Evaluation based on completeness of vision and ability to execute

Claranet has been positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe, for the fourth year running. Claranet believes that its placement in the Quadrant, which includes managed services on public cloud for the first time, re-affirms its market-leading position in the European hosting industry.

Gartner has revised the criteria for its IaaS and hosting Magic Quadrants this year to take into account the evolving market. While there is still a focus on locally-hosted services in Europe, public cloud services are gaining in popularity throughout Europe; a change that has been reflected in the name and evaluation criteria for Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting.

Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet, commented:

We see hybrid IT as a key differentiator for us and have, over the past two years, invested heavily in our public cloud capabilities to ensure that we can offer a complete range of hosted services. Applications and data are what matters to organisations, and at Claranet we believe that availability, security and performance are the essential elements in ensuring effective application delivery. These requirements vary from application to application, and getting the right infrastructure services in place for each application environment is key.

Public cloud services are now a key part of the solution to the optimum delivery of applications and data, but they’re not the answer for everything. A service provider who can help manage applications across multiple platforms, such as its own infrastructure, and the customer’s premises, underpinned by an integrated network, is essential. Claranet’s heritage in network provision is a key component of our cloud proposition. It enhances our value in the market and is something that sets us apart from many of our competitors. By offering network-integrated services, we can take advantage of the growing popularity of hybrid cloud and bypass the challenges associated with managing disparate IT environments for our customers.”

In its latest report, published by Tiny Haynes et al. on June 28, 2016, Gartner states:

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

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.

Nasser concluded:

IT departments are a key strategic asset to business, and need to focus on innovation and adding value; something that they will struggle to do without the right suppliers supporting them. Businesses who have their application and infrastructure services optimised are able to act faster and be more effective. When this happens, organisations become more agile, efficient and innovative.”

To find out more about this year’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe, 2016, and to read a full version of the report, along with a foreword by our CEO and founder, Charles Nasser, please continue below:

Read the full Gartner report

A cybersecurity breach costs on average $3.5 million. Typically, it goes undetected for 209 days, and it takes 32 days to respond appropriately once it has been detected [1]. To make matters worse, there is a one million person shortfall in security experts, according to CISCO [2].

So whether or not your organization is prepared for a cyberattack could be the difference between success and failure. Here’s the outline of a plan:

Prepare

The most important part of a plan is the objective.

If you’ve ever attended an official Amazon Web Services event like the AWS Summit, where Amazon is presenting its latest updates and services to potential customers, you’ll have noticed a big area next to the lecture theatres: the partner zone.

Some people ask: why does AWS put such emphasis on their partners? Does AWS not have a business strategy like IBM or HP?

Claranet and Bashton (a Claranet Group Company) are the proud Platinum Sponsor of the AWS Summit London on 6-7 July.

Cloud computing is radically changing the way companies do IT and is accelerating innovation in companies of all sizes.

The summit is designed to equip new customers with knowledge about the agility and capacity for innovation that AWS can bring to their business. It consists of two days:

Enterprise Summit: 6th July, ExCeL, London

Universal recognition of benefits presented by DevOps approach, though implementation challenges remain

DevOps has been hailed as a way for organisations to achieve greater business agility, but research conducted by Claranet reveals that DevOps can have wider-reaching business benefits. However, these benefits will only be realised if DevOps adoptees can overcome their infrastructural, organisational and cultural challenges.

The research, which surveyed 900 IT decision-makers from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Benelux, found that while a growing minority (32 per cent, up from 26% last year) have implemented a DevOps approach, 100 per cent of those organisations have seen benefits of some sort. Looking at the benefits most likely to be achieved, six in ten (60 per cent) reported having better applications, 56 per cent have seen understanding between employees improve and 55 per cent have increased their profitability.

However, making a success of DevOps has, for the vast majority (92 per cent), not been without its challenges, with many encountering cultural, skills and technical issues. 40 per cent, for example, said that there was a lack of business understanding of how to leverage DevOps strategically, 36 per cent struggled with unstable infrastructure and a quarter (24 per cent) encountered cultural resistance internally.

Commenting on the findings, Claranet’s Product Director, Neil Thomas, said:

A growing number of businesses have turned to DevOps as a way of achieving competitive advantage and keeping pace with the quickening business tempo, but it’s clear that the benefits are far wider, driving a better quality output in addition to speed and agility. If you can get it right, DevOps can be hugely advantageous. It generally means more efficient working across the organisation, where technical teams can better understand the business needs, and improved software, which allows work to develop smoothly, with fewer hiccups and fewer bugs. With both operations and development teams working towards a shared goal you can do away with battles for budgets and create an environment in which creativity and innovation can thrive.

We are at a position in the software industry where cloud, or dynamic and changeable infrastructure, has given us the opportunity to change how we design, deliver and operate our software systems – which is where DevOps comes in. But businesses need to have the right infrastructure and management processes in place for it to work effectively.

While getting the right tools and processes in place is critical, culture can be a real stumbling block, primarily because operations and development teams traditionally approached things very differently. At a very simplistic level, developers look to change things while operations teams look to preserve them. They need to welcome the changes involved in this shift in approach, be ready to adapt to changing circumstances and be more flexible about job functions.”