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THE WEEK IN IT
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
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Financial IT
Cyber security
Mobile networks
Banking IT
Deutsche Telekom and Orange, the owners of mobile network operator EE, have
been holding preliminary talks with BT
over the possibility of selling off the UK
business, it has emerged. The news came
barely 48 hours after BT revealed it was
in talks to re-unite with its old flame O2,
which shacked up with current owner
Telefnica in 2005 after splitting with BT
four years previously.
IT suppliers
Cyber security
National Trust for Scotland has implemented a core networking architecture to replace a legacy
system that was frequently bringing the IT department to its knees.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 2
STEVANZZ/THINKSTOCK
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Government IT
Public sector IT
Greater shared services in the public sector was among the issues raised in the
Unlocking the sharing economy government
report, published last week. The report
highlighted how government bodies that
use the concept of sharing cities offer
shared council buildings with community groups and create local online hubs,
where skills and assets can be shared.
Business applications
IT careers
Digital government
Banking IT
25%
UK-based providers
Americas-based providers
Europe-based providers
India-based providers
14%
24%
Asia-Pacific-based providers
ANALYSIS
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
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UK helping
US military
build
intelligence
software
Is BT
embedding
secret spy
equipment in
routers?
ESTT/THINKSTOCK
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Defence of ignorance
ANALYSIS
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BT has consistently
said it could not be
held responsible for
what anybody did with
its communications
infrastructure
The new complaint does not present any
new evidence, said the BT letter to NCP
officials. Rather, it relies on a recycling of the
allegations by Computer Weekly which, in
turn, itself relies on the Reprieve allegations.
The purported new evidence in question
in fact consists of a number of magazine articles published by Computer Weekly. There
is nothing new and material in the Computer
Weekly articles. Much of the information
contained in these articles appears to be
sourced from Reprieve. The articles appear
therefore to be almost contrived for the
purposes of creating a basis for re-opening
the original complaint, said BTs official
response to the evidence.
Independent documentation
strikes in the region, against suspected insurgents and terrorists, during which innocent
bystanders were also killed, it was alleged.
Documents discovered by Computer
Weekly showed the BT line formed part
of a global US military network called the
Defense Information Systems Network
(DISN), which formed the backbone for a
global military and intelligence communications system used to track terrorists and
direct weapons such as drones.
BT insisted this did not suggest a reason to
assess its work under human rights guidelines. The complaint is wholly artificial, lacking in any foundation, it said.
BT has consistently said it could not be
held responsible for what anybody did with
the communications infrastructure it supplied. It has denied having any knowledge of
links to US drone strikes.
In response to questions about the latest
Reprieve complaint, a BT spokesman said:
Reprieves complaint is being looked at by
UK National Contact Point and, under their
rules, it would be inappropriate for us to
comment on the matter, at this stage.
Reprieves complaint
is being looked at by
UK National Contact
Point and, under their
rules, it would be
inappropriate for us to
comment on the matter
at this stage
BT
A BIS spokeswoman said: The NCP does
not comment on complaints outside of its
published assessments and statements.
The issue will be settled shortly, when UK
officials are expected to decide on whether
the OECD rules on corporate social responsibility oblige BT to look into the allegations in
light of the fresh evidence. n
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 5
ANALYSIS
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
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DATA VITAL TO
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Busting
cloud myths:
Four user
instances
where cloud
computing
failed
Building
return on
investment
from cloud
computing
Cloud is irresistible
BOWIE15/THINKSTOCK
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ANALYSIS
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Challenges of mirroring
But clearly it is not practical to run an identical mirror of public cloud-optimised applications on-premise.
So where does a CIO go for fault-tolerant
cloud computing?
Under the leadership of its new CEO,
Satya Nadella, Microsoft has aligned its
strategy around cloud and mobile. The
Azure downtime is clearly more than just a
hitch it is deeply embarrassing for Nadella
and undermines the principles he has been
pushing for Microsoft since he took over
earlier this year.
But until Microsoft and other cloud providers offer a service level agreement with zero
downtime, CIOs will have to continue to juggle the complexities of attaining high availability whenever there is a cloud element in
their IT infrastructure. n
CLOUD AVAILABILITY
PRESENTS CHALLENGES
Despite contracts that offer three nines
availability or higher, attaining a highly
resilient cloud service is hit and miss.
In my experience, IT managers expect
the cloud service provider to cater for resilience, said Geoff Connell, director of ICT
at oneSource, the Havering and Newham
councils shared service.
Connell recently bought a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) hosted
service from Skyscape, via Capgemini, on
behalf of seven London boroughs, but he
admitted high availability has been somewhat problematic.
Although it is relatively early days, we
have not been impressed with the resilience
so far, he said.
But when Oracle hosted the councils
ERP in its Oracle on-demand service out of
Houston, Texas, availability was solid.
Oracles arrangements to failover in
the event of any service outage was excellent, resulting in really strong performance
and availability, said Connell. Ultimately,
theres no substitute for making sure the
tender specification or the cloud service specification fully covers the service
requirements.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 7
CASE STUDY
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Data
backup
strategy from
a disaster
recovery
perspective
Challenges
in virtual
server backup
and how to
tackle them
PERNOD RICARD
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CASE STUDY
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Distributed IT challenges
for us was to find a solution and integrator which could scale effectively across this
landscape, Bennett says.
With Asigra cloud backup and the service
providers expertise, the IT team is able to
offer local backup for the local-area network
(LAN) to speed recovery of data; offsite
backup for secure long-term protection, with
long backup history; as well as a complementary virtual disaster recovery service.
All backup monitoring is performed
through Backup Technologys web portal, so
all Pernod Ricard Emea IT staff have complete visibility of their backups, 24/7, from
anywhere in the world, says Bennett. This
provides a regimented backup and disaster
recovery process across Pernod Ricards
Emea operations, he adds.
The backup project has improved the
companys ability to make sure all of its
business-critical data is quickly and securely
protected and stored offsite. The new systems protect in excess of 350TB of data
for Pernod Ricard and offer virtual disaster
recovery services to each market, securing
more than 200 servers.
The project has also freed up the in-house
IT team to concentrate on the day-to-day
running of the networks.
Pernod Ricard has had to invoke the disaster recovery system twice in a live situation
which, the company says, was executed
smoothly. According to Bennett, recovery
of files, databases and emails happens on a
regular basis. This not only quantifies the
success but also illustrates how the combination of a number of technologies has led to
a substantial improvement in our quality of
service, he says.
Based on the live scenarios, the IT team
gives feedback to Backup Technology, which
then improves recovery speeds and adds
features the company wants.
The drinks giant now has a centralised
strategy which gives it greater confidence
about managing its critical data.
I now know the critical systems and business data across the region are protected
and there is a recovery solution tested each
year. Thats a great weight off my mind,
Bennett concludes. n
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 9
INTERVIEW
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CW500
s the investment
banking sector
recovers from the
financial meltdown that
began in 2008, banks
such as HSBC Global Banking and Markets
(GBM) are transforming IT. They are investing in electronic platforms in response to
regular changes to industry regulation,
while becoming digital across all areas of
the business.
And the provision and support of IT hardware and software is not the end of the story
for the industrys CIOs, with data king in the
digital era.
HSBC GBM CIO Sumeet Chabria is a
computer science graduate from Stony Brook
University in New York. He has worked at the
group for about 20 years in a range of senior
IT roles, including CIO for the Global Banking
and Markets division in the Americas.
He is now global IT head of HSBCs investment banking business, where he manages
thousands of IT staff across the world, works
with hundreds of IT suppliers and supports
hundreds of business-critical IT systems.
interview
These include trading systems and settlement systems, as well as interfaces with
clients and exchanges, to name a few. There
is no one core piece of software we run a
plethora of platforms, says Chabria.
European
banks raise
data game in
response to
regulations
MATT BUCK/FLICKR
Three in
four banks
struggle with
stress testing
INTERVIEW
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IT departments and CIOs have been worried about uptime, downtime resilience and
disaster recovery. Now is the time to spend
as much time ensuring the quality of information is as good. One of the top priorities
for me is making sure the information is correct, he adds.
According to Chabria, in the past when
things were less digital, timely manual
checks could be performed on the data quality such is the importance of getting it right.
But today, as a result of the industry becoming digital through automation and making
activity electronic, this is not possible.
We look at IT and data together. Data is
the blood in the system and we want to make
sure it is healthy, he says.
We look at IT and
data together. Data is
the blood in the system
and we want to make
sure it is healthy
For example, 12 banks including HSBC
are creating a standardised language and a
messaging system, known as the Neptune
project, in the corporate bond market.
Investment banks are known for their large
in-house IT resources and developments, but
the move to modern digital technologies in
the sector is changing this.
If customers want bespoke products, we
have to customise but where the industry is
moving to simplified business models there
can be common platform sharing between
banks. I am open to that, says Chabria. Joint
ventures are another option, he adds.
For example, Chabria says HSBC was
among four banks that worked with business process outsourcing supplier Genpact
and financial information service Markit on
the creation of a centralised know-your-customer service, which verifies and identifies
clients for due diligence.
But he says the industry needs to look
beyond in-house teams and established
technology suppliers for innovation and has
identified the startup sector as a source: We
need to access talent wherever it is present
and use it for innovation. n
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 11
EDITORS COMMENT
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networking technologies
emerging in
the enterprise
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Steve Broadhead
takes a look at the
latest networking
technologies on
offer, and those
being adopted in
the enterprise
BUYERS GUIDE
he networking world has always had a tendency to get carried away with new
trends and technologies many of which, in truth, are simply re-inventions with
new names while forgetting to focus on the basics of efficiently running a corporate network.
Whether that network now resides in the physical corporate offices, some other datacentre
or public/private cloud is largely irrelevant. What is important is to see the take-up of new,
relevant technologies that improve networking beyond where it is today. Here, we look at a
few examples of these technologies, as well as what some of the more established suppliers
are doing to re-invent their offerings.
Clouds of virtualisation
Enterprise
Networks:
What are the
challenges?
The SDN
state of play:
First steps for
the enterprise
One area that partly as a result of the cloud and virtualisation has been a focal point
is the convergence of networking and storage. While the big names including Dell, IBM,
Cisco, EMC and HP have all been majorly involved, there has been plenty of activity
beyond these incumbents.
Cirba, for instance, has focused on optimising input/output (I/O) with respect to virtualisation management systems and cloud management platform deployment. The supplier
argues companies often do not consider I/O when deploying virtual machines (VMs), which
can result in uneven loads across physical hosts. When network-attached storage (NAS)
or other storage technologies send disk I/O across the network, Cirba models combine I/O
to intelligently balance workloads and minimise the stress points that can otherwise occur.
The net effect is safely increasing VM density while at the same time minimising the risk of
contention for resources.
Another move again a factor in the cloud-plus-virtualisation combination is from virtualised (hardware-to-software) systems. For example, Avere has just introduced a virtual NAS
product that provides the ability to deploy and scale compute in the cloud while using both
on-premise and cloud-based storage resources. The idea is to connect the dots between the
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 13
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compute cloud, storage cloud and on-premise storage, without sacrificing performance, worrying about security or seeing IT overspend. This is a software-only product that runs in the
compute cloud alongside applications, providing low-latency access to the active data and
enabling applications to run at maximum performance.
Pluribus Networks is another company looking to bring all network and compute elements
together, using distributed-network hypervisor operating system Netvisor for the convergence of compute, network, storage and virtualisation. It is based on open-compute and
open-networking technologies and is aimed at enabling enterprises to better support application performance service-level agreements (SLAs) while reducing operating expenditure
and capital expenditure, as well as accelerating service-deployment velocity.
One of many examples of the current move from IT-centric to customer-focused products
comes in the form of Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom4 infrastructure performance management platform for physical, virtual and cloud-computing environments. The technology
was recently introduced to the Morrisons
supermarket chain.
The retailers head of storage, Simon
he irtual
Close, says: The Virtual Instrument platform has evolved from an engineering-type
nstrument platform
system to something more customerhas evolved from
focused. Morrisons was keen to consolidate down from a large number of storage
an engineering
suppliers to a single supplier and single SAN
environment, with VirtualWisdom plumbed
type system to
in the middle of it to ensure and assure
application and data performance and
something more
response times, as well as availability.
T
I
customer-focused
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This switch in terms of moving the network to the users, rather than the engineers, has also
been mirrored by Sunrise Software in the latest release of its IT service management (ITSM)
application, Sostenuto. Again, the interface is designed for IT administrators not IT professionals to use, while fairly radical features (certainly for network management tools) such
as gamification have been introduced.
The changing shape of the corporate network has also meant a change in the way it is managed, with performance and application management becoming increasingly prevalent. Network management is being re-invented. For instance, Sideband Networks XRE/vXRE system
for network performance management correlates live traffic with logged network traffic,
giving a single point of management regardless of wired/wireless or local area network
(LAN)/wide area network (WAN) characteristics. The system provides analytics of network
traffic up to 40Gbps, addressing both physical and virtual planes, and delivers intelligence
that notifies with real-time alerts and actions for network issues. So it combines being a dynamic network
discovery tool for network mapping with the ability to
e have a
drill down into the network performance.
number of
Advances in wireless
Wireless is another area of recent innovation beyond the basic Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engingeers (IEEE) standards implementations. This is with respect to two particular aspects bring-your-own-device (BYOD) technnology and Wi-Fi in the cloud.
Network management systems must meet demands
The former has meant real wireless, wire-like infra Google joins enterprise cloud battle with additions
structures really have had to be put into place. Wi-Fi
Five commercial SDN controllers to know about
technology company Xirrus, for example, has an arraybased system designed to effectively replace a wired
network after all, a network of iPads and smartphones renders an Ethernet switch redundant. This means the size of Wi-Fi deployments is increasing enormously.
While often its the bigger, established suppliers which validate a new (or re-invented)
technology area, its the smaller, more nimble players which populate it in the first place.
We have a number of new players in various market segments including cloud, virtualisation, application management and others leading the way in getting actual products out to
the user. So, while some of the giants of networking are talking the talk regarding SDN and
cloud, for example its actually the newbies which are more focused on actually delivering
the product. n
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 15
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Microsoft and
Amazons cloud
war rumbles on
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here is no doubt that both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are determined to get to the top spot by becoming the preferred enterprise cloud platform.
As the final quarter of 2014 approached, the industry eagerly awaited major
announcements from the cloud giants. Ahead of Amazons AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in the second week of November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella created
a splash by making a slew of Microsoft Azure announcements at an event in San Francisco.
Here, we take a closer look Microsofts most recent moves in the cloud market.
AWS feels
the pressure
of cloud
competition
Microsoft
and Google
claw for cloud
market share
with AWS
Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was launched with a limited set of virtual machine
(VM) types that did not match the choice available with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2). But over the past two years, Microsoft kept adding new VM types to meet enterprise requirements. At the same time, Amazon added new compute, memory and storageoptimised instance types in the form of its C3, R3 and I2 family.
Enterprise workloads moving to cloud need powerful instance types that deliver the same
performance as on-premise servers. Unlike web-scale applications that can run on a fleet
of cheap, low-end VMs, these workloads need beefy, powerful, monolithic VMs with a lot
of compute power and memory capacity. They need high input/output operations per second (IOPS) to deliver expected throughput.
Amazons r3.8xlarge EC2 instance type has 32 virtual central processing units (vCPUs)
with 244GB RAM along with SSD storage. This is the maximum RAM that any EC2
instance type can support. Microsoft announced new G-Series VM sizes that offer double
the RAM of Amazon EC2. With 32 cores, 448GB of RAM and 6,500GB of SSD storage, the
Standard_G5 VM size beats every VM type available in the public cloud.
This is a big deal for enterprise customers running SAP, Oracle OLTP and OLAP,
PeopleSoft and other heavy line-of-business applications.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 16
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The other important factor to note is the central processing unit (CPU). Amazon EC2 R3
is based on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 family of processors, while Azure G-Series is based
on the Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family. This move from Microsoft has taken Azure one
step closer to enterprises, but nothing will stop Amazon from countering this with additional instance types.
With Azure
Marketplace,
Microsoft will
connect enterprises
with the product
companies hosting
their SaaS
solutions on Azure
According to Microsoft, 40% of Azure revenue comes from independent software suppliers. Given the strong relationship Microsoft had with these suppliers, this is not surprising to see. With all the .Net desktop applications moving to software as a service (SaaS),
Azure is becoming the preferred destination for the independent software suppliers and
product companies.
With Azure Marketplace, Microsoft will connect enterprises with the product companies
hosting their SaaS solutions on Azure. This will be a win-win situation for Microsoft as well as
its customers.
In contrast, AWS Marketplace has been operational for two years with hundreds of products available ready to be launched on AWS.
Microsoft already has a platform branded as Azure Marketplace, but it doesnt have the
ecosystem that Amazon has.
Both Microsoft
and AWS are
determined to get
to the top spot
by becoming the
preferred enterprise
cloud platform
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With the revamped strategy, Microsoft is hoping to bring its partner community closer
to the customers. CoreOS, the web-scale, lightweight Linux OS, made its debut on Azure
through the Marketplace.
Cloudera on Azure
When Microsoft decided to bring big data to Azure, it chose to go with Hortonworks, a
Yahoo spin-off. Given Microsofts friendly relationship with Yahoo, it was an obvious move.
Hortonworks is thoroughly integrated with Azure as HDInsight. In a surprising move,
Microsoft invited Mike Olsen, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera, to the stage
at its cloud event to demo the technology running on Azure.
Microsoft never previously had a relationship with Cloudera, which happens to be the biggest rival of Hortonworks. With Oracles investment and its big presence on AWS, Cloudera
was never on Microsofts radar.
It was a win for Cloudera to make its stack
available on one of the popular platforms. For
Microsoft, it made a strong statement that it is
icrosoft is in a
willing to go to any length to get the big brands on
its side.
tussle with
AWS
VM
R H
Docker on Azure
Container technology is currently red hot in the market. Docker is riding the wave by getting
the attention of the industry.
Having announced the integration of Docker with the next version of Windows Server,
Microsoft has gone ahead with deeper integration with Azure. Microsoft will host the registry
of Docker images that developers can access from the Azure
management portal.
Why does Amazon dominate the cloud world?
Linux VMs running on Azure are getting extensions to
Microsoft strengthens Azure hybrid cloud
simplify
launching Docker containers on the Microsoft
AWS to launch second EU datacentre region
cloud. It will be interesting to see how the Docker and
Microsoft partnership will pan out.
Chief executive Satya Nadella, with support from Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president
of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, is leaving no stone unturned in making his
cloud-first vision a reality. The cloud war is hotting up and these announcements are certainly a major milestone. n
Janakiram MSV is a Gigaom Research analyst and the principal analyst at Janakiram & Associates.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 18
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