Data Chain: Cloud closure highlights data sovereignty risk, says Claranet

Posted on by Jay Fearn

The recent high-profile closure of a US cloud vendor’s UK service is a reminder for end users to clarify what contractual rights their providers sew into their service agreements. According to Product Director Martin Saunders, while Doyenz’ actions have been contractually sound, the case casts light on the important questions end users need to be asking of their Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), if they are to protect themselves from losing critical business information, or unknowingly having their data transported to, and stored in, undesirable jurisdictions.

US-based disaster recovery vendor Doyenz launched its rCloud service in the UK in November 2011, based in a data centre in London. In early August, the vendor announced that it would no longer be supporting the rCloud backup and recovery service, giving notice that it would stop the service, offering to move customers’ data to a US facility.

Commenting on the case, Saunders said that cloud users should be looking for contractual clarity and reassurance from cloud providers to understand how the service is delivered, where data is stored and ultimately who is accountable and liable for service delivery.

“Cloud is a relatively new delivery model, so instances when cloud providers have stopped trading have so far been rare occurrences. However, end-users must take precautionary steps to ensure business continuity for any situation as they must assume ultimate responsibility for their data,” said Saunders. “It’s important to remember that CSPs, like all external suppliers, will not act as insurers of a customer’s business, so it’s important that the risks are adequately accounted for.

“Market messaging today tends to over-play vendor specific messages about platforms or, too often, paints cloud as a panacea. Whilst neither approach is necessarily incorrect, they downplay or risk ignoring the practical considerations facing organisations adopting cloud services and may be damaging the public perception of cloud.”

Although customers have been given the choice of transferring their data to Doyenz’ US-based data centres, Saunders expressed doubt over the viability of this option, owing to users’ legitimate concerns about data location.

“Claranet’s own research into end user concerns about cloud services found that data sovereignty is one of the key concerns for organisations when moving to the cloud,” continued Saunders. “Moving data to a cloud service can often mean it is hosted in another country and therefore subject to different data laws. If users have no visibility or control over where their data resides, they are risking the security of their data, their customers and even their own business’ survival.”

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"Trough of Disillusionment" over cloud not new…

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Managed Services Provider says concerns over cloud predates Gartner’s latest ‘Hype Cycle’ report

Public disillusionment with the cloud, as expressed by Gartner’s analysts in the firm’s latest Hype Cycle Special Report, is not new and dates back at least a year, Claranet says.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle gauges public expectations about emerging and maturing technologies, and charts their progress towards acceptance. In its latest report, Gartner placed cloud computing on the downward slope named the “trough of disillusionment” that traditionally follows the initial hype and inflated expectations that new technologies invariably generate.

Claranet’s Managing Director, Michel Robert, said that public disillusionment with cloud is at least a year old, referencing independent research that his own company undertook in 2011 about users’ concerns over cloud computing.

“The Gartner report is correct to place cloud in its picturesquely-named ‘trough of disillusionment’, but it’s hardly news that the initial burst of expectation in cloud has subsided,” said Robert. “Before we launched our Virtual Data Centre service in 2011, we conducted extensive research into users’ concerns about the cloud. The poll of 300 senior IT decision makers found that there were still substantial worries about data sovereignty, security and reliability issues with the cloud computing.

“The first rush of enthusiasm for cloud seemed to peak early in 2011. By that stage, roughly half of the market was using some form of cloud service; however there remained a stubborn proportion of organisations that remained unconvinced of the benefits, or wary of the risks. Our research found that a third of respondents were delaying procurement of cloud services for an average of twelve months, and the list of concerns about the cloud showed why,” he continued.

“People were getting disillusioned with the ubiquity of the word ‘cloud’, which tends to obscure the nature of the actual services. On top of that, the cloud industry as a whole was failing to reassure potential customers over some fundamental questions: where is my data held; how is it protected; how can you guarantee maximum uptime; and who is responsible for overall availability?”

Robert said the industry as a whole was improving, but that it needed more hard work to drag the name of cloud out of the ‘trough of disillusionment’ and into the ‘slope of enlightenment’.

“Increasingly, service providers are realising that it is not enough to tag the name ‘cloud’ onto their services. Our industry needs to answer users’ legitimate concerns directly: for example, we need to be completely transparent over where and how their data is stored, and ideally offer in-country data centres to allay data sovereignty concerns. Providers also need to start taking responsibility for overall service availability, including network uptime. For those providers that lack their own network, this will require closer partnerships with network operators so that they can provide a completely integrated service, from desk to data centre.

“Gartner’s report will, we hope, spur the industry on to improve their services and, just as importantly, to communicate them to the public. With this report, Gartner may well have marked the ‘end of the beginning’ for the cloud,” said Robert. “In fact, we hope that it marks the beginning of the end for the very phrase ‘cloud computing’, a vague term that fails to differentiate between different types of service, while preventing providers from communicating on actual business benefits,” he concluded.

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MicroScope: Gartner calls time on peak of cloud hype

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Extract taken from MicroScope

Cloud computing has passed the peak of inflated expectations and is heading for the trough of disillusionment with BYOD a little bit behind still at the top of the hype cycle.

The phrases and the positioning come from Gartner which has issued its latest hype cycle for emerging technologies with the peak and trough then followed by the slope of enlightenment and then the plateau of productivity.

Right at the bottom of the trough is hosted virtual desktops and cloud computing has some way to go until it has passed out of the bottom dip on the hype cycle.

But the channel is already aware of the changing reaction to the cloud on the ground with some no longer using that phrase when pitching hosting services.

“The Gartner report is correct to place cloud in its picturesquely-named ‘trough of disillusionment’, but it’s hardly news that the initial burst of expectation in cloud has subsided,” said Michel Robert, managing director of Claranet.

“Before we launched our Virtual Data Centre service in 2011, we conducted extensive research into users’ concerns about the cloud. The poll of 300 senior IT decision makers found that there were still substantial worries about data sovereignty, security and reliability issues with the cloud computing,” he added.

He said the hope of Gartner placing cloud in the rough of disillusionment was that it would spur some activity by the industry: “to improve their services and, just as importantly, to communicate them to the public”.

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Cloud Pro: Cloud accreditation – 7 questions to ask providers

Posted on by Jay Fearn

With cloud skills in short supply, opinion is divided about the merit of qualifications and accreditations when choosing a supplier. Cloud Pro puts 7 questions to different providers in the cloud industry market on this topic. Martin Saunders, Product Director at Claranet UK comments on how to evaluate accreditation bodies.

Extract taken from Cloud Pro

Question 7: Evaluate the accreditation bodies

…On this question, we have to go back to basics says Martin Saunders, product director at Claranet.

“What does ‘accreditation’ mean? On the one hand, you have organisations that put themselves through the stress of ensuring that their infrastructure, technology and processes are up to scratch and submitting documents and evidence to standards bodies,” he says. All so that they can get their ISO:27001, PCI-DSS or Public Sector Network (PSN) accreditation.

On the other end of the scale are the self accredited. “There’s a whole host of groups who have spotted a gap in the market to provide their own cloud accreditations, which give a fig leaf of respectability,” says Saunders.

Look at the basis for the accreditation – are they based on existing, well-known standards, or are they woolly in their wording or their origins? That should be the litmus test of any accreditation that is dangled before end users.”

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The Practical Cloud: Third Financial uses Cloud delivery to gain new wealth management markets

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Extract taken from The Practical Cloud

Background

The world of wealth management is changing fast. Like other spheres of business, it has had to come rapidly to terms with the challenges of today’s fast-changing legal and technological environment.

A new breed of young, wealthy and technology-literate individuals now expect to do business on their mobile devices – including managing their money. Meanwhile, a flood of new compliance regulations governing the use and transmittal of sensitive financial information means that wealth managers have had to change with the times.

Third Financial is at the forefront of this evolution. The firm has created a suite of software, known as tercero, which enables wealth managers and private banks to deliver real-time investment management, reporting, wealth CRM, compliance oversight and mobile capabilities to their clients, delivered to the internet-connected device of their choice.

The Problem

Driven by its comprehensive tercero wealth management platform, Third Financial has enjoyed spectacular growth in the four years since its founding. As it grew, however, the company found itself facing the same problem: potential clients loved the software and the capabilities it offered, but many did not have the technical ability, infrastructure or willingness to host it themselves.

“Our customers are experts in money management but tend not to be particularly proficient in IT,” explained Third Financial’s CEO Stewart Foster. “If they wanted to deploy the tercero suite they used to have two choices: either host it on their own premises, or put it into a dedicated hosted environment in a datacentre. For many of our customers, both options added another layer of expense and management. Few of our clients want to spend time and money buying licences or hardware, and then managing the resulting IT issues. All of this distracts them from their core business of managing their clients’ money.

“The whole point of the tercero platform is that it provides everything our clients need – reporting, compliance, customer relations and portfolio management – in a single package. The additional investment in hosting that many of our prospective clients required, typically costing tens of thousands of pounds, threatened to become an obstacle to our expansion,” said Foster.

Third Financial decided to find a technology partner that could provide a secure and resilient hosting service for its application suite, and that could enable it to deliver tercero as a Cloud service, rather than one that the clients hosted and managed themselves. After putting out a tender, the Third Financial chose Claranet to deliver the hosting platform that would best support its software, and its future success.

The Solution

Claranet proposed that Third Financial migrate the tercero suite onto its Managed Application Hosting platform. The service enables organisations to place its software into one of Claranet’s enterprise-grade, Tier 3 datacentres, where it is monitored and managed by Claranet’s staff to optimise application performance and availability.

Third Financial migrated its software to Claranet’s Managed Application Hosting service, placing it in a secure, fully-virtualised environment based on best-of-breed hosting infrastructure. The service went live in December 2011. Claranet takes responsibility for every aspect of the live application environment, including the security of the data held within the tercero applications – a crucial consideration for any financial services firm or end user.

“Compliance is the big issue that wealth managers worry about, especially when they entrust their data to a third party,” said Foster. “We need to be able to assure our clients that their sensitive data would be safe with Claranet, for two important reasons: so that they can reassure their own customers, and also to satisfy compliance regulations from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

“A key criterion for choosing Claranet was that they are an ISO:27001- and ISO:9000-accredited provider. What is more, our service is based solely in UK datacentres, which protects us from the headache of data sovereignty issues.

“What this means for our customers is that they have the assurance that their data is looked after by an organisation that takes security and quality assurance seriously. In fact, the data is far more secure than it would be if our clients hosted it on their premises. The whole architecture of Claranet’s Managed Application Hosting is designed around security; this makes the service a much easier sell to our clients, and also reassures the regulator,” said Foster.

The Benefits

“The partnership with Claranet underpins a key element of business strategy,” said Foster. “The old sticking point that we used to have with prospective clients – their lack of infrastructure to support tercero – has been removed. Without that obstacle, the software once again sells itself.

“In fact, Claranet enables us to provide a much more stable, reliable and high-performance platform for tercero. It has never run faster or better than it has on Claranet’s platform, which is much more robust than anything our clients could realistically achieve on their own infrastructure.”

Third Financial’s customers no longer have to worry about buying expensive third party software licences or hardware, nor do they have the problem of managing and optimising the software, as this is all performed by Claranet. The software can now be provided through a simple log-in to a secure environment that has been pre-loaded with the tercero suite.

The service also features a pre-production environment where Third Financial can deploy and test upgrades to tercero before they are rolled out to customers.

“We projected that half of our new business revenue would come from the hosted platform within a year of implementation, and the reaction from our prospective customers leads us to believe that we will more than match that prediction,” said Foster.

“The new generation of wealthy people expect state-of-the-art tools on their mobile devices. With Claranet’s platform, we can ensure that wherever the end user is, as long as they can access the internet, they will be able to access their wealth management tools,” he concluded.

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Euro Investor: Claranet's hosting platform brings wealth of benefits to Third Financial

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Article taken from Euro Investor

The world of wealth management is changing fast. Like other spheres of business, it has had to come rapidly to terms with the challenges of today’s fast-changing legal and technological environment. A new breed of young, wealthy and technology-literate individuals now expect to do business on their mobile devices – including managing their money. Meanwhile, a flood of new compliance regulations governing the use and transmittal of sensitive financial information means that wealth managers have had to change with the times.

Third Financial is at the forefront of this evolution. The firm has created a suite of software, known as tercero, which enables wealth managers and private banks to deliver real-time investment management, reporting, wealth CRM, compliance oversight and mobile capabilities to their clients, delivered to the internet-connected device of their choice.

Driven by its comprehensive tercero wealth management platform, Third Financial has enjoyed spectacular growth in the four years since its founding. As it grew, however, the company found itself facing the same problem: potential clients loved the software and the capabilities it offered, but many did not have the technical ability, infrastructure or willingness to host it themselves.

“Our customers are experts in money management but tend not to be particularly proficient in IT,” explained Third Financial’s CEO Stewart Foster. “If they wanted to deploy the tercero suite they used to have two choices: either host it on their own premises, or put it into a dedicated hosted environment in a data centre. For many of our customers, both options added another layer of expense and management. Few of our clients want to spend time and money buying licences or hardware, and then managing the resulting IT issues. All of this distracts them from their core business of managing their clients’ money.

“The whole point of the tercero platform is that it provides everything our clients need – reporting, compliance, customer relations and portfolio management – in a single package. The additional investment in hosting that many of our prospective clients required, typically costing tens of thousands of pounds, threatened to become an obstacle to our expansion,” said Foster.

Third Financial decided to find a technology partner that could provide a secure and resilient hosting service for its application suite, and that could enable it to deliver tercero as a Cloud service, rather than one that the clients hosted and managed themselves. After putting out a tender, the Third Financial chose Claranet to deliver the hosting platform that would best support its software, and its future success.

Claranet proposed that Third Financial migrate the tercero suite onto its Managed Application Hosting platform. The service enables organisations to place its software into one of Claranet’s enterprise-grade, Tier 3 data centres, where it is monitored and managed by Claranet’s expert staff to optimise application performance and availability.

Third Financial migrated its software to Claranet’s Managed Application Hosting service, placing it in a secure, fully-virtualised environment based on best-of-breed hosting infrastructure. The service went live in December 2011. Claranet takes responsibility for every aspect of the live application environment, including the security of the data held within the tercero applications – a crucial consideration for any financial services firm or end user.

“Compliance is the big issue that wealth managers worry about, especially when they entrust their data to a third party,” said Foster. “We need to be able to assure our clients that their sensitive data would be safe with Claranet, for two important reasons: so that they can reassure their own customers, and also to satisfy compliance regulations from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

“A key criterion for choosing Claranet was that they are an ISO:27001- and ISO:9000-accredited provider. What is more, our service is based solely in UK data centres, which protects us from the headache of data sovereignty issues.

“What this means for our customers is that they have the assurance that their data is looked after by an organisation that takes security and quality assurance seriously. In fact, the data is far more secure than it would be if our clients hosted it on their premises. The whole architecture of Claranet’s Managed Application Hosting is designed around security; this makes the service a much easier sell to our clients, and also reassures the regulator,” said Foster.

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Data Chain: Claranet brings a wealth of benefits to Third Financial

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Extract taken from Data Chain

The world of wealth management is changing fast. Like other spheres of business, it has had to come rapidly to terms with the challenges of today’s fast-changing legal and technological environment. A new breed of young, wealthy and technology-literate individuals now expect to do business on their mobile devices – including managing their money. Meanwhile, a flood of new compliance regulations governing the use and transmittal of sensitive financial information means that wealth managers have had to change with the times.

Third Financial is at the forefront of this evolution. The firm has created a suite of software, known as tercero, which enables wealth managers and private banks to deliver real-time investment management, reporting, wealth CRM, compliance oversight and mobile capabilities to their clients, delivered to the internet-connected device of their choice.

The challenge

Driven by its comprehensive tercero wealth management platform, Third Financial has enjoyed spectacular growth in the four years since its founding. As it grew, however, the company found itself facing the same problem: potential clients loved the software and the capabilities it offered, but many did not have the technical ability, infrastructure or willingness to host it themselves.

“Our customers are experts in money management but tend not to be particularly proficient in IT,” explained Third Financial’s CEO Stewart Foster. “If they wanted to deploy the tercero suite they used to have two choices: either host it on their own premises, or put it into a dedicated hosted environment in a data centre. For many of our customers, both options added another layer of expense and management. Few of our clients want to spend time and money buying licences or hardware, and then managing the resulting IT issues. All of this distracts them from their core business of managing their clients’ money.

“The whole point of the tercero platform is that it provides everything our clients need – reporting, compliance, customer relations and portfolio management – in a single package. The additional investment in hosting that many of our prospective clients required, typically costing tens of thousands of pounds, threatened to become an obstacle to our expansion,” said Foster.

Third Financial decided to find a technology partner that could provide a secure and resilient hosting service for its application suite, and that could enable it to deliver tercero as a Cloud service, rather than one that the clients hosted and managed themselves. After putting out a tender, the Third Financial chose Claranet to deliver the hosting platform that would best support its software, and its future success.

The solution

Claranet proposed that Third Financial migrate the tercero suite onto its Managed Application Hosting platform. The service enables organisations to place its software into one of Claranet’s enterprise-grade, Tier 3 data centres, where it is monitored and managed by Claranet’s expert staff to optimise application performance and availability.

Third Financial migrated its software to Claranet’s Managed Application Hosting service, placing it in a secure, fully-virtualised environment based on best-of-breed hosting infrastructure. The service went live in December 2011. Claranet takes responsibility for every aspect of the live application environment, including the security of the data held within the tercero applications – a crucial consideration for any financial services firm or end user.

“Compliance is the big issue that wealth managers worry about, especially when they entrust their data to a third party,” said Foster. “We need to be able to assure our clients that their sensitive data would be safe with Claranet, for two important reasons: so that they can reassure their own customers, and also to satisfy compliance regulations from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

“A key criterion for choosing Claranet was that they are an ISO:27001- and ISO:9000-accredited provider. What is more, our service is based solely in UK data centres, which protects us from the headache of data sovereignty issues.

“What this means for our customers is that they have the assurance that their data is looked after by an organisation that takes security and quality assurance seriously. In fact, the data is far more secure than it would be if our clients hosted it on their premises. The whole architecture of Claranet’s Managed Application Hosting is designed around security; this makes the service a much easier sell to our clients, and also reassures the regulator,” said Foster.

The results

“The partnership with Claranet underpins a key element of business strategy,” said Foster. “The old sticking point that we used to have with prospective clients – their lack of infrastructure to support tercero – has been removed. Without that obstacle, the software once again sells itself.

“In fact, Claranet enables us to provide a much more stable, reliable and high-performance platform for tercero. It has never run faster or better than it has on Claranet’s platform, which is much more robust than anything our clients could realistically achieve on their own infrastructure.”

Third Financial’s customers no longer have to worry about buying expensive third party software licences or hardware, nor do they have the problem of managing and optimising the software, as this is all performed by Claranet. The software can now be provided through a simple log-in to a secure environment that has been pre-loaded with the tercero suite.

The service also features a pre-production environment where Third Financial can deploy and test upgrades to tercero before they are rolled out to customers.

“We projected that half of our new business revenue would come from the hosted platform within a year of implementation, and the reaction from our prospective customers leads us to believe that we will more than match that prediction,” said Foster.

“The new generation of wealthy people expect state-of-the-art tools on their mobile devices. With Claranet’s platform, we can ensure that wherever the end user is, as long as they can access the internet, they will be able to access their wealth management tools,” he concluded.

Find out more:

Data Chain: Claranet launches 3G service for today's mobile office

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Extract taken from The Data Chain

Claranet has launched a new 3G service integrating mobile working and back-up connectivity, which links directly to its private network. The new service avoids the need for its customers and their end-users in turn, to use the public internet for any flow of data.

Using either a SIM card for mobile users or a 3G router to provide extra connectivity for office locations, the service provides a new level of flexibility and simplicity to connect with Claranet’s private network.

While most mobile carriers price their private 3G offerings to discourage small and mid-market businesses through excessive set-up charges, Claranet doesn’t charge to enable its private network, so customers can start small and grow as they need. This drastically reduces the cost of entry for companies wanting to create secure remote working access for their employees. It also allows for greater flexibility to meet changing demand as the trend for bring your own device (BYOD) develops.

The service will keep data within an organisation’s firewall, removing costly and bureaucratic authentication processes from IT departments and the need for virtual private networks to encrypt data on the public internet, constraining bandwidth and data flows.

According to the latest research 35 percent of CIOs, IT Managers and business decision-makers believe that their mobile workforce will grow over the next year. A quarter of those questioned in the recent IDC EMEA Enterprise Mobility CIO Survey[1] also stated that they would spend more on mobile technology over the next 12 months.

Michel Robert, Managing Director at Claranet UK says:

Our new 3G service is an important part of our offering to a market that is adjusting to the rise of BYOD. CIOs need to be confident that this new mobile way of working will reduce complexity while maintaining the integrity and security of their data. If mobile working or back-up connectivity are not fully integrated with the private network, then IT departments effectively have to run 3G as a separate system. Different levels of security and specific authentication processes are then needed for the rest of their IT platform.

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Inside Networks: European rollout for Claranet Virtual Data Centre

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Extract taken from Inside Networks’ August issue

Claranet has announced its Virtual Data Centre (VDC) is now live in Germany and France.

The award winning service was launched in the UK in late 2011 and enables users to build their own data centre in the cloud and provision it with compute, storage and networking resources with a few clicks of a mouse. The Claranet VDC also provides a burst capability for periods of unexpectedly high demand, so users pay only for the assets that they use.

The French and German version are based on the successful UK model, including the groundbreaking software orchestration layer that makes it compatible with every type of hypervisor, and the portal-based ‘drag-and –drop’ interface. Early positive feedback from the French and German markets has focused on VDC’s use of in-country data centres and integration with Claranet’s own European MPLS network.

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Data Chain: Claranet launches 3G service for today's mobile office

Posted on by Jay Fearn

Extract taken from The Data Chain

Claranet has launched a new 3G service integrating mobile working and back-up connectivity, which links directly to its private network. The new service avoids the need for its customers and their end-users in turn, to use the public internet for any flow of data.

Using either a SIM card for mobile users or a 3G router to provide extra connectivity for office locations, the service provides a new level of flexibility and simplicity to connect with Claranet’s private network.

While most mobile carriers price their private 3G offerings to discourage small and mid-market businesses through excessive set-up charges, Claranet doesn’t charge to enable its private network, so customers can start small and grow as they need. This drastically reduces the cost of entry for companies wanting to create secure remote working access for their employees. It also allows for greater flexibility to meet changing demand as the trend for bring your own device (BYOD) develops.

The service will keep data within an organisation’s firewall, removing costly and bureaucratic authentication processes from IT departments and the need for virtual private networks to encrypt data on the public internet, constraining bandwidth and data flows.

According to the latest research 35 percent of CIOs, IT Managers and business decision-makers believe that their mobile workforce will grow over the next year. A quarter of those questioned in the recent IDC EMEA Enterprise Mobility CIO Survey[1] also stated that they would spend more on mobile technology over the next 12 months.

Michel Robert, Managing Director at Claranet UK says:

Our new 3G service is an important part of our offering to a market that is adjusting to the rise of BYOD. CIOs need to be confident that this new mobile way of working will reduce complexity while maintaining the integrity and security of their data. If mobile working or back-up connectivity are not fully integrated with the private network, then IT departments effectively have to run 3G as a separate system. Different levels of security and specific authentication processes are then needed for the rest of their IT platform.

Find out more: