Claranet News

Claranet announced as Platinum Sponsor of the AWS Enterprise Summit in London

Leading managed services provider Claranet is the sole Platinum Sponsor the 2016 Amazon Web Service (AWS) Enterprise Summit in London. Claranet’s sponsorship of the event, being held at the ExCel Centre on 8 November, further establishes its position as a key European-wide provider of managed services on AWS.

The AWS Enterprise Summit in London is designed to educate attendees on how to accelerate adoption of the cloud and maximise the benefits it can deliver to an organisation.

Claranet achieved Premier Partner Status with AWS earlier this year. It is rapidly deepening its engagement and expertise with the cloud giant to enable customers to take advantage of the platform. John Allen, CTO of Claranet customer Missguided, will speak at the Summit on the company’s transformation following its recent migration to AWS with Claranet. Sam Bashton, a leader of Claranet’s Cloud Practice, will also be offering consultancy sessions to IT leaders who are looking to understand how they can get the best out of AWS infrastructure.

Michel Robert, Managing Director of Claranet UK, commented:

Enabling customers to take full advantage of the transformational benefits that Cloud-based services can bring, is a key focus for our business. The AWS Summits across the UK and Europe are therefore major events for us. Earlier this year we were the Platinum Sponsor of the 2016 European AWS Summit, and we take pride in lending our support for the AWS Enterprise Summit as well.

Our close ties to AWS means that we are in a strong position to provide the expertise a customer needs to migrate to and make best us of the AWS platform, resulting in better application performance, availability and security. Missguided’s success with AWS is a prime example of the potential of the cloud platform to transform the way a business operates for the better.”

Claranet has built a European-wide cloud practice, aiming to bring the significant benefits of managed AWS services to business across Europe. In 2016, Claranet acquired UK business Bashton to develop its DevOps and AWS expertise. It also acquired AWS specialists Morea in France and Celingest in Spain in 2015. Its customers today include ITV, BBC Worldwide, Missguided, Orange, Superdry, Liverpool Football Club, and Virgin Holidays.

Robert concluded:

Our heritage in both hosting and network services puts us in a strong position to take advantage of cloud platforms such as AWS on behalf of our customers. Our ability to draw on the wide range of AWS services and combine these with a range of tools for code release and automation into a single offering drives real value for our customers. Throughout our 20-year history, we’ve seen the ways in which innovative technologies can transform the way businesses operate and improve efficiencies; the advent of the cloud is no exception. The AWS Enterprise Summit offers an exceptional chance for more businesses to realise the benefits of AWS solutions, and we are delighted to play a part in that.”

IT leaders must shadow their business more closely to reduce Shadow IT

Communication, awareness and flexibility key to reducing Shadow IT risk

European organisations are increasingly concerned about Shadow IT, research from managed services provider Claranet has found. Despite the much reported potential for innovation that working collaboratively with employees brings, many IT leaders are struggling to be more flexible. The result is that more people are adopting the technology that they need without the involvement or authorisation of the IT department.

Surveying 900 IT decision-makers across a variety of organisations in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and the Benelux, Claranet found that almost one in four respondents (24 per cent) named Shadow IT as one of the biggest IT challenges that their organisation is currently facing. Only 13 per cent reported Shadow IT as a major IT challenge last year, representing a significant 11 percentage point rise.

Andy Wilton, CIO of Claranet, explains: “The role of the IT leader is changing rapidly, and the successful ones will be those who can move away from clinging to shiny objects and managing infrastructure, and think more strategically about what their businesses really need to be successful. Part of this move involves doing more to build understanding between the wider business and the IT department and it is clear that there’s work to do on that front. According to our own research, 72 per cent of IT departments don’t fully understanding the needs of the business and 74 per cent of businesses don’t properly understand what their IT department does, or how it can help. IT teams should focus their efforts on innovation and understanding how to support the core business through applications and data rather than managing infrastructure, which should be left to a trusted partner. This shift in priorities will leave the IT department with more time to concentrate on building relationships, and working collaboratively throughout the business, to build effective processes for procuring modern applications and services.

“By developing closer relationships with business units IT leaders can negate Shadow IT: either through the business unit feeling close enough to request the IT team does the procurement, or through the IT team outlining a policy by which individuals can procure on their own but in a controlled and recorded way. The benefit of the latter approach means security is less of a risk, while there is more freedom for the individual, as well as adequate provision for technical assistance. Keeping a regularly updated inventory means the IT team have a good picture of the usable IT estate in the company, allowing them to understand risk and plan strategically.

“Employees are increasingly influenced by their personal lives in terms of what technology they want to use, and, ultimately, trying to fight against the tide of this consumerisation of IT won’t work. But more importantly, there are also more valuable activities that they should be focusing on, like growing their businesses. This being said, the potential risks of Shadow IT are too great for it to be ignored, so a flexible compromise, built around solid communication, relationships and monitoring must be reached. In effect the IT team needs to let go of its grasp on all technology procurement and learn to shadow the business back,” Wilton concluded.

The Economist: The UK Middle Market Forum – Business after Brexit

Date: 

Tuesday, November 8, 2016 –

08:30 to 17:00

Venue: 

St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London

The Economist’s first Middle Market Forum will examine how businesses can weather the Brexit storm whilst still trying to overcome the daily challenges of securing growth capital, recruiting and retaining skilled workers, keeping abreast of latest technology changes and perfecting internal management structures.

Claranet’s very own founder and CEO, Charles Nasser, will be speaking on one of the panels: ‘Breaking the vicious cycle: securing funding to finance growth’ at 15:15.

Information and registration

On June 23rd Britons voted to leave the European Union, creating shockwaves across the world. The months ahead are rife with uncertainty, from the value of the pound and the future of trade with the continent to the timeline of Brexit and whether the United Kingdom itself will hold together.

Middle-market companies, with a turnover between £25m and £500m, are the backbone of the UK economy, contributing over a third of private-sector GDP, revenues and employment while representing barely 2% of all UK firms. Business leaders must also overcome the daily challenges of securing growth capital, recruiting and retaining skilled workers, keeping abreast of latest technology changes, perfecting internal management structures and getting the tools to expand abroad.

The Economist’s first Middle Market Forum will gather the UK’s leading mid-market chief executive officers, managing directors, founders and owners to discuss what lies ahead for British businesses in the wake of the vote for Brexit. A cheaper pound will make imports more expensive, but could be a boon for exporting firms.

  • Will the UK enter a new recession?
  • What is the Brexit timeframe and is it indeed inevitable?
  • Can business carry on as usual until the activation of the Lisbon Treaty’s article 50, which would officially launch Britain’s divorce from the EU?
  • What happens during the difficult negotiations over the separation?

We’ll be asking, how well equipped is Britain’s middle market to plan for the UK’s uncertain future while keeping up revenue and employment? How can business leaders develop a strategy amid such uncertainty?

Speakers and agenda

  • Rt Hon Michael Gove, MP: Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath
  • William Sargent: Co-founder and CEO, Framestore
  • Graham Cartledge, CBE: Chariman, Benoy
  • Mottie Kessler: Chairman and CEO, 2m Holidays
  • Guy Harwood: Chairman, Harwoods
  • John Timpson: Chairman, Timpson Limited
  • Spencer McCarthy: Chairman and CEO, Churchill Retirement Living
  • Rob Donaldson: Head of Corporate Finance, RSM
  • Stephen Fitzpatrick: Founder and CEO, OVO Energy
  • Kenny Wilson: CEO, Cath Kidston
  • Mark Wilson: Executive Vice-President and CFO of Aston Martin Lagonda
  • Miriam Gonzalez: Partner, Co-chair International Trade Practice, Dechert
  • Rami Ranger, CBE: Chairman, SunMark
  • Anthony Fletcher: CEO, Graze
  • Jon Reynolds: CEO and Co-founder, Swiftkey
  • Annette Doyle: Managing Director, Trumpf
  • Sian Keane: Vice-President Talent and People, Farfetch UK
  • Edward Ungar: CCO, Onfido
  • Charles Nasser: Founder and CEO, Claranet Group

Click here for the full agenda and schedule

Financial Software Limited transforms service delivery with a hosted solution from Claranet

Executive summary

Challenge: In response to changing market conditions, FSL developed a software-as-a-service solution. This meant that, in addition to selling software, they now also provide hosting services for their app portfolio and needed to improve the flexibiltiy and scability of its IT environment.

Solution: Claranet worked with FSL to design and implement a fully managed solution, running on IBM System x3550 servers with a dedicated storage area network (SAN).

Result: With its new platform, FSL has gained the flexibility it needs to meet the changing demands of a growing client base and to guarantee high levels of customer service.

The challenge

Founded as an independent software vendor (ISV), FSL has developed a range of innovative applications for investment management and taxation. Changing market trends, however, have driven an increase in the demand for more innovative service delivery models.

“What we have seen recently is that more and more companies are moving away from the traditional model of simply buying software and then installing it on their own systems,” remarked Joe Hughes, Senior Technical Consultant at Financial Software Limited. “We realised that one way to help our customers maximise efficiencies was to broaden the scope of our service offerings and develop a software-as-a-service [SaaS] solution. Now, in addition
to selling software, we also provide hosting services for our application portfolio.”

Response to FSL’s new service offerings has been impressive, and the company realised that if it was to maintain the high levels of service that customers had come to expect, it needed to improve the scalability and flexibility of its existing IT environment.

The solution

Claranet worked with FSL to design and implement a fully managed solution, running on IBM System x3550 servers with a dedicated storage area network (SAN). Claranet began by converting FSL’s physical architecture to a virtual environment, using VMware vSphere.

As the first operating system specifically designed for virtual deployments, vSphere transforms physical hardware into a shared, virtualised environment that can scale to meet dynamic workloads on demand. Using the ESXi hypervisor architecture included in VMware vSphere 5, Claranet partitioned a large number of virtual machines on six IBM System x servers.

The company also established a dual-site configuration for the environment, hosting FSL’s main production systems at its primary data centre, which is located within the IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services facility in Chelmsford, Essex. A second virtual platform was built at another Claranet data centre in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, and will provide disaster recovery capabilities in the event of system downtime.

IBM System x3550 servers deliver high availability and scalability, providing an efficient, secure base for FSL’s private environment. Multiple System x3550 servers are used to run
the company’s production systems, with an equivalent number of servers being housed in Claranet’s second data centre and used for disaster recovery.

To provide failover capabilities between the two hosting sites, Claranet is using VMware Site Recovery Manager. This disaster recovery solution leverages vSphere Replication to deliver simple and powerful replication of applications to Claranet’s secondary data centre, along with fully automated site recovery and migration.

“The new environment has massively reduced risk for us as a company,” noted Hughes. “As our applications on the virtual machines can be automatically moved from one ESXi host to
another, it doesn’t matter if a physical server fails. In the highly unlikely event that the main data centre goes down entirely, VMware Site Recovery Manager will provide automatic failover to a second data centre. This will allow us to get our systems back up and running in just minutes, compared to the days it would have taken to recover our data from tape storage in the past. In this way, we can almost completely eliminate downtime for our clients.”

The result

With its new platform, FSL has gained the flexibility it needs to meet the changing demands of a growing client base and to guarantee high levels of customer service. IBM System x3550 servers provide high levels of scalability, making them ideal for consolidating large numbers of virtual machines onto a single server, and for virtualising the large databases and mission-critical workloads that FSL hosts for its customers.

“It is much quicker and easier for us to add more resources as we need them, which is critical to us as we continue to grow and provide hosted application services for more clients,” Hughes continued. “Our applications are highly customised, which means that every time we develop a new version of a particular application, we have to provision a new server for testing and development, as well as a standalone production environment. In the past, it would take us up to three weeks to provision new hosted application environments on our physical servers. Now, we can get an application up and running in under two hours.”

The solution that Claranet has developed for us has absolutely delivered on these requirements, and allows us to provide better service to our clients at a lower cost, helping to boost our competitive edge.”

Imran Khan
Managing Director at FSL

Imran Khan, Managing Director of Financial Software Limited, concluded: “When we started this project, we had two main requirements: we were looking for a solution that would enable us to rapidly scale production to meet changing demand and that would guarantee near-constant uptime for our operations. The solution that Claranet has developed for us has absolutely delivered on these requirements, and allows us to provide better service to our clients at a lower cost, helping to boost our competitive edge.”

About FSL

Financial Software Limited (FSL) is a leading financial software company that has supported clients in the UK financial markets for over 16 years. FSL currently delivers its applications and services to more than 75 clients, who range from some of the UK’s largest financial institutions to smaller investment management funds and banks.

Download full case study

BLM prepares for growth with move to scalable, high-availability infrastructure

Executive summary

Challenge: The key challenge was to move BLM’s core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Solution: Claranet moved BLM’s critical business applications to a high-availability dedicated environment built on the VMware platform split between two data centres, with automated failover between the two sites for Disaster Recovery purposes.

Result: By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet onVMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

The challenge

The key objective for BLM was to move its core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Darren Broughton, Infrastructure Manager at BLM explained:

“As we continued to grow in size, it became clear that our on-premises IT hosting facilities were no longer suitable. We began to experience challenges in simply maintaining the infrastructure. Over the last few years we have several significant outages, generally as a result of power supply or air conditioning failures. It became very clear that we were spending too much time and resource on maintaining our ageing environment.”

Not only was BLM’s IT system held back by costs, but the physical size of the server rooms was also becoming an issue. Additionally, the business was looking at launching a new Document Management System (DMS) which would be used by the entire company. Rather than go through the costly rigmarole of investing in and installing further physical infrastructure the IT department decided to look for a more cost-effective solution:

“We wanted to increase the speed of our system and reduce the administrative burden of setting up new servers and applications for the DMS. We needed IT to be the business enabler, but our old IT infrastructure was a cost drain and not flexible enough for us to help the business to grow,” continued Broughton.

Also important to BLM was the ability to comprehensively protect all its critical applications and data in a flexible and safe environment. The limited physical space at the firm’s offices meant that providing a disaster recovery (DR) environment in-house, whilst also meeting the rapid expansion requirements, was simply not an option.

The solution

In order to meet BLM’s needs, the firm’s IT team embarked on a server migration project in partnership with managed services provider Claranet. This saw the firm’s critical business applications migrated to a high-availability dedicated environment, built on the VMware platform at Claranet’s data centres in Essex and Hertfordshire.

BLM’s IT team looked into five managed services providers: “Claranet proved to be the most flexible, offering a design with VMware that was built exactly as per our specification
and requirement.”

Having a hands-on team at Claranet took away a lot of the administration of setting up a new environment and because our existing infrastructure was already virtualised, it was very easy to migrate the virtual machines over to the new locations.”

Darren Broughton
Infrastructure Manager at BLM

Key to the migration process was offering BLM’s entire staff access to the newly deployed DMS application, which the firm’s lawyers and technical experts rely on for the file sharing and electronic storage of critical documents.

BLM is now running a high availability platform, split between two data centres, with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) playing an integral part in enabling automated failover between the two sites for DR purposes.

Since this migration, both Claranet sites have been added to BLM’s network so that the IT team can migrate applications seamlessly from their on-premises platform to their dedicated platform without intervention from Claranet. The virtualisation of servers both at BLM and at Claranet has enabled a smooth integration between the two environments and the scaling required.

The result

By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet on VMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

“Previously we would need to spend time monitoring and maintaining our IT environment, but now, we can respond much more quickly to business demands from our lawyers, meaning we’re providing a better service to BLM’s clients. And when we do need more infrastructure, we can simply request additional memory and storage from Claranet, or spin up new VMware hosts in accordance with business demand, rather than manually installing more servers in our limited on-premise locations.

BLM has also been able to create a formal Disaster Recovery strategy, protecting the workloads and applications in an automated way to ensure a seamless recovery using VMware’s SRM component. “With Claranet’s help we have developed a hybrid solution between our on-premises site and Claranet’s data centres. Adding some legacy hardware and public cloud platforms to our network means our core business applications are now virtually risk-free of outages and centrally managed. This cutting edge capability is delivered from new applications that we can implement quickly and confidently on the platform.”

About BLM

BLM is a leading risk and insurance law firm with head offices in Manchester and London, UK. The firm has a workforce of over 1,600 people, spread over nine offices in the UK and Ireland.

A fast growing law firm, BLM has experienced continual growth over the past 15 years, tripling its workforce as well as nearly doubling the number of offices across the UK. This rapid growth and physical expansion led to an increasingly complex IT infrastructure – and in turn a higher OPEX – needed to run the firm’s key business applications, products and services, as well as the day-to-day office operations of BLM’s lawyers.

Download full case study

Law firm prepares for growth with move to scalable, high-availability infrastructure

Executive summary

Challenge: The key challenge was to move BLM’s core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Solution: Claranet moved BLM’s critical business applications to a high-availability dedicated environment built on the VMware platform split between two data centres, with automated failover between the two sites for Disaster Recovery purposes.

Result: By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet onVMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

The challenge

The key objective for BLM was to move its core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Darren Broughton, Infrastructure Manager at BLM explained:

“As we continued to grow in size, it became clear that our on-premises IT hosting facilities were no longer suitable. We began to experience challenges in simply maintaining the infrastructure. Over the last few years we have several significant outages, generally as a result of power supply or air conditioning failures. It became very clear that we were spending too much time and resource on maintaining our ageing environment.”

Not only was BLM’s IT system held back by costs, but the physical size of the server rooms was also becoming an issue. Additionally, the business was looking at launching a new Document Management System (DMS) which would be used by the entire company. Rather than go through the costly rigmarole of investing in and installing further physical infrastructure the IT department decided to look for a more cost-effective solution:

“We wanted to increase the speed of our system and reduce the administrative burden of setting up new servers and applications for the DMS. We needed IT to be the business enabler, but our old IT infrastructure was a cost drain and not flexible enough for us to help the business to grow,” continued Broughton.

Also important to BLM was the ability to comprehensively protect all its critical applications and data in a flexible and safe environment. The limited physical space at the firm’s offices meant that providing a disaster recovery (DR) environment in-house, whilst also meeting the rapid expansion requirements, was simply not an option.

The solution

In order to meet BLM’s needs, the firm’s IT team embarked on a server migration project in partnership with managed services provider Claranet. This saw the firm’s critical business applications migrated to a high-availability dedicated environment, built on the VMware platform at Claranet’s data centres in Essex and Hertfordshire.

BLM’s IT team looked into five managed services providers: “Claranet proved to be the most flexible, offering a design with VMware that was built exactly as per our specification
and requirement.”

Having a hands-on team at Claranet took away a lot of the administration of setting up a new environment and because our existing infrastructure was already virtualised, it was very easy to migrate the virtual machines over to the new locations.”

Darren Broughton
Infrastructure Manager at BLM

Key to the migration process was offering BLM’s entire staff access to the newly deployed DMS application, which the firm’s lawyers and technical experts rely on for the file sharing and electronic storage of critical documents.

BLM is now running a high availability platform, split between two data centres, with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) playing an integral part in enabling automated failover between the two sites for DR purposes.

Since this migration, both Claranet sites have been added to BLM’s network so that the IT team can migrate applications seamlessly from their on-premises platform to their dedicated platform without intervention from Claranet. The virtualisation of servers both at BLM and at Claranet has enabled a smooth integration between the two environments and the scaling required.

The result

By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet on VMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

“Previously we would need to spend time monitoring and maintaining our IT environment, but now, we can respond much more quickly to business demands from our lawyers, meaning we’re providing a better service to BLM’s clients. And when we do need more infrastructure, we can simply request additional memory and storage from Claranet, or spin up new VMware hosts in accordance with business demand, rather than manually installing more servers in our limited on-premise locations.

BLM has also been able to create a formal Disaster Recovery strategy, protecting the workloads and applications in an automated way to ensure a seamless recovery using VMware’s SRM component. “With Claranet’s help we have developed a hybrid solution between our on-premises site and Claranet’s data centres. Adding some legacy hardware and public cloud platforms to our network means our core business applications are now virtually risk-free of outages and centrally managed. This cutting edge capability is delivered from new applications that we can implement quickly and confidently on the platform.”

About BLM

BLM is a leading risk and insurance law firm with head offices in Manchester and London, UK. The firm has a workforce of over 1,600 people, spread over nine offices in the UK and Ireland.

A fast growing law firm, BLM has experienced continual growth over the past 15 years, tripling its workforce as well as nearly doubling the number of offices across the UK. This rapid growth and physical expansion led to an increasingly complex IT infrastructure – and in turn a higher OPEX – needed to run the firm’s key business applications, products and services, as well as the day-to-day office operations of BLM’s lawyers.

Download full case study

Managed Services Providers to play critical role in harnessing the power of hyper-scale public cloud

MSPs key to making Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud services accessible to mid-market.

Adoption of hyper-scale public cloud platforms is increasing across the UK market but the potentially huge business benefits are being missed because of a lack of understanding of the complex tools available for automating, migrating and managing public cloud services.

The transformational benefits of public cloud have been widely documented and it is increasingly seen as an acceptable platform for businesses to use. However, the complexities and extensive toolsets of the Big Three (AWS, Microsoft and Google) hyper-scale public cloud platforms are such that many businesses lack the expertise required to properly harness them.. Managed Services Providers like Claranet are ideally placed to bridge that gap, providing both the expertise and knowledge to get the most from any cloud deployment.

Neil Thomas, Product and Marketing Director, Claranet UK, explained:

Public cloud is for good reason a huge growth market. With the expertise, innovation and scale that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are throwing at the development of cloud services, businesses stand to achieve significant benefits. However, it is important to understand that public cloud is not just an alternative infrastructure but a completely different tool with many additional services. If end users do not harness these services, then it would be a waste to make a move to the Big Three. Service providers like Claranet have developed their public cloud experience and work closely alongside the main providers to stay up-to-date with the new tools and services, which are being launched nearly every week.”

Businesses need to focus on guiding the development of applications and processes that will differentiate their organisations, ideally by taking a DevOps approach. By using automation tools to deploy and manage infrastructure, deploy code onto that infrastructure, and then to maintain the code base and any changes, IT leaders will be far more effective at supporting the bottom line of their organisations.

Neil continues:

With our customers, we have noticed a close link between those that use a public cloud deployment to best effect and who also deploy an effective DevOps way of working. The potential for automation that comes with the Big Three in terms of infrastructure and code deployment is ideal, and I would say essential, if a true DevOps approach is going to be successful. An experienced partner allows businesses to focus on their applications while the provider uses their skills in the platform, and the required associated tooling, to unlock the transformational benefits public cloud can bring.”

Claranet secures position on The Sunday Times Top Track 250

Record growth and continued expansion earns MSP a place among Britain’s fastest-growing private companies

Managed services provider (MSP) Claranet has achieved the rank of 120 in The Sunday Times Top Track 250 2016, having successfully increased its annualised revenues from £133m a year ago to over £200m today. Published on Sunday (2 October 2016), the league table ranks Britain’s private mid-market growth companies with the biggest sales.

One of only a handful of IT-focused companies in the league table, this is the third time Claranet has appeared in The Sunday Times’ FastTrack series, earning the 118th place in last year’s International Track and 56th position in The Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100 2016.

Established in the UK in 1996, Claranet has grown both organically and via acquisition to become a leading pan-European MSP, delivering a broad range of IT hosting, network and communications services to more than 5,700 businesses across Europe. This year the company’s annualised revenues rose by 49 per cent, driven by a spate of new contract wins and a number of strategic European acquisitions, including Bashton, Diademys and Ardenta.

Claranet has maintained its financial independence since it was founded, enabling it to pursue international expansion opportunities and to evolve its service offering in the face of changing market opportunities. Claranet is currently pursuing the next stage in its evolution, enhancing its service capabilities to enable its customers to take advantage of the transformational benefits of new technologies like public cloud services.

Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of Claranet, commented:

Achieving a place alongside some of Britain’s fastest-growing private businesses is very pleasing, not least because Claranet celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. The IT industry has never been more important to UK businesses, but equally it has never been a more competitive field to be in. Despite that, we have remained consistent in our growth throughout our two decades in business and this shows no signs of stopping; something that owes much to our constant evolution as an organisation.”

Nasser concluded:

Claranet’s heritage as a network provider means we have long possessed a deep understanding of IP-based technologies, which has allowed us to build out a comprehensive portfolio of hosting and application management services. We continue to evolve our service offering to reflect the changing market, both through the acquisition of companies with niche specialisms, and through our commitment to up-skilling our workforce. Our company strategy is based on trust. By focusing on building trusted relationships, many of which span over a decade, we have been able to help our customers grow and succeed in the long-term.”

Businesses turning to IT services providers as skills shortages continue to deepen

36 per cent of third party IT deployments driven by a shortage of in-house skills, finds Claranet

Research from Claranet has found that a shortage of in-house skills and internal IT resources are two of the most popular reasons businesses give for using IT services providers (ITSPs). For Claranet, the results confirm that ITSPs are playing a key role in plugging the technology skills gap, though the company has warned that businesses will need to select their partners carefully to achieve the desired results.

Vanson Bourne surveyed 900 IT leaders and decision makers across the six countries in which Claranet operates – the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Benelux. The research found that 36 per cent of European IT leaders choose to use Service Providers to access skills that are not available in-house. Over a third (36 per cent) also said that a shortage of in-house resources – likely linked to the shortage of in-house skills – was a factor in engaging third-party ITSPs.

The digital skills gap has become a cause for increasing concern amongst IT decision-makers over the last few years. In a recent survey, Harvey Nash talked to 3,352 CIOs and technology leaders across 82 countries, and found that 65 per cent of these were suffering from a technology skills shortage – the highest proportion since the recession, almost a decade ago. This figure is six per cent higher than in 2015, further revealing a deepening of the digital skills gap.

The quickening pace of technology makes it difficult to cultivate the in-house expertise needed to get ahead of the game. Claranet is seeing this play out with public cloud; while acceptance of public cloud is at an all-time high, businesses often lack the skills required to manage it, making the role of IT services providers critical.

Andy Wilton, CIO at Claranet, comments:

The deficit in IT skills means that businesses must be more selective about the types of skills they employ in-house and those that they choose to outsource. Organisations are competing for a small pool of IT talent, which requires making tough decisions about which exact skillsets are required within the organisation. Public cloud is particularly specialised and it can be hard to find an in-house generalist who possesses the advanced skillsets to deliver the required capabilities with confidence. But there’s a strong case to suggest that internal IT teams shouldn’t be managing servers or any sort of infrastructure at all, and instead they should plough their energies into app development. Those businesses that are winning in their markets are those that have amazing applications, so that’s where the focus needs to be.”

“The future of any European organisation that wants to insulate itself from the growing skills shortage and compete at the forefront of digital transformation lies in the ability to work with an IT services provider who can provide the pivotal IT skills needed. By doing so, companies will be able to access individuals with specialised skills on-demand and at a cheaper price.”

“However, it’s essential for organisations to find the right fit when it comes to their outsourcing arrangement. To an unprecedented degree, this choice and relationship will become critical to the healthy posture of any business. Ultimately, you need experts to help you architect the best possible solution for your applications. This will add more value to the business and mitigate technological stumbling blocks,” Wilton concluded.