“Companies must fundamentally change or die” was the message from The Economist’s Technology Frontiers conference in March this year. Speed to market of new products and services has become a survival issue with Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels warning, “Businesses need to become more experimental. Product cycles are still lasting years, while small, innovative businesses take just months.”

With the web creating a crowded market and consumers no longer having any sense of loyalty, he said organisations must bring products to market quickly, measure how customers are using them and either continue or kill the product.

Vivek Kundara, vice president at Salesforce, echoed his views at the event, saying, “In the consumer web you are one click away from extinction. That is the future of business. We will see unprecedented creative destruction of businesses not embracing innovations. This is fundamentally re-engineering entire sectors of the economy.”

Read the full "Survival of the fittest" article…

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This year’s results were significant, with overall disruptions dropping by over a quarter (26%) in the last twelve months. And the driving factor behind this? What we’ve seen over the last year is all the hype surrounding new ways of working become a reality. Organisations have increasingly built resilience into operations through investment in cloud computing and virtualisation technologies, as well as managed recovery programmes.

Whereas ‘recovery’ strategies were previously an essential piece in any business toolkit, this has, encouragingly, been replaced with an intense focus on continual availability. Business-as-usual is no longer something to recover and ‘downtime’ is being stripped from the business vocabulary. Today’s companies recognise that operations have to run around the clock, 24/7 to match consumer demand and expectations. This has been helped, in no small way, by the high-profile outages that plagued certain companies throughout 2012 and illustrated the far-reaching consequences that significant downtime can bring.

This is a profound shift, one that Nelson Phillips discussed in the recent Delivering the Available Enterprise report. And, when this is supported by a sharp upturn in dedicated workplace recovery investment, as our research shows, it’s clear that businesses are actively looking to ensure guaranteed resilience for their people, as well as their systems.

While there is still work to be done (figures show that the workplace is not yet completely free of disruption), there is a real sense of momentum here, as the UK companies continue taking large steps towards becoming Available Enterprises.

SunGard has created a chart which gives you an at-a-glance view of the pros and cons of each service but the most important point is that when you choose SunGard Availability Services as your cloud partner, expert cloud consultancy comes as standard. We appreciate that with a multitude of potential IT configurations, each customer’s circumstances are unique. Our experienced consultants will work closely with you to understand your particular challenges and IT infrastructure while assessing its suitability for virtualisation. They will present all the options and provide the professional advice you need to make an informed decision on the future shape of your IT.

View the Spectrum of Managed Cloud Solutions chart

The paper, Cloud Workload Migration: Where the Cloud-Based Service Delivery Model Makes Sense, is based on research that shows the cloud services market remains relatively immature. It is forecast to grow significantly within the next five years in terms of both subscriber numbers and value. However, persistent concerns around the security (80%), reliability (37%), performance (28%) and management (20%) of cloud services mean that the majority (81%) of physical and virtualised workloads currently remain tethered to on-premise infrastructure.

Corporate fears have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the recent high profile outages that have hit household names such as Amazon Web Services, Google and many others. These very public failings have inevitably served to heighten organisations’ mistrust of the cloud’s ability to provide the secure, robust application and service delivery they need.

Yet the failure of public cloud services to isolate customer workloads and guarantee uptime does not tell the whole story: not all cloud services are the same. It is illogical to tar all varieties of cloud computing with the same brush as widely available private and hybrid cloud delivery models can address these lingering anxieties. These solutions are usually based on dedicated, single-tenanted or like-minded enterprisetenanted architecture, hosted either off or on-premise and connected by secure network links. In some cases, cloud service providers can even demonstrate that they offer better physical security, data protection and failover capabilities than on-premise environments!

The survey highlighted another common concern. Over a third (37%) of IT managers also worry that they will struggle to migrate and retrieve data quickly in line with national and European data protection regulations. (Interestingly, this was less of a concern for larger firms and this may be because they have already outsourced information to third party hosting companies and are therefore more familiar with the processes involved).

Continue to read the full Cloud concerns article…

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As we’ve become more and more reliant on the sophisticated technology that runs our work and personal lives, customers, suppliers and employees unquestioningly expect businesses to be available wherever and whenever they need them. SunGard Availability Services’ research[1] into the subject shows this is driven by a number of factors such as:

• The growth of Bring Your Own Devices (BYoD) – Employees expect to be able to use whatever devices they like – including their own laptops, tablets and smartphones – to access the information they need but managing availability across a plethora of different devices poses an immense challenge for CIOs. This is a particular problem when according to our research, only 18% of companies currently have a BYoD policy in place.

• The need to meet customer expectations and SLA requirements – This was cited as the most important driver by more than half (55%) of the CIOs surveyed.

• The demands of an increasingly mobile workforce – According to a forecast from IT analytics firm IDC, by 2015 the world’s mobile worker population will represent 37.2% of the total workforce.

• Increased internationalisation – Those involved in complex supply chains around the world need to access and process information quickly, irrespective of organisational boundaries and time zones. This means there is no longer any such thing as a downtime window. In fact, CIOs report that business travellers are the most unforgiving when they cannot access the services and information they need on their travels, inadvertently helping to make the business case for availability in their own organisations.

• Growing recognition of availability as a source of competitive advantage – Simply being more available than your competitors can be the decisive factor in getting a customer’s business and almost a third (32%) cited this as a quantifiable advantage of becoming an available enterprise.

• The emergence of ‘digital natives’ – The IT-savvy generation that has grown up with Facebook, Amazon and Google has very little tolerance for downtime.

These issues are among those explored in a fascinating interview between myself and Professor Nelson Phillips of Imperial College London.

Watch the video here!

To view the research for yourself or to take advantage of our READpapers, videos, infographics and more, check out our dedicated Available Enterprise portal.

2012 was one of the wettest years on record. Over 52 inches of rainfall splashed down on Britain, despite the country experiencing a drought over the first three months. Over 8,000 homes and businesses were battered by heavy rain, storms and flash floods. UK agriculture suffered as crops were hit, and the country’s transport infrastructure was severely disrupted. More worryingly, research from the Met Office has warned that we can expect more ‘extreme’ weather events in the future, with average rainfall levels rising across Britain. Clearly 2012 was not a one off problem.

The weather has always been a topic of concern for Brits, yet we seem powerless when it comes to provisioning against it.  Year after year UK businesses are continually disrupted by severe weather – in 2012 it was flooding and before that snow brought the country to a standstill. Admittedly Britain has a somewhat changeable climate but it’s hard to believe that the infrastructures of North America or Western Europe could be so badly affected by wind, rain or snow so regularly.

A Change in Defence

During the winter months the threat of flooding and severe weather events loom like dark clouds over UK businesses, posing risks of workplace closures, travel chaos and productivity disruption. Too often supply chains are left broken and customer demands go unsupplied thanks to Britain’s weather.

Now, as technology like cloud computing hits the mainstream and businesses begin to see the benefits of remote and flexible-working, we should expect to see a step-change in continuity and recovery planning for UK organisations against severe weather.  The cloud, for example, offers the potential for 24/7 access to data and mission critical applications, regardless of time, location and device. And once the physical location becomes less of a factor, severe weather becomes less of an issue, as employees are able to work remotely, whether that is from home, on the move or from a secondary recovery site. Ideal if flood waters have left the office uninhabitable. Here accessibility should be the key concern; a business’s data is useless if it can’t be used. Organisations must ensure that all employees have remote access to the tools they need to continue working.

Firms should be careful, however, not rely too heavily on remote working technologies. As Hurricane Sandy demonstrated, disruptions to local power or communications infrastructure, when severe enough, can compromise plans to work from home. Rather than putting all eggs in one recovery basket, businesses need to equip themselves with both near and far recovery options. With a near site recovery option, staff should still be able to access the secondary office, even in the cases of disruption to the local transport network. On the other hand, a far site recovery space would allow your staff to reach a working facility when a wider area has been affected. The key lesson here is that the organisation must put in place a comprehensive recovery plan that can deal with even the most severe eventuality.

Maintaining clear communication channels with the workforce, customers and stakeholders is another key area for consideration. After a disruptive event such as flooding, businesses can quickly descend into confusion and inaction as employees remain in the dark around continuity efforts and whether important deadlines will be met. Customers can also become quickly disillusioned with a business that is unable to fulfil its service promises and, in times of austerity when loyalty wanes, downtime can have costly repercussions for future business. Organisations must keep all parties informed of developments, business priorities and the overall recovery strategy in order to ensure that everyone is travelling in the same direction. Here, increased data analytics allow businesses to get a better picture of the organisation’s recovery, what areas have been fully remedied and where additional resources can be deployed to help employees get back to business as usual.

The Bigger Picture

With the government’s recently announced £5m funding scheme to help regional businesses protect themselves from flood risks, we are starting to see real improvements to UK recovery planning. More action is needed however. From the government, it’s further strategic investment to ensure that businesses can continue despite severe weather events. From businesses, it’s recognising responsibility and accepting that their availability measures, not floods, should be culpable for disruption. Technology like cloud computing and managed services provide the means to overcome such disruptions – whatever the weather!

Note: This article first appeared in Contingency Today 8/5/13: http://www.contingencytoday.com/online_article/Flood-protection—how-to-make-sure-it-doesn_t-sink-your-business/3850

We agreed that the overriding argument in making a convincing business case for investment is undoubtedly the importance of ensuring customer satisfaction.  This applies both as a defensive measure – 42% of CIOs in our survey[1] predicted that outages would be likely to result in losing customers – and as a source of competitive advantage to lock existing customers in and win new business.   And this is not just wishful thinking: almost a third (32%) of CIOs stated that becoming an available enterprise had already increased their competitiveness as a business.

Another persuasive argument is the cost of business downtime. More than half (58%) of those surveyed cited the damaging effect on revenues and profitability as the single biggest consequence of an outage.  How much would being out of action for a day cost your business? Will your customers and potential customers wait for you to get back online?  As we know ourselves as consumers, we usually have a choice of suppliers and if we can’t buy from our first choice provider, we will simply move on to the next one down the list.

Younger companies are in the enviable position of being able to build availability into their ICT infrastructure from the start but for more established businesses, legacy systems undoubtedly present the biggest obstacle.  However, with some time, effort and lateral thinking, there are ways to make them more available and as many of these systems run priority services for customers, organisations can’t afford to shrink from the challenge.

No one would pretend that making the case for infrastructure investment in today’s economic climate is easy and this is compounded by the fact that with cloud technology now mainstream, improvements to IT infrastructure are largely invisible. But the facts speak for themselves.  Customers today are increasingly intolerant of downtime – 55% of CIOs said customer expectations are driving the push for availability – and being unavailable to do business could mean they very quickly become ex-customers.

The trend towards near shoring and offshoring continues apace. Seven years ago a UK enterprise might have 500 staff in India. Now there are enterprises with 1000s of staff in off shore locations in service centres around the world in countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland and the Philippines.

Increasingly offshore locations are not just providing commodity services but higher value ones such as IT application development, analytics and component processes that complete real time processes back in the home country.

So, in this regulated and litigious world of business, how resilient are these operations? How confident are the board and non-execs that the business could stay available during a disruption?

We invite you to participate anonymously in a joint Continuity Central / SunGard Availability Services snap shot survey, the results of which will be published in a webinar in June 2013

Take part

Greater reductions in server and storage hardware/software installation, upgrade and maintenance costs, for example, are one potential benefit associated with pay as you go, or computing on demand services, that tie costs more closely to usage, compared to often low CPU utilisation rates associated with running on-premises systems. A study from research firm IDC conducted in 2012 found that moving onpremises hosted applications into cloud environments could save a company 70% on the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with a single application over five years, though those costs will vary considerably according to the specific cloud service provider.

Indeed, IT staff routinely identify flexibility rather than cost savings as the bigger attraction of switching applications and services into a cloud-hosted model alongside the opportunity to free themselves from daily operational and infrastructure management tasks to focus on other projects by outsourcing the latter responsibilities to a third party.

Many, but not all, types of application are suitable for offpremises cloud provision for a variety of reasons however. Certain latency sensitive applications which demand responses in milliseconds, real time web applications with high performance demands or those with strict data security requirements may be better off either kept in-house, or hosted within hybrid cloud environments which tightly integrate, protect and secure dedicated, single tenanted off-premise and on-premise systems. However, given the potential benefits, companies should at least be analysing existing workloads to evaluate if and where operational efficiencies can be improved by switching to a cloud-based delivery model.

A significant majority of applications and services remain in-house

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The overall findings indicate that confidence increases/decreases in line with the size of the organisation – 38% said they were very confident, but that number rose to 59% among companies employing over 20,000 people, suggesting that larger companies which have already outsourced greater volumes of information to third party hosting companies are more familiar with, and therefore less uncertain about, the processes involved.

Remaining concerns can be addressed to a certain extent via hybrid cloud platforms that store some data and legacy applications in hosted environments and others on-premises where data regulation or security and performance concerns demand it is hosted locally. They are also solved by SLAs and terms and conditions offered by some private-hosted and dedicated cloud services whose providers have sufficient data centre footprint of their own to guarantee that sensitive information stays either within its country of origin or the regional boundaries set out by data protection regulation, and can be quickly retrieved to meet the terms of subject access requests and eDisclosure directives for example.

Where data is hosted off-premises, terms that ensure any data returned to the customer is in a format which enables continued processing are crucial. Cloud service providers must be able to show that they delete all of the customer’s information when that customer terminates the contract and that no other copies are retained within their own cloud architecture, back up sets or the architecture owned by any subcontractor, partner or equipment supplier the cloud service provider may use. Efficient provisioning, migration, management and auditing controls are important here as are network connectivity and security mechanisms that guarantee adequate bandwidth and data integrity when information is being transmitted between sites.

Confidence in efficient data transfer and retrieval from and between cloud services is not universal

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