Actively rooting out vulnerabilities is the most effective way of preventing attacks of this nature

Recent research by Kaspersky Lab has found that leaked exploits have rapidly become one of the most dangerous methods of compromising vulnerable systems, with more than five million attacks blocked by the company in the second quarter of 2017 alone. This highlights the vital importance of adequate and frequent penetration testing procedures in finding software flaws, and taking appropriate action before an attack can take place. This is according to internet security experts at Sec-1, a Claranet Group company.

Attackers use phishing emails or hijacked websites to spread malware loaded with an exploit. An exploit is a piece of software that takes advantage of a vulnerability in order to gain access or, in the case of RansomWare, encrypt the device. Recent attacks, such as WannaCry and NotPetya, have the ability to spread and hunt out machines without the latest patches/updates installed. Others, like the original CryptoLocker which first appeared in 2013, spread through spam messages and exploit kits that rely on manipulating user behaviour. Either way, these attacks can succeed so organisations need to redouble their efforts to patch vulnerabilities in their systems. This should go hand-in-hand with existing security efforts which focus on user behaviour.

Holly Williams, Senior Security Consultant at Sec-1 said:

Seeing malware authors bundle leaked exploits in order to improve propagation rates highlights the need for testing of the internal corporate network. This is something that is often overlooked in favour of purely testing the perimeter”

Zero-day attacks are a concern for IT teams, and for the wider business as a whole due to their very nature as an assault on an undisclosed vulnerability. This means that the most up-to-date systems can be compromised. Although real-world attacks utilising malware are still extremely rare and to date, the most effective attacks have exploited known vulnerabilities, an example being the Flash vulnerability, CVE-2015-7645. It’s true that this trend for leaked exploits to be added to malware shows that attackers are becoming more sophisticated in a bid to capitalise on insufficient attention to patching and good security hygiene. Now, more than ever, the justification for performing regular penetration testing is clear, find the unpatched vulnerabilities well before the hackers can get to them.”

Alongside this, it is crucial to note that many of the recent high-profile leaks such as EternalBlue, used in the malware WannaCry and NotPetya, actually had a patch already available. This malware also used previously known hacking methods. Again, comprehensive, frequent penetration testing can prevent this from becoming a problem.

Of recent malware, NotPetya in particular was talked about as having done something that is advanced for malware. However, the method of credential extraction used is already well-known to penetration testers and other security experts. As for both WannaCry and NotPetya, a patch was made available months before the attack actually hit. This points to many organisations needing to get a much better handle on the pre-existing vulnerabilities in their systems.”

To help make this happen, Williams feels that entrusting the responsibility for penetration testing to a third party can be hugely beneficial.

A third party organisation brings a fresh pair of eyes to the testing process, meaning they can often spot vulnerabilities (and an absence of available patches) more effectively than IT staff who have been close to the system for a long period of time. In short though, it all boils down to being better prepared: exploits can be hugely dangerous, so implementing the right testing procedures aimed at determining where current security practices are insufficient should be a key priority.”

Upskilling staff and outsourcing IT responsibilities should be key priorities for retailers looking to remain ahead of the game

New research commissioned by Claranet has discovered that skills shortages in the retail sector are making it difficult for IT departments to play their part in driving innovation and helping their business achieve competitive advantage. The results from the research highlight the need for retailers to address these deficiencies by upskilling their IT staff and outsourcing areas of their IT estates to be able to focus on their core objectives.

The research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne and surveyed 121 retailers from across Europe, found that while IT departments clearly recognise their central role in supporting wider business objectives and driving organisational change, skills shortages are limiting their potential. 36 per cent of respondents, for example, consider enabling business agility a key objective for the IT department and a further 30 per cent identified assisting revenue generation for the wider business as a top priority.

However, the research found that a significant proportion of retailers are being hamstrung by a lack of available skills within their organisations. 25 per cent stated that skills shortages were the biggest challenge facing the IT department, 30 per cent reported that skills shortages were a main barrier to wide-scale technology change within the business, and almost half (48 per cent) cited a general shortage of digital skills across the entire organisation.

Commenting on the findings, Michel Robert, CEO at Claranet UK, said:

The retail world is transforming dramatically because customers’ behaviour is radically changing, and to keep pace retailers need to rapidly adopt new ways of servicing their customers. The retailers that are winning in their markets today are the ones that are skilfully harnessing the power of new technologies to achieve competitive advantage. But while it’s encouraging that IT departments in the retail sector recognise their leading role supporting business change, it’s clear that they’re struggling to keep up.”

IT leaders in the sector face a broad range of challenges – from a lack of executive support to budget limitations – but it’s arguably skills shortages, both in the IT department and the wider business, that are the most crippling. Skills and staffing are essential if the IT department is to shed its cost centre image and drive the business forward. With demand for often-niche digital and technical skills increasing, CIOs in the retail sector will need to think carefully about which skills they need to foster internally and which they should look to access through third parties.”

Michel Robert believes that, to help tackle this problem, retailers should focus their efforts on upskilling their current IT workforce in the areas where they can add the most value.

In such a fast-paced industry, it makes absolute business sense for retailers to outsource everything they possibly can, so that their staff can focus 100% of their efforts on core business objectives. Nowhere is this truer than with IT infrastructure, and while reliable infrastructure is critical for every organisation, maintaining the skills in-house to achieve that adds absolutely no business value. By outsourcing infrastructure management to trusted third parties, retailers can spend less time keeping the lights on and more time cultivating the digital skills needed to improve the performance of their applications and drive innovation.”

The figures quoted in this release are from Claranet’s 2017/18 Market Research Report – Beyond Digital Transformation, which will be published later this month

84 per cent of financial services organisations believing that the financial services IT department should be more focused on customer experience

Whilst digital disruption and the accompanying surge of FinTech challengers have made customer experience a key battleground in the financial services industry, many financial services businesses are still struggling to differentiate based on customer experience. Despite IT’s critical importance in delivering this, according to research commissioned by managed services provider Claranet the department is not successfully assuming a decisive role in customer experience.

Surveying 138 IT and digital decision makers from financial services organisations across Europe, market research firm Vanson Bourne found that 84 per cent believe that the IT department should be more focused on customer experience. This is particularly concerning considering that 47 per cent of these respondents also said that they are stagnating as an organisation because they are not keeping pace with competitors’ digital solutions and/or offerings.

Jason Zimmer, a FinTech specialist at Claranet, expanded on the research:

Digital disruption has provided an opening for nimble FinTechs and other start-up challengers to outmanoeuvre incumbents. One area in which they’re often able to take advantage of digital technology is in customer experience, where many financial services businesses are not meeting the modern consumer’s digital-savviness and intolerance of inconvenience. Taking on the challenge of a more competitive marketplace by aligning with these needs requires financial services businesses to leverage their technical skills and resources.”

Despite this, our research indicates that a large majority of IT and digital decision makers in this sector feel that their department lacks the requisite focus on customer experience. In this context, it is hardly surprising that research shows that almost half of financial services organisations are languishing due to not keeping up with competitors’ digital initiatives. It’s hard for an organisation to execute effectively initiatives that provide for the modern customer’s digital needs when the technological infrastructure is not in place.”

When looking at the reasons for IT’s underwhelming involvement in customer experience, Zimmer assigns some of the blame to wider cultural issues within organisations:

Half of our financial services respondents said that the IT department is still seen as a cost centre, despite its pivotal role in value-creating and competitive innovations. This attitude is rooted in an old school perspective on what IT does – one that sees its importance confined to ‘keeping the lights on’ and maintenance. At a time when digital disruption is reshaping the market, this approach prevents businesses from getting the full weight of their IT department behind initiatives that require their technical nous.”

This perception is likely entrenched in the reality that many financial services IT departments still spend a lot of time on IT infrastructure and maintenance type tasks. This means they have less resources to dedicate to core business objectives, including being more competitive by meeting customer’s digital needs. Reliable infrastructure and maintaining basic IT functions is vital for organisational success, but there’s often no reason why this should not be outsourced to third-party specialists, allowing the IT department to refocus on what it does best – creating value for the company through the effective use of technology.”

The figures quoted in this release are from Claranet’s 2017/18 Market Research Report – Beyond Digital Transformation, which will be published later this month.

New certification adds further capabilities to MSP’s integrated service offering

Claranet has been officially named as a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP), in recognition of the company’s successful track record in assisting enterprises in adopting containerisation software. This latest certification underlines Claranet’s commitment to helping customers at every step of their IT evolution, as well as its passion for embracing rapidly growing technologies.

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications. With more and more IT teams now turning to containers to help them easily manage an array of applications across both cloud and on-premise systems, becoming a KCSP complements Claranet’s commitment to enabling organisations to embrace the cloud without being locked into long-term contracts with a single provider.

Ian Furness, Hosting Services Director at Claranet UK, said:

Becoming a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider is a hugely positive endorsement of the work we have been doing in the container’s space. Containerisation has the power to dramatically increase agility and efficiency in the IT department, by eliminating many of the compatibility problems that businesses encounter when trying to manage applications and data across a mixture of cloud, on-premise and legacy infrastructure.”

Core to the Claranet philosophy is ensuring our proficiency covers the entirety of the IT spectrum. This is encapsulated by us holding the highest level of certification for delivering managed services on all of the ‘big three’ public cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The Kubernetes certification marks our latest achievement in this area: making sure that businesses of all sizes have rapid access to IT expertise and services that they may not have in-house. At the same time, being a KCSP further underlines our focus on making cloud adoption as flexible as possible for organisations, by eliminating vendor lock-in and opening businesses to a wider range of cloud options.”

Furness also believes that attaining KCSP status illustrates the leading role that MSPs can play in taking the burden of containerisation away from businesses, and freeing up IT staff and key decision-makers to focus on innovation and wider business objectives.

Leveraging containers has huge potential to relieve IT teams of the complex challenges of managing rapidly evolving infrastructure. However, implementing containerisation in the right way takes time and effort, which a stretched IT team may not be able to provide internally. By outsourcing this responsibility to trusted third parties, IT staff can free up their time for more innovative projects and focus on driving the business forward.”

Almost half of financial services firms have implemented DevOps, underlining its value for industries facing disruption

Financial services organisations are adopting DevOps approaches faster and with more decisiveness than organisations in other industries, in what appears to be a bid to adapt to disruptive conditions in the financial services industry. This is according to research by managed services provider Claranet.

Vanson Bourne surveyed 900 end user IT leaders from mid-market businesses in six European markets – Germany, Benelux, France, Spain, Portugal, and the UK. Focusing on DevOps adoption, it found that 45 per cent of financial services organisations have already developed a DevOps approach. By comparison, only 32 per cent of organisations in a variety of other industries, including retail, software, and digital and media, have done so.

Michel Robert, MD of Claranet UK, commented on the financial services industry’s inclination towards DevOps:

FinTech startups are using technology to shake things up in the financial services industry with a customer-centric, agile approach. For the big incumbents in the industry the adoption of DevOps suggests a change in mindset and is likely being used as a way of taking on these startups and learning from their innovations.

By encouraging faster software and application development, DevOps enables financial services organisations to streamline the way they deal with the vast quantities of data they process internally. Vitally, it also enables them to rapidly develop new products and services, allowing them to compete with the FinTech disruptors.

Despite being encumbered by legacy IT approaches and siloed data, as well as strict regulatory and security necessities, the financial services industry is ahead in the DevOps game. This demonstrates that DevOps is not only capable of speeding up development time, but is also an approach that prioritises application and data security, a factor that is closely monitored in financial services.”

Financial services organisation who have not yet adopted DevOps are also much more likely to have plans in place to eventually develop capacities. Whilst almost 25 per cent of the overall sample stated that they are either not planning to implement DevOps or haven’t yet made a decision, only 12 per cent of financial services organisations are in the same position.

According to Michel, financial services organisations’ embrace of DevOps demonstrates how digital disruption necessitates new ways of working:

Startups use the internet to remove friction, overturn legacy distribution methods, and create new business models. It’s vital that incumbents are ready to compete – and this means being able to bring their full IT capabilities to bear when streamlining their operations and launching new products and services. DevOps enables them to do so, creating a culture where developing, testing, and making new applications and software rapidly and securely is the norm.

Much of the financial services market is vulnerable to disruption and the dominant players have organisational, cultural, and regulatory impediments to rapid change. This complexity is an impetus to move faster, and taking a DevOps approach can unlock new opportunities for growth. Other industries facing disruption, from retail to media, would do well to look to DevOps as a means of getting ahead of change.”

Customer experience is becoming a key competitive differentiator as the retail market polarises between those who maximise the time customers spend in contact with retailers, and those who seek to reduce the buying process to a minimum

The focus on customer experience is polarising the retail market into either delighting consumers with immersive buying experiences or making buying as fast and practical as possible. This is according to Managed Service Provider Claranet, who says that the effective use of technology will be a prerequisite to success in creating these kind of customer experiences.

Research from Planet Retail and Digimarc found that 63 per cent of retailers consider improving in-store and online customer service as the one action that would have the greatest impact on their organisation’s profitability. Michel Robert, UK Managing Director at Claranet spoke about the significance of this statistic, and the resulting approaches retailers are using to improve customer experience:

With digital disruption fundamentally altering the ways retailers serve customers’ buying needs, it is unsurprising that so many now put customer experience at the core of their competitiveness. We’re increasingly seeing the market’s approach to customer experience polarising between two distinct paths. On the one hand, you have those who seek to make the buying experience as practical and frictionless as possible, typified by Amazon. On the other, there are those retailers who want to involve customers in a brand experience, who eschew getting customers from consideration to purchase as quickly as possible in favour of delighting them and involving them in the buying experience.”

Both dynamics have implications for retail technology leaders, as Michel Robert underlines:

Choosing to immerse consumers in a shopping experience has different technological implications from finding the most seamless way to get a potential buyer from consideration to purchase. For example, The Burberry Beauty Box in Covent Garden aims to engage visitors in an immersive brand experience, and deploys augmented reality (AR) technology to allow customers to virtually sample different nail shades. By contrast, Pets At Home deployed in-store iPads in order to make the administrative process of purchasing a pet easier and to reduce customer wait time by enabling more in-store purchases and registrations to be done away from the till.

The key difference is that the former maximises the time the consumer spends in contact with the retailer for every purchase, whilst the latter seeks to minimise this time. The technological priorities are therefore different – whilst the former seeks to deliver rich content to customers, whether that’s an instore AR experience or an intricate online brochure, the latter removes as many steps from the buying process as possible.”

Despite this difference in tactical priorities, these approaches both rely on the implementation of an effective IT infrastructure, according to Michel Robert:

Both the convenience and the more involved experience approach put a premium on network connectivity and other elements of IT infrastructure that enable the smooth functioning of anything from AR to ecommerce platforms. The Pets At Home example is illuminating here – the company had to switch network providers and roll out a brand new network to support the iPad system.”

Michel Robert concludes that retail IT leaders should shift their approach to their day-to-day role to focus on creating a delightful or practical customer experience:

To enable either approach to work, IT leaders need to be able to remove themselves from the IT bubble and focus on the basic needs of customers. Taking the customer’s perspective can unlock new areas where IT can make the customer experience either more immersive or more convenient.”

Leading pan-European managed services provider Claranet will be the sole platinum sponsor at this year’s AWS Summit London, taking place on 28 June at the ExCeL. Platinum sponsorship is the highest level of sponsorship available, and Claranet’s sponsorship represents the next step in a business relationship that has enabled the company to help customers across Europe take advantage of the full breadth and sophistication of the AWS platform.

The AWS Summit designed to help attendees learn how to maximise the benefits of cloud computing to their organisations and to securely accelerate cloud adoption. Claranet has developed close links with AWS over the last few years, driven by the increasing popularity of the platform as a way to unlock a wide variety of business benefits. The company achieved the highest level of AWS partnership in late 2016 – Premier Consulting Partner status – indicating that it has both the technical expertise and the experience AWS deployments required to meet the huge appetite for the AWS platform in the market.

Sam Bashton, Head of Claranet’s Cloud Practice, commented:

AWS has proved to be the bedrock of business agility and digital transformation for many of our customers, and it forms a critical part of our offering. We have invested a lot into the relationship in recent years, and this is reflected in our AWS Premier Consulting Partner status, and now in our platinum sponsorship of this year’s Summit. Developing a European-wide cloud practice has enabled us to bring the benefits of AWS to a wide variety of businesses, moulding the diverse capabilities of the platform to the specific requirements of our customers.”

Claranet has made several strategic acquisitions over the last few years to support its cloud practice and its capacity to work with AWS. Most recently, at the end of May it purchased French cloud and DevOps specialist Oxalide to reinforce its ability to deploy and manage critical web applications in the cloud.

Sam concluded by underlining the significance of cloud computing in modern ICT, and the role of AWS in this:

Looking at how the industry has been inundated with talk of cloud’s value for the last few years, one might be mistaken for thinking that there is a lot of hype. However, when you look to everything from how consumers listen to music on their daily commute to how employees access their documents whilst working from home, it’s clear that cloud computing has had a transformative impact. AWS has been at the heart of this transformation for over a decade, allowing a variety of businesses to access the many benefits of the cloud, and we’re proud to support them in this endeavour.”

Leader position retained for the fifth year running

Claranet believes that its placement in the Quadrant underlines once again the market-leading position it holds in the European hosting industry. This latest recognition also follows Claranet’s placement in Gartner’s inaugural Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide, in March this year.

Commenting on the company’s placement in the Quadrant, Charles Nasser, Claranet’s CEO, said:

“We are proud to be recognised by Gartner in this year’s Magic Quadrant, which we believe reflects the work we do as an organisation to continually improve our hosting expertise and capabilities.

“This year has seen us continue our focus on offering best-in-class private and public cloud managed services and we have invested heavily to ensure that we can meet the often-complex needs of our customers and their mission critical applications. Fundamentally, it is applications and data that keep an organisation’s wheels turning so having the infrastructure, tooling and expertise to achieve the right balance of security, availability, performance and cost is essential.

“We have cultivated strong relationships with the leading hyper-scale public cloud providers over the last few years. This, combined with our own infrastructure, application expertise and heritage in network provision, means that we are able to deliver leading-edge hybrid cloud solutions that help our customers do amazing things. We believe this gives us the edge in an incredibly competitive and fast-paced environment,”

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.

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

“Leaders 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. They also have a presence in multiple European locations to offer solutions around data sovereignty requirements.”

Looking at the challenges facing IT teams, Charles Nasser added:

“With IT departments facing significant pressure to innovate and add value to their organisations – without compromising security – they need suppliers supporting them who can meet their demands and align effectively with their strategic objectives. To achieve greater agility and efficiency, and therefore free up time to be spent on innovation, it is crucial for businesses to have their application and infrastructure services in order and in the right place.”

To find out more about this year’s Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe, 2017, and to read a full version of the report, please continue below:

Read the full Gartner report

The e-gaming industry’s most prestigious awards event recognises Ardenta as IT Supplier of the Year

Ardenta, part of the Claranet Group, is delighted to announce that it has been named the winner of EGR B2B’s coveted IT Supplier of the Year award for the fourth time in five years. The ceremony, held at London’s exclusive Hurlingham Club, celebrates excellence and innovation in the online gaming industry.

Established seven years ago by the widely-respected E-Gaming Review, which provides news, expert analysis and comment on industry issues, the EGR B2B Awards recognise the very best suppliers operating across all the major online gaming disciplines, including betting and gaming software, networks, mobile, payments, recruitment, IT and infrastructure. A host of the industry’s leading players including OpenBet, Betradar and Playtech featured on this year’s shortlist, judged by an independent panel of external experts.

Neil Truby, MD and co-founder of Ardenta, commented:

We are immensely proud to have been named IT Supplier of the Year at the EGR B2B Awards. Winning this award for the fourth time in five years demonstrates clearly that we are providing our customers with the very best IT solutions for their business, through consistent innovation and a focus on delivering agility, reliability and flexibility. This award comes at a very exciting time for Ardenta as we continue to develop our service and offer our customers with unparalleled IT solutions.”

Brad Allen, EGR news editor, added:

Many congratulations to Ardenta for winning IT Supplier of the year at last night’s EGR B2B Awards.”

Judges noted Ardenta’s flexible approach to the e-gaming industry and its list of tier one clients, as well as the company’s evolution into a modern-day IT provider, led by the development of its scalable cloud-based solutions.”

Claranet, the managed services IT provider, has been awarded 170th place in The Sunday Times International Track 200 for 2017. Published on 11 June 2017, the table ranks the 200 privately owned companies in Britain with the fastest-growing international sales. This latest accolade is the second time Claranet has appeared in The Sunday Times’ Fast Track series this year, having been listed 93rd in the Profit Track 100 ranking.

Over the course of the past year, Claranet has continued to expand rapidly as a leader in Public Cloud and Security, bringing its technology solutions to an ever-increasing range of markets in the UK and beyond. Acquisitions and organic growth have both been key priorities for Claranet in the past 12 months, and have seen the company reach new heights in terms of its overall size and ability to serve new and existing customers.

In December, Claranet acquired Brazilian cloud services provider CredibiliT, marking its first foray into South America, and confirming its status as one of the most ambitious and dynamic players in the global private, public and hybrid cloud hosting environments. This was followed in February by the establishment of Claranet Italy, designed to support the growing demand for managed public cloud solutions in the Italian market.

Maintaining this momentum, Claranet announced in late May that it had acquired three additional companies: Sec-1 in the UK, Oxalide in France and ITEN Solutions in Portugal. These acquisitions represent a 40% growth in revenues and a significant step forward for Claranet, confirming the company’s market-leading position in France and Portugal and boosting its Group-wide security and application management capabilities for the benefit of its customers.

To support this activity, Claranet has also completed a refinancing exercise, providing the company with long-term funding and an incremental acquisition facility of £80 million. The organisation has also taken on new minority shareholders, including investment management firm Tikehau Capital, with the refinancing provided by ABN AMRO, Bank of Ireland, HSBC, Natixis, Partners Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of the Claranet Group, said:

The acquisitions we have made over the last year, along with our continued organic growth and refinancing exercise, has meant we have been able to establish a significant operation in the managed IT services market both at the European level and beyond. In many ways, this places us ahead of our competitors in the markets in which we operate and securing a place in the International Track 200 is a reflection of the success of this work.”

We’re looking forward to consolidating our position further over the coming months, making sure we can continue to provide the widest variety and highest quality of services to help our customers do amazing things.”