There a lots of statistics – most of them probably totally apocryphal – about how much money a slow website can cost you. You only need to know this: slow web applications enrage your users.
Avoid enraging your users by following these tips:
First things first – make sure performance is up to scratch.
Web acceleration and regional distribution
Claranet, the leading managed services provider in Europe, has launched its new Skype for Business integration for the Claranet Hosted Voice service in the UK. The new service means that organisations will benefit from the superior enterprise-grade functionality of a hosted PBX system, with the front end usability of Skype for Business within the wider Office 365 family.
As a standalone product, Skype for Business is a market leading tool but it lacks the enterprise grade telephony functionality that comes with a PBX system. Claranet’s new service fully integrates Skype for Business with the Hosted Voice cloud PBX set-up, ensuring the advantages of both approaches for end users.
Many organisations have been averse to adopting full Skype for Business functionality and have maintained their PBX phone systems because telephony is still considered the central form of communication, with any change being seen as too risky. The result is that while many have adopted Skype for Business within the wider Office 365 package, they only use the video conferencing and IM functionality, maintaining the PBX phone on the office desk for voice calls.
James Mitchell, Senior Product Manager for Unified Communications, said:
Integrating an existing PBX system with Skype for Business is not straight forward, resulting in many organisations putting it quite a way down their to-do list. With our new service, customers will be able to upgrade entirely to our Hosted Voice service with Skype for Business as the front end tool. Claranet has done the heavy lifting to fully integrate the Skype for Business package with our Hosted Voice service. The service, combined with Claranet’s Office 365 offer, results in a comprehensive and reliable unified communications solution.”
The new Skype for Business service is an addition to Claranet’s existing Hosted Voice VoIP service, which provides a complete telephone system incorporating handsets and soft phones, with full integration with smartphones and tablets. Fully ISO 27001 and ISO 22301 accredited, the service is highly secure meeting all necessary standards with realistic service level agreements.
James concludes:
Studies from Broadsoft have suggested that 94 per cent of UK businesses still use an on-site PBX system, rendering the vast majority unable to take advantage of true unified communications and the benefits it entails. Attempting to connect a legacy PBX with a wider modern communications suite just doesn’t work as it results in restricted functionality and a fragmented suite of applications. Our new Skype for Business service removes all of these challenges.”
The current state of the IT industry is very prone to hype and distortion of all kinds. So there’s nothing quite like getting the latest insights straight from the horse’s mouth.
We asked 900 senior IT decision-makers from six European countries (Benelux, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, UK) a whole load of curious cloud questions. We received intriguing answers on everything from IT challenges, roles and budgets, to levels of innovation, application updates and DevOps adoption.
What did we learn?
‘Business as usual’ approach to IT development too slow for modern businesses
Rapidly changing business models are causing businesses to reconsider their approach to IT, as they look to capitalise on the huge opportunity for differentiation through the effective use of technology. However, this is posing real difficulties for IT departments across Europe according to the latest research from managed services provider Claranet. As business leaders across Europe seek to transform their organisations, the incremental ‘business as usual’ approach to IT improvement is increasingly unfit for purpose.
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, discovered that 46 per cent of European IT decision makers find supporting fast changing business models a key challenge, up from 35 per cent in 2015. In the UK, the number of IT departments struggling to support a rapidly transitioning business is even higher, with 54 per cent of respondents citing it as a problem.
For Michel Robert, Claranet’s UK managing director, the results highlight the growing imperative for IT departments to embrace more dynamic approaches to keep up with changing business needs:
Our research shows that the IT department needs a fundamental rethink of how it approaches innovation and development. Traditionally, IT departments have incrementally upgraded their capabilities, adding new features sequentially. While this pace of development was acceptable in the past, and often the only pace permitted by infrastructure and software development limitations, it is now no longer agile enough to satisfy the needs of modern businesses.
If IT departments are to empower their organisations, and keep pace with the desired rate of change, they need to adopt more progressive approaches to IT management, focusing on practises which will boost their applications, such as public cloud and DevOps. The flexibility and agility brought by public cloud services enable IT departments to spin up new services which scale on demand, without heavy investments in additional infrastructure. DevOps, meanwhile, can increase the frequency of updates, and speed to market, ensuring the application estate can support changing business conditions.”
Robert concluded:
IT services providers have a central role in supporting their customers in handling this level of significant change. Strong partnerships are able to ease the pressure on IT leaders, giving them the tools they need to respond effectively to the needs of their organisations. Companies should look to partner with services providers who promote an application first approach. This means addressing the hosting, management and development needs of individual applications and prioritising the availability, performance and security of applications which will make the most difference to the business.”
To access the full report, visit: www.claranet.co.uk/research
Is the cloud secure?
This is literally the most-asked question in the industry: we asked 900 senior IT decision makers from across Europe to list their top IT challenges and security is their number one IT challenge.
In fact, it’s actually the accessibility of data, rather than its location that has the biggest impact of security.
Claranet Ethernet over FTTC (EoFTTC) services bridge the gap between value Broadband services and dedicated Ethernet. Offering guaranteed and dedicated bandwidth, backed by expertise, Claranet Ethernet over FTTC offers a lower cost Ethernet option backed by full Ethernet SLAs.
Our experts can advise you on which of our connectivity services is best suited to your business needs.
Working with Claranet removes the burden of project managing and carrying out the installation of your Ethernet over FTTC service yourself, saving you time.
We take care of the ongoing 24×7 management and monitoring of your service including managing the router. However, you retain the control you need with access to around the clock UK support.
We work with you to ensure your service continually meets your needs.
Direct access to the expertise you need. Superior optimisation
High resilience and low latency supports the secure delivery of bandwidth intensive and mission critical applications and data
Get the optimal service for each location. We’re carrier agnostic
Challenge: The ASA maintains a vast complaints management database, that needs to meet stringent availability criteria.
Solution: With Claranet, the ASA upgraded to a failsafe disaster recovery and business continuity solution.
Result: By upgrading to Claranet’s highly secure and available cloud recovery platform, the ASA has reduced the time taken to recover data and gained seamless protection for its critical complaints management database.
To ensure that all complaints are dealt with efficiently, the ASA maintains a vast complaints management database, which acts as an electronic record of all registered complaints and related correspondence. The complaints database runs in a virtualised VMware environment hosted by ASA’s on-premises IT infrastructure, and needs to meet stringent availability criteria.
Giles King, Systems Manager at the Advertising Standards Authority, elaborated:
We have strict targets for investigating complaints and aim to turn around most cases within five to ten days. This makes it absolutely essential for us to ensure that the information in our database remains highly available at all times. Not only would downtime impact our ability to resolve existing complaints on time, it would also create a backlog of new complaints for us to deal with, causing further delays.”
While the ASA performed regular backups of its systems, the organisation was not confident in its existing disaster recovery strategy. If physical systems at its main data centre failed, the ASA would have to contract an external provider to ship backup servers to its main site then manually restore systems from backups, which could take several days – a delay that the organisation could not afford.
To ensure a swift return to business as usual, even after a major disruption, the ASA looked to upgrade to a failsafe business continuity and disaster recovery solution. After meeting with a number of providers, the organisation engaged IBM Business Partner and business continuity specialist Claranet to develop and host a state-of-the-art disaster recovery platform, fully interoperable with ASA’s existing platform. Convinced by Claranet’s credentials, the ASA moved ahead with a proof-of-concept phase, testing a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution that used VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to automatically replicate virtualised applications to a secure cloud platform, fully managed by Claranet.
Claranet established a dedicated disaster recovery environment for the ASA’s complaints management database on its DRaaS platform. The cloud recovery environment is hosted at Claranet’s own UK-based data centre on IBM System x3550 M4 servers and shared storage based on IBM Storwize V7000. The System x servers are optimised for performance, featuring the latest Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors, and deliver outstanding uptime, offering the ideal foundation for a cloud environment. Claranet has provisioned a number of virtual servers on the System x servers using VMware vSphere.
“Moving to a fully managed, hosted disaster recovery platform meant that we avoided the expense and effort of provisioning the environment ourselves, as well as the ongoing cost of staffing and general overhead,” said King. “If there are any problems, Claranet will be there to see that they are resolved right away, which saves us a considerable amount of effort. With Claranet managing everything, we don’t even have to think about it.”
To provide failover capabilities between the main instance of the ASA’s complaints management database and the disaster recovery platform, Claranet uses VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) on the DRaaS platform. The solution leverages VMware vSphere replication using SRM to deliver simple and powerful replication of applications, along with fully automated site recovery and migration.
The solution handles the switch-over to virtual servers in the recovery environment, as well as the switch-back to the original production servers once the disaster scenario is over. This means that when the ASA fails back over to the original hardware, the organisation can rapidly and easily bring back all the transactions that have taken place on the backup environment, so absolutely no data is lost.
By upgrading from a traditional disaster recovery plan to Claranet’s highly secure and available cloud recovery platform, the ASA has reduced the time taken to recover data following a disaster and gained seamless protection for its critical complaints management database.
Beyond faster recovery, the new environment gives us complete peace of mind that essential information is protected, which is priceless. The combination of IBM infrastructure and VMware technology gives us an enterprise-class platform for ensuring fail-safe disaster recovery, and Claranet’s expertise means that the environment is always maintained at an optimum level.”
In the future, the ASA plans to gradually migrate more of its enterprise systems, including email, customer relationship management and document management applications, to Claranet’s disaster recovery platform, ensuring end-to-end business continuity.
King concluded:
Having a dedicated recovery environment for our core systems will massively strengthen our business continuity. The flexibility and scalability of Claranet’s DR solution makes it easy to extend the environment, so it can grow in line with our needs. No business wants to experience a real disaster, but if we ever find ourselves in that situation we want to give ourselves the best chance of getting operations back up and running quickly. Joining forces with a strong partner like Claranet gives us that certainty.”
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) regulates advertising across all media in the UK, and has been working to keep advertisements legal, decent, honest and truthful for more than 50 years. A crucial part of the ASA’s duties involves acting on complaints lodged by consumers and businesses about advertising content.
In recent years, the number of complaints registered by the ASA has risen steadily, driven in part by the exponential growth of online media. In 2012 alone, the organisation investigated more than 31,000 complaints about 18,990 ads.
Business brings a first-to-market continuity solution to Claranet’s EMEA customers
Managed services provider Claranet is working with business continuity expert Data Deposit Box to strengthen its cloud backup and disaster recovery services in EMEA. The solution is aimed at SOHO, SMBs and SMEs and will offer Claranet’s customers greater flexibility, reliability and control over their data backup and data management practices.
The move also marks award-winning Data Deposit Box’s first foray into the European market with a managed services provider. Data Deposit Box expects a positive European reception having recently won Best Storage Presentation at the highly anticipated Dallas ChannelPro SMB Forum event and Best Cloud Solution and Best Storage Solution at the high profile Austin ASCII Events IT Summit in North America.
The cost-efficient solution is simple to use and offers a continuous backup model, enabling the simultaneous backup of multiple customer devices where the software is installed. It combines Data Deposit Box’s innovative portal with customer data that is stored in Claranet’s shared storage environment. Claranet takes the lead in the initial installation, leaving the customer to manage the easy-to-use portal interface. Data can be accessed from any device running the portal software and, in the event of a disaster recovery scenario, retrieved instantly.
Commenting on the solution, Neil Thomas, Claranet’s Product Director, said:
Businesses are increasingly aware of the damaging effects of data loss and our customers are no exception, which is why we are continuing to build out our disaster recovery capabilities. Our contact with Data Deposit Box comes as part of our continued investment in cloud backup and disaster recovery, and follows the acquisition of disaster recovery experts Techgate, enhancing our ability to support our customers’ data and applications.
Data Deposit Box has developed a strong reputation for excellence in North America and we are delighted to introduce this service into the EMEA region. We are able to provide our customers with a secure, in-country hosting solution, with 24×7 support, which helps to protect their businesses from risk.”
Troy Cheeseman, President and Chief Operating Officer at Data Deposit Box concluded:
We are actively looking to build out our presence in EMEA, which makes Claranet, with a strong footprint in six European markets, financial stability and broad customer base, an ideal strategic contact. Our robust and flexible solution perfectly complements Claranet’s existing portfolio, and we look forward to consulting with Claranet and its customers to bring our innovative disaster recovery tools to market.”
MSP ranked 56th most profitable privately owned business in the country
Claranet has secured the 56th position in The Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100 2016, having increased its profits at an average annual rate of 72 per cent since 2012. This is the second time that the managed services provider (MSP) has appeared in The Sunday Times’ FastTrack series, having earned the 118th place in The Sunday Times International Track 200 last year.
Published on Sunday (10th April 2016), The Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100 league table, now in its 16th year, ranks Britain’s private companies with the fastest-growing profits over their latest three years of available accounts. To qualify for consideration businesses must be UK registered, privately-owned and not subsidiaries.
Celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year, having been established in 1996 as an ISP, Claranet has evolved into a full-service managed services provider with a presence in six European countries. Having maintained its financial independence since it was founded, the company has been free to pursue international expansion opportunities and been able to remain agile in the face of changing market opportunities.
Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet, commented:
Financial strength is core to our value proposition as a managed services provider and is critical if we are to secure the trust of our customers. Our ability to adapt to better suit a constantly changing market has enabled the business to improve profitability, securing its financial strength. By balancing fiscal responsibility with technological innovation we have been able to grow the business sustainably over our 20-year history.
Claranet is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the shift from on-premises IT to cloud-based environments. The combination of our strong local presence and international reach means that our business has been consistent in its growth both organically and through acquisition in Western Europe.”
Almost half of European IT leaders say the IT department’s core function is to reduce costs, according to latest research from Claranet
With IT budgets going up in recent years, IT departments’ fixation on cost reduction might be expected to be lower on the agenda than enabling revenue generation for the wider business or innovating to support growth strategies. However, recent research from Claranet shows IT departments across Europe are still fixated on containing costs at the expense of working on new value-add activities.
Independent research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Claranet and surveyed 900 European IT leaders, has found that cost reduction is significantly more likely to be a focus for IT departments in 2016 than it was a year ago. In spite of budget increases, 46 per cent of respondents highlighted cost reduction as a core function today, compared with just over a third (34 per cent) in 2015.
This focus on costs is likely to come to the detriment of other value-add activities; just 29 per cent of IT leaders view enabling revenue generation for the wider business as a core function, and only a quarter (25 per cent) believe they should be engaged in increasing customer loyalty.
Commenting on the findings, Michel Robert, Claranet’s UK managing director, said:
European IT budgets are growing, which would suggest there’s a recognition within businesses of the importance of IT, however time and resources are still not being spent on more forward-thinking projects that can generate more revenue in the long-term. It is clear from the data that the focus on cost reduction and ‘keeping the lights on’ we witnessed in last year’s report has been maintained and, for many, has actually increased. It goes without saying that costs are important, but it’s critical that IT departments can reposition themselves internally as enablers of business agility and innovation, rather than as cost centres.
Any business looking to digitally transform their processes must have the right partners and suppliers in place to carry out those standard tasks universal to IT departments. By working with a managed service provider, CIOs can effectively outsource this work and spend more time working on strategy and revenue-generating activities. Many talented IT directors have their hands tied with tasks inappropriate to their team’s skillset, so taking on an external partner can solve an HR problem as much as it can solve issues with the IT function’s ability to support of the wider business.”
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