Gordon’s Wine Bar, established in 1890 and thought to be London’s oldest, is a popular venue for office workers and tourists wanting to experience a taste of Dickensian London. Owner Simon Gordon noticed that petty theft was becoming a growing problem in the bar’s atmospheric, candle-lit cellars.

“”What seemed like quite a daunting task has turned into an exciting business opportunity for us because we have found the right partner and are benefitting from their consultancy and support.””

Business challenge

Simon Gordon wanted to prevent his customers becoming victims of theft, both to avoid the distress caused by the loss of a bag or briefcase and to protect the bar’s reputation. He developed ‘Facewatch’, an innovative web-based app enabling businesses to instantly submit digital evidence packages to the police online. As adoption and use of the Facewatch system grew by businesses and the police, so did the requirement to host the data in a reliable and secure environment that was trusted and recognised by all.

Solution

• Government Cloud.

Business Benefits

• Accelerated IL3 accreditation
• Opens up new business opportunities in the public sector
• Access to expert consultancy and advice
• Highly available and secure platform
• Ability to scale up in line with business growth.

You can read the full story here.

“”By working with Sungard AS we have the flexibility we need to provide services at IL2 and eventually IL3 level both nationally and internationally. Sungard AS has committed to work alongside us strategically, which will enable us to get on with building relationships with police forces and developing our product’s capabilities.””

FUJIFILM’s popular FUJIFILM Imagine On Line & Mobile platform allows people to print their digital photos on a variety of items including photo books, mugs, coasters, clothing and keyrings to make truly personal gifts and mementos. 

Images are stored in the cloud for editing at home or in one of 300 FUJIFILM shops or kiosks, with images either printed in store or sent by post.  If consumers were unable to access their photos instantly the FUJIFILM Imagine On Line & Mobile service would grind to a halt and FUJIFILM’s reputation would suffer irreparable damage. Consequently, high availability around the clock is critical.

““The customers of today demand instant service. If they couldn’t download their photos from the cloud fairly quickly they would soon move their photos to a competitor site so having Sungard AS as our partner gives me peace of mind. As GM of the company I can say it really is the calibre of people who are critical and the Sungard AS team have proved themselves to be exceptional.””

Business Challenge

For FUJIFILM availability is paramount, ensuring the images at the heart of its business are always readily accessible. With ambitions to expand worldwide, it needed a scalable, flexible and secure technology platform provided by a company with global reach.  For this, they entered into discussions with Sungard Availability Services.

Solution

Managed Private Cloud.

““I like having the backing of a large, international company but the flexibility and helpful attitude of a smaller business – we get the best of both worlds and our two companies are a good cultural match.””

You can read the full case study here.

The city now stands at over 8.6 million, placing even more pressure on a transport network that is already showing signs of struggling.

Commuting to and from the city is already an arduous task, with images of people squeezing themselves into carriages a far too familiar one – and an experience that will become even more common as the city’s population continues to expand.

Currently, the average worker will spend over 10,634 hours of their career simply commuting – and for London based employees this works out at nearly an hour and a quarter every day. Often in cramped, loud and difficult conditions, working or using the time productively is all but impossible. And as the population stats show – not helped by frequent rail upgrades and unpredictable strike action – this is only going to get worse.

Our Working Lives are due a Transformation

With the speed of business ever increasing, wasting so much time on a daily basis is madness. Businesses must start thinking about providing their employees with the ability to work from any location, not just their city offices, developing new working practices that can keep business moving 24/7.

Turning to new technologies, including Desktop-as-a-Service solutions, could be the answer.

If the workforce can access business critical information from any device, at home, at a satellite office or even within a shared office space, this would reduce the need to commute into London (and commuting in general) as frequently, avoiding uncomfortable journeys and reducing the pressure on public transport.

Field based staff armed with laptops have always enjoyed work location flexibility but employees normally tied to the office with a desktop PC is symptomatic of handling sensitive information and therefore aren’t afforded location flexibility for fear of data loss and security breaches.

This is also true of laptops where the data resides on the device making it easy to download and transfer data from one device to another.

Virtualising the desktop and applications is arguably the best way to secure your data and provide work location flexibility since the data and processing takes place in a data centre not the end user device, be it a work device or one owned by the employee. Of course, face to face meetings are still a vital part of business communications, but having that option to work, either from home or a different office location, and then travel outside of the morning and evening rush hours could prove valuable in enhancing both staff efficiency and employee happiness.

Find out more about UK attitudes to desktop virtualisation here.

Building Bigger and Better

And for the IT department, this responsibility couldn’t have come at a worse time, propelling the CIO to centre stage during a challenging economic period. Increased demands on the IT team has meant that the CIO is now facing a serious challenge to keep the business at the forefront of enterprise technology, and all without significantly raising the level of IT spending.

In order to fulfil this task and do more with less, clearly IT must become more sophisticated. Contending with requests for increased mobility and improved security as well as a desire from users to work on their own devices means that IT must be optimised, offering an overall framework in which the business can operate flexibly and with freedom of choice. However, this risks creating a hugely sprawling and complex environment – which can present difficulties for the CIO to manage and keep secure as well as agile.

So exactly how can businesses build out its IT without adding to its overall complexity?

Cloud Computing: a Vital Cog in the Machine

Although cloud computing may have been hyped as a cure-all to IT complexity, this certainly isn’t the case and adding everything to the cloud is not the answer. Instead businesses must think more strategically in how they build their IT estates, employing an overall strategy that sits across the entire organisation. This means a single environment that can encompass new cloud-based services alongside other, mission-critical legacy applications that may not be suited to cloud deployments.

Using a true hybrid IT solution can enable organisations to extend their data centres into the public and private clouds of other providers as required. Businesses can then ensure they are able to both scale up or down as their needs, market opportunities and, crucially, regulations dictate. This hybrid IT approach can also facilitate the integration of existing IT investments in time, resources, money, infrastructures, application development and security protocols with new technologies, particularly cloud-based.

Staying in Control

Key to this level of workload mobility will be ensuring that the IT department remains firmly in control. With compliance guidelines differing across markets, regions and industries not every cloud will suit every business.

The community clouds project – in which providers offer an environment tuned to the needs and compliance demands of a specific sector of businesses – could offer a solution. Helping to provide peace of mind by ensuring that the cloud meets strict accreditation standards, community clouds can streamline IT provisioning,.

Ultimately, any level of IT provisioning can be challenging – not only from a perspective of time, but also resource. Agility is key: the only way IT can survive such an increase in demand is to move from being a reactive department, working according to individual requests, and become a proactive part of the business. Creating a framework that allows users the freedom to make their own decisions within the boundaries of the CIO’s control.

Max Feneck was presenting at Cisco Live Milan 2015 when he shared these thoughts for @CiscoUKI and @SungardASUK.

Within Ireland, the data sovereignty issue has been slowly brought into the spotlight through the appointment of Helen Dixon as the country’s Data Protection Commissioner and her plans to expand the department. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s long-running battle with the US court system over the right to privacy has gathered numerous column inches. More globally, the fallout from Sony’s devastating hack has ensured that data security is being discussed in boardrooms up and down the country.

All across the world, organisations are coming under increased scrutiny from stakeholders to ensure they have the correct compliance policies in place in order to operate safely and without risk. This is especially important in Ireland – long established as a technology hub in its own right, the country is also a gateway for US businesses looking to enter the European market. With IT behemoths such as Google, Facebook and Apple, as well as hundreds of tech start-ups all present in the region, any security slip-ups could end up being played out on the global stage. As such, protection standards must be adhered to strictly and without exception. Thanks to the maturity of the market, businesses now expect Ireland to operate within the highest standards of information security.

Changes Ahead

These conversations over compliance will doubtless continue throughout 2015. The EU Commission’s much touted data protection law will similarly fuel the debate before it is eventually enacted, as expected, in 2017. This means there will be yet another body with the power to rightly hand out fines and sanctions to organisations that mishandle, or fail to take every step possible to protect their mission critical and sensitive data.

The upcoming EU directive will highlight the responsibility businesses have to their customers for the safety of their data, and while it might only be the major leaks that make the headlines, smaller incidents can have a huge knock-on effect. Previously poor regulation has been blamed for businesses failing to take responsibility, but this new ruling will help instil that sense of importance around customer data.

Investing in Best Practice

With this understanding of the market we felt investment in developing and maintaining security practices and processes that reach the globally accepted ISO 27001:2013 standard was vital.

Regulation is sometimes perceived as a bureaucratic burden and a barrier to doing business and making profit; however this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Achieving the ISO 27001 certification offers peace of mind to Sungard Availability Services’ customers in Ireland and assures them that resilience and information availability is built into all aspects of our business.

Sungard Availability Services, Cisco, Citrix and NetApp

Dublin, Ireland: – Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), a leading provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, today announces the launch of its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) in Ireland and the UK. This is the first solution of its kind to be developed alongside leading global providers Cisco*, Citrix and NetApp to provide a complete cloud-based desktop solution for organisations.

Changing working practices continue to create tensions between the CEOs’ desire for increased productivity, availability and security, and millennial employees demanding mobile work styles enabled by multiple applications accessed from any device and anywhere.

For our customers, who typically have high availability needs, it’s a complex, large scale challenge and customers are asking us to help them provide a complete service that addresses both changing work styles and their availability demands. The Sungard AS Desktop as a Service provides the optimal IT infrastructure to deliver desktops wherever they are needed: be it their offices; on the move or into emergency workplace recovery offices.

Sungard AS’ DaaS solution is the first project to have been announced in partnership with best-of-breed providers Cisco, Citrix and NetApp. The solution will offer a 100 per cent availability service level agreement – for gold customers, with minimum 99.95% SLAs on silver and bronze contracts – providing customers constant access to their desktop, from any location and device.

Sungard AS’ consultancy-led delivery aims to minimise the IT challenges associated with implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure and to enable new ways to work better with state-of-the-art workspaces that are mobile, virtual and secure. Sungard AS’ managed-services provision helps ensure high availability of critical systems, supporting flexible and mobile working practices and improvements to staff productivity.

The service is a natural extension of Sungard AS’ existing capabilities. With the organisation already providing bespoke virtual desktops for over 4,000 end users, Sungard AS has demonstrated a strong track record in this area. Additionally, the company manages around 2,600 desktop images as part of its recovery services, any of which may need to be provisioned at a moment’s notice and without failure.

As part of the Sungard AS environment customers will be able to access the company’s optional Workplace Recovery services, where 100 recovery desktops can be rolled out in just 2 hours – allowing businesses a near seamless recovery in case of disruption to their home based IT or usual office facilities. Additionally, the service can be rapidly scaled up in order to accommodate seasonal demand peaks. This means you can access office space and IT more flexibly and faster when you need it.

“This service has been in high demand from our customer base, and they trust Sungard AS to deliver. It is underpinned by accredited Cisco Powered design, which brings together best-in-class technology and market leadership, enabling organisations to accelerate growth and reduce costs,” commented Keith Tilley, EVP, Global Sales & Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services. “Our expertise in resilient infrastructure means that customers are happy to place their desktop environments in our hands, knowing that we are probably the only service in Europe which can offer the level of highly available IT which will ensure organisations are always on and able to do business.”

Mike Threlfall, European Customer Services and Consulting Director said: “Our consultancy service will help unlock further value for customers and remove much of the complexity around implementing a virtual desktop solution. For us the answer does not lie simply in throwing technology at the problem but requires a comprehensive and objective overview that will assess the needs of employees as well as the organisation’s infrastructure requirements. Unlocking the value of the enterprise in this way, businesses can ensure that they put into place the optimal working practices that will enable them to draw the best performances from their staff.

“There is no denying that the expectations of employees are changing, and with more and more ‘Digital Natives’ entering the workplace, IT departments are finding it increasingly challenging to keep up the pace with today’s technology demands. Employees now expect to access vital data and key applications from any location or device. The introduction of Desktop as a Service represents a huge competitive advantage for our customers as they aim to transform and optimise their current working practices.”

Organisations looking to migrate to virtual desktops or workplace environments or upgrade their first generation virtual desktops are invited to contact Sungard Availability Services to undertake an initial business assessment to determine the right desktop strategy for their business and provide the business case to take to the board.

Notes:

*Sungard AS is already an approved Cisco Cloud and Managed Services Master partner having achieved Cisco Powered services designations for Cisco Powered Infrastructure as a Service and Cisco Powered Disaster Recovery as a Service. With the launch of DaaS, Sungard AS intends to make this its third Cisco Powered Service.

Our email address has changed to @SungardAS.com
Please add ‘AS’ to ensure your emails are delivered after 31st December

Sungard Availability Services, Cisco, Citrix and NetApp

London, United Kingdom: – Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), a leading provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, today announces the launch of its Desktop as a Service (DaaS) in the UK and Ireland. This is the first solution of its kind to be developed alongside leading global providers Cisco*, Citrix and NetApp to provide a complete cloud-based desktop solution for organisations.

Changing working practices continue to create tensions between the CEOs’ desire for increased productivity, availability and security, and millennial employees demanding mobile work styles enabled by multiple applications accessed from any device and anywhere.

For our customers, who typically have high availability needs, it’s a complex, large scale challenge and customers are asking us to help them provide a complete service that addresses both changing work styles and their availability demands. The Sungard AS Desktop as a Service provides the optimal IT infrastructure to deliver desktops wherever they are needed: be it their offices; on the move or into emergency workplace recovery offices.

Sungard AS’ DaaS solution is the first project to have been announced in partnership with best-of-breed providers Cisco, Citrix and NetApp. The solution will offer a 100 per cent availability service level agreement – for gold customers, with minimum 99.95% SLAs on silver and bronze contracts – providing customers constant access to their desktop, from any location and device.

Sungard AS’ consultancy-led delivery aims to minimise the IT challenges associated with implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure and to enable new ways to work better with state-of-the-art workspaces that are mobile, virtual and secure. Sungard AS’ managed-services provision helps ensure high availability of critical systems, supporting flexible and mobile working practices and improvements to staff productivity.

The service is a natural extension of Sungard AS’ existing capabilities. With the organisation already providing bespoke virtual desktops for over 4,000 end users, Sungard AS has demonstrated a strong track record in this area. Additionally, the company manages around 2,600 desktop images as part of its recovery services, any of which may need to be provisioned at a moment’s notice and without failure.

As part of the Sungard AS environment customers will be able to access the company’s optional Workplace Recovery services, where 100 recovery desktops can be rolled out in just 2 hours – allowing businesses a near seamless recovery in case of disruption to their home based IT or usual office facilities. Additionally, the service can be rapidly scaled up in order to accommodate seasonal demand peaks. This means you can access office space and IT more flexibly and faster when you need it.

“This service has been in high demand from our customer base, and they trust Sungard AS to deliver.  It is underpinned by accredited Cisco Powered design, which brings together best-in-class technology and market leadership, enabling organisations to accelerate growth and reduce costs,” commented Keith Tilley, EVP, Global Sales & Customer Services Management at Sungard Availability Services. “Our expertise in resilient infrastructure means that customers are happy to place their desktop environments in our hands, knowing that we are probably the only service in Europe which can offer the level of highly available IT which will ensure organisations are always on and able to do business.”

Mike Threlfall, European Customer Services and Consulting Director said: “Our consultancy service will help unlock further value for customers and remove much of the complexity around implementing a virtual desktop solution. For us the answer does not lie simply in throwing technology at the problem but requires a comprehensive and objective overview that will assess the needs of employees as well as the organisation’s infrastructure requirements. Unlocking the value of the enterprise in this way, businesses can ensure that they put into place the optimal working practices that will enable them to draw the best performances from their staff.

“There is no denying that the expectations of employees are changing, and with more and more ‘Digital Natives’ entering the workplace, IT departments are finding it increasingly challenging to keep up the pace with today’s technology demands. Employees now expect to access vital data and key applications from any location or device. The introduction of Desktop as a Service represents a huge competitive advantage for our customers as they aim to transform and optimise their current working practices.”

Organisations looking to migrate to virtual desktops or workplace environments or upgrade their first generation virtual desktops are invited to contact Sungard Availability Services to undertake an initial business assessment to determine the right desktop strategy for their business and provide the business case to take to the board.

Notes:

*Sungard AS is already an approved Cisco Cloud and Managed Services Master partner having achieved Cisco Powered services designations for Cisco Powered Infrastructure as a Service and Cisco Powered Disaster Recovery as a Service.  With the launch of DaaS, Sungard AS intends to make this its third Cisco Powered Service.

Our email address has changed to @SungardAS.com
Please add ‘AS’ to ensure your emails are delivered after 31st December

Sungard Availability Services (“Sungard AS”), a leading provider of information availability through managed IT, cloud and recovery services, today announced that it has achieved the ISO 27001:2013 standard for its enterprise-grade shared private cloud environment and managed services offering. By attaining the standard, Sungard AS Ireland has proven to an independent third-party that it has developed and implemented a best-in-class information security management system (ISMS) for itself and its customers.

The ISO 27001:2013 certification provides organisations with an internationally recognised, independent verification that the company is able to securely manage information security, retaining confidentiality, integrity and availability of all data. Sungard AS has proven that it has in place the appropriate processes to properly secure its data and the data of its Irish customer base – helping businesses ensure that their mission critical information is both safe and readily accessible.

“Ireland has now established itself not only as a technology hub in its own right, but as access point for US business looking to enter the European market. And as host to the European headquarters of some of the world’s most influential IT organisations, data protection in the region is vitally important. Thanks to the maturity of the market, businesses now expect the highest standard of information security,” said Andrew Barber, Chief Security Officer, EMEA and APAC, Sungard Availability Services.

“Being endorsed by an independent and internationally recognised body will bring further piece of mind to customers in Ireland and assure them that, as their partner of choice for cloud or managed hosting, that resilience and information availability is built into all aspects of our business, from strategic planning to day-to-day operations.”

Sungard AS Ireland’s accreditation is the latest example of the company’s long-standing commitment to tangibly demonstrating quality, compliance and good governance across its operations and processes. Current external governance accreditation includes ITIL, ISO 9001:2008, ISO 22301 and BS 31100: 2008.

Continuing on from my previous insights, this week I’d like to share numbers 4-6 from my list of those elements will either impact enterprise IT or come to the forefront of consideration during the year ahead.

The final three of the top six trends that will shape enterprise IT in 2015:

4. The general election

With politicians already limbering up for next year’s election, IT service providers need to ready themselves for the imminent debate. Austerity will continue, with the government looking to reduce its spend dramatically – whilst the need to demonstrate value to the public will not go away.

And thanks to the sensitive nature of government data, any vendor will need to jump through a number of hoops regarding infrastructure considerations and information security classifications.  For smaller Independent Software Vendors this could be a problem, and it’s one we’ll see solved through high profile partnerships with MSPs that can provide not only the technology, but also the accreditations needed (and the help to attain them!) to bid successfully for government contracts.

5. The rise of Desktop as a Service

2015 will create an even bigger demand for Desktop as a Service (DaaS). The expectations of employees are changing, and with more and more ‘Generation Y’ workers entering the workforce, IT departments are finding it increasingly challenging to keep up the pace with today’s technology demands[2]. For some millennials, the tech package combined with flexible working practices can be a major factor when considering potential employers.  This trend is only set to get bigger, especially with further adoption of flexible working laws.

Whether ‘digital natives’ or ‘digital migrants’, employees now expect to access mission critical data and key applications from any location or device and if companies wish to keep up with modern working practices they need to ensure that they make headway in 2015 into providing this type of service.

6. Coping with Cloud Complexity

Cloud has most certainly hit the mainstream, and in 2014 over three quarters of UK organisations formally adopted at least one cloud-based service.  However, not everything is rosy – while the cloud initially promised to cut IT complexity, many CIOs have found themselves with a new set of challenges. With so many early cloud adopters rushing in and only looking at the immediate, short-term benefits of the cloud many have found themselves caught up in the intricate network of vendors, none of which have integrated clouds.

The cloud myth is well and truly over. In the next year we’ll see businesses looking to extricate themselves from their multiple IT environments – streamlining their estate as they understand that cloud computing is not a technical achievement, but a tool to deliver a specific, individual business outcome.

Forward looking CIOs – or perhaps just wise ones! – will see that the key to successful cloud deployments that do deliver, are based upon responsibly consuming cloud alongside the other physical and virtual environments the business has. Hybrid IT will precede truly integrated Hybrid Cloud, and may indeed be essential to it.

Upcoming legislation like the EU Data Protection directive will mean even more  pressure to secure mission critical data, and CIOs need to ensure they are doing everything in their power to protect customer information. The story is the same in the public sector: with ministers under increased scrutiny thanks to the 2015 election, mistakes and data losses will simply not be tolerated.

Alongside increased pressure on governance and compliance, organisations are also expecting the IT department to make a greater contribution in achieving their business objectives – a difficult task when so much of the CIOs time and resource is tied up in simply keeping the lights on. Within this environment we will see an increased demand for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that can help businesses through what is set to be an IT minefield of a year.

Here are the first three top six trends that will shape enterprise IT in 2015:

1. Increased Value in Services:

The cost of raw infrastructure is already plummeting thanks to price-wars between the biggest providers – including AWS, Microsoft and Google. As a result the bottom is falling out of the market and customers now look beyond raw infrastructure for value

And with many IT departments moving away from the traditional maintenance model and looking to demonstrate business value through innovation and a focus on the application-layer, organisations no longer have the expertise, or the need to deal with raw infrastructure.

In the next year we’ll see a rise in the number of businesses turning to MSPs[1] – with IT priorities shifting from reducing costs to helping create an agile and flexible work environment, businesses will look to  their technology partners to do the dull maintenance work. Thanks to MSPs the CIO can now pour his or her department’s resources in to developing an IT environment which can be shaped and customised by individual departments – trusting that the heavy lifting and availability demands will be dealt with elsewhere.

2. Investing in Orchestration

As I’ve already mentioned, the traditional role of the CIO is shifting, with more attention being paid to the innovation. Again, this means a move away from tried and tested methods of managing infrastructure. Over the next year we will start to see CIOs throw out the outdated ‘command and control’ model of infrastructure governance. Instead IT leaders will begin to embrace data centre orchestration technologies that can offer seamless infrastructure performance, with data moving freely across hybrid IT infrastructures.

The move will allow CIOs to continue to pull away from the ‘dirty’ infrastructure work, retaining their focus on demonstrating real value to the business and delivering a competitive edge.

3. Increased pressure on data compliance

We’re starting to see a number of companies coming under increasing scrutiny for their data protection and compliance policies, and this scrutiny is only going to increase with the new laws coming in 2017 from the EU Commission concerning data regulation. This will significantly increase a business’ responsibility for critical data, and have the power to impose large sanctions for mishandling, or failing to take every step possible to protect it.  This ruling will greatly impact any business model based on the use/management of data such as cloud, Bring-Your-Own-Device and datacentre storage.

We will start to see more debates around who will have to take responsibility for this. MSPs should also prepare for a huge influx of queries from customers about their data, so a thorough understanding of the new regulation itself will be crucial in order to deal with all of the inbound requests. 2017 might seem like a long time away but the radical changes in law will require organisations to work hard over the next two years to have a chance of complying and avoiding substantial fines in the future.