but a
more traditional, enterprise focus. However, despite some of Levies comments at the time,
he sees it as positive for his firm.
Salesforce.com has a much larger footprint than we do, he said. That means it can [get
a better view of] the criteria that customers are looking for in their technology. We think
Salesforce.com and others talking about having your data in the cloud and being able to share
it easily will help educate the market that this is a very important category, and when that
happens, we think Box is in the strongest position to take advantage of it.
Levie is clear that regardless of how some view his firm as consumer-driven, it is doing
everything to make itself an enterprise-ready option. Box recently announced two-factor
authentication, a partnership with email security specialist Proofpoint, and a new application programming interface enabling enterprises to extract data from the service and
run it through their own business intelligence and big data platforms to get the most out
of the information.
We dont think the traditional suppliers can solve the problems customers have, he said.
Customers are having challenges around how to access information on mobile devices,
how to collaborate with people anywhere they are in the world, and how to get their data in
different kinds of applications, not just the ones
that are on-premise and not just the ones that are
sold by their traditional go-to suppliers.
nterprises are
Levie claimed few traditional options could
address those issues so customers would need to
going to get much
turn to cloud solutions. In that landscape, he said,
Box has the best technology.
better technology

European datacentre essential

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

CW Europe November 2012 10

stockbyte/Thinkstock

networking

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Cloud disaster
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Disaster recovery
boosts business
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recruitment firm
The importance
of European
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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

he FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) Council of Europe has blamed the tradition of one


large incumbent provider and the lack of ambition from the government for the UK
lagging behind when it comes to fibre broadband.
The council recently launched its rankings of those investing the most into
FTTH, which brings fibre broadband connectivity straight into homes and businesses,
rather than sharing cabinets or copper connections with neighbours, providing much faster
speeds for users.
In the global rankings which list countries with a minimum of 1% of its households with
FTTH connections the Asia-Pacific region scored the highest, with South Korea, the United
Arab Emirates and Hong Kong claiming the most subscribers.
However, even when compared with the rest of Europe, the UK did not even rank, as less
than 1% of its households have such connections.
Nadia Babaali, communications director for the FTTH Council of Europe, said it was not
only the UK at fault, as other large economies, such as Germany, were similarly holding
back. However, she said attitudes need to change to prepare the UK for the future.
In these countries, you have strong incumbent operators that have already made strong
investments, a long time ago, in copper networks, and they would like to keep these networks
for as long as possible as they are making money on them, she said.
The copper infrastructure is obsolete and the operators know it. In countries where
you have a lot of competition for example from cable operators or from alternative
CW Europe November 2012 11

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.

Hazy regulations holding back deployment


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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

Jennifer Scott is the networking editor for Computer Weekly.


CW Europe November 2012 12

Business intelligence

single supplier e-procurement


portal tightens supply chain
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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.

Aerial view of the Sandvik industrial


area in Sandviken, Sweden

CW Europe November 2012 13

Business intelligence

Cutting costs, supporting growth

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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

Brian McKenna is business applications editor for Computer Weekly.


CW Europe November 2012 14

outsourcing

Are IT problems to blame for


Santanders exit from RBS deal?
Spanish bank Banco Santander has pulled out of its 1.7bn agreement to take
over 316 RBS branches because of IT integration issues. Karl Flinders reports
Kake Pugh/Flickr

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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.

Integration targets not met

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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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

2012 was set. It is

Banco Santander had a strategy to grow by


now apparent that
acquisition and integrate the IT operations of
the firms it buys to Partenon, which uses inthis revised target
house middleware called Banksphere.
As well as rationalising IT, this creates crosswill not be achieved
selling opportunities and improves customers
satisfaction and operational performance. The
platform uses a single database so all of a customers relationships with the bank are automatically linked through a single view of customers.
Santander bought Abbey in 2004 and acquired Alliance & Leicester in 2008. It set a
target of 300m cost savings after integrating Abbey with Partenon and it planned to
make efficiency savings of between 30m and 50m by integrating Alliance & Leicester
with its core banking system. n
Karl Flinders is services editor at Computer Weekly.

Regulators must force banks to overhaul IT


Regulators must force banks to overhaul complex IT infrastructures which risk causing further
large-scale system outages, IT trade body Intellect has urged.
The UKs financial IT infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose and risks damaging the economy by creating more glitches such as the recent RBS outage, said the body in its report Biting
the bullet why now is the time to rebuild the foundations of the financial system.
Banks are willing to spend money on cutting-edge technology that facilitates high-frequency
trading or reduces the time it takes to process a transaction in the capital markets where
every cut millisecond means more profit but not on modernising the infrastructure that allows
them to deliver better customer services, act as a catalyst for the economy or allow regulators
to perform their roles, said the report.
This attitude means banks are currently spending 90% of their IT budgets on managing
legacy systems, it said.
CW Europe November 2012 16

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