Claranet News

Majority of cloud users benefiting from IT innovation following adoption, new research finds

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Claranet research points to redefined role with reduced administrative burden

Half of organisations believe that cloud adoption has changed the role of their IT department, but more than four-fifths still anticipate having a need for a distinct department as far in the future as 2020, according to research by Claranet. While the transformative potential of cloud computing is having a profound effect on how the IT department operates, it is facilitating a change in focus towards strategy and innovation rather than rendering it obsolete, says Claranet Managing Director Michel Robert.

Claranet’s third annual cloud adoption survey, which polled 300 IT decision-makers from a range of small and medium-sized businesses, and enterprises, found that 49 per cent of respondents have seen their organisation’s adoption of cloud solutions change the role of the IT department. Of these, 57 per cent said the IT department was now more strategic in its outlook, while 55 per cent said that cloud computing had put their IT department in a strong position to innovate new solutions for the organisation.

This shift in focus was emphasised by organisations’ expectations of what the core activities of their IT departments will be in the future. 54 per cent said that data security would be a key function in 2020 (down from 66 per cent today), while technical support was cited by 46 per cent (compared with 60 per cent for whom it is currently a major focus). More than four-fifths (82 per cent) believe that their organisation will still have a need for a distinct IT department in 2020, rather than its functions being entirely outsourced or absorbed by other internal departments.

Organisations are increasingly aware of the true potential of cloud adoption and outsourcing, seeing it as presenting an opportunity to redirect resources and take a longer-term strategic view of their IT operations. This might mean investigating innovative new ‘cloud-native’ applications that they would not be able to run on their on-premises infrastructure, and that will facilitate new business opportunities, rather than simply porting existing applications,” Robert said.

Claranet’s research also found that reducing pressure on in-house IT teams was a key objective of cloud migration projects for three quarters (75 per cent) of organisations. However, of those organisations for whom adopting cloud services has changed the role of their IT department, less than a quarter (23 per cent) have seen it reduce in size.

“The fact that the vast majority of IT departments are seeing no change to their staffing levels once they migrate functions to the cloud is a strong sign that – far from sounding the death-knell for internal IT departments – cloud adoption can relieve pressure on in-house teams. By outsourcing resource-heavy tasks that contribute little to the bottom line, organisations can free up their IT departments to focus on the kind of innovation and strategic thinking that ensures IT best serves the needs and direction of the business,” Robert concluded.

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Claranet research points to importance of network integrated cloud services

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Nearly half of businesses are concerned about cloud’s dependency on internet access, finds Claranet’s 3rd annual cloud adoption survey

Around half of UK cloud users are concerned about cloud’s dependency on internet access, potentially inhibiting organisations’ experiences of cloud computing, Claranet’s third annual cloud adoption survey has found. The findings, states the Managed Services Provider (MSP), serve as a reminder of the importance of the network to any cloud services offering.

The research, which polled 300 IT decision-makers from a range of small and medium-sized businesses, and enterprises, found that 73 per cent of respondents were using some form of cloud service, up from 62 per cent in 2012. However, 53 per cent of cloud users stated that cloud’s dependency on internet access was a cause for concern during the migration process.

Claranet’s UK Managing Director, Michel Robert, said that working with a provider with closely integrated cloud and networking services can help to allay concerns about cloud connectivity.

Robert said:

While worries about internet access haven’t held back the overall cloud adoption rate, it’s clear from these figures that there may be implications for the types of workloads and data that some businesses feel confident hosting in the cloud. After all, these services are only as reliable and secure as the network down which they are delivered. To take but one example, business-critical accounting and finance applications, which end-users must be able to access whenever they need them, are still held on in-house infrastructure by 85 per cent of organisations.

“Unreliable, unsecure networks will do little to reassure cloud users, but the connectivity question needn’t be a cause for concern when it comes to cloud provision. It’s possible to circumvent these issues by opting for an MSP that has a strong and deep understanding of network services and has closely integrated cloud and network services. In doing so, end users need only rely on a single supplier with a single SLA for the safe delivery of their applications,” he continued.

“Although it’s possible to outsource these functions to separate providers, businesses risk encountering supplier management issues. With responsibility for uptime split between two or more service providers, with separate SLAs, it is often unclear who is accountable in cases where service is disrupted or has degraded and how to get the service back online.

“As ever more organisations entrust their business-critical workloads, to the cloud, providing a complete, network-integrated service has never been more important, ensuring that customers can safely access their applications as and when they need them,” Robert concluded.

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Claranet appoints new CIO to lead technology development across Western Europe

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Claranet has today announced the appointment of Andy Wilton as its new CIO. The move comes at a time of rapid development and strategic growth for the company in the UK and across Europe, with continued investment in its technology platforms and business systems.

As head of Claranet’s Technology Group, Andy will be responsible for existing IT systems, infrastructure and platforms, together with technology and service integration of newly acquired businesses.

His appointment marks the eve of the first anniversary of Claranet’s acquisition of Star (in the UK) and Typhon (in France) and the company’s establishment as one of the leading managed services providers in Western Europe to the mid-market, including its recognition as a ‘leader’ in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for European Managed Hosting.

Andy has qualifications in physics and computer science, having studied at the University of Nottingham and later Aston University where he received his PhD. His professional career includes senior positions at 3Com, Siemens Network Systems (now part of KCom) and more recently seven years as IT Director of 2e2.

Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet says:

Since our acquisition last year we have taken the time to create a fully integrated business that takes an expanded range of services to market. Andy’s skill in handling company integration and experience in managing cloud hosting environments made him an ideal choice to join our team, helping to consolidate our share of market as a leading MSP in Europe.”

As one of the few European headquartered providers with a pan-European presence, Claranet is in a strong position as the market continues to mature.

Andy Wilton comments:

Claranet’s extended period of growth and innovation makes this a very exciting time to join the business. The big challenge for cloud providers is how to respond to the rapid changes in market demands in what is still a comparatively immature landscape. Ensuring a fully integrated service that is flexible to every customers’ need is no simple task.”

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Claranet wins Best Customer Service Strategy Award

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Managed Services Provider wins SVC’s inaugural customer service award

Claranet took home the Award for Best Customer Service Strategy at the Storage, Virtualization and Cloud (SVC) Awards last week (21st November 2013), where it was also a shortlisted finalist for Private Cloud Project of the Year. The Awards ceremony was held at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Knightsbridge, London. The SVC Awards honour the IT industry, specifically companies and teams operating in the cloud, virtualization and storage sectors.

Wiebe Nauta, Claranet’s Operations Director said:

Claranet has always put service excellence and customer service at the heart of its operations. We are delighted to have received the Best Customer Service Strategy Award, which validates our customer-centric approach and recognises our continued commitment to our customers.”

As the leading independent managed services provider in Europe, customer service has been central to Claranet’s business and its success to-date. Claranet adopts industry best practice to its service operations, with an ITIL-based service management approach, which ensures that the highest standards of service are delivered at all customer touchpoints. In addition to winning the SVC’s inaugural customer service award, Claranet has also been shortlisted as a finalist for Quality Service Provider of the Year, at the UK Customer Satisfaction Awards, which are run by the Institute of Customer Service.

Wiebe continues:

We place great emphasis on establishing genuine dialogue with our customers, and pride ourselves on building long-term, collaborative relationships. No matter how big or small the customer, Claranet places the relationship at the centre of its work, from the initial design and delivery of solutions right through the full lifecycle of those products and services.”

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Claranet rolls up its sleeves for BBC’s Children in Need

Posted on by Jay Fearn

MSP partners with Peugeot to host charity car wash microsite

Managed Services Provider (MSP) Claranet has teamed up with Peugeot, as part of its corporate social responsibility programme, to support their work with BBC’s Children in Need, hosting the microsite for their annual charity car wash event, ‘The UK’s Largest Car Wash’.

Running since 1980, Children in Need is the BBC’s corporate charity in the UK. They provide grants to projects throughout the UK, which focus on children and young people who are disadvantaged. Peugeot began fundraising for the charity in 2012, launching ‘The UK’s Largest Car Wash’, for which they invited their customers to ‘Get Sudsey with Pudsey’, at over 200 Peugeot dealerships across the country.

To mobilise support for the campaign this year, Peugeot has launched a stand-alone website, and turned to Claranet to host it on their infrastructure as a service platform, the Virtual Data Centre (VDC). The microsite (www.pudseyscarwash.co.uk), which went live in October and runs through to December, is a fully interactive portal through which supporters can find and organise local charity car washes, learn about the project and, importantly, donate money.

Steven Fahey, PR Manager at Peugeot, said: “Our online presence and digital communications strategy is central to our fundraising work with Children in Need. Without a fully operational and reliable website for the campaign, we would risk missing out on important donations and support for the charity, something that we couldn’t risk. Due to the nature of the campaign, traffic to the site can change rapidly. This meant that we needed a hosting partner that could handle these demands and keep the site running smoothly. Having worked with Claranet since the start of this year, we had seen their Virtual Data Centre (VDC) service in action, and knew that they would be the right provider for this project.”

Claranet’s cloud platform (VDC) is designed to handle the sudden surges of interest that are part and parcel of the Children in Need campaign. The platform gives Peugeot the ability to scale the site to their needs, to cope with times of peak demand, while the resilience of the service ensures that the highest levels of availability and uptime are maintained.

Claranet UK’s Managing Director, Michel Robert, added: “Claranet’s cloud platform ensures that Peugeot’s microsite can cope with spikes in traffic, which are driven by calls to action on the Children in Need programme. Working with the team at Peugeot, Claranet can work out the likely impact of planned programmes and advertising schedules, and dynamically increase compute capacity to meet peak traffic. Corporate social responsibility and charities hold an important place in our company ethos, so we are delighted to be able to participate alongside Peugeot to support such an important and worthwhile cause.”

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Increasing awareness of importance of data sovereignty, but education still needed

Posted on by Jay Fearn

53 per cent of organisations now see where data is held as a key decision factor

More than half of organisations that outsource their IT to a cloud service provider are concerned about whether their data is going to be located at home or abroad, and see this as an important consideration in deciding which provider to work with, according to new research by Claranet. While encouraging, this suggests that a sizeable minority may be failing to fully appreciate the potential implications of data sovereignty, and highlights the importance of asking providers the right questions, says Claranet’s UK Managing Director Michel Robert.

52 per cent of organisations that have migrated at least one IT function or application to the cloud described data sovereignty as a concern. This is up from 47 per cent last year.

“Heightened concern about data sovereignty is perhaps not surprising in the current climate, especially in the wake of recent revelations about the NSA’s Prism surveillance initiative. But, there is still a need for education as to the importance of having clarity and control over where and how your organisation’s data is being stored,” Robert said.

“Different data sets will, of course warrant different levels of consideration about where they are located, depending on importance, access, sensitivity, and regulatory requirements. But, even if organisations trust their providers to store data in a safe, compliant fashion, they should not be doing so blindly. They need to be asking potential providers the right questions about where their data will be held, and what this means for the security and accessibility of that data by third-parties in the country of storage and beyond.”

Claranet’s third annual survey into cloud adoption trends also revealed that 83 per cent of organisations believe security expertise to be an important factor in determining their choice of cloud service provider. 81 per cent indicated that their ability to trust a provider was important.

“It is no surprise that such large numbers regard security expertise as so important. After all, any CIO or IT manager in a data-driven organisation that isn’t concerned with security probably isn’t doing their job properly. But security and sovereignty should go hand-in-hand, and the disparity between perceptions of the importance of these two factors does perhaps show sovereignty to be something of a blind spot for end-users,” Robert said.

“Ultimately, outsourcing your IT does not equate to outsourcing the responsibility for what happens to your data – however much you trust your provider. Trust has to be earned, and organisations must ensure they are asking the right questions of providers,” he concluded.

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Discrete deployment terms unfit for the hybrid world, warns Claranet

Posted on by Jay Fearn

In a hybrid world, in which any combination of cloud services may be consumed by a single customer, rigid definitions of cloud deployment models may serve to hinder rather than promote innovation, Claranet warns today.

Michel Robert, Claranet’s UK managing director, says:

Definitions such as PaaS or IaaS have been useful in a rapidly evolving market in differentiating between cloud services and the attributes of each. However, the reality is customer requirements tend to be best addressed by combining different elements of these services together. The result is that while many organisations want a to take advantage of cloud services, the categories of cloud can create a false sense of inflexibility and confusion as to the best way forward.

“IaaS and PaaS as stand alone services may not be suitable, particularly for the mid-market, where many customers are looking for managed services to remove the burden of application and infrastructure management. In many cases, it will be a mix of services which will be required – satisfying their need for both control and ease of management” he continued.

Robert went on to suggest that with the predicted hybridisation of the cloud industry, deployment terms will become increasingly unhelpful, and that businesses would need to take a more holistic view of their IT requirements:

“The relevance of these discrete terms is diminishing. Analysts and technology firms are predicting a hybrid world, mixing on-premise IT with off, mixing dedicated with shared hosting, and mixing public and private cloud.

“The new realities of cloud adoption mean that businesses need help in making the move to cloud and plotting their migration paths. MSPs should be looking to leverage the range of cloud services as components of a service rather than the service itself. In doing so, there will be greater innovation and customer requirements will be better served,” Robert concluded.

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Kremlin goes back to the future to secure data – but managed services will be more practical for most, says Claranet

Posted on by Jay Fearn

While the news that the Kremlin is going to spend £10,000 on a number of electronic typewriters in an attempt to eliminate the risk of damaging data leaks might raise a chuckle, it does show the level of concern over how best to safeguard sensitive data in an increasingly complex IT world, says Claranet Managing Director Michel Robert.

Increasing the creation of paper documentation is probably not a great idea,” Robert said. “Not only can it be difficult and time-consuming to identify valuable information in paper documents, but they can also represent a security risk themselves, especially from internal threats. And that’s before even considering the threats posed by fire, flood, or other natural disaster that might destroy those documents.”

As the vast majority of data is created by business systems, the primary focus remains on securing IT systems, Robert said: “If you are concerned about safeguarding your data, your first step should be to evaluate how much of your data is actually sensitive, how long it needs to be retained for, and how often it will be accessed. In taking this approach there is the opportunity to reduce complexity and the volumes of data stored securely.

“Having completed this audit, IT decision-makers can focus on building the right mix of internal and external services to meet their requirements. It is important to carefully consider network security and resilience, including private MPLS networks, encryption, and integrated 3G services to address mobile working,” he continued.

“Not all managed service providers are born equal, however. Organisations need to identify a provider with the capacity to supply integrated hosting, communication, and network services, providing a solution that is bespoke to their needs. Transparency over how and where data is stored is also crucial, with in-country data centres providing assurances as to sovereignty,” Robert concluded.

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Claranet positioned as a Leader in latest Gartner Magic Quadrant

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Gartner announces latest Magic Quadrant for European Managed Hosting

Managed services provider Claranet has been positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant in Gartner’s latest European Magic Quadrant for European Managed Hosting, published June 19, 2013 by Tiny Haynes et al.

Gartner stated that vendors in the Leaders Quadrant have proved they have staying power in this market, can frequently innovate on their existing products and can be relied on for enterprise-class needs. They have proved their technical competence and ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They address multiple use cases with stand-alone or integrated solutions.

Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet, states that:

Claranet has a strong history of networking and hosting provision, which means that customers have a single line of accountability and that we have a broad understanding across our customers’ IT spectrum.

Secondly, as one of the few European-headquartered providers with a pan-European presence, Claranet is in a strong position as the market continues to mature. Our acquisitions of Star in the UK and Typhon in France have consolidated our position in Europe while maintaining our financial and corporate stability – both enormously important trust factors when storing data with a provider.”

The Gartner Magic Quadrant assessment offers snapshots of markets and their participants. It enables users to map vendor strengths against their current and future needs. Gartner evaluated Claranet’s hosting portfolio on both its completeness of vision and its ability to execute using 15 weighted criteria.

Charles continues:

Our hosting and network solutions offer significant operational cost-savings, enhanced flexibility and scalability, and immediate return on investment (ROI) We believe it is this integrated portfolio, matched with our ability to operate across multiple borders, that has enabled us to enter this Magic Quadrant in the Leaders category at our first attempt. Claranet believes this to be a strong affirmation of our hosting solutions.”

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Claranet takes leading position in Gartner Magic Quadrant

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Gartner announces latest Magic Quadrant for European Managed Hosting

Managed services provider Claranet has been placed in the “Leaders” category in Gartner’s latest European Magic Quadrant research paper.

The report includes Claranet for the first time, citing key factors: the MSP’s agility in meeting customer demand for more flexible hosting, its strong hosting portfolio combined with network experience, and its investment in creating multiple standard platforms for running families of applications.

Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet, states that a number of points can be taken from the report’s findings:

“The impact of a well-organised account team on the quality of customer service is highlighted as a key differentiator. Gartner’s praise for Claranet in putting agile process teams in place is a testament to our flexibility to meet customer demands and our ability to proactively anticipate requirements. We also have strong history of networking and hosting provision, which means that customers have a single line of accountability and that we have a broad understanding across our customers’ IT spectrum.

“Secondly, as one of the few European-headquartered providers with a pan-European presence, Claranet is in a strong position as the market continues to mature. Our acquisitions of Star in the UK and Typhon in France have consolidated our position in Europe while maintaining our financial and corporate stability – both enormously important trust factors when storing data with a provider.”

The Gartner Magic Quadrant assessment offers snapshots of markets and their participants. It enables users to map vendor strengths against their current and future needs. Gartner assessed Claranet’s hosting portfolio on both its completeness of vision and its ability to execute using 15 weighted criteria.

Charles continues:

Our hosting and network solutions offer significant operational cost-savings, enhanced flexibility and scalability, and immediate return on investment (ROI) It is this integrated portfolio, matched with our ability to operate across multiple borders, that has enabled us to enter this Magic Quadrant in the Leaders category at our first attempt – a strong affirmation of our hosting solutions.”

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