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Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 1computerweekly.com
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Good ethics the key to unlocking data potential
The European Union is working on a unified law for data privacy, but businesses can already gain consumer trust by being transparent, flexible and morally correct
CW EuropeAUGUST 2015
COMPUTER WEEKLY’S DIGITAL MAGAZINE FOR EUROPEAN IT LEADERS
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 2
Hacker teen dodges jail for 50,000 cyber attacks
A teenager has reportedly dodged jail despite a Finnish court finding him guilty of 50,700 instances of aggravated computer intrusions. Instead, the court handed down a two-year suspended sentence to the 17-year-old Julius Kivimaki, who has been linked to the hacktivist group Lizard Squad.
Non-EU IT workers in the UK increase by 13%
The number of IT professionals from outside the European Union (EU) plying their trade in the UK increased by 13% in 2014 compared with the previous year, according to government figures.
Italian firm Hacking Team gets hacked
Unknown hackers have posted a torrent file-sharing link to more than 400GB of Hacking Team data, including emails, that could reveal the identity of customers.
Irish Power adopts GE predictive analytics tool
Irish Power is running a data ana-lytics platform from GE, combining operational data to help it improve the efficiency of its Whitegate power plant, located 25 miles east of the city of Cork. The software is part of GE’s digitisation strategy to offer software-powered services for the so-called industrial internet.
Tieto buys Norwegian software company
Finnish IT services company Tieto is strengthening its business in Norway through the NOK 610m (£50m) acquisition of Norwegian enterprise software company Software Innovation.
European Union launches Internet Referral Unit
Europol has officially launched the European Union Internet Referral Unit to combat terrorist propaganda and related violent extremist activities on the internet. n
Additional resources❯ Top 50 most influential women in UK IT
❯ Storage for desktop virtualisation
❯ A guide to software-defined networks
❯ A CIO guide to the service cloud
❯ A guide to OpenStack storage
NEWS IN BRIEF
More than one billion Visa contactless transactions in Europe in 12 months
Visa cardholders in Europe have completed 1.1 billion contactless payment transactions, worth about €12.6bn, in the past 12 months, with contactless cards most used in the UK. According to Visa Europe, Brits are the biggest contactless spenders, with €330m spent in March this year alone.
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 3
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Editor, CW Europe; special projects editor, Computer Weekly: Kayleigh Bateman
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Data ethics about more than compliance
Data is a valuable thing nowadays, and more businesses are collecting it for exactly that reason. However, with the collection of data also comes concern for consumers and governments over where the data is stored and what companies will do with it.
This issue of CW Europe investigates the different cultural attitudes towards data management ethics, and why compliance is only one element of it.
Many businesses have cited difficulties in doing business in Europe due to consumers having to deal with a patchwork of data protection regulations in the various European Union (EU) member states. Meanwhile, consumers worry about will happen to their data when it is moved across the border to another member state.
These fears over a lack of unified laws spanning the various EU member states have prompted the European Commission to draft a European General Data Protection Regulation.
Despite work getting underway on the new regulations, read why business can’t afford to wait for authorities to agree on them. And find out why compa-nies are being urged to strive for maximum transparency so consumers know what data is being used and how they can prevent this from happening.
Also in this issue, find out why Swedish service provider Elastx has opted for Solidfire all-flash arrays to power its OpenStack-based cloud services for customers.
The Stokholm-based infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud services firm initially deployed Solidfire three years ago when it started up, but soon needed storage that would integrate with its OpenStack cloud infrastructure.
Elastx’s CEO Joakim Öhman tells CW Europe’s storage editor Antony Adshead why the company looked at general storage for all of its platforms. n
Kayleigh Bateman, editor of CW Europe and special projects editor for Computer Weekly
EDITOR’S COMMENTHoMe
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Fears over a lack oF uniFied laws spanning the various
eu member states have prompted the european commission to draFt a
european general data protection regulation
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 4
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethicsThe EU is working hard to achieve a unified law on data ethics and privacy, but companies should look beyond just complying with the law to gain consumer trust. Stef Gyssels reports
Data is an increasingly valuable good. That is why organi-sations are so eager to collect as much of it as possible. And that is also why consumers and governments are
increasingly concerned about what organisations will do with their data.
The European Union (EU) has been actively involved in data protection and the data movement for many years. The most vis-ible result of these activities was the Directive of the European Parliament in 1995 “on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data”.
This directive, which stipulated basic human rights such as pri-vacy and access to their own personal data on the one hand, and free movement of data between member states of the EU on the other, was to be the foundation for national laws in each individual member state.
The freedom for each member state to interpret this directive according to the local culture and views on data privacy seemed
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Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 5
the best possible solution, given the sometimes huge differences between those member states.
“When you compare some more privacy-prone southern coun-tries to the Scandinavian countries, where even salary and tax return details are posted online, you can understand it is not easy to find a common ground that covers the needs of all countries and citizens,” says Deloitte UK research director Harvey Lewis.
Outdated and cOnfusingYet the need for a unified law across the various member states has become increasingly pressing. International companies struggle with the current situation, according to Lewis. “Many of our customers have to deal with a patchwork of data protection regulations in the various member states. That makes it very difficult to do business in Europe at times,” he says.
On top of that, European consumers are also concerned with what happens to their data when it’s moved across the border to another member state, where a quite different set of regulations is in force. And the technological advances between 1995 and today weren’t all covered by the 20-year-old directive.
That is why the European Commission decided to draft a European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which should be a reflection of the current state of affairs and should supersede the Data Protection Directive and all of its derived national laws. “It’s a dream for companies but a nightmare for European bureaucrats,” says Lewis.
It is indeed a long struggle to have each nation’s interests and priorities integrated in the new regulation. To have everybody’s
interests protected and reconciled, a working committee was formed: the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which includes representatives from each member state.
The committee’s website provides a summary of all activities taking place in this area. It also features a recent announcement that the committee has handed over a summary of all findings and agreements to the European Commission, Parliament and Council – an important step towards reaching a European-wide regulation. Officially, the target date is set at the end of this year. But everybody agrees this is a very ambitious target.
Why Wait?But companies cannot afford to wait for the European authori-ties to agree on this new regulation – they need to move for-ward now. “Not everything can be covered in this new regula-tion,” says ING Belgium information architect Dirk Coutuer. “Some things are better left to common sense – general
DATA PRIVACY
“not everything can be covered in this new regulation. some
things are better leFt to common sense”
Dirk Coutuer, iNG BelGium
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 6
knowledge such as ‘don’t give your password to third parties’, for instance.”
Companies don’t need a regulation to know what they should be doing to gain customers’ trust, says Coutuer. “That is why I think it would be a good idea for organisations to jointly write down a set of rules and best practices that they can guarantee to comply with,” he says.
In the meantime, companies should strive for maximum transparency, so that consumers know what data is being used and how they can prevent this from happening – a decision that does not necessarily differ that much between citizens from dif-ferent countries, according to Coutuer.
“I see more of a difference between generations than between countries,” he says. “The younger generation doesn’t worry about privacy at all, and doesn’t give a thought about what happens with their data. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do that for
them. Freedom – including freedom of your personal data – is too valuable to just give that away without a good fight.”
a virtuOus circle Of data ethicsFrank Buytendijk, an analyst at Gartner specialising in data eth-ics, agrees that companies shouldn’t focus on the European GDPR or on its due date, whenever that may be.
“Technology shows what you can do, laws and regulations tell you what you’re allowed to do, but ethics tell you what you should do. If you limit yourself to complying with laws and regu-lations, you get stuck at the level of a toddler that only obeys because it is forced to do so, not because it wants to,” he says.
Buytendijk distinguishes three more levels of data ethics. Firstly, the level of risk avoidance and, secondly, the level of distinctive capabilities where you use data ethics as a competitive advantage: “Take, for example, TomTom: it includes privacy in the design of its products to distinguish itself from the GPS vendors that can’t guarantee you the privacy of your travel details,” he says.
And finally, says Buytendijk, there is the level of true, inherent data ethics values: “These are the adult organisations that prac-tice data ethics because they believe in doing the right thing.”
All interviewees agree that compliance is but one of the sides to data ethics and that, in the end, companies should be able to con-vince the customer to trust them with their data by being trans-parent, flexible and morally correct, not just by complying with the law. “If you do that, customers will start to expect that from every company. That’s how you create a virtuous circle of data ethics,” Deloitte’s Lewis concludes. n
“technology shows what you can do, laws and regulations
tell you what you’re allowed to do, but ethics tell you what you
should do” FraNk BuyteNDijke, GartNer
DATA PRIVACY
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 7
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStackStockholm-based Elastx uses Solidfire all-flash arrays to support as-a-service provision on OpenStack with easy API connections to Cinder. Antony Adshead reports
Swedish service provider Elastx has opted for Solidfire all-flash arrays to power its OpenStack-based cloud services for customers. The Stockholm-based company delivers
platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and cloud services to mostly Sweden-based customers, ranging from individuals to enterprise-class organisations.
It initially deployed Solidfire three years ago when first starting up, but after a year or so it needed storage that would integrate with its OpenStack cloud infrastructure.
Elastx CEO Joakim Öhman looked at general storage for all its platforms but had already identified the need for OpenStack com-patibility. “We knew we would deploy OpenStack, so we wanted something that would integrate well with it that was SSD-based and that would scale horizontally,” he says. “Solidfire was the only system at the time that could fully meet these requirements. There was no-one else with OpenStack compatibility.”
Elastx deployed four 3TB nodes of Solidfire SF3010 all-flash storage. These use 300GB MLC (multi-level cell) flash drives.
CASE STUDY
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Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 8
Solidfire hardware scales in 1U nodes that go from four up to 100, with I/O performance reaching up to five million IOPS.
PerfOrmance versatilitySolidfire started out aiming at cloud service providers and is Fibre Channel and iSCSI block storage. With cloud in mind, it has automation and multi-tenancy functionality and adminis-trators can assign storage volumes with different characteristics to different customers.
More recently, Solidfire has added advanced storage features, such as replication and other data protection functions, to appeal more to the enterprise market. It also provides application pro-gramming interfaces (APIs) to allow its storage to be used with OpenStack’s Cinder block storage.
“We added a couple of lines of configuration into OpenStack to integrate with Solidfire,” says Elastx’s Öhman. “Then we could provision it to different storage volumes that gave different levels of performance according to customer requirements.”
The alternative at the time, he says, would have been to use the native Cinder block storage functionality in OpenStack – but that would have needed the company to build its own hardware.
Öhman says the key benefits of Solidfire are its integration with OpenStack and that it hasn’t suffered a single outage in that time. “It has performed as we expected it to and it has the ability to scale up,” he says.
The key measurable benefit has been that Elastx set a target for the amount of time it wanted to spend on management each month – and the actual total has come in well below that. n
CASE STUDY
European IaaS adoption to soarThe European infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40% between now and 2019, as enterprises look to wind down their on-premise datacentre investments, writes Caroline Donnelly.
According to Frost & Sullivan’s Analysis of the European infra-structure-as-a-service market report, this section of the cloud market generated revenues in the region of $1.95bn in 2014 but is on course to hit $10.1bn by 2019.
Shuba Ramkumar, a senior research analyst in Frost & Sullivan’s information and communications technologies divi-sion, says much of this growth is being driven by enterprises realising the flexibility and cost benefits of moving more of their datacentre infrastructure to the cloud.
“The on-demand, pay-as-you-go model of cloud services is garnering intense interest in Europe as it allows enterprises to effectively deal with volatility and seasonality in IT demand,” says Ramkumar.
Furthermore, according to the report, it also makes it easier for users to manage their IT budgets in the face of challenging economic conditions in parts of Europe.
“The deployment of IaaS decreases enterprise capital investment in internal datacentres, hardware and human resources, which can instead be directed to core business functions,” the report states.
cw europe August 2015 9
T he growing strength of the US dollar has big implica-tions for European CIOs’ IT budgets, as unfavourable exchange rates with the Euro force technology suppli-ers to raise their prices to make up the shortfall.
“It’s a trend analyst house Gartner has been cautioning IT chiefs to watch for several months now, as it fears US suppliers may resort to “obfuscation techniques” to push product price hikes through without users realising.
Microsoft has already publicly confirmed plans to increase the Eurozone pricing for its Azure public cloud platform from 1 August to counteract the effect of the strong US dollar against the weakening Euro.
The news came as a surprise to some – given that users are accustomed to cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google cutting their prices, rather than increasing them.
However, with scores of US technology suppliers attributing downbeat revenue figures to the strength of the US dollar, it’s thought Google and AWS may come under pressure to follow Microsoft’s lead.
Both Google and AWS blamed exchanged rates, in their most recent set of financial results, for shortfalls in excess of $1bn in their quarterly revenues.
THe rising cosT of cloudWhether they will or not is anyone’s guess, says Gartner research director Tiny Haynes. But with Amazon by far and away the cloud
Should the Strong uS dollar prompt european CIoS to
Shop around for Cloud?The strengthening dollar is predicted to send IT costs soaring – so how
can cloud-focused CIOs protect their budgets? Caroline Donnelly reports
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Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 10
market’s biggest player, its response to the Microsoft news will be interesting to watch.
“The price competitiveness has always been downward-facing between these firms, with Microsoft offering to match AWS on price, while there has been something of a price war going on between AWS and Google too,” says Haynes.
“The exchange rates have had a considerable impact on their businesses, so – in that sense – there is a reason and a pressure to increase pricing, and it could happen.”
Owen Rogers, senior analyst at 451 Research for digital eco-nomics, isn’t so sure. He thinks Google and AWS may decide to sit tight and take the financial hit, provided they’re making good enough margins on the other services they sell.
“As soon as you start using a virtual machine, for example, you start using other services, such as storage and databases,” he says.
“While the user may only have examined the cost of using vir-tual machines from a provider, the more of them they use, the more likely they are to use all these other services.
“As long as AWS and Google are making margins on other services, it’s still a profitable way to do business and I think the same would apply despite the currency fluctuations.”
From a competitive standpoint, AWS and Google could benefit from leaving their pricing alone, he adds. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see them
keep their prices at current levels and then take the hit in the short term, so they still appear good value for money and can concen-trate on upselling other value-add services on top.”
Big opporTuniTies for sMall providersWith the current economic instability in Greece and the knock-on effect this could have on the rest of the region, Gartner predicts the dollar will maintain its strength through to 2017 at least, which could result in product price hikes of at least 20%.
“We are expecting some price rises and CIO budgets are only increasing – based on our 2015 data – by 3.1%. So there is going to be a bit of gap,” warns Haynes.
This means European CIOs may have to find ways to make their IT budgets stretch a little further, and that may prompt a renewed push to move more of their business to the cloud.
“We certainly saw cloud become the go-to for a number of Mediterranean economies at the start of the downturn, with companies deciding to go down the operational expenditure route rather than the capital expenditure route to procure IT services,” says Haynes.
“When you start to look at the hardware costs, particularly if prices rise, we could see another push towards the cloud.”
If so, whose cloud would users be better off moving to? In light of the Microsoft situation, 451 Research’s Rogers says companies should think
CLOUD COMPUTING
“exchange rates have had a considerable impact on
cloud businesses”tiNy HayNes, GartNer
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 11
about seeking out local, European providers, as this should protect them against the risk of further US/Euro currency fluctuations.
“Local providers should seize this opportunity to shout about their local differentiation,” he says.
But simply trying to position themselves as local, cheaper alternatives to Microsoft and the other incumbents is unlikely to prove enough for smaller providers win new business, warns Haynes.
“European cloud buyers don’t tend to go for providers just on price,” he says. “We conducted a survey of CIOs last year and asked them about cloud adoption. Half said they were doing it for business agility benefits – and only 14% because of the price.”
This a view shared by Kate Craig-Wood, managing director of UK-based infrastructure-as-a-service provider Memset.
“We have learnt that fighting hard to keep prices similar to or lower than AWS doesn’t actually get you a lot more business, sug-gesting there isn’t much price sensitivity in the market,” she says.
As such, James Walker, president of cloud networking development trade body OpenCloud Connect, claims users are far more interested in hearing about the benefits of using local IT partners – which is what providers should be emphasising.
“They can underline their understanding of the different European country markets and the data privacy, security and compliance requirements in each,” he says.
“Multi-language support can be a differentiator, as well as the capability to be more easily or flexibly integrated into the custom-er’s environment.”
supplier lock-in risksCompanies that have already bought into the notion of the Microsoft cloud, for example, may find jumping ship isn’t a straightforward process, warns Walker.
“Cloud services are not necessarily directly inter-changeable in the services offered – so there may or may not be opportunities for European cloud
service providers to step in,” Walker says.“It’s also a question of supplier lock-in. If a customer has already
spent heavily on integration with Microsoft’s cloud or has a large investment in Office or Lync, they may not be able to move.
“For customers still planning their move to cloud, though, there may be an opportunity for European providers to step in to consideration.”
Even then, users should be aware that opting for a local provider doesn’t necessarily mean they will be immune to the effects of currency fluctuations, cautions Craig-Wood.
“While a strengthening dollar can give us a competitive advan-tage in the short term, it is a double-edged sword for infrastructure and cloud hosting providers, as half of our costs are from server hardware themselves, rather than people, power, etc,” she says.
“Most of the server hardware Memset relies on comes from US providers. Therefore, our costs will inevitably go up.”
However CIOs choose to respond, it’s worth bearing in mind that, while the currency situation is likely to persist for some time, cloud prices are likely to continue their downward trajectory when stability returns. n
CLOUD COMPUTING
❯The amount of money generated by sales of
cloud‑related infrastructure grew by more than 25% to nearly $6.3bn in the first
quarter of 2015.
cw europe August 2015 12
O ne of the most important tasks of a CIO is to make sure employees love to come to work, says Lars Ruben Hansen, CIO of supermarket chain Rema 1000 Denmark and wholesale company
Reitan Distribution.He says this after building up the two companies’ shared IT
department and managing it for more than 20 years. “It is very important that the employees feel the company is a good place to work, and that they feel motivated. That leads to them doing an even better job tomorrow than today,” says Hansen.
In pursuit of this goal, he shows belief in the abilities of employees. “I tell them not to ask me what to do all the time. They have to make their own choices and do what they think is best. If it turns out to be a bad decision, it is not the end of the world – they just have to make a better decision next time.”
Hansen also makes sure he is seen as part of the group. “I am open and honest, and talk a lot with the employees. Every Friday, the whole IT department has coffee together for an hour, just talking and having fun. I do not want to be seen as the boss, even though the employees know that I am the one who has the last word.”
CIO INTERVIEW
WInnIng the heartS of the It WorkforCe
CIO of supermarket chain Rema 1000 Denmark and wholesale company Reitan Distribution, Lars Ruben Hansen, tells Jenny Stadigs
about how he wants his staff to love coming to work
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Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 13
differenT approacHes To iTThe fact that not all CIOs have this approach was made bluntly obvious to Hansen when Rema 1000 Denmark acquired whole-sale company Edeka Denmark in 2008. “I had to merge the com-panies’ IT departments, and it turned out to be quite a task to make the employees from the different companies able to work together, since the mentalities were so different,” he says.
The employees from Edeka were used to asking the boss to make most decisions for them, and were afraid to make mistakes, according to Hansen. “At first, I tried to compromise and find a middle ground, but I soon realised I needed to get the new mem-bers of the IT department into our mindset instead.”
But Hansen did not hurry the change in the former Edeka employees. “You cannot say, ‘You have to work in another way tomorrow’. You have to see where people are, work together with them to make the change, and be open and honest. They have to believe in you. If you take it easy, the results will come,” he says.
Managing THe iT esTaTeRema 1000 Denmark is part of Norwegian discount chain Rema 1000, which was founded in 1979. The first Danish Rema 1000 stores opened in 1994, at which time Hansen was hired to manage the IT of the new company. “At first it was only me, but after two years I needed more people to help me, and I also became CIO.”
The IT department, located in Horsens in Denmark, now com-prises 16 people, and the number of Danish stores has grown to 261. “We do not have particularly close contact with Rema 1000
INTERVIEW
Hansen: “You have to see where people are, work together with
them to make the change, and be open and honest. They have to
believe in you. If you take it easy, the results will come”
Home
News
Editorial
Don’t wait for EU regulation to practice good data ethics
Swedish cloud provider Elastx chooses Solidfire all-flash storage for OpenStack
Should the strong US dollar prompt European CIOs to shop around for cloud?
Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 14
in Norway. I visited it recently, but we can run our business in Denmark in our own way, as long as we are doing well. We have our own IT systems, but large IT investments have to be discussed at our board meetings, where Norway is represented,” says Hansen.
Rema 1000 Denmark and Reitan Distribution have outsourced development, but run their own servers. “We are thinking about outsourcing some of them, for example servers running Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, but it is cheaper for us to run the critical systems ourselves, since it would be very expensive to pay an outsourcing company to guar-antee the uptime we need.”
cenTral iT for francHised reTail sTores Denmark-based Rema 1000 is a franchised discount concept, which means the company buys large quantities of a limited range of products and offers these to semi-independent owners under their own brands. “But for us at the IT department it makes no difference that we are franchise-based – we would operate in the same way even if we owned the stores ourselves.”
The IT department decides which systems are to be used, and if the stores are to get new IT equipment. “All stores have the same IT so we
can keep complexity and costs down. That benefits our customers through lower prices.”
Hansen hopes to be able to make the IT in the stores even easier to use, and he also wants to simplify the store owners’ work through IT. “The goal is to enable them to just focus on their business. For example, if they do not sell as much of a product as other comparable stores, we want
the IT system to tell them they have a problem with the product.”The problem could be, for example, that the product is placed
poorly in the store, or that the shelf is empty.
scalaBle iT will supporT fuTure growTHRema 1000 Denmark does not have an internet store. “Of course we also look in that direction, but we do not feel that we have the right solution yet,” says Hansen. “We must not only satisfy our customers – we must impress
our customers.”According to Hansen, the main
goal of Rema 1000 Denmark and Reitan Distribution is to grow by opening more stores, but that goal has a limited impact on IT.
“We hope to have more than 300 stores in Denmark soon, but since our IT systems are scalable we will not need that many more people in the IT department,” he says. n
INTERVIEW
❯Workforces will become frustrated if they do not have
the technology they need to deliver what their organisation wants.
“all stores have the same it so we can keep complexity and costs down. that beneFits our
customers through lower prices”lars ruBeN HaNseN, rema 1000 DeNmark
aND reitaN DistriButioN
cw europe August 2015 15
Deutsche Telekom has made no bones about its ambi-tions to become a market leader in Europe’s cloud services market. The German company recently proclaimed its goal of doubling current annual rev-
enue of €1bn from business customers by the end of 2018, as it extends its focus from the private cloud to the public cloud.
“At Deutsche Telekom, we want to grow by more than 20% each year in the field of cloud platforms, and to become the leading provider for businesses in Europe,” says Ferri Abolhassan, head of the IT division at Deutsche Telekom’s enterprise-focused unit, T-Systems.
Last year, revenue from cloud services, in particular in the highly secure private cloud, increased by double-figure percentage points at T-Systems alone, the company adds.
hoW deutSChe telekom planS to Challenge aWS and
google In the CloudGerman telco Deutsche Telekom wants to evolve into the
public cloud and plans to beat sector giants such as Amazon and Google at their own game. Anne Morris reports
CLOUD COMPUTING
HoMe
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To achieve its goals, the Bonn-based company intends to intensify its collaborations with technology partners “who are, in turn, market leaders”, including Microsoft, Airbnb and Huawei. Abolhassan firmly emphasises that such partnerships are essential to support Deutsche Telekom’s over-arching cloud business strategy.
Indeed, China-based Huawei, which is in turn placing an increased focus on IT services, is already collaborating with Deutsche Telekom in both the private and public cloud, with the intention of helping the German operator to develop services in both these areas in future.
“After we agreed on our co-operation regarding IT infrastructure and private cloud services during CeBit [2015], we are now combining our know-how and cutting-edge technology in the public cloud area to ensure that companies of all sizes are provided with the cloud of their choice,” says Haibo Zhang, president of Huawei Deutsche Telekom key account department.
Speaking at Huawei’s Innovation Day in Munich in June, Abolhassan goes further still. Not only does he want to see Deutsche Telekom become a leading provider of cloud services in Europe, he also wants to see Europe produce a competitor to the cloud-based companies that have so far emerged from the US.
“There must also be in Europe a force that is an answer to all the initiatives coming from the US,” he says. Together with Huawei and its
other partners, Deutsche Telekom plans to pit itself more strongly against Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
coMpeTiTive advanTagesThe German company certainly has its work cut out if it intends to be part of the European answer to such cloud heavyweights.
AWS, for example, “is a $5bn business and still growing fast”, says Amazon founder Jeff Bezos during the company’s first-quarter results presentation. “Born a decade ago, AWS is a good example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon.”
To meet such challenges head-on, Deutsche Telekom is step-ping up cloud activities across the group and establishing a strategy for services in the public cloud, including infrastructure and applications.
What’s more, Abolhassan notes that the company has a major advantage up its sleeve: security. Since cloud services for Europe are provided from datacentres in Germany, this means they are subject to strict German data protection guidelines.
“In cloud computing, datacentre location brings the valuable advantage of security. Our customers and partners place their full
trust in Deutsche Telekom in this regard,” says Abolhassan.
Indeed, the Experton group, which produces the annual Cloud Vendor Benchmark for the German and Swiss markets, notes that the cloud offerings from Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems gained a positive
CLOUD COMPUTING
“there must be in europe a Force that is an answer to all the
initiatives coming From the us”Ferri aBolHassaN, DeutsCHe telekom
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cw europe August 2015 17
rating overall in 2015 for their high data security and data protection standards, noted as “an advan-tage in the cloud market, which is set to reach a volume of more than €12bn in Germany in 2016”.
According to Experton, “there is still a preference for offerings with high data protection compliance”, and this is supposedly “so attractive that more and more US IT service providers are choosing to slip under this cloak of security”.
Building a cloud sTraTegyIn essence, cloud services form a core part of the German com-pany’s new strategy, which embraces other new areas such as the digitisation of industry, machine-to-machine applications, secu-rity and big data.
This all forms part of a fundamental overhaul of the T-Systems group, which is emerging from a major transformation pro-gramme. This process saw the company sell off less profitable activities such as hardware reselling, as well as businesses such as T-Systems Italia and the systems integration unit in France.
Abolhassan says the company plans to take a step-by-step approach to the development of its future cloud strategy. “I want to make cloud more tangible,” he says, noting that most people now have digital content in one form or another but often don’t know where it actually is. What they need is someone who will take care of their content, he adds.
Devices, networks and content all need to be connected together. The challenge is also to achieve connectivity without disruption.
virTual plaTforMsAn example of a virtualised end-to-end service developed by Deutsche Telekom is Mall2Go. Introduced at CeBit in 2014, Mall2Go is a shopping app that enables employees of large companies to do their daily shopping by mobile phone and receive deliveries to their office on the same day.
The virtual platform is designed to enable regional supermarkets and smaller businesses to reach larger groups of customers than they can via their physical locations, while same-day delivery is an added value for customers.
Now available as a service, employees can order what they need via the Mall2Go app. With the app, they can browse a store’s products and add items to their shopping cart using barcode or QR-code scan. Via a sharing function, they can also allow friends and family to check the shopping list and add items.
MeeTing fuTure cHallengesThe company already appears to be making an impression with its cloud strategy. In Experton’s Cloud Vendor Benchmark for 2015, Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems achieved top scores among Germany’s leading cloud providers in more than 10 disciplines.
The Experton analysts also drew attention to the change in strategy at Deutsche Telekom’s corporate customer arm in their benchmark study: “Thanks to its own internal transformation, T-Systems has also made the permanent leap to the ranks of the top IT players and is strategically aligning its portfolio with the challenges of the future.” n
CLOUD COMPUTING
❯ It is a common perception that the adoption of cloud computing
in Europe lags behind the US, but the tide now appears to
be turning.
cw europe August 2015 18
Log management originates from a time when storage was limited and expensive. The aim was to preserve logs gen-erated by a range of IT devices and store them centrally for future scrutiny, at least for a period of time, before
overwriting them on the device.The need to examine old logs may have been to prove compli-
ance of some sort, investigate a security incident or scrutinise a user’s suspected misbehaviour.
As storage became cheaper, devices could keep archives of more log data, so the original need to prevent overwriting old data became less pressing. But machine data had proved its worth for investigating IT incidents.
With more and more devices churning it out – servers (real and virtual), routers, load balancers, application delivery controllers, firewalls, user devices and cloud platforms – another challenge emerged: to correlate it all.
A primary early-use case was security. This led to log manage-ment being rebranded as security information and event man-agement (SIEM). But attaching “security” to the name diverted attention from two other broader capabilities some of the emerg-ing tools were capable of.
First, machine data is valuable to IT systems’ general manage-ment. For example, monitoring virtual and cloud environments to identify inactive (ghost) or rogue virtual machines; or detecting when an online application needs extra resources from a cloud
turnIng maChIne data Into operatIonal IntellIgenCe
Bob Tarzey looks at how companies analyse server and security logs to tackle cyber crime, prevent internal
fraud and optimise the user experience
LOG MANAGEMENT
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Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 19
platform (cloud-bursting) and checking beforehand that this is needed to serve real users and not a volumetric denial of service attack. Recent research shows European businesses benefiting from such techniques to manage IT complexity.
Second, the intelligence could lend insight into an organisation’s com-mercial activity and inform business decisions. For example, correlating callcentre volumes and/or waiting times with other customer-related data, monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure acceptable transaction times for web-based services, or tai-loring online adverts based on user information such as device type. Research shows that managing the cross-channel customer experience is easier with the insight provided by machine data.
froM log ManageMenT To operaTional inTelligenceResearch in 2014 looked at the maturity of European organisa-tions using machine data. The most advanced were going well beyond the use of traditional log files, enriching the data with other sources. This included communications records (for exam-ple from email and voice systems); internet activity data (click streams, cookie records); data from other sorts of machines (industrial plant, sensors); and external feeds such as software vulnerability information, social media and weather reports.
These organisations were doing this to take and use operational intelligence to a higher level; to provide insight – through the auto-mated collection, management and analysis of data from a wide range machines – into the very heart of the organisation’s activities.
Applications for this data needed tools capable of using it in real time, so systems could respond to the issues arising – be they security, performance or business-related.
Four stages of operational intelligence capability were recog-nised in the report:n Search and investigate – the original concept of log manage-
ment, the historic view;n Proactive monitoring – this covers SIEM, which some suppli-
ers have evolved to provide a real-time capability to respond to security incidents;
n Operational visibility – the capability to automate certain aspects of IT management, depending on events;
n Real-time business insights – the ability for IT systems to respond to arising business issues.
The final level requires tools with user interfaces such that business managers can use them, as well as IT operations. Research shows only organisations with the most advanced
LOG MANAGEMENT
machine data is valuable to the general management oF
it systems and provides intelligence which could lend insight into an organisation’s
commercial activity and inForm business decisions
continued on page 21
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How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
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LOG MANAGEMENT
Buying criteria for operational intelligence toolsData collection and storagen Does the tool have built-in adapters to gather machine data
from a wide range of sources?n Does it have an application programming interface (API) for
adding custom sources?n Does the tool have a flexible repository to accommodate
data from multiple sources, while providing a meaningful representation of the underlying raw machine data?
n Can data sources be added easily to existing data stores?n Is the tool able to integrate data from multiple sources to
provide a single view?n Can large volumes of data be processed fast enough to pro-
vide real-time correlation between events happening now and historic data?
n Does the repository support or integrate with big data stores such as Hadoop?
n Can external data feeds be integrated to enrich internally gathered machine data (for example, adding real-world locations to IP addresses and mapping information)?
User interfacen Is the user interface suitable for use by both business and
IT users (for example, drag and drop interface)?n Is the user interface customisable to support individual
user preferences?
n Does it represent machine data in a format that can be understood by non-IT users?
n Are graphics/reports easy to create, customise and share?n Is the user interface powerful enough to support complex
correlations (for example, support for pivot tables)?n Does the tool provide automated alerting?n Does the licensing model accommodate broad rather than
narrow use of the interface?n Do the tools enable external co-operation with users
from outside organisations, such as partners and service providers?
Administration and programmingn Is the tool easy to manage with a clear administrator
console?n Does the tool provide automated alerts regarding security
issues and other IT administrative issues?n Is the tool extensible, that is, can programmers build their
own add-on applications on both the client and server?n Does the tool support standard methods for building exten-
sions (for example, JavaScript, Python)?n Are add-on applications easily shared among communities
of developers and their users?n Does the tool integrate with other enterprise applications
or custom applications?
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Winning the hearts of the IT workforce
How Deutsche Telekom plans to challenge AWS and Google in the cloud
Turning machine data into operational intelligence
cw europe August 2015 21
operational intelligence capability provide insight all the way to board level.
Another challenge is to collect data from as wide a range of sources as possible. Around 40% of organisations say they col-lect all or most log data from IT applications, infrastructure and websites; this falls to about 20% for mobile devices and applica-tions. However, with the use of purpose-built tools the amount gathered rises quickly.
log ManageMenT ToolsThere are a range of specialised SIEM software suppliers, although it should be pointed out that some – such as HP ArcSight, IBM QRadar and LogRhythm – claim to serve the broader use case, along with specialist operational intelligence suppliers. Perhaps the best known is Splunk.
By no means does Splunk have the market to itself. Competitors include XpoLog, LogEntries, Tibco (which acquired LogLogic in 2012) and Vitria, as well as open-source tools such as Graylog and Logstash. There also cloud-based tools such as Sumo Logic, Loggly, LogEntries and, inevitably, there is now Splunk Cloud.
Perhaps the biggest competitor to all of these comes from attempts to use machine data and turn it into operational intelligence using existing in-house business intelligence and data processing tools. There are many options for using a free resource that many are not exploiting, but could benefit from so doing. n
Bob Tarzey is an analyst at Quocirca.
LOG MANAGEMENT
Research shows only organisations
with the most advanced
operational intelligence
capability provide insight all the way
to board level