“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Laozi, 600 BC.

IT is not core business for many companies operating in the UK mid-market, yet IT is instrumental to their success in a highly competitive market place. Very often IT teams are under resourced and under invested.

As a board becomes more aware of the benefits of IT, their demands and expectations can lead to knee-jerk reactions and unreal expectations. It quickly becomes clear that a transformation programme is required to bring IT to be an enabler for growth, delivering improved efficiency, access to new markets and employee flexibility – the list is endless and still growing. But the IT team is already over stretched and locked in a daily battle just to ‘keep the lights on.’ Sometimes it is easy to lay the blame at the door of the IT department. Whilst the perception that IT is not delivering may be unfair, it is likely a reality.

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I heard a statistic from a leading vendor last week that said 80% of all unified communications projects fail. As someone who tries to help organisations truly embrace the transformational opportunity that exists with UC I was shocked by this statistic.

The biggest problem I see for those 80% of UC projects is that it is seen as a technology initiative. It isn’t. Technology is of course key, but a successful unified communications project must consider so much more than infrastructure, servers and software.

To ensure your project is truly transformational you must look outside the technology and at how this project will and should affect people, process and communication. I believe many projects fail before they start, but asking some very basic questions can avert this:

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A sorry state of affairs

Number porting may not be the most exciting subject in world but it is clearly important to many businesses, and as a blog topic it is sexier than a piece about the intricacies of rating call usage. Let’s face it, the current state of affairs is a mess. Back in 1996 when the industry (and I mainly mean BT) was told that number portability was to be a right for all customers the UK telecoms industry blazed a trail. It took almost a decade for most of our EU neighbors to catch up. However, since these halcyon days a climate of inefficiency and disappointment has prevailed.

The average time to port in the UK takes 2 days, but what that figure doesn’t take into account is the arduous processes put in place by the major telcos. The process from beginning to end can and does take weeks. Conversely, the average time to port in the USA, Canada, Israel and Australia is under 3 hours. We are most definitely getting something wrong as an industry.

Number portability was put in place to provide choice to both businesses and consumers, allowing them to take advantage of new market entrants and technologies in an exciting deregulated world. Instead it has become a minefield of processes, industry acronyms and (in my own personal opinion) stalling tactics from major telcos often to prevent churn.

My personal plea to OFCOM is this: make change happen and keep in mind the business consumers who are the lifeblood of our industry.

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Since 2008 industry experts have been predicting an explosion in desktop virtualisation. To cater for this predicted demand many companies built platforms.

The reality is that the numbers predicted by Gartner – 40% of all corporate desktops virtualised by 2013 – have failed to materialise. Hosted Desktop has not become ubiquitous. But there are thousands of companies using and enjoying the benefits of Hosted Desktop services, who would never go back to the traditional model. There is an ever growing market for these services and while industry predictions were over optimistic, in both scale and time frame, the reality is people are moving to the Hosted Desktop model.

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The advent of high speed broadband services has always been a hot topic amongst our partners, customers and the media at large. ADSL Max and ADSL2+ are great technologies which BT has rolled out to most of the UK. But, having recently moved to a fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection myself, it dawned on me that some of the features it offers are a real game changer for organisations wanting to enable or further improve connectivity to remote home office users. Interestingly this has nothing to do with the part of the service everyone seems so focused on: the download speed.

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The mid-market is a great opportunity for any new technology and no doubt we have all seen the J curves for future uptake of cloud services, just as we saw them for mobile, VOIP, smart phones etc.

The bottom end of the market has engaged – with little choice – based on low cost or free offerings; while enterprise organisations can pay for whatever fits a business case and can show an ROI within 36 months.

In contrast, the mid-market is notoriously resistant to change or spending money unless there is a problem to solve or a very quick ROI – usually in a period less than 12 months.

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Most websites contain both static content and dynamic content, a combination that can really slow down user experience.

Of course, you want to avoid this slow-down at all costs and improve your user experience which can be achieved by scaling the web layer.

You might think to throw more server instances at the issue, though ultimately this is both ineffective cost-wise, and eventually not scalable.

Fear not, however, there is a solution, and it’s called caching.

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If you lack control over the performance and reliability of the network that connects you to the cloud capability, then no amount of resilience and technical wizardry on the part of your cloud provider will be of any value at all.

Typically, cloud providers do not own or provide the network connection. Net neutrality on the public internet backbone means that neither you nor your cloud provider will have any control over how your data packets are handled. If someone or something suddenly uses more bandwidth than expected, you may see a significant degradation of your application performance. If the application in question is mission-critical this could have a serious impact on the business. The importance of the network to cloud services means that a strong Service Level Agreement (SLA) and appropriate monitoring are vital in order to maintain optimal business continuity.

Reliance upon the network for access and application performance makes it essential to find a cloud infrastructure provider that understands and has expertise in networking and IT security. An Integrated Cloud Provider can deliver both the cloud resources and a fully controlled network. This means that you can set priorities on your traffic, as the link is direct from your in-house network fabric straight to the cloud provider, with no reliance on the public internet or an intermediate ISP. So as part of your cloud agreement, you can reserve a certain minimum network capacity for each of your mission critical applications.

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Honest assessment of needs, hybrid implementation, and innovative deployment key to maximising ROI, says Claranet

Analysis firm Forrester claims in a recent report into business agility that “cloud really doesn’t matter” when it comes to increasing revenues, and that there is no clear dividing line between high- and low-performing organisations in terms of knowledge and use of cloud technologies. This is not surprising, says Claranet’s UK Managing Director Michel Robert: rather than boosting performance directly, the true ROI of cloud services lies in their power to enable new applications and ways of working.

The report reveals that “Infrastructure Elasticity”, Forrester’s measure of agility afforded by cloud computing, accounted for almost no difference in enterprise performance. Robert believes that organisations need to understand what workloads they are moving to the cloud and why, as well as what benefits to expect from doing so:

Jumping headlong into a wholesale migration of IT infrastructure simply because the cloud is the ‘next big thing’ is not likely to get an organisation very far. For example, Claranet’s own research shows that while 87 per cent of organisations cite increasing flexibility and scalability as a key objective for migrating to cloud, a large majority (75 per cent) indicate that their actual requirement for scalability is ‘average to entirely predictable’. This disparity suggests that many organisations are investing in the cloud without properly understanding their requirements and the level of investment needed for their needs. After all, if they are not experiencing frequent or extreme variance in demand, they may be wasting time and money chasing the scalability that cloud computing offers,” he said.

“In cloud computing, there is no such thing as ‘one size fits all’. It is important for organisations to honestly assess their needs at the outset, make improvements to their IT systems gradually, and mix on-premises infrastructure with migrating elements to the cloud in a hybrid approach that reflects their changing priorities and needs. It is a case of ‘evolution, not revolution’,” Robert continued.

Despite the potential cost-savings inherent in moving to the cloud, Robert believes that its true value lies not in the infrastructure itself but in how organisations use the cloud to improve the development and use of applications: “Increasingly, it is the ability of a cloud provider to both host applications and manage their development that enables innovation within organisations,” he said.

“Claranet’s latest research found that many organisations are capitalising on their cloud adoption to launch ‘cloud-native’ applications that they would not otherwise have been able to run. This is especially the case with communications services, where unified communications deployments are 58 per cent cloud-native, VoIP services 59 per cent, and video conferencing facilities 66 per cent,” Robert continued.

Choosing the right provider is key to unlocking the full potential of the cloud, Robert said: “Organisations must look for a cloud service provider that will take a consultative approach to recommending an appropriate service based on a full understanding of an organisation’s requirements, rather than simply delivering ‘cloud for cloud’s sake’,” he concluded.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.

Increased demand for flexible working and BYOD driving need for development

Claranet is to build on its membership of the Citrix Service Provider (CSP) programme by using Citrix XenApp to deliver enhanced security, low-bandwidth optimisation for limited or mobile connections, and a like-for-like Windows 7-style end-user experience. This comes as Bring Your Own Device and mobile working trends increase demand for remote access to corporate data and applications.

With organisations increasingly keen to accommodate more flexible working patterns to boost productivity, the ability to replicate employees’ desktop experience, with full access to data and applications, is a crucial factor in enabling employees to work effectively on any device, wherever they are,” said Michel Robert, Managing Director of Claranet UK.

“Equally important for businesses is having confidence that the data and applications being accessed are secure. Claranet has an existing high-performance, customisable and easy-to-consume Hosted Desktop service, based on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services. Our relationship with Citrix means we will be able to build on this expertise to provide security enhancements alongside other benefits such as more granular control over user experience, easier customisation, and reduced bandwidth consumption,” Robert continued.

Claranet’s most recent research into cloud adoption trends, completed in September 2013, showed that 71 per cent of organisations see data security and data privacy as a concern when it comes to migrating data and applications to cloud services, with more than half of those citing them each as a major concern. These concerns are in part driven by the heightened risk to data security caused by remote access through portable devices.

“In many traditional IT environments, increased security often implies greater restrictions and control of users. With Claranet’s hosted desktop service, users’ workspaces reside remotely and securely in the cloud and can be accessed from any Internet-enabled device. This makes access to an organisation’s corporate desktop – from any device, anywhere, at any time – a reality,” concluded Robert.

With the growing trend toward businesses enabling mobile ways of working and the growth of BYOD programmes, the demand for desktops-as-a-service is set to continue into 2014. As a leading independent managed service provider in the UK and Western Europe, and a Citrix Service Provider partner, Claranet’s broad portfolio and expertise in hosted desktop services gives it a strong position to help drive adoption of DaaS. The planned enhancements to its hosted desktop platform will help Claranet to build on its experience in delivering hosted desktop solutions and establish even greater trust as a provider,” said Ken Oestreich, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Desktops and Apps, at Citrix.

Find out more:

• For more information about Claranet’s hosting portfolio, visit hosting services.
• For more information about Claranet’s communications portfolio, visit communications services.
• For more information about Claranet’s networks portfolio, visit networks services.