Don’t miss Claranet at Cloud Expo Europe on 12th & 13th April at ExCel, London!
Cloud Expo Europe is the world’s biggest, best attended and multi-award winning cloud event.
We will be attending this show for the sixth time in a row and this year we will going bigger than ever, celebrating our 20th anniversary with a 55 square metre stand!
We have some amazing news to share with you all – here’s a sneak peak:
How long can you afford for your website to be offline?
A day? An hour? Ten minutes?
A denial of service (DoS) attack aims to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend an online service, potentially causing significant disruption to your customers and revenue losses.
They are caused when an attackers sends dummy web traffic to a site or application in such large amounts that your app is put out of operation.
Effective utilisation of technology, adaptive business strategies and increased quality across the organisation come hand in hand with a DevOps approach. Discover how a DevOps approach can help your organisation bring the tools together to build systems that underpin your business.
DevOps, DevOps, DevOps…
Greater alignment between IT and the business needed to harness potential of shadow IT
European organisations will only fully realise the benefits of shadow IT on innovation if IT leaders can align themselves more closely with other business units, research from managed services provider Claranet suggests.
The research, which surveyed 900 IT decision-makers from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Benelux, from a range of mid-market organisations found that only a minority of European IT leaders view shadow IT as a challenge. Just 13 per cent of respondents stated that shadow IT was a major challenge, a significantly smaller proportion than those reporting security or complexity as a challenge (48 per cent and 39 per cent respectively).
For Claranet’s Group CIO, Andy Wilton, the results serve to overturn conventional wisdom that shadow IT is inherently problematic, suggesting instead that it can be a driver of innovation within an organisation.
Wilton commented:
We know that shadow IT is occurring in organisations of all sizes, but the jury is still out as to whether or not it is an intrinsically bad thing. Indeed, the data suggests that shadow IT isn’t the evil that many in the industry would have us believe; just 13 per cent of IT leaders view it as a major challenge, leaving a sizeable contingent that are either untroubled by it or, within reason, see it as a positive driver of innovation within their organisations. It’s an incredibly divisive issue, but whatever your view, the occurrence of shadow IT is often indicative of a larger issue: a disconnect between the IT department and the wider organisation.”
He continued:
Shadow IT does, however, present an opportunity to drive innovation, and businesses view the practice as an important source of feedback and service improvement. By monitoring employees’ use of unsanctioned programmes, IT leaders may discover unexpected benefits in their approach. By integrating those elements of shadow IT that have business value and eliminating potential pain points in the infrastructure, IT leaders could directly contribute to their organisations’ balance sheets.”
Wilton went on to say that building good relationships and understanding departmental needs is crucial to securing the benefits of shadow IT but also to containing any of the risks associated with it. He concluded:
Shadow IT is not going away, so IT leaders must work to ensure that, even if software is procured without their direct involvement, it is done in a controlled way to ensure efficiencies in spend and safeguard corporate data. Here, closer relationships and better understanding between IT and the wider business are critical, and it’s clear from our research that there is a great deal of room for improvement in that regard. Three quarters (74 per cent) of IT leaders report having an incomplete understanding of their organisations, and unless this knowledge gap is addressed, they will struggle to harness the potential of shadow IT.”
Backing up your critical systems can make the difference between business success and failure.
And the recent floods across England have once again demonstrated the business cost of complacency, with two-thirds of SMBs having been affected by floods at some point in the past three years. [1]
Fortunately, backing up your business-critical data and systems to the cloud is simpler and more cost-effective than ever.
Here are our top 11 reasons why you should back up your data in the cloud in 2016.
1) Hassle-free guarantee of data security
2015 saw the cloud industry mature as a whole, with growth across private, public and hybrid cloud.
28 per cent overall, according to Synergy Research. [1]
Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke commented on their research:
In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish.”
Investing in communications technology can be a lot like buying a car.
Although you’ve invested time and money in the autonomy to drive anywhere, at any time, you have also bought the responsibility of the maintenance and periodic repair of the car, and when it breaks down entirely it’s expensive to replace it. Which is why buying a beaten-up old jalopy for a long road trip is a bad idea.
Challenge: Healthcode handle important and sensitive data within a strict regulatory framework and need guarantees on data location, security and uptime.
Solution: A secure Managed Hosting solution, featuring enterprise grade disaster recovery and data protection measures, all underpinned by Claranet’s core MPLS network.
Result: Claranet has enabled Healthcode to accommodate growing customer demand, without surrendering the tight control it requires over its customers’ personal data.
Healthcode’s core business is electronic billing and the company processes approximately 18,000 bills from providers to insurers on a daily basis and around 600,000 clinical records annually. Its services and applications are critical to the functioning of private hospitals, insurers and consultants up and down the country, who entrust them with extremely confidential, personal and commercially sensitive data.
Given the sensitivities of the data that Healthcode handles and the regulatory framework governing the health industry, data sovereignty is a key issue for its clients who stipulate
that their data should not leave the UK.
To meet its clients’ service delivery and data protection requirements head on, Healthcode required a secure, resilient managed hosting solution delivered only out of UK-based data centres, explained Peter Connor, Managing Director at Healthcode:
A lot of very sensitive data goes through our systems, and we’re held directly accountable by our partners and their customers in the case of an outage or data breach. Our customers rely on our services to function day-to-day, so in order to support their businesses, it’s critical that they can access our applications at all times. Our stringent compliance to the ISO27001 system in the management of information security is, after all, a core reason our services are chosen above our competitors, so we needed a hosting provider that could offer us all-important guarantees about data location, security and uptime.”
With these key considerations in mind, Healthcode called on Claranet who devised a secure and reliable Managed Hosting solution designed to safeguard the delivery of its applications.
Underpinned by Claranet’s MPLS network, the solution features enterprise grade disaster recovery and data protection measures with 24/7 support from the managed services provider. Claranet also provides Healthcode with a number of other key services, including Internet Connectivity, Web Acceleration and DoS Protection to protect against external threats, Hosted Desktop and email services. Crucially, Claranet is able to meet the Healthcode’s data sovereignty requirements, as the service is delivered exclusively out of UK-based datacentres.
Peter explained the wider significance of the introduced solution:
Having worked with Claranet before, we knew they would go the extra mile to exactly meet our specifications. Claranet proposed a tailored service that met our strict
security and availability demands. Our new infrastructure is so watertight that it would take some sort of force majeure event for us to have to use our disaster recovery environment – but it does give us and our clients’ peace of mind. It was a combination of Claranet’s processes, people and facilities, and their ability to offer a complete end-to-end solution, which led us to choose them as our hosting partner.”
Healthcode’s new Managed Hosting platform has enabled the company to accommodate growing customer demand, without surrendering the tight control it requires over its customers’ personal data.
Peter continued:
Our new platform is more resilient and robust against data breaches with an in-built disaster recovery system so we can offer a truly secure service to the private health sector. Data sovereignty is critically important for our business, and as Claranet operates only in-country data centres, they are able to offer the assurances on data location we – and by extension, our customers – need.”
Claranet’s revamped solution has provided Healthcode with the infrastructure support necessary to cement its position as market leader, though, as Peter explained, the true benefit of the service has been seen in the everyday work carried out with Claranet’s dedicated support team to continually support and improve application delivery:
Both approachable and accommodating, Claranet’s service management team is at the front line, ensuring applications run at their optimum speed, are completely secure, and that changes can be made instantaneously. Their understanding of our plans for growth in turn enables us to deliver our innovative applications, and deliver return on investment to our customers.”
Download full case study in PDF
Jointly owned by AXA PPPh, Bupa, Aviva, Nuffield Health and VitalityHealth, Healthcode is the leading online application software provider for the private healthcare sector in the UK.
Specialising in products that enable private practices and hospitals to manage their insurance and billing processes, the company currently processes in excess of £2.5 billion worth of bills and insurance claims every year.
With the increased use of e-billing and online insurance processing by its clients, Healthcode has seen demand for its range of applications grow rapidly in recent years, prompting the company to refresh its infrastructure.
Claranet acquires Aspaway, Runiso and Morea to strengthen application management capabilities
Claranet, the leading managed services provider in Europe, has completed its third acquisition in France in as many months, having acquired French hosting providers Morea, Runiso and Aspaway. The acquisitions will significantly enhance the company’s application management and public cloud capabilities and position Claranet as one of the most ambitious, capable and dynamic players in the French market.
As part of its corporate strategy, Claranet has been working to establish a larger footprint in France and ensure that it is able to cater to the increasingly complex hosting needs of its customers. The acquisitions of Morea, Runiso and Aspaway go a long way to helping the company fulfil these ambitions, and have seen the Claranet Group grow to over 1,000 employees, with over 5,500 customers. The newly expanded Group will have annual revenues of over €228 million.
The company is leveraging Morea’s expertise with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build out public cloud services across the entire Group, while the secure and high-availability hosting services brought by Runiso and Aspaway will enable Claranet to manage more complex and business-critical applications for its customers.
Olivier Beaudet, Claranet’s Group CMO and Managing Director of Claranet France, commented:
The acquisitions of Morea, Runiso and Aspaway mark a turning point for Claranet France, strengthening our market offering and enabling us to better respond to the changing needs of our customers. We now have an incredibly broad service offering, incorporating managed hosting and DevOps, healthcare specialisation and PCI-DSS compliance, public cloud and the highest levels of security, putting us in a good position to pursue further growth. Claranet France is now the second largest country in the Claranet Group, and we are one of the most capable and dynamic hosting providers in the French market.”
He continued:
Morea’s heritage in managing public cloud environments also stands to benefit the Claranet Group more widely as we are now developing new products and services to help our customers to access the advantages of public cloud but with the support of Claranet’s managed services.
Claranet continues to be a success story in the European technology market, having grown steadily both organically and through acquisition. Adopting an ambitious growth strategy, these acquisitions are the latest made by the company across Europe over the last 18 months, these were preceded by: Echiron (Portugal), Grita (France), NovaData (The Netherlands), Celingest (Spain), Techgate (UK), and LinuxIT (UK).
The network is the backbone of the modern 24×7 digital business.
Your website, your transactions, your communications…everything in your business relies on it.
All the time.
And when network downtime can cost £3,670 [1] a minute, your network performance sets the precedent for your company’s performance.
But, despite this, networks trail far behind other areas of IT infrastructure in terms of their agility and ability to respond to changing business needs.
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