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ly. And that’s not easy when a cloud service provider might be headquartered in one country, house its serv-ers in another and have its customers spread far and wide. Even an individual app can send data to more than one location.
Hopefully soon you’ll be able to use a Stratus-designed tool to track and trace your data.
Who’s sneaking a look at my data?Stratus’ second aim is to research “Protection of pri-vacy of data during process-ing and storing.”
Have only authorised people accessed your data in the cloud, or has a gov-ernment agency or other party being on a fishing expedition?
A number of cloud servic-es promote file encryption but Dr Ko notes for simple logistical reasons, such as making backup copies, files have to be read at various points when they’re stored online. “There is no escaping decryption in the cloud,” he says.
What’s gone wrong with my data?Stratus’ third aim is “Aware-ness and response to anomalous data activities” or finding out immediately if something is wrong with your data or if its security has been compromised.
And its fourth research aim is the related “Resiliency and recovery of data,” and rapid recovery from a cloud mishap and insure business continuity.
Dr Ko says Stratus will create a wide range of tools. The first prototypes will be showcased at an event on November 27.
There will be “fair and equal distribution of the ben-efits,” of products and servic-es created by Stratus, he says. “It’s a win-win situation.” All the parties involved will co-own the intellectual property created but “it’s not so much about who owns the IP as who uses the IP,” he says.
And it’s not just about creating software. Dr Ko hopes Stratus can work with the Cloud Security Alliance to develop what he calls a “Rosetta Stone for different countries’ data control poli-cies” – which would certainly be a useful tool as data is shuffled around the planet from one jurisdiction to another.
On human frailtyAn organisation can have all of its security locked down tight on a technical level but still be vulnerable to attack because staff are careless about security procedures or the way they process information.
Everyone’s trying to tight-en up their rules but getting
people to stick to them is the tricky part.
“Change is often dif-ficult because we overesti-mate rational thinking and underestimate the big role that emotions play in our decision making,” Gartner vice-president Debbie Logan says.
“We think if we push hard enough people will change. And we prevent people from changing by putting obstacles in their way. Rec-ognising, however, that all decisions involve some ele-ment of emotion can help change efforts: after all, emo-tion is engagement.
Security professionals can tap into employee emo-tions and other workplace motivators by using video conferencing or face-to-face meetings instead of email communications and appealing to a sense of pur-pose, she says.
“For example, instead of suggesting that people should want to protect their customers’ data, which is an abstract concept, make it personal by suggesting that they would want to treat corporate and customer sen-sitive data the way they want their own personal sensitive data protected.”
Another tactic is to tap into the human desire to avoid social exclusion, she says.
“We’re herd animals, we need each other. Therefore, make social change a group exercise. Instead of posting on an intranet, have a meet-ing about what you want changed.
“Presenting a business case with numbers won’t inspire followers. Instead, security leaders should craft a vision to help the organi-sation understand why it’s necessary to make changes. Explain what’s in it for col-leagues and the broader organisation, and create an emotional connection to help people understand what matters to them at work.”
Chris Keall
A public-private project is tackling the prob-lem of cloud security and the first fruits of its labour should be seen in late November.
The “Stratus” initiative was founded last year with $12.2 million from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, with private sector partners chipping in matching funds.
Its backers aim to make a global splash by creating technologies that put cloud users back in control of their own data.
On the public side, Status research is being carried out by around 30 (and count-ing) graduate and post-graduate students and academic staff at Auckland University, Waikato University and Unitec.
On the private side are four local security companies: Aura, LayerX, Verscient and Gal-lagher (the NBR Rich List family company best known for its electric fencing but now diversified into multiple areas of security, real and cyber).
A non-profit global group, the Cloud Security Alliance, is also supporting Stratus. The CSA was formed in 2009 from corporate customers of cloud computing services in the US; it now boasts more than 60,000 members worldwide and member organisations range
from banks, phone companies and music labels to the likes of Amazon, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft.
Waikato has the most staff devoted to the six-year project. That’s a natural fit given the university was home to New Zealand’s first internet gate way, and its research and com-mercialisation arm produced network secu-rity and monitoring success story Endace (sold to US company Emulex for $115 million in 2013).
Waikato University also supplies Stratus’ project lead: senior computer science lec-turer Dr Ryan Ko, best-known in IT circles for creating New Zealand’s first masters degree in cyber security.
Dr Ko says Stratus’ aim is to “create a suite of novel security tools, techniques and capa-bilities that return control of data to cloud computing users.”
Four aimsStratus will produce software tools and ser-vices – some licensed to its commercial part-ners, some open source or free to all-comers. But it will also produce best-practice guide-lines to help organisations manage their cloud access, and the ever-present element of human frailty.
The project has four research aims, and
it’s looking to produce real-life products and services from each over the next six years.
Where is my data?The first aim is “transparency and auditabil-ity of data activities in clouds.” In layman’s terms, this could be translated as “Where the heck is my data and who is accessing it?”
Data sovereignty laws, security concerns and simple curiosity and a desire to be in control of a business mean businesspeople want to know where a cloud service stores its files. “The cloud” always means a server
farm somewhere, be it the US, Singapore or Hamilton.
Banks and district health boards are examples of organisations who often don’t want their data to go overseas, he says. They want assurances their data will be held local-
24 / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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NZ Inc takes on cloud security HEAD OF THE CLOUD: Dr Ryan Ko is project lead
for Stratus, which sees three universities and four private companies pooling resources to create a suite of made-in-New Zealand software tools. The aim of the game is to put customers of cloud services back in control of their data
SPECIAL REPORT: I.T. 25The National Business Review / August 14, 2015
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Waikato’s Dr Ko is seeing two big trends in hacker attacks over the past few months.
The first is “spear phishing” or when hackers compromise one staff member’s account, then use it to entrap or compromise others in the same organisation.
“Phishing is often based on fear,” he says. “For example, emails about a restructuring that say something like ‘Click this link and find out if you will be in the newly structured organisation.”
Exploiting curiosity and people’s need for instant gratification is spear-phishers’ other main trick. Dr Ko notes that just hours after the Boston marathon bombing, a spear phishing email was doing the rounds. The video featured genuine footage of the tragedy but, as the clip played, malicious software ran in the background, probing a person’s PC for security holes.
The other big trend recently has been ransomware. A ransomware attack typically sees hackers remotely seize control of your computer, encrypt its data, then demand money to un-encrypt it.
A variant is to threaten a denial-of-service attack (where a server is overwhelmed by bots trying to connect, making it inaccessible to regular users) unless a ransom is paid.
The threat to New Zealand businesses is real.In May, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC),
a division of the GCSB, issued an advisory that “an extortion campaign is currently targeting New Zealand organisations. Several organisations have received extortion emails threatening a sustained denial-of-service attack (DoS) unless a payment is made to the email sender. To demonstrate that the threat is credible, shortly after receiving the extortion email, the organisations are then hit with a short-duration DoS attack, lasting up to an hour.”
The extorters demanded $NZ8000 from each victim.Dr Ko says he’s aware of instances where people
have paid up and a ransomware problem has gone away.
But the advice from Martin Cocker, chief executive
of the non-profit Netsafe, is to kiss your data goodbye. The only real protection is to have good backups, or to use a cloud service (which will have its own backups and likely tighter security than your company’s inhouse setup).
“Businesses should not pay,” Mr Cocker says.“Some businesses that have paid ransomware
ransoms have successfully recovered their files – but this DoS extortion is much more like an old-fashioned protection racket where you pay to be protected from the people that you are paying.
“The most likely scenario is that payment will alert the hackers that they are prepared to pay and will increase the chances of them being targeted again.”
Clifford Clark, the officer in charge of the Police National Cyber Crime Centre (NC3), agrees. “They’ll only come back for more,” he says.
Mr Clark says an organisation that receives an extortion email should contact police, plus the NCSC via the email [email protected] and its ISP.
What are the biggest security threats today?
Phot
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Kar
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Salesforce is a company, which has a CRM system at the heart of its business model and has become a multi-billion dollar success as a result.
Salesforce sells its service by using cloud technology to store and build upon customer information, sales history and points of interaction.
While Salesforce can be classed as storage technology, it is also day-to-day management of customers for a business’ sales team.
The tool is helpful for management as it creates trending reporting, pipeline reporting, as well as logging the sales team’s interaction with customers. At any point, someone working in a sales team can access the records on a specific client and see all the relevant information such as a client’s history of spending with the company and the total amount of times a client was contacted in the past.
But there is still a gap in the market for cloud-based systems communicating, says Enterprise IT chief executive Stuart Speers.
He says although innovative cloud-based systems such as Salesforce and Xero are great additions for businesses, at the moment it is difficult to make the softwares interact with each other.
He says it’s important for businesses to see records of interactions with customers inside Salesforce and be able to connect to information across different cloud-based systems. [email protected]
SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD 27The National Business Review / August 14, 2015
Jason Walls
Cloud technology was made famous as a mass storage system, a digital filing cabinet that can be accessed anywhere, any time.
This emphasis on scale, convenience and the ability to store information is what helped make the cloud what it is today.
As a tool, it has grown enormously over the past decade and is poised to dominate the tech world for the foreseeable future.
A study by Goldman Sachs earlier this year predicts the spending on cloud computing infrastructure platforms will increase by 30% on a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through to 2018. Goldman also forecasts infrastructure and platform spend growing to $43 billion in 2018 – that is up from an already impressive $16 billion in 2013.
As usage of the cloud balloons worldwide, New Zealand businesses are increasingly looking at the cloud not just as a viable business option but also as a necessary one.
Stellar Consulting partner Travis Barker says most businesses can benefit from using the cloud.
He says one of the major drawcards is that it is “light-years faster” than traditional storage systems. One reason for this is that
many older systems find it difficult to handle the sheer amount of data being created by business today.
Mr Barker says there are different cloud-based technologies helping make this possible, including Hadoop, a system that allows enormous amounts of data to be stored in multiple nodes (a device or data point on a larger network).
US-based Forrester analyst
Mike Gualtieri says Hadoop is an infrastructure software, for storing and processing larger data sets.
“Imagine you had a file that was larger than your PC’s capacity. You could not store that file, right? Cloud infrastructure lets you store files larger than a particular node or server capacity. So you can store very, very large files. It also lets you store many files,” he says.
Mr Barker says this is a good
option for businesses, especially for those working with a lot of data.
“With the cloud, you have the option of a large scale computing environment where you can easily split up file systems quickly and at a low cost,” he says.
He says many organisations are struggling with storing data in traditional premises, so systems such as Hadoop, and other cloud based infrastructure are increasing in popularity.
More than just a filing cabinetAlthough the cloud is most famous for its data storage uses, businesses can gain a lot more by using it as more than just a place to keep files.
Cloud technology has huge potential in the form of customer relationship management (CRM). The tool spells big businesses for SMEs in particular.
A study conducted this year by US-based SME software creator Intuit shows businesses using a
fully functioning CRM system can increase sales by almost 30%, jump sales productivity by 34% and forecasting accuracy shoots up by 42%. Why? Well, when it comes to the bare bones, people like interacting with other people.
Maintaining a good relationship with customers should entice them to come back time and again, which means fewer dollars spent on advertising and marketing, and more costs saved.
According to Intuit’s study, the cloud can help make the CRM process easier, faster and in the end, make a business more profitable. Take Salesforce for example.
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26 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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TRAVIS BARKER: Says most businesses benefit when using the cloud
Nick Grant
The cloud isn’t the be-all and end-all as far as Don Williams is concerned.
The Australia-New Zealand vice president of Switzerland-based “availability provider” Veeam Software says the solution his com-pany provides to its 157,000 global custom-ers (6500 of them in Australasia) is “much broader than just the cloud.”
Veeam’s core product is the Availability Suite, which offers companies the ability to recover all applications and data in 15 minutes or less after a disaster via a combi-nation of virtualisation, storage and cloud technologies.
Some of the company’s clients use its software on their own servers at their own premises, Mr Williams says, some use it “in a cloud-based scenario” but most are doing both.
A combination of the two is the most-cost effective way to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup rule that decrees a company needs to store three copies of its data on two different media, one of which is off site.
“Having one of those media being the cloud also meets the requirement of being
off site,” he says.But it really comes down to the custom-
er’s business requirements and resources. “A large organisation might have one data
centre in the North Island and one in the South Island and be replicating between the two,” Mr Williams says.
“An SME, however, may not be able to
afford to maintain two data centres – by lev-eraging the cloud they can avoid investing in the storage and servers required for a second physical site, which is a great ‘use-case’ sce-nario.”
Karl Hardisty, on the other hand, would tend to recommend the cloud to customers because of the flexibility it offers.
Of course, a lot of that’s got to do with the fact that Auckland-based Mothership, of
which Mr Hardisty is managing director, is all about the cloud these days. “Essentially we provide public and private cloud platforms that are managed or unmanaged for end users,” he says.
“So we either just provide the hardware and software and they have their own peo-ple to set it up and run it, or we do that for them.”
It wasn’t also so, however. When the com-pany was founded in 2004 it offered standard shared website hosting services.
“Back then, clients would generally have their website on a shared hosting server with lots of others or they’d have their own physi-cal server,” he says. “It was probably 2007-08 when we seriously looked at the cloud and said, ‘This is the way it’s going to go’.”
One of the big improvements in cloud technology since then is the interface, Mr Hardisty says – whereas previously it required specialists to run it, now it’s much more accessible to all, which facilitates the aforementioned flexibility.
He cites a Christchurch-based construc-tion company as an example.
“Traditional house building methods allow an SME to be able to do 10-15 houses a year but with the rebuild that’s going on, sud-denly they need to be able to do 40-50 per year,” he says.
The resulting efficiency drive has led the company to move its building software out of the office where it was the preserve of
Terminology can cloud the issue
Continued P32
AVAILABILITY ADVOCATE: Veeam Australia-New Zealand vice president Don Williams
28 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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Chris Keall
Where is the love?Halfway through the Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) rollout,
only a small fraction of those within reach of UFB fibre have chosen to connect, according to figures just released by Com-munications Minister Amy Adams.
As of June 30, 724,000 homes, schools and workplaces had UFB fibre rolled past their premise by Chorus or smaller play-ers Ultrafast Fibre, Enable or NorthPower (by the end of the project, 1.34 million premises will be in reach of the UFB as its target stands today).
Of those, 106,025 or 14.6% had chosen to connect to the UFB via a retailer like Spark, Vodafone or M2 NZ (formerly CallPlus), or 2degrees (which recently entered the landline market by buying Snap).
In terms of the UFB’s sister project, the Rural Broadband Initiative, 269,000 rural addresses are now within reach of fibre or fixed wireless broad-band subsidised by the Crown. There isn’t any total connection figure but Ms Adams tells NBR that 8500 have connected to new RBI Towers construct-ed by Vodafone, which makes up about 20% of the rollout.
Broadband use booming at homeThe government can point to a gain in momentum. At the start of last year, UFB uptake was at a truly miserable 5.45%.
Still, why are so many continuing to turn up their nose?On the home front, there has been a boom in streaming
video on-demand (SVOD) use. Netflix launched in March, Sky TV’s Neon followed soon after and Spark made its Light-box service free to all of its broadband customers (nearly 670,000). Chorus and Vocus both tracked astonishing 40% jumps in data traffic on their networks over the first six months of this year.
But like many people, I can access the likes of Netflix just fine on my aging copper connection (there was congestion earlier this year but this was largely solved by ISPs boosting
their efforts to cache content or store local copies of popular downloads. In most cases, this meant installing Netflix servers locally). Fibre does help – especially if other members of your family want to access the internet while you’re hogging band-width watching a flick – but at a pinch copper is okay.
But not so much in businessDoes the Netflix factor account for the explosion in data traffic this year? Pretty much. “I don’t think the boom has hit business yet,” says Rudi Hefer, chief executive of Vibe – a
wholesale outfit or ISP for ISPs. There has been a steady uptick in traffic but not the kind of explosive growth
that streaming view has sparked in the residential market.
Yet, for business customers, there are com-pelling reasons to move to fibre. All comput-ing is becoming cloud computing. And, for full-blooded cloud computing, you need all
the benefits of a fibre connection that is more reliable than copper, far less susceptible to peak-
time congestion, offers a lot of speed in both direc-tions (most copper connections have extremely slow uploads) and has performance that doesn’t
degrade with distance (a copper connection performs more poorly the further you are from the nearest cabinet or phone exchange).
Untold storyThat’s a good story but it’s one that’s just not being told. Crown Fibre Holdings has done minimal promotion. The same goes for the local fibre companies. Chorus did a bit of TV about it at the start, but its already modest advertising budget was crunched back in a cost-cutting deal brokered by Crown Fibre Holdings in March last year. Considering the government has put $2.1 billion into the UFB and RBI (including the $360 million top up with Budget 2015), the lack of emphasis on promoting the benefits of faster
Why is UFB
uptake so low?
Continued P30
The benefits of fibre for business make a good
story. Why is no one telling it?
Rudi Hefer
SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD 31The National Business Review / August 14, 201530 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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broadband is astounding.The government says it was always going
to be up to retail ISPs to promote fibre but there has been little action on that front, either. In many instances they can squeeze more profit from a copper line, so there is simply no incentive.
A money loserAnother related factor is that Spark – which holds around 50% of the retail market – has only just developed a voice-over-IP or internet calling product. Before it was intro-duced, in May, Spark had to keep old cop-per for phone calls as it installed fibre. That meant it had to pay Chorus for two lines and lost money on every UFB connection accord-ing to Chris Quin (who until June 30 was chief executive for home, mobile and business).
Most UFB connections are free for home users or subsidised for business (where an installation usually equates to one month’s connection fees). Schools get both free connections and free data via Network for Learning, a Crown company set up with a budget of $212 million. For both business and home users, UFB plans cost no more than DSL (copper broadband) accounts. Yet the UFB still gets bad word of mouth, and it’s all about the weeks or months it can take to get a fibre connection. “Local fibre company and Chorus delays can be very frustrating,” a Vector spokesman tells NBR. “They need to be held more accountable to the service lev-els they committed to in their contracts with the Crown. They’re certainly not doing that at the moment or at least the market doesn’t perceive that they do.”
New rulesFor its part, Chorus has blamed consent rules and lobbied for change. In response, Ms Adams has released a discussion paper proposing “deemed consent,” which would mean Chorus and other companies involved in UFB rollout would no longer be required to gain the consent of every property owner
down a right-of-way, or every owner in a multi-unit dwelling, before laying fibre. If the law change goes through, an owner who doesn’t speak up within a set timeframe will be deemed to have given their okay.
Another complication is that while UFB uptake is low, the public-private network is competitively priced – and that has slowed down private sector development.
Seeby Woodhouse, owner of Voyager, says his company now re-sells UFB fibre where possible. Other net-works just can’t compete with the UFB’s competitive wholesale rate, he says.
And Vector, which at one stage was laying fibre around Auckland at a furious pace, has now slowed right down. Its offer-ing for a customer these days will typically include a mix of UFB
fibre and Vector fibre. Chorus (in which the Crown owns a 24% stake) has growing con-trol of the wholesale market in New Zealand’s largest city. For Vector’s part, it’s now putting less emphasis on “speeds and feeds” and more on value-added services, including an upcoming cyber-security initiative.
Waking upMeanwhile, the business market – particu-
larly the lagging SME segment – is, one way or another, slowly starting to wake up to the benefits of fibre.
IDC IT services and cloud research director Adam Dodds quotes a recent study of companies with 0 to 200 staff that found about 20% want
to connect to the UFB when it comes to their area. The main reasons given
were the need for greater speed (96%) and reliability (98%)
of the network, with 75% stating that it
is specifically for the deployment of cloud-based services.
ADAM DODDS: Small to medium businesses finally waking up to the benefits of fibre
Why is UFB uptake so low?
From P28
Jason Walls
For a start-up business any unwanted addi-tional costs can have a hugely detrimental effect, so it’s no surprise that IT is usually top of many business minds.
In an environment where technology is constantly changing and what was just the “latest and greatest” quickly becomes irrel-evant for doing business, knowing what tech to invest in can be daunting.
But understanding current trends could save a start up a lot of money and, in some cases, be the difference between pushing through to the next business level, and falling at the wayside.
Cloud-based technologies are becoming increasingly critical for start-ups which live and die on the speed of infrastructure.
And according to research by McKinsey & Company, small business are the ones trail blazing cloud services.
A report, Big business in small business: Cloud services for SMBs, suggests this year small and medium businesses share of the US cloud service market is expected to reach $US28 billion – with an expected profit pool
of US$3.5 billion – representing 40-50% of the total cloud market opportunity in the country.
In New Zealand, it is a similar story. Enterprise IT chief executive Stuart Speers
says for a start-up, investing in the cloud is a “no brainer.” He says the cloud is “data host-ing on steroids.
“It’s largely accepted that there are busi-ness benefits by not worrying about manag-ing core infrastructure.”
He says rather than paying a hefty sum for initial hardware and software required for starting a business, a cloud platform is much cheaper as many service providers offer flex-ible payment models.
As all a client’s data is centralised and stored across multiple server systems, a busi-ness can have instant online access to servers and resources at a lower cost.
Mr Speers says this option will be much more attractive to business start-ups that are often strapped-for-cash in the early years of existence.
In using the cloud, costs are variable and a business is not forced to pay upfront costs for technology they may never end up deploying.
“[Without the cloud] you have to pick the size of the infrastructure you’re going to purchase initially and hope you have the right size. But if the business booms, you suddenly have a bigger cost,” says Mr Speers.
This means new businesses can be freed up to sink more cash into things they actually need, he says.
Agylix business development manager Patrick Daly agrees it is a good idea for busi-nesses to consider the cloud when beginning.
“One of the things [start-ups] save with the cloud is not having an outlay on hardware infrastructure and staff compared to doing it all in-house.”
He says being able to pay-as-you go is a much better method of payment too. “A busi-ness doesn’t have the issues of maintaining high skill levels in-house because a lot of the technical infrastructure skills are provided by the cloud provider.”
Some not on Cloud 9 Although the cloud can offer advantages both in terms of cost and flexibility, there are still those who believe the cloud can rain on a business’ parade as the company increases in size. Eric Frenkiel, co-founder and chief exec-utive of MemSQL (a high-performance, in-memory database) told Wired Magazine that the cloud was not effective in the long run.
MemSQL came down from the cloud two years after the company was founded, mov-ing most of its operation from Amazon’s cloud service to physical computers as the compa-ny had reached a point where this option was
Should the cloud be top of mind for start-ups?
STUART SPEERS: Says it is largely accepted
that there are business benefits by not worrying
about managing core infrastructure
PATRICK DALY: One of the things start-ups save with the cloud is
not having an outlay on hardware infrastructure
and staff compared to doing it all in-house
Enterprise IT chief executive Stuart Speers says for a start-up, investing in the cloud is a ‘no brainer’
Continued P32
a couple of administration staff and into the cloud where it can be accessed by employees on the ground at building and construction sites.
Nonetheless, Mr Hardisty notes, when considering whether to use dedicated servers or cloud services or a combination of the two, it’s important to take into account what the client is comfortable with
“There are still a lot of decisionmakers in the IT industry who are older and whose careers have pro-gressed through the dedicated physical servers,” he says. “While some embrace new technology, others don’t feel the need to understand it or don’t want to because what they’ve done historically has worked.
In any case, Mr Hardisty says, “the cloud is ulti-mately still provisioned from physical servers – the difference is in how they’re spliced or sliced up and secured.”
For Martin Gleeson, managing director of transtasman online service provider iPayroll, it’s really just a matter of nomenclature.
His company has been “a pure cloud company” since it started in 2001, it’s just that the term ‘cloud’ hadn’t been coined yet – “we just called it online pay-rolls or internet payrolls,” he says. “Back then, you’d often go to a client’s site and they wouldn’t even have the internet, or if they did they’d have dial up.
“But it always was and still is software as a service. The changing terminology hasn’t really changed the functionality.”
Terminology has always been a potential sticking point when talking to potential customers, however. “We rode the wave of internet banking in the early 2000s,” Mr Gleeson says. “When we’d talk to people about online payroll, they didn’t really understand what we were going on about. But, if we compared it to internet banking, you could see a light-bulb sud-denly go off in their heads.”
Nowadays, he notes, there are just as many people whose eyes cloud over when ‘the cloud’ is mentioned.
“So we still say, ‘Online payroll cloud services is a bit like internet banking’ and immediately they get it.”
SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD 33The National Business Review / August 14, 2015
Michael Snowden
Why are you interested in moving to the cloud? Is it because you have heard that IT costs in the cloud are lower than your internal systems and security is usually stronger than what you currently have?
Perhaps you can envision more flexibility without the dead-weight burden of fixed IT server costs, which can never create any com-petitive advantage for you.
More importantly, you may have identified cloud computing as a vital enabling resource to support the introduction of new disrup-tive business models or take advantage of important technologies such as big data and analytics.
How should you approach your move to the cloud? As always, it will depend on the size of your organisation, the software applications you run, the source of your cur-rent IT support and the “pain points” you are experiencing.
Your firm’s leadership will dictate an appe-tite for risk in terms of data sovereignty, or where your data will be stored, how quickly new software should be adopted and what cloud providers will be engaged, among many other decision factors.
The big question to ask is: what should you do with your existing, or “legacy” software that you rely on to help run your business? Your key line-of-business application(s) may be standard but not available as a cloud ser-vice. The software may have been standard originally but has been so heavily customised over time that no equivalent is available as a cloud service. The software may be entirely custom-written so that there is no cloud equivalent.
This is the point at which serious money will need to be spent if you want to replace your existing line-of-business software with a “born-in-the-cloud” solution. It is not simply
the cost of new cloud software subscriptions, of course, but also the cost of systems integra-tion and the development and adoption of new internal processes.
However, if there are no compelling rea-sons to replace your line-of-business soft-ware, you can still take full advantage of cloud computing.
The solution is to move all of your software to a cloud service provider who can deliver those applications back to your users. This is known as “desktop-as-a-service.” Nothing changes in terms of your employee user expe-riences and there are no expensive or long implementation cycles.
Migrating existing software applica-tions and company data into the cloud for desktop-as-a-service delivery to your users is the fastest, least-risk and lowest-cost of all alternatives for a firm to move to the cloud.
How do you find a suitable cloud services vendor? There are now a number of well-qualified and experienced cloud service pro-viders available in the New Zealand market who have for more than 10 years been suc-cessfully migrating a company’s full suite of software to the cloud and delivering back a cloud “desktop-as-a-service.”
It is even possible to bundle all of the transition or migration costs into a simple per user, per month fee, thus providing a full cloud solution without any incremental capi-tal expenditure.
The most important selection criteria is the cloud service provider’s reputation, once the table stakes of technical com-petency and competitive price have been established. Care is needed in interpret-ing any cloud services proposal as, with a relatively immature market and imperfect knowledge, it is easy to not make a valid “apples-for-apples” comparison.
Firms of all sizes are migrating all of their software applications and data into the cloud and enjoying lower costs of IT, stronger secu-rity and variable cost, per user pricing, by adopting a “desktop-as-a-service” solution. The costs and risks of this strategy are the low-est of all alternatives and the upside of cloud computing benefits are the greatest for firms in this position.
Dr Snowden is chief executive of OneNet. [email protected]
How to move my IT into the cloud affordably
32 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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The most important selection
criteria is the cloud service provider’s reputation – Michael Snowden
cheaper than using the cloud. The private car shuttle service
app company Uber also moved its operations off the Amazon cloud services to physical servers, citing cost issues.
But cash is not always king when it comes to the cloud.
vBridge director Hamish Roy says some businesses will actually move away from a cheap product if it offers them a cheap service.
He says it’s not a race to the bottom in terms of price as it was a few years ago. He says it’s a race to the level of service that an individual company is looking to achieve.
“It’s like buying a pack of five
sausages at the supermarket, and to get the sixth sausage requires buying another pack of five. It’s never quite the amount you want and therefore you have to over-spend to get the performance you want, or underspend and not get the performance you want.”
Unisys NZ country manager Steve Griffin agrees with Mr Roy that it’s not a race to zero to price cloud services, adding he does not think a bottom will ever be reached.
“But it will reach a commodity pricing level that you are either part of or not. And some organisa-tions will be dealing at the other end of the spectrum by offering a bit more TLC around a client’s data.” [email protected]
Should the cloud be top of mind for startups?
From P31
Terminology can cloud the issueFrom P27
SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD 35The National Business Review / August 14, 201534 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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Chris Keall
There is nothing like living through some-thing to fully appreciate the challenges involved.
NBR is currently mulling its options for moving to the cloud. Or, I should say, mov-ing more of our business online.
Like most small to medium businesses, some of our systems are already in the cloud. Our sales team has upgraded to Salesforce.com, while our designers use Adobe’s Creative Cloud (which uses the internet for updates and sharing files). We use an IP-based phone system. And there’s the usual outbreak of staff using personal cloud options like Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple iCloud to share files with outsid-ers, or their smart device out of the office.
But most of our software and files are still on-premise (for which we paid the business continuity price during a recent power cut that took out our office’s server and our email). Part of our back-up process is manual.
We’re not cloud-first. We’re cloud-some-times That makes us typical.
“The New Zealand market is one of the top three countries in the Asia Pacific region for cloud adoption,” IDC IT services and cloud research director Adam Dodds says.
This means that 97% of New Zealand organisations have “given cloud a go” in some way, according to IDC’s New Zealand Cloud survey.
“The challenge is shifting from giving cloud a go, or ad hoc usage, to maturing to a cloud-first strategy where there is a strong focus on people, process and governance,” he says.
Convinced but sitting on their handsMost are already sold on the benefits of the cloud. There is greater flexibility, scability, a much better chance of busi-ness continuity and, in most cases, far more robust security if a managed service provider, or the likes of Amazon Web Ser-vices, Google or Microsoft is running your
software and storing your files. The cloud is not magic. Any internet-
based service faces glitches and outages (NBR recently went a morning without phone service after 2Talk fell over). But in most cases their uptime is better than inhouse servers. Mr Dodds quotes research that says 75% of small businesses (those with 0 to 200 seats) want to do more with the cloud.
So what’s stopping them?
One issue is the financial hump you encounter when moving to the cloud.
A storied benefit of the cloud is that you move from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. You’ll never again have to write a big cheque for a new server as you move to the monthly subscription model used by most cloud services. A cou-ple of companies have quoted NBR close to $15,000 to move our email and Office software to the cloud and then the same again to set up file storage and sharing in the cloud and move other elements like databases online. All up, it works out to $1000 per employee and it means a quarter where you get a double-whammy of opex and capex.
Datacom director of IT management Scott Green points out there are other issues for companies of all sizes.
One is that a move to the cloud usu-ally also involves a network or broadband upgrade. Fibre is a must for the cloud. ADSL (copper) just isn’t reliable enough, only offers top speed one-way, and is subject to congestions. In NBR’s case, we’ve already pepped up our office network with a wi-fi upgrade, and moved from ADSL (copper) to a cloud-friendly 100Mbit/s fibre connection with Voyager. The Voyager connection has proved very reliable but, still, when most of your business is in the cloud, losing your internet connection means your company grinds to a halt. The advice IT services com-panies have given us is if you move most of your software online, get a second internet
connection with a different ISP. Chalk up another cost.
Different types of cloudMr Green also emphasises that what is loosely called “the cloud” in fact involves a number of different options including – at the big picture level – public cloud options (such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), private cloud (where you have serv-ers dedicated to your organisation) or being hosted at a data centre (which eliminates servers from your business but isn’t really cloud if you have a direct connection to your data centre provider).
It’s a case of horses for courses, the Datacom boss says. Many organisations use a mix of public cloud, private cloud and hosted services. Some of this is driven by technical issues like performance (not so much of an issue now the likes of Google and Amazon have server farms as close as Sydney); some by regulatory issues like data sovereignty or IRD access to financial data (which must still be kept within New Zea-land unless your cloud software provider has an exemption; Xero and MYOB are among those who do). Many government departments or corporates are required to keep data within New Zealand or, at the most, within Australasia. And once you’ve got a mix of cloud services, you have to start thinking about the cost of managing them – or rope in a dashboard solution from the likes of Datacom to keep tabs on things.
In Datacom’s case, it plays on both sides
of the fence. It has its own data centres dot-ted around Australasia but also partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, among others. It recently became an AWS Managed Services Partner – one of just 20 that Amazon has worldwide.
AW-what?For many SMEs, there’s simple ignorance of the options involved. “Most still think of Amazon as a bookstore,” says Rudi Hefer, chief executive of Vibe, a wholesale opera-tion or “ISP for ISPs” that deals directly with some big clients (including Office Max) but mostly supplies services to second-tier internet service providers.
At the other end of the spectrum, savvy corporate users are, if anything, starting to pull back a little from the cloud – or at least the public cloud, Mr Green says.
“They’re a little bit more aware of the type of workloads and consumption that suits public cloud and what isn’t and can drive up costs over time,” he says.
One example: it’s very cheap and get-ting cheaper all the time to store data in the cloud. But the trap for young players is that it can be expensive to retrieve that data; especially if you have to do so frequently. A hosted solution could be better. Mr Green says to make sure you get independent advice. IDC’s Mr Dodds says companies should avoid long-term cloud contracts given the fast-moving, competitive nature of the market. Keep your options open.
[email protected]’S SCOTT GREEN: Factor in costs like upgrading your network and broadband, and the expense of transitioning to the cloud
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SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD 37The National Business Review / August 14, 201536 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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Campbell Gibson
The government is in the middle of a serious technology upgrade, with the biggest Inland Revenue’s transformation, estimated to cost up to $1.9 billion over a decade.
A project that hasn’t been given much attention is the gov-ernment’s telecommunications as a service (TaaS) programme; a joint initiative led by the Depart-ment of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Business.
The programme will affect nine government departments, which over time will move their communications to cloud services.
A tender for TaaS closed in February and the two lead
departments are currently nar-rowing down a shortlist that will produce a selection of suppliers.
Documents say the govern-ment’s investment in TaaS is upward of $500 million or in the region of 10% of the total market and nearly 30% of the business market.
The tender is part of govern-ment chief information officer Colin MacDonald’s work and was signalled in the Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan to 2017,
approved by Cabinet in June 2013.
A DIA spokeswoman says the project will change the way tel-ecommunications services are delivered, managed and used by government agencies.
“This is a complex programme of work and will take some time. The next steps include develop-ment and negotiation of com-mercial terms for the contracts. We expect services to begin to become available later this year,” the spokeswoman says.
The DIA refused to disclose the number of companies on the shortlist or who they are.
ShoreTel Australia-New Zea-land managing director Jamie Romanin says government organisations are converting their telephony or unified com-munications to cloud as a service because of their high consump-tion. ShoreTel is not involved in the tender.
Because of the high volume,
Mr Romanin says governments tend to look for a standalone voice solution rather than an application or a unified commu-nications solution.
The number of people employed in government depart-ments tends to fluctuate depend-ing on funding but Mr Romanin
SCALE UP, SCALE DOWN: Shoretel Australia-New Zealand managing director Jamie Romanin says cloud communication services cater to organisations that have fluctuating employee numbers, such as government
Government narrowing down $500m telecommunications contract
says telephony in the cloud allows the scale to move up and down and eliminates the baggage of having legacy equipment lying around.
But it’s a balancing act for customers moving their commu-nications to the cloud.
Mr Romanin is an advocate of a hybrid model and says telepho-ny tends to be one of the last pro-cess that is moving to the cloud.
“For the past three to five years we’ve seen the uptake of cloud services for many other types of applications become quite rapid. The uptake for cloud telephony has been slower but it’s certainly increasing.”
He says the rollout of ultra-fast broadband in Australia and New Zealand has made companies more comfortable in putting real time processes like voice in the cloud.
“In saying that, there’s been a lack of function for cloud-based telephony solutions to date. Cus-tomers are coming from an on-site or premise based telephony world, where they’re used to rich unified communications - inte-grating voice with video, web conferencing, email and other applications - and it has almost been a step backwards for a lot of customers in the early days of telephony as a service.
“It also comes down the flex-ibility of cloud solutions. We’re finding that customers want to move communications to the cloud but also want the flexibil-ity to keep some equipment on premise and have a blend.
He says medium-sized busi-nesses have the most need for a hybrid model where their head-quarters may be based in a city and have outposts in regional areas.
In this case, he says the out-posts may be more functional with complete cloud telephony, so there is less need for main-tenance while the city-based premises can maintain legacy equipment with cloud mixed in.
Department of ConservationDepartment of Internal AffairsInland Revenue�Ministry of Business Innovation
and EmploymentMinistry for Primary Industries�Ministry for Social DevelopmentNZ Defence Force�NZ Police (and emergency
services)NZ Trade and Enterprise
Departments in telecommunications as a service RFP
Nathan Smith
Since the New Zealand and global business community has clearly decided cloud tech-nology is here to stay, the next question is how it will all be priced.
Only a few years ago, pricing models for cloud services were generally based on old methods of hiring server storage space and calculating how many staff members or internet connections a company owned. But as the technology rapidly evolves, providers and customers alike are changing the way they offer and demand the product.
Cloud technology is still being sold as a service, and priced as such, but one intriguing aspect of cloud computing is that it is all acting as essentially a commodity in many respects. Whether the technology will be subject to commodity economics is as yet unknown but the trend is worth watching closely.
For instance, most cloud providers make moving to the cloud easy by providing a pay-as-you-go pricing model of cloud services. This means consumers request a service, it is allocated by the provider and users only pay for the amount requested and used.
Once a user gets more comfortable using the cloud, it can use alternative pricing mod-els, such as reserving computer power (your pipeline through the cloud) for a longer period of time (for up to a year) to secure lower costs. The concept of pay-as-you-go does appear to make cloud a commodity-type product, which makes the technology somewhat easier to price on what could be called “cloud spot markets.”
That’s good news for customers. If they are charged to use computing power and band-width, it means providers can be more flexible in offering greater capacity in times of need.
Unisys NZ country manager Steve Griffin says this is the modern way of pricing for cloud services. Companies buy computer power, not infrastructure, and consume on that basis.
“Being able to scale up or scale down, and paying for what a company consumes is the pricing model of the future. Customers are paying similar prices for the technology but providers put different wrappers around offer-ings, which gives them an advantage with bespoke products,” he says.
This pricing model doesn’t just affect cloud data storage technology, it also affects teleph-
ony. Mr Griffin says the pay-per-user idea is quickly becoming uncompetitive.
In the consistent evolution of cloud tech-nology, many providers are moving toward pricing models desired by the client, such as the pay-as-you-go concept. But there is some suggestion that larger telecommunication organisations aren’t yet able to graduate to this model because their foundation technology simply wasn’t built for the cloud and can’t per-form flexibly enough to be truly bespoke.
OrcaCom director Grant Dennis says there are only a few companies using bespoke cloud software built for a specific client and no one blames the large telcos for not building cloud software from scratch. Coding cloud software from the ground up is invasive and cripplingly
expensive for large telcos, and telcos can only drop their prices so low. This isn’t such a con-straint for smaller providers.
“To deliver a high-quality telephone call or share a large document, cloud resources need to be reliable, redundant and right for the client. Those resources have a cost and there needs to be a minimum margin made.
“The prices for cloud are only going to come down so far but they’re never going to get to the point where they’re a loss leader. Amazon is a larger provider but it has the flex-ibility. Its data storage prices have come right down but they’re still not giving it away,” Mr Dennis says.
Revera chief executive Robin Cockayne sees the potential flexibility of larger telecommuni-cations to create price-competitive and unique cloud offerings slightly differently. He says their technology means they already own a set of building blocks to create similar bespoke
capabilities. They don’t need to build from the bottom, just bring to bear what’s already there.
“Our art is to produce those variations using existing building blocks. So telcos are quite adaptable to whatever the situation or opportunity to create value might look like.
“The providers that can adapt to changing circumstances will come to the fore. It doesn’t really matter if the provider is large or a small business. There doesn’t appear to be any limi-tation on the technology’s reach from a capa-bility perspective,” Mr Cockayne says.
At one point a few years ago with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure, it did feel like a race to the bottom for pricing. It knocked some providers out of the market and brought others in. vBridge director Hamish Roy isn’t sure the race was in response to what the customers desired or whether it was the larger cloud providers wanting to achieve an arbitrary goal. “There is a lot of complexity in finding out who is going to provide the level of service a company needs. So, to that extent, a hybrid solution is a great and affordable entry point for a lot of businesses. This is the ability to deploy some data in the cloud and some things locally.”
“But hybrid is simply a method of transi-tion toward full hosting. There may be a valid reason to keep some processes off the cloud. A company may be running a factory which has specific automation and some of this needs to remain close to the machines it is controlling. But the idea should be to put most processes into the cloud eventually,” Mr Roy says.
Pricing for cloud isn’t likely to fluctuate sig-nificantly according to these experts but it also isn’t likely to drop near zero either. Dimension Data chief information officer James Wells says price is a function of scale and scale is a func-tion of population. New Zealand is small and, if providers are looking at cost as pay-as-you-go, that’s also only part of the story.
“One day, this could all end up like the electricity spot market. But I tend to wonder if by that stage the underlying construct driving business applications will change to the point where that’s less relevant.
“The truth of all of this is that the most efficient model is somewhere in between. This is where the value of hybrid cloud comes into play. Companies will always have a base cost to maintain. In modern digital strategy, it is really down to the individual business to understand what they want to do and why,” Mr Wells says.
Tech priced as a
GRANT DENNIS: Says the prices for cloud ‘are only going to come down so far’
SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD 39The National Business Review / August 14, 2015
Christian Byrnes
The internet of things is driving deep changes in security practices. Safety is now a major issue.
With the internet of things (IoT), the conver-gence of physical security and internet security is inevitable. This will force security leaders across industries to accept responsibility for the pro-tection of life, which may not have previously been in their purview.
Digital business requires the addition of a new fourth element of security: safety. Joining confidential-ity, integrity and availability as an essential component of security programs, safety becomes essential to man-aging security in the IoT.
Notably:�physical infrastructure
complexity/automation increase risk;�hazard recognition and
control now include cyber needs; and�cyber attacks can have
physical impacts.Your job will be to
protect the organisation from things that can kill. I once met a hospital chief information officer who revealed that the chief medical officer asked him to be prepared in two years for the “fact that networked devices will be administer-ing pharmaceuticals to our patients.” The comput-
ers will be responsible for determining how much of a drug to put into a blood-stream. The IoT doesn’t just sense what is going on; it changes what is going on. It changes the physical world.
Cybersecurity scenario: race to the edgeLooking ahead, there is a need for organisations to add transparency, as well as safety in their “race to the edge.”
For security profession-als, this means moving from managing technology at the core of the business in a closed fashion, to add-ing transparency as you manage technology that lives closer to the edge of the organisation and per-sonal use.
Guard the jewelsThis is where you are now and it is the home state for most organisations. It’s characterised by an aver-sion to sharing with the government, use of trade secrets to compete and more of a “walled gardens” mentality.
Expand the empireThis is where many organisations are going by default. It often is an unmanaged “race to the edge” and may or may not be the right place for you. It is characterised by critical infrastructure organisa-
tions, physical security or many ‘dumb’ devices with secure wrappers, and organisations with uncoor-dinated IoT projects.
Share the wealthThe social media providers will be here, where there’s no approach to safety. Organisations that are slow to the edge may still be under pressure for trans-
parency. This quadrant could make your life easier if you can effectively man-age the risk.
Lead the revolutionFor organisations willing to push in this direction, such as high volume consumer markets, transparency and safety become leadership issues. Enterprises gain high leverage from con-
textual data. If you can live in this quadrant, it’s ideal. This is the home of the IoT revolution.
Moving forward, secu-rity professionals need to find where they are in the scenarios today and deter-mine where they are going (if anywhere). Remember the necessity to assess your existing and future role in securing the physical as
well as the digital world and address safety issues early. Finally, don’t let your-self play “catch-up” to your business. Plan cybersecu-rity with them rather than after them.
Build safety at the edge for security in 2020
38 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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How do you choose the Best Cloud ERP system for your business?
Most vendors will tell you their software is cloud enabled. How do you cut through the marketing speak to find the best solution for you?
Does it provide an engaging user experience? – Your users are accustomed to using modern consumer technology which focuses on providing a positive user experience and ease of use.
Is it change ready? – Business doesn’t remain static. You need to adapt to changes in your organisation structure, markets, statutory requirements, reporting requirements etc. Will you be able to make the changes to the system to support this without expensive vendor or third party consultants?
Does it provide upgrade elasticity? – Can you chose to upgrade at a time which suits you, or are you tied to the provider’s schedule?
Does it fit your Business? – Older style ERP suites are designed around manufacturing and inventory management processes. If your organisation is about people and services you need an application which has been designed with this focus.
Is it complete? – It takes many years to develop a good ERP suite. Products built specifically for the cloud may be immature or lack depth of functionality.
Is it portable? – In a multi tenanted cloud environment it is essential that your data is held in its own separate database, not in a partition. This provides greater security and enables you to migrate to an on premise solution, or a different cloud provider should you need to.
Is there local implementation expertise available? –Your data may reside in the cloud but your people don’t. You still need locally based implementation expertise and ongoing support.
To learn how Unit4 Business World can answer these questions contact Pat Daly.
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Christian Byrnes, managing vice president at Gartner
Dionisio Zumerle
After three decades where managing end-points was synonymous with imposing strict security on laptops, enterprises are about to face a much greater security challenge.
IT leaders are asked to protect their enter-prise data not just on smartphones and tab-lets, but while it travels through the Internet of Things (IoT), on connected cars, on smart TVs and on smart watches and other wear-able devices.
The advent of the digital workplace is increasing the speed at which enterprise mobility and security are moving away from each other. Employees have become accus-tomed to working across multiple devices, to transferring files between devices, and to fast and fluid switching between their personal and professional worlds. In reality, protecting data with traditional endpoint management models is incompatible with mobile operat-ing systems and their application-centric economies.
Three factors need to be addressed to bridge the gap between enterprise mobility and effective security for business informa-tion: people, process and technology.
People: Freedom plus accountabilityUsers bypass the legacy endpoint security models imposed on their mobile devices because they are incompatible with their need to mix business and personal life. The ones that comply feel disarmed and frustrat-ed and simply miss out on the opportunities that the digital workplace can offer.
Solutions may be to encourage greater user accountability and offer enterprise mobile applications with consumer-grade user experiences.
Security teams beware – if your potential solution results in a sub-optimal user experi-ence, your employees will turn toward pri-vately owned devices and privately managed applications. The latter often leads to silent enterprise leaks: incidents that go unobserved when employees upload enterprise data to third-party clouds. Once leaked, the enter-prise can neither track nor retrieve that data.
The way to make enterprise data more secure is to increase the level of user freedom and, at the same time, hold users accountable and responsible for their actions. To increase accountability, organisations need to make what occurs on mobile devices part of the enterprise conversation, and set clear security expectations.
Deploy solutions that increase visibility and monitoring on what occurs on mobile devices. Events are logged and actions can
be stopped when they are trying to breach the policy. This might translate to file-level encryption or watermarking files and moni-toring their route via proxy.
Make use of enterprise mobility manage-ment (EMM) tools to replace legacy lockdown tools and offer a user-friendly solution: for example, replace a VPN-based password tied to a hardware token with an EMM tool that would seamlessly activate transport security when an application is opened, and deacti-vate when it is closed.
Process: organisational and cultural changes
Watch out that you don’t misinterpret risk and maintain organisational structures that are not designed for enterprise mobility.
Solutions are to translate technical mobility risks into enterprise risks so the goals are clear and to think strategically but act tactically.
Typically, the team managing mobility is decoupled from the team that traditionally manages the legacy endpoints. This requires organisational and culture changes.
The mobile team must involve the net-work and security teams at the time the policy is written, so the goals are clear and everyone is on board. This should occur before the selection of a mobility tool, and collaboration should continue.
Think strategically, act tactically: The OS release-cycle for mobile devices and plat-forms is 12 to 18 months, and every new release offers new enterprise functionality. Plan, so you can adjust or replace security solutions and take advantage of new, native features. IT leaders should ask, “In 18 months, can we swap out the solution we are putting in today?”
Technology: prevent shadow ITIt is difficult for businesses to impose man-agement and security policies because the endpoint platforms are administered by the employees and are centred on applications,
not networks.The solutions are to
abandon device-centric security systems in favour of app-centric models and identify native solutions in the mid and long term.
Organisations should move away from device lockdown as much as pos-sible but still treat all end-points as untrusted ones. To prevent shadow IT by employees, focus on offering the same quality of experi-ence through mobile-based solutions.
Deploy app containment solutions that can encrypt and isolate enterprise data from personal data, protect-ing the single app, rather than the device. Aim for flexible solutions such as app wrapping, which can impose app-level policy enforcement on the fly.
Look to native solutions offered by device manu-
facturers and app vendors. Examples include an iOS feature that allows the enterprise to select which apps and accounts are used to open documents and attachments, or an app such as Evernote, which offers a personal account in which the enterprise adds a business workspace that is administered and owned by the enterprise.
By focusing your efforts on providing solutions that are tailored for mobile use, looking at security from a tactical standpoint and favouring app-centric models, you can offer your workforce a system that will enable it to take its digital workplace with it, along with enterprise mobile security.
Mobile security challenges
in the age of digital business
Dionisio Zumerle is a research director at Gartner
Continued on facing page
From P38
Increase the level of user freedom and,
at the same time, hold users accountable and responsible for their actions
40 SPECIAL REPORT: I.T – THE CLOUD / The National Business ReviewAugust 14, 2015
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New Zealand might be geographically distant from most things but its cloud market isn’t nec-essarily lagging.
An observation from Stratokey chief execu-tive Anthony Scotney was that the New Zealand cloud market is about “five years behind” its counterparts in the US and Europe. New Zea-land companies have approached the technol-ogy with caution and initial investment in cloud infrastructure was understandably focused on larger markets initially.
“This has likely led to a delay in local organi-sations adopting cloud technologies due to security and data residency concerns about hosting critical business information on servers based overseas,” he says.
Dimension Data chief information officer James Wells says it’s a provocative statement but doesn’t appear to reflect his experience of the New Zealand market. While organisations have an ideal of a cloud-first strategy, they’ve been pragmatic in asking which model is most appro-priate for them.
“We’re seeing the digital strategy conversa-tion split into two areas. One is from the front-
end governance level deciding how a company works with new markets. Then there’s the back-end digital strategy dealing with what tools a company has and how to make them more effective.”
vBridge director Hamish Roy says the tech-nology used in New Zealand is similar to that used across the world.
“There’s no disadvantage in this respect, and we probably lead in a number of areas because we have a much shorter time to deploy. This is one benefit of having a smaller country. We can be nimbler in keeping up with the latest itera-tions of these technologies. So on that point we’re right up to date.”
Given New Zealand is 97% small and medi-um enterprises, the hybrid model (in which companies use a mix of cloud and on-premises storage technology) is a sensible choice for many SMEs. Revera chief executive Robin Cock-ayne thinks this trend will continue.
“The maturity of the hybrid model and the deployment of cloud will actually invigorate over the next 12 months. So if we are in the mid-dle of the bell curve, we’ll be moving to the front soon,” he says. [email protected]
We can be nimbler in keeping
up with the latest iterations of these technologies – Hamish Roy
Campbell Gibson
The cost of upgrading to the cloud may seem intimidating for small businesses using custom-made software.
A recent survey of 306 IT profession-als by US-based cloud company Appi-an found 87% of the respondents had a preference for custom-made software over pre-packaged software. The two most common reasons were because it is designed to serve a unique need (51%) and has more options and ability to make enhancements (46%).
Almost half of the respondents said their companies were in the process of migrating to a cloud-based application development platform, while 24% said they had already migrated and 15% said they will migrate in the next one to five years.
Costs are different for each business but anecdotal evidence suggests some small businesses may have to fork out as much as $30,000 to migrate to the cloud. Those with vested interests say this shouldn’t be confused with simply upgrading infrastructure, however.
“If you have a custom application
that’s sitting on an old legacy version of a server and it’s hard to find support, then it’s going to require some more work,” Microsoft cloud and enterprise business group lead Dirk Develter says.
“It’s very easy to mix up the cost of moving to cloud with just plain tidying up infrastructure.”
He says the cloud is typically cost effective but when custom software is thrown into the mix, unforeseen costs arise.
Jade Software chief innovation officer John Ascroft agrees and says he has encountered three businesses in the past couple of months who still run programs on unsupported software.
He says this could be as simple as a business still running Microsoft XP or Java but more so on software that has been built in-house.
The software can almost always be upgraded, he says, but the cost is immense compared to off-the-shelf cloud software that can be customised.
Mr Ascroft says the first and best option is to find software that is a 90% match but, “generally these businesses stick with the old software because it is doing something quite special,” he says.
Plan B managing director Ian For-rester says businesses need to be “cog-nisant of what their requirements are.”
“If they need to do an upgrade there’s a cost irrespective of whether they’re using their own hardware, a pri-vate cloud or a public cloud,” he says.
NZ is not lagging behind
Old software, new cloud
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