what’s in store for it in 2012? -...
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10-16 January 2012 | computerweekly.com
What’s in store for IT in 2012?The global economy is causing uncerTainTy in The iT secTor, so whaT can we expecT in The year ahead? page 4
Buyer’s guide: IT consumerisationin The firsT of a Three-parT series, we consider The meriTs of consumer Technology in business page 10
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RIM rebuffs Amazon and Microsoft approaches
Top 10 cloud computing stories of 2011
Top 10 social media stories of 2011
Atos to provide £8m GP data mining system
Top 10 IT skills and careers stories of 2011
VMware puts Windows on Kindle Fire
HTC loses Apple patent dispute
Top 10 gadgets of 2011
Businesses want more IT consultants for Christmas
IT professionals are impulsive risk-takers
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> IT in the UK SME sectorThis report from Knowledge Peers and Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) reveals what leaders of small and medium-sized businesses think of IT – its strategic value, its potential, and the changing way in which it is being used in their organisations.
> Eight threats your antivirus won’t stopNews headlines are a constant reminder that malware attacks and data leakage are on the rise. High-profile incidents that make big news might seem out of the ordinary. Yet businesses of every size face similar risks in the everyday acts of using digital technology and the internet for legitimate purposes.
> Unlocking growth: How open data creates new opportunities for the UKThe use of open data could be a critical factor in determining the success or failure of the UK’s growth agenda, according this report from business advisory firm Deloitte.
> Importance of testing software in realistic network conditionsApplications are expected to work over WANs, wireless LANs, GPRS, 3G or satellite networks. Often, software performance testing is only conducted on LANs. Equal performance is not guaran-teed in non-LAN networks. This report provides an introduction to the impact of deploying software over a WAN.
uk tech50 videoS
> Mike Lynch unveiled as the most influential person in UK ITHP’s Mike Lynch, voted the most influential person in UK IT, doesn’t like to think about challenges, but about opportunities.
photo StorieS
bloGS
> Philip Virgo: Will 2012 be the year that convergence finally happens?The rise of the smartphone as the global social networking and online browsing device of choice has expedited the convergence of fixed and mobile communications into “ubiquitous broadband”. Hence the driving force behind deals which upstage BDUK Broadband policy like that of O2 and Kensington and Westminster in much that same way that BSkyB upstaged IBA Satellite policy, two decades ago.
> Cliff Saran: Video – code qualityMatt Peachey, vice-president, Europe, at Veracode, says eight out of 10 applications will be insecure. In this video he discusses why developers do not relate security to code quality. Peachey says it is not just in-house code that may be insecure – do not trust suppliers: “Do not assume that the software you buy from third parties is secure. It probably is not secure.”
> Adrian Bridgwater: Software development in 2012 – three wise predictions?After our yuletide festivities and an extensive round of “how was 2011?” analysis, it seems only appropriate to make some predictions for the year ahead. Inside the software development ecosphere we find a world of shifting data transport channels right now – social media, cloud computing and massively “empowered” mobile devices are all impacting the way data is delivered.
> Mark Ballard: What a NHSIT year for CSCTuesday 27 December was a good day to bury bad news. With 60 million Brits digesting their Christmas feasts in front of crap telly, news outlets were running skeleton crews. This was the day Computer Sciences Corporation let it slip that it might have to write off the entire $1.5bn it has invested in the UK NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), after two years of negotiations under the threat of cancellation.
> Peter Blower: IT’s the human connectionWe invited top IT leaders to share their ideas for how to innovate with IT. Peter Blower, EMEA senior IT manager at Starbucks, explains how the coffee firm has used IT to get closer to customers and solve problems, rather than deploying technology for the sake of it.
> Phil Pavitt: How to transform your IT estate without capital investmentIn this presentation, Phil Pavitt, HMRC CIO and director general for change, explains how HMRC’s IT transforma-tion programme is making one of the UK’s largest IT estates modern, cost-effective and sustainable, while saving £131m per year running costs.
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> BBC Domesday Touchtable unveiledTwo technologies met to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, with the 2011 BBC Domesday Reloaded Project being revealed.
> 10 Reasons to consider the Nokia Lumia 800 for businessNokia is hoping that its new relation-ship with Windows Mobile will come good in 2012. following the release of the Lumia 800 recently, here at ComputerWeekly.com we’ve compiled 10 reasons for you to consider the Lumia 800 for work.
2 | 10-16 JANUARY 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
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the week in IT
3 | 10-16 january 2011 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
mobile networks
Google adds to patent estate in bid to protect AndroidGoogle has acquired 187 patents and 36 applications, adding to the 1,000 it purchased from IBM in September 2011 in a move to protect its Android mobile operating system from com-petitors’ patent lawsuits. The cost of Google’s intellectual property spend-ing spree runs into billions of dollars, having also purchased hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility ear-lier in 2011 for $12.5bn (£7.7bn). networking hardware
Gartner predicts biggest growth in comms equipment salesFor 2012, analyst Gartner expects telecommunications equipment and enterprise software to see the biggest growth in IT spending. The firm expects spending in telecom-munications to grow by 6.9%, with enterprise software growing by 6.4%. Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total $3.8 trillion in 2012, a 3.7% increase from 2011. it outsourcing
Shell hires Accenture to maintain HR and payroll applicationsOil giant Shell has transferred the management of its HR and payroll applications to Accenture as part of a multi-year SAP managed service. Shell’s HR and payroll systems sup-port 90,000 customers in 60 coun-tries. The deal will cover employee administration, self-service, environ-mental health, and payroll services. it outsourcing
Police reject Home Office plans to replace NPIA with private IT firmPolice chiefs have rejected draft Home Office plans for a private com-pany to manage police IT because it was unworkable under police force rules. Plans remain on the drawing board a year after the coalition an-nounced it would dissolve the Na-tional Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) and place its IT functions into a private company. The Home Office has pledged to form the new organi-sation by Spring 2012.
it outsourcing
Lincolnshire Police names G4S as back-office IT outsourcerLincolnshire Police Authority is to outsource its IT functions, along with its entire back office, to security firm G4S in a deal worth £200m. The authority has selected G4S as its pre-ferred bidder to enter into a strategic partnership that will provide a num-ber of services to support frontline policing, including its ICT services, control room, resource management unit, HR and support services.
business applications
Oracle reports 2% growth for Q2 as companies tighten IT spendingOracle sales grew only 2% to $8.8bn (£5.6bn) for its second quarter results compared to the same period last year, sparking fears that companies are cutting back on tech spending. Experts had anticipated sales of 7%. Hardware revenue for the quarter took the largest hit, down by 14%. mobile networks
EC set to legislate over public mobile networks abroadThe EC is planning to amend its leg-islation for roaming on public mobile communications networks, which would enable users to choose their data roaming provider. The EU has been looking to address the issue of the charges mobile users pay when they are abroad, a growing issue as users increasingly rely on smart-phones to access information. public sector
National Audit Office questions government skills for ICT strategyThe government lacks the technical skills to deliver on aspects of its ICT strategy, the National Audit Office has found. The NAO was respond-ing to the progress made on the government’s ambitious ICT strategy released in March to tackle systemic problems in government ICT pro-jects. It commended the early pro-gress being made in implementing the strategy but said progress has not kept pace with ambitions. it risk management
Microsoft issues patch for critical Windows DoS vulnerabilityMicrosoft has issued an emergency security update for a critical flaw that affects all currently supported versions of Windows and Windows Server and could be used for a denial of service (DoS) attack. The update resolves a denial of service issue present in all versions of ASP.NET. Microsoft software developer Scott Guthrie said the flaw refers to a vul-nerability to hash collision attacks.
it outsourcing
Atos wins £8m deal for patient data retrieval in GP practicesIT services company Atos has won an £8m five-year contract to provide a computer system that will retrieve patient information across GP prac-tices. The company will provide a General Practice Extraction Service, designed to enable comparable data extractions across the NHS. The De-partment of Health said the service will provide improvements to patient care by providing access to practice-level information.
CSC may write off $1.5bn for NHS ITCSC has braced shareholders for a write-off of the $1.5bn it invested in the troubled National Programme for IT (NPfIT) after negotiations with the NHS broke down. The company last month retracted a previous financial statement in which it reassured investors that negotiations with the NHS had been substantially completed. The supplier said the UK government had rejected draft agreements it and the NHS had prepared in the summer and which had just been waiting for government approval. “CSC was informed that neither the memorandum of understanding nor the contract amendment then under discussion would be approved by the government,” CSC told shareholders.
“We saw the advantages of utilising the office at a 120% capacity based on a number of our workforce working from home or remotely”
Myron Hrycyk, Severn Trent
cio interview
World IT spending growth forecast
Computing hardware
Telecoms services
Telecoms equipment
IT services
Enterprise software
7.6%
5.1%
9.6%
6.4%
6.9%
3.1%
7.7%
6.9%
6.1%
2.3%
2011 2012Source: Gartner
news analysis
What’s in store for IT leaders in 2012?
4 | 10-16 january 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
In this first issue of 2012, Computer Weekly reporters gaze into their crystal balls to bring you their expert predictions
The global economy is creat-ing an atmosphere of uncer-tainty in the IT sector, but what can we expect in 2012?
This time last year there was mild optimism about growth in the econo-my following the carnage of the cred-it crunch. But hope has quickly changed into despair and the Euro-zone crisis threatens to push parts of the world back into recession.
Even the Chinese economy is growing at a much slower rate as Eu-ropean customers of its manufac-tured products tighten their belts.
Variables such as the economic backdrop and security threats will, as always, influence IT decision mak-ers. But the evolution of cloud com-puting, the move from IPv4 network-ing to IPv6, as well as the introduction of Windows 8 will be worth watching over the next year.
Of particular interest will be the public sector, which is battling with massive budget cuts; and financial services, which faces trouble in the form of the Euro crisis.
EconomyThere will be another year of uncer-tainty and CIO plans could be put on hold as many CFOs expect the UK to re-enter recession, says Deloitte.
Research from the business consul-tancy revealed that chief financial of-ficers (CFOs) believe there is a 54% chance of the UK experiencing a dou-ble-dip recession.
With CFOs already pricing in a UK recession, according to Deloitte, CIOs are likely to be hit by reduced budg-ets and pressure to do more for less.
“CFOs are working on the assump-tion that the UK is likely to fall back into recession,” said Deloitte.
New IT investments could suffer as a massive 87% of the CFOs inter-viewed said it is a bad time to take extra risks in terms of spending. This marks a change from a year ago, when businesses believed a recovery was on the horizon.
“CFOs entered 2011 with a focus on expanding into new markets and increasing spending; they enter 2012 with a focus on cutting costs and in-creasing cash flow,” said the report.
Part of last year’s focus on moving into new markets involved creating enterprise-wide mobile strategies. Mobile banking and mobile shopping services were, for example, intro-
“CIO plans could be put on hold as many CFOs expect the UK to re-enter recession”
“CFOs are working on the assumption that the UK is likely to fall back into recession”
IT predIcTIons
duced en masse by the major banks and retailers.
Securing the businessThe proliferation of such strategies has introduced a new challenge for 2012. The amount of business done through mobile devices has made them a potentially more lucrative tar-get for hackers.
Security remains a challenge as new IT trends present new vulnera-bilities. Many predict mobile threats will be among the most pressing is-sues for businesses in 2012.
This is due to the range of vulnera-bilities affecting increasingly popular mobile platforms such as smart-phones and tablets. Vulnerabilities range from the high risk of data loss and the availability of unsecure ap-plications from app stores, to the growing threat from mobile malware, says Ruggero Contu of research firm Gartner. McAfee Labs expects attack-ers will bypass PCs and go straight after mobile banking apps, as more users handle their finances on mobile device platforms.
And hackers are not just targeting mobile devices and applications. Em-bedded systems designed for a spe-cific control function in larger sys-tems that are commonly used in
vehicles, medical devices and print-ers are also tipped as an emerging area of security threat. Security ex-perts expect proof-of-concept codes exploiting embedded systems to be-come more effective in 2012.
Meanwhile, security risks that emerged last year – such as those re-lated to consumer cloud computing services – are likely to continue to pose pressing threats. With business take-up of the cloud expected to in-crease, these threats will grow.
New cloud debateResearch from Computer Weekly’s parent TechTarget found that 24% of businesses plan to grow their ex-penditure for cloud services over the next year.
But boardroom discussions about the cloud will turn from the technol-ogy, where the argument has been won, to the commercial models.
Most IT leaders are now learning
how the cloud will radically redefine relationships with key suppliers. CIOs have bought into the concept of pay-as-you-go pricing, and the idea that cloud providers take ownership of IT risk elements such as availabili-ty and scalability. But when pressed, many established vendors are prov-ing unable to transfer the marketing hype to their products.
This will reshape the relationship between IT supplier and customer, and will provide opportunities for smaller, innovative firms that are not tied down by outdated software li-censing models.
Outsourcing consolidationAs cloud adoption accelerates, the supplier landscape will change. Traditional IT service providers, if they have not already, will have to re-engineer their service offerings.
At the same time they will have to radically change how they charge customers. This combination could fuel consolidation in the sector as suppliers acquire the skills and technology to give them a foothold in the cloud.
The big IT firms such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have already launched cloud versions of software but the 2012 release of Windows 8 will generate much discussion about cloud-style subscriptions. Cloud sub-scriptions will offer instant updates, compared to the conventional up-grade-based cyclical licensing model of products such as Windows. This is likely to prove a further catalyst to a fundamental debate about the future shape of the IT industry.
Windows 8Microsoft is expected to make the next version of its desktop and serv-er operating system (OS) available this year. The desktop version is set to provide tight integration with Microsoft’s Live cloud services and the Windows Store for Windows 8 applications. However, many busi-nesses are unlikely to make any »
more onlineAnalysis: CIO predictions for 2012
Analysis: Server virtualisation predictions for 2012
Analysis: Cloud predictions for enterprise IT in 2012
news analysis
5 | 10-16 january 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
plans to upgrade their desktop OS to Windows 8, as they are still mi-grating to Windows 7.
According to some experts, the Windows 8 Server OS may become a viable alternative to VMware for serv-er virtualisation.
Windows will also support the ARM microprocessor based on sys-tem-on-a-chip architectures, which Microsoft claims will enable smaller, thinner devices while reducing the amount of power required for the de-vice and increasing the battery life.
Through a project the company calls Redstone, HP is developing ARM-based blade servers that could dramatically reduce the thermal foot-print of Windows-based blade serv-ers in datacentres.
Migration to IPv6Another key technology driver in 2012 will be the shift from IPv4 networking to IPv6, as a result of the depletion of IPv4 addresses on the in-ternet. The IPv4 Exhaustion Counter shows that RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry allocating internet addresses across Europe, will run out of addresses on 22 July 2012.
Telecoms providers, the govern-ment and businesses will need to mi-grate to IPv6 to run applications and services that require additional IP ad-dresses, once the IPv4 address space has been depleted. The switchover will not happen overnight, but with no more new IPv4 addresses, net-
work managers will need to build IPv6 into their networks.
There will be a cost involved in hardware, software and training to switch. But, according to Verizon Business, benefits include a reduced internal enterprise network and IT operating expenditure and seamless integration with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Sectors to watchTwo of the biggest areas of IT spend-ing will be in financial services and the public sector.
After the carnage of the credit crunch, which began with the col-lapse of Lehman Brothers, banks shook up their IT to cut costs and manage the huge mergers between troubled banks and acquisitions of failing banks.
Thousands of IT professionals in the sector lost their jobs over the past few years and that might not be the end of it. Gartner predicts that, by 2014, more than one third of Europe-an banks will collapse as a result of major national defaults in Europe.
Another area to experience severe turmoil has been the public sector. This was the result of its very own credit crunch, the debt crisis. Here too, thousands of IT professionals lost their jobs but the government has set out a strategy that aims to make IT work better in Whitehall.
The public sector will be looking closer at the cloud; it will switch to a “digital by default” model for public services; and it will be busy develop-ing systems for the massive Universal Credit programme.
The significance of the cloud in government is set to grow in 2012, particularly after the publication of the G-Cloud framework in February. This will enable the public sector to buy from a list of accredited suppli-ers. But while the government has its fair share of evangelists for on-de-mand services, the cloud is likely to
remain at a nascent stage this year, as many organisations remain locked into existing contracts and public sector leaders get their heads around a new way of procuring IT.
Meanwhile the digital-by-default agenda, led by the newly-created Government Digital Service team, will gather pace as departments seek cost-effective means of delivering ser-vices in an environment of fiscal re-straint. This year more services are set to go online, with Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude having stat-ed the government’s approach will be “online-only” where possible.
In the background, but of no less significance, the development of sys-tems for the Universal Credit pro-
gramme will gain momentum in 2012 to meet the tight roll-out dead-line for 2013. Some critics have pre-dicted this could be the next large-scale public sector IT failure, due to the complexity of the systems in-volved. True or not, 2012 will cer-tainly be the key year in determining the project’s success.
2012 will be a little different than was expected 12 months ago. The green shoots of recovery have been stamped on before they had a chance to bloom. CIOs will have to yet again take a leading role in making technol-ogy do more for less. But at least, with the latest technologies utilising the cloud, they will have fresh op-tions to consider. ■
Greatest concerns for CFOs in 2012: Quotes are selected CFO comments on concerns
CFO views on opportunities today and following the failure of Lehman Brothers
Corporate priorities for 2012
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news analysis
Check your licensing for staff gadgets
7 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
Firms must consider software contract terms when allowing staff to use their own IT at work. Cliff Saran reports
Given the pace of change in gadgets that people wish to bring to work, IT depart-ments need to consider
whether their software contracts are compatible with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) schemes. What are the issues around licensing Windows software accessed via tablets, smart-phones and non-corporate PCs?
Licensing is one of the areas that IT departments must not underestimate if they are to remain compliant as staff use their own devices at work.
It is no longer the case that a CIO can estimate licence costs by count-ing the number of staff using applica-tions. Some products are charged on a per-client basis (as in the Microsoft Client Access Licence), which means an organisation will need to pay for every device that can access them. Through virtual desktop infrastruc-ture (VDI), users can access the cor-porate network and applications via their smartphones and tablet devices. As such, access from those devices may incur a licence charge.
Enterprise agreementsThis is particularly relevant to Microsoft enterprise agreements
(EA), given many businesses use Microsoft volume licensing to cover their Windows desktop and server environments.
But one research firm that has looked at Microsoft’s new EA found that the software company has simplified client access licensing. According to the Directions on Microsoft Licensing report published in December 2011, iPads and smart-phones used to access VDI often need to be licensed with a Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) subscription, and if used to access Office running on a VDI host, they typically need to be assigned an Office suite licence as well.
The report’s author, research vice-president, John Cullen, said: “Previ-ously, EA customers had to purchase VDA or Office licences for iPads (or any other device that didn’t fall under the definition of qualified desktop) separately under Select or Select Plus (typically at a higher cost and less convenience than under an EA) or arrange a special accommodation to include the devices in the qualified desktop count. Going forward, it is clearly Microsoft’s intention to use EAs to
increase compliance with these pre-existing rules and to make compli-ance more convenient.”
But simplicity does not necessarily mean that licensing will be cheap. On Computer Weekly’s sister site, SearchEnterpriseDesktop,
Paul DeGroat, principal consultant at Pica Communications, said: “The Microsoft licences needed to use a tablet with Office in a work environment will probably cost more than the tablet itself. For full flexibility, for example, an iPad user will need Microsoft licences that cost up to $1,000 (plus ongoing subscriptions, worth about $200 per year) to access virtual machines and remote desktop sessions running Office applications.”
Roaming rightsIn a Forrester Research report, Five criteria when choosing a Microsoft volume licensing program, the ana-lyst firm highlights the benefits of “Roaming Use Rights”, which cov-ers virtual desktops and application streaming.
“Microsoft licences Office and Windows by device, which means that you need to buy separate licenc-es for each non-corporate device from which employees access hosted in-stances of these products,” said For-rester principal analyst Duncan Jones in the report.
“Microsoft introduced Roaming Use Rights last year to address the potential unfairness of this approach. An EA may therefore be the cheapest way to support large VDI or streamed environments, provided the devices belong to the employee or a third party and remain off your company’s premises.” ■
desktop computing
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IT departments must check whether their software contracts
cover staff using their own devices at work
Along with the licensing required by Microsoft, CIOs will also need to consider the licensing implications of the platform they use to provide virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), to give users remote access to their Windows applications and data. Softchoice, a US-based Microsoft specialist, has compiled a guide to the different licensing options.
Microsoft licensing required for Citrix XenApp:RDS CALs (Windows Remote Desktop Services client access licences)Exchange CALs and Windows Server CALsWindows Virtual Desktop access and/or WindowsOperating system with Software AssuranceOffice applications with Roaming Use Rights (commonly granted through maintaining Software Assurance)Windows applicable infrastructure licensing: Windows Server; SQL Server; Exchange Server
Microsoft licensing requirements for VMware ThinApp:Exchange CALs; Windows Server CALsWindows Virtual Desktop Access and/or Windows operating system with Software AssuranceOffice applications with Roaming Use Rights (commonly granted through maintaining Software Assurance)Windows applicable infrastructure licensing: Windows Server; SQL Server; Exchange Server
Microsoft licensing requirements for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS):RDS CALs (Windows Remote Desktop Services client access licences)Exchange CALs; Windows Server CALsWindows Virtual Desktop access and/or WindowsOperating system with Software AssuranceOffice applications with Roaming Use Rights (commonly granted through Software Assurance)Windows applicable infrastructure licensing: Windows Server; SQL Server; Exchange Server
Source: Softchoice
Technology choices
more online› Government invites bids for £60m G-Cloud contracts
› Government IT asset register nears completion
› Government opens consultation on definition of IT open standards
interview
Driving a public sector IT revolution
8 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
Denise McDonagh, director of Home Office IT, talks to Kathleen Hall about transforming technology in government
as director of IT at the Home Office, Denise McDonagh has countless real-life examples of why the tradi-
tional approach to government IT is not working.
She is one of the public sector IT leaders with a growing appetite for change, and is closely involved with the department’s contribution to the government’s IT transforma-tion strategy.
“We’ve got to the point where things have to change,” she says. “We can’t continue to deliver IT in the way we do. I have many examples of frustrated customers, as they can’t get IT quickly enough and at a price they can afford.”
McDonagh has worked in govern-ment IT for 31 years, beginning her career at a junior level to eventually take one of the top Whitehall IT roles.
She implemented an “extend and blend programme” in 2009 for the Home Office, which broke up suppli-er duplication on a number of sys-tems management contracts within the department, including desktops, hosting, and networks. That activity rationalised and improved hosting capabilities and took out more than £100m in costs over the life of the contracts.
The experience positioned the department to become one of the government’s Foundation Delivery Partners (FDP) for its G-Cloud strat-egy, which aims to break-up the tra-ditional IT supplier base and move IT procurement to a commodity-based approach. McDonagh is tasked with working on infrastruc-ture, platform and software as-a-ser-vice, as well as electronic data ref-erence management and the Public Services Network.
Breaking up the big contractsAfter 2016, most of the department’s big contracts will end for good, says McDonagh.
“I can never see big contracts with systems integrators, where they de-liver a whole host of services, hap-pening again. If I looked at how I host
all my data, I could put some of it in the public cloud. For areas where data has to be secure, I could look at the government’s hosting capabili-ties,” she says.
McDonagh’s involvement in cross-government strategy comes from a real frustration about the way IT is currently delivered and a desire to in-fluence how it is done in the future.
“I’m here because I’ve spent so long in the old world and it hasn’t worked. I get beaten up a lot by cus-tomers as I don’t have the option to give them what they need. And by the time we are in a position to deliv-er it to them, they don’t need it any more. The people in the communica-tions department are on my head because I can’t give them access to social media, Facebook, Twitter – all
the tools they need to do the job. And the scientists in the department are frustrated because I can’t give them the IT they need to do things quickly. So things have to change,” she says.
“One of the things we want to do is look at how we can bring in innova-tion from a vast pool of IT sources outside the system integrators, but at a price and pace that we can afford.”
In the past, the approach has been to sit on projects and try to think of everything that is going to happen and put in requirements for every event. “Then, inevitably, six months down the line everything changes, which renders it out of date. We need to do things differently, whereby we start off even if we don’t know what the final outcome will be,” she says.
Moving to the cloudAs an FDP, the Home Office has been tasked with testing the principles of the cloud. For every argument recently made by government IT leaders, such as G-Cloud director Chris Chant, as to what is wrong with public sector IT, McDonagh says the department has a real-life example.
“We had an issue the other day with our audit colleagues who were looking for a hosting platform to sit some software on. That was some-
thing we should have been able to deliver to them within weeks, at a price that they could afford and that they could turn off whenever they wanted. Instead it took nine months, working with a number of systems integrators at a cost which is not ac-ceptable,” she says.
One of McDonagh’s biggest chal-lenges is to decide what business ap-plications would be appropriate to move to the cloud. The Cabinet Of-fice is revising its security levels on the Government Protective Marking System, which determines the level of sensitivity of information, and will publish a paper in April. Once this is complete she will have a clearer pic-ture of security implications.
“I’m hoping to use that to deter-mine what needs to sit in the restrict-ed space. I would suspect at least 50%, and that’s a cautious estimate. When we get e-mails sent to say cakes are on the cabinet over there, that doesn’t need to be sent from a re-stricted desktop,” she says.
“But things such as our case work-ing system, I wouldn’t put that in the cloud at this point in time, not even a private cloud, because the technolo-gy and the process and capability isn’t mature enough yet for a line-of-business application of that size.”
The government has invited appli-cations from cloud providers to join the trial run of its G-Cloud framework agreement. So far the interest from the market has been very positive, says McDonagh: “In the last three to six months we’ve met some really in-teresting SMEs with really interesting products to sell.”
The government recently extend-ed its G-Cloud tender deadline due to the amount of applications re-ceived. This level of interest has kept the small team approving sup-pliers very busy. ■
“I can never see big [government] contracts with systems integrators happening again”
IT leadershIp
community
The benefits of supporting user-centric computing
CIOs must resolve to turn to start-ups
9 | 10-16 january 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
Few would dispute that the needs of the business come first when it comes to IT service delivery. And in the
current environment, cost consid-erations are top for business and IT alike. As a result, it’s easy to neglect the needs of the people actually using IT as part of their day-to-day job.
It’s equally easy to say that this shouldn’t matter that much. After all, people are paid to do a job and to use the tools they’re provided with. But it does matter, for a number of reasons.
First, if people have to work with technology that doesn’t quite meet their needs, they often find ways around constraints. This has poten-tially far-reaching implications in terms of IT security and support.
Second, loss of productivity and morale often occur when technology is employed that users have difficulty getting to grips with.
Last, but by no means least, users are becoming ever more tech-savvy, and the devices and services they use in their private lives are at times su-perior to those provided by their em-ployers – and it is these personal technologies against which they judge work IT systems.
Many of the direct and indirect costs associated with these drivers aren’t straightforward to measure. But they are costs nevertheless,
whether it’s lost productivity, in-creased support and training, remedi-ation work to deal with security breaches, or other issues. There’s an-other reason as well why it makes sense to pay more attention to the needs and wants of the people using corporate kit and applications. Users who are on the whole happy with IT tend to be more tolerant and support-ive and this, in turn, can make it easi-er to get support or funding for IT-ini-tiated projects.
So what can IT do to move the user centre-stage, and yet not lose control nor increase risk and costs? One tech-nology solution worth considering is
User virtualisation can lower support costs and improve risk management and security
Bryan Glick leader martha Bennett opinion
“user virtualisation”, which enables the central management of users’ pro-files, settings and policies indepen-dently of the physical or virtual de-vices they use. This meets IT’s needs for maintaining control and security, while making sure that desktop and applications have each individual us-er’s chosen look-and-feel, regardless of the device used to access them.
There’s a variety of scenarios where user virtualisation can bring benefits in lowering support costs, improving risk management and se-curity, while at the same time im-proving the user experience and min-imising lost productivity. The key scenarios are:l Desktop migrationl User support optimisationl Support for flexible workingl Hot-desking
So what should IT departments look for in a user virtualisation solu-tion? As is invariably the case with off-the-shelf software, there is proba-bly no solution that meets all the re-quirements a company may have.
The relative importance of individ-ual features will depend on what’s key to each organisation’s specific circumstances, and what the main driver is for a potential user-virtuali-sation project.
For example, a company with tens of thousands of desktops looking to migrate to a new version of the oper-ating system is likely to have differ-ent requirements from one seeking to support flexible working.
So the first step would be to com-pile a feature list of ideal user virtu-alisation solutions (click on this link to view) and give each criteria a weighting. The weightings form the basis of a list of “must have”, “would like to have” and “nice to have” crite-ria. This list can then be used to sup-port the dialogue with potential solu-tion vendors.
It is crucial, though, not just to consider today’s requirements and how these are met by specific solu-tions. Equally important, if not more so, is the consideration of how an organisation’s needs may evolve in the future, to help ensure that the benefits from user virtuali-sation are maximised. ■
Martha Bennett is vice president and head of strategy at analyst Freeform Dynamics
So you’ve been back at work for a week now after the Christmas binge, and no doubt already you’re fed up with 2012 prediction stories.
Computer Weekly is as guilty as anyone, as our first issue of the year focuses on some of the highlights we expect to be writing about over the next year. Of course, they’re no different from the issues we’ve been writ-ing about for the last few months, but there’s no harm in sparing a moment to take stock of where uK IT stands in a year when the eyes of the world will be on this country.
Our start-of-term report card would no doubt be headlined, “Could do better”. 2011 brought a slowly growing realisation among politicians and business leaders that tech-nology can and must play a key role in the uK’s economic recovery, but IT is hardly at the top of the agenda.
We have wrung our hands for years about why the uK cannot produce the next apple/Google/Facebook, but even with a growing government focus on tech start-ups, corpor-ate IT decision-makers remain a risk-averse bunch in their attitude to selecting suppliers. That must change, and here is where CIOs can play their part this year.
as we have pointed out before, cloud computing heralds a dramatic change in the IT buyer-suppler relationship. This is already reflected in the consumer tech world, where small firms with no track record are gaining popularity creating mobile apps and cloud services. CIOs need to follow this trend.
When autonomy founder Mike Lynch accepted his award as the most influential person in uK IT in our uKtech50 list last month, his speech called on IT leaders to be open to start-ups - to take a risk on small firms they might otherwise ignore. This is where much of the innovation in IT is emerg-ing, and as such promises an important source of competitive advantage for IT buy-ers that spot such an opportunity.
If there is one new year’s resolution we would encourage IT managers to make it is this: to nurture the innovative small firms that will be key to both your success and our economic future. ■
editor’s blogcomputerweekly.com/editor
buyer’s guide
10 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
There is a growing realisation that desktop computing is no longer about IT providing a set of tools for employ-
ees. Consumer technology is more advanced than desktop IT, and staff are generally more tech-savvy than previous generations. So why con-tinue with the centralised approach to desktop computing?
The command and control philoso-phy that has driven corporate IT for over a decade is being put to the test. It may have brought user IT spending under control, but it is now a noose around the neck of business creativity.
began in the early 1960s when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) started building Ar-paNet, the forerunner to the internet.
Business/IT alignmentSo why the preamble into the golden era of computer history? Users have always pushed forward the bounda-ries of what IT can do, to help them
Giving users the power to chooseCliff Saran considers the merits of consumer technology in business and what it means for the IT department
do their jobs better. If one of the tenets of IT is to support the business, then surely it must support those people in the business who want to push the boundaries of what is possible?
Ted Schadler, a vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, thinks so. In the Forrester paper, How consumerisation drives innovation, he notes: “Allowing
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IT consumerisation is more than just a fad. It is a trend which began over 30 years ago with machines such as the Apple II and IBM PC. Ar-guably, the revolution probably start-ed back in 1982 when Mitch Kapor invented the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program – the first killer application for the new IBM PC. This gave users the ability to do number-crunching that was previously the preserve of data processing managers. A decade later, in the 1990s, relational databas-es and their reporting tools gave users the freedom to analyse business information.
Until the mid-1990s, it was busi-ness people who drove IT consumeri-sation. But Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for sharing information, which later became the worldwide web, was the final piece of the jigsaw in the con-sumerisation of communications that
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CW Buyer’s guideConsumerisation of it
part 1 of 3
Allowing employees to use devices, applications and sites that aren’t sanctioned by the company is a key driver of their ability to solve new customer and business problems
buyer’s guide
In a CIO panel discussion at the Business Cloud Summit 2011 in London in December 2011, Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of News International, spoke of how the company is creating an Apple-like genius bar to help users set up their own devices at work.
Cheesbrough left Telegraph Media Group in 2010 to head up IT at News International, where he is driving the media company’s cloud strategy. In his previous role, Cheesbrough pioneered the roll-out of Google Apps at Telegraph Media Group.
“It is important to give users the flexibility to use their own device,” he says. “We have a technology bar. You choose your hardware, and you can drop in and have an expert talk through the device.”
As in his previous position, Cheesbrough is pushing the cloud deep into the News International culture. The browser is a core application at the organisation.
Cheesbrough believes cloud computing injects agility into the enterprise, supports collaboration across departments and is supporting mobile working. He admits that when he joined the news organisation last year, there was a lot of resistance to cloud from the traditional technology team, but says it was “sitting on a burning platform and we had to act”.
News International’s approach to IT consumerisation
employees to use devices, applica-tions and sites that aren’t sanc-tioned by the company is a key driver of their ability to solve new customer and business problems.”
He recommends that CIOs and IT directors focus on two areas. First is what he describes as the climate – the environment a company’s executives create. “Climate is an easier thing to change,” notes Schadler in the report. “A climate of permission to make positive change requires only that your boss agrees. Any boss can do that, within limits.”
The second concerns providing staff with the technology, the tools and permission to collaborate and in-novate by offering a complete tech-nology toolkit. This should include devices that allow employees to be connected and productive on the go and collaboration tools such as web conferencing, instant messaging and social technology. “Any IT organisa-tion can deliver those tools. It starts a virtual cycle: great tools that employ-ees love leads them to look for other great tools to harness,” says Schadler.
The IT-savvy userAn online survey carried out by analyst firm Freeform Dynamics re-ported that over 60% of the 1,600 IT and business professionals who par-ticipated said staff were keen to use their own equipment at work.
“Users are becoming ever more tech-savvy, and the devices and ser-vices they use in their private lives are at times superior to those provid-ed by their employers, and it is these
personal technologies against which they judge work IT systems,” says Martha Bennett, vice-president, head of strategy at Freeform Dynamics, who led the research.
Thanks to plug-and-play technolo-gies for home users, people are com-fortable connecting their internet-ca-pable TVs to the web to access BBC iPlayer, streaming music and video around their homes using DNLA, and sharing multimedia, documents and printers via a home file server. They are tech-savvy and see the benefits of connecting smartphones, tablets and other devices to their sophisticated home networks. If their home net-works are so rich, why is the local area at work so clinical?
Other users are turning away from traditional business software. Why spend hundreds of pounds on Micro-soft Office Professional just to edit word processor documents or spreadsheets? OpenOffice is a free, open source alternative that, while not as rich in functionality as MS Of-fice, provides the basics.
Andrew Millard, senior director, marketing Europe, at Citrix Online, the online services division at of Citrix and maker of the GoToMeeting cloud-based product, says IT consumerisa-tion requires a cultural change in busi-ness. “Offering flexible working is key to hanging on to people,” he says. “Lo-cation is less important now.”
People will happily use Google Docs because it simplifies document sharing over the internet, without the need for IT to set up a sophisticated SharePoint collaboration server.
And it is not just the Microsoft desktop that is being torn apart by IT consumerisation. Android and iOS devices can easily connect to Micro-soft Exchange, providing e-mail, cal-endar and contacts’ synchronisation without the need for IT to deploy a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).
BES, SharePoint and MS Office are products built for a different era of computing – one of client-server computing. Thanks to open interfac-es, open data and mash-ups, users can now build surprisingly sophisti-cated applications themselves. This era of user empowerment is rather like the first age of computer power users, who came from the accounts department.
Given the austerity measures businesses are now facing, can they really justify spending on business IT, especially when consumer tech-nology is offering very compelling alternatives and users are happy to fund their own technology purchas-es and spend their own time putting IT together to make their working lives easier?
Consumerisation strategyJeanne Harris, executive research fellow and senior executive at the Accenture Institute for High Performance in Chicago, says while IT executives are aware of IT con-sumerisation, most executives do not have a strategy.
According to Accenture research, IT executives are looking at IT con-sumerisation in a piecemeal fashion. They are looking at individual prod-ucts, such as allowing people to use Gmail or an iPad. “About a quarter of IT executives are starting to formulate
a cohesive strategy,” she adds.Harris regards the level of user
computing maturity as adolescent. “End-user computing has grown up. We used to teach people how to crawl and walk. They have reached the teenage stage, and feel they can be more productive if they can man-age their own IT,” she says.
In this era of consumer-led com-puting, rather than specifying exactly which systems to use, IT can provide an approved list of devices, operating systems and applications that meet the criteria required by the business in terms of security, compatibility, re-liability and support. This is the beauty of open systems.
IT consumerisation, where the user has the power to choose, is most ef-fective when the supporting technol-ogy is open. A so-called end-to-end solution, no matter how secure and seamlessly integrated it claims to be, will limit the ability for users to plug their own devices into corporate sys-tems, inevitably leading to an in-crease in support costs. ■
more onlineCES 2011: Embrace IT consumerisation
Report reveals concerns over consumerisation of IT
How to make a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programme work
The consumerisation of IT: you need to be ready
11 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
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The consumerisation of IT may be reflecting a wider change in the business landscape that alters current thinking on the relationship between a business and its staff.
In 1985, Michael Porter used the term “value chain” in his book, Competi-tive advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance, to describe the function of a business. While it fits best within the manufacturing sector, the concept of the value chain has become core to business management.
Jeanne Harris, executive research fellow and senior executive at the Accenture Institute for High Performance in Chicago, says: “At the time the value chain was developed, it applied to the Russell 3000 index [of top US companies], but today half of the Russell 3000 build value in a different way to manufacturers. They produce ideas, not finished products.”
In the paper Chains, Shops and Networks, published in 2005 by the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business, Harris notes that more and more companies are operating in a space in which traditional assets, both physical and monetary, are of shrinking importance to business success. “Replacing them in significance are assets such as customer relationships, intellectual property, and a pipeline of senior executives,” the paper states.
Harris sees IT consumerisation as an outgrowth of the value chain. In many ways, today’s business practices were forged in the industrial revolution of the 18th century. In the age of the internet and consumer empowerment, is it still best practice to have people travel to a place of work, which houses equipment and where staff productivity is measured as a seven-hour shift?
Out of the value chain
security think tank
12 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
As more businesses embrace cloud computing, informa-tion security professionals must effectively manage
security compliance in the cloud.Public cloud computing gives the
individual company much less con-trol than a private cloud – but greater scalability, elasticity and business benefit. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings give the company much less control than infrastructure-as-a-ser-vice (IaaS) offerings, where the com-pany remains in charge of operating system configurations and applica-tion platform patches.
Business-centric securityFor John Colley, managing director, Europe, of (ISC)2, cloud computing is good news for IT security profes-sionals, since it forces organisations to focus on the basics. “Understand
ward to gain board support and budget to managing across the organi-sation to engender broader apprecia-tion for requirements across all de-partments. This should open more doors to engage in the discussions that are taking place informally, as well as the formal, enabling them to anticipate and provide for those re-quirements, he says.
“It’s about bringing down the barri-ers and adopting a more open ap-proach to security and IT so both de-partments have a finger on the pulse of what tools and technologies are considered important to enabling the organisation to achieve its business goals,” he adds.
Colley believes that without an open approach there is no foundation for understanding what matters in terms of compliance. “We can follow all the advice in the world about the
Managing security in the cloudWarwick Ashford asks industry experts what practical steps IT security professionals can take to ensure cloud security
development of frameworks – the is-sues to address with suppliers and the areas they are likely to have ad-dressed anyway – but if we don’t have a grip on the impact cloud is having on our business, we cannot assure compliance.”
Risk assessment to identify costs, risks, probabilities and business im-pact are key to any successful cloud outsourcing strategy. Phil Stewart, di-rector of communications at ISSA UK, urges CISOs to ask questions such as: What makes business sense to outsource? What is simply too risky or cost ineffective to outsource? And, what are the legal implications of moving the data?
For Stewart, the international standard ISO 31000 on “risk manage-ment – principles & guidelines”, is an extremely useful reference for assess-ing business risks.
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your business and what it is doing, develop the appropriate policy and enforce it,” he says.
After all, using the public cloud ef-fectively is an IT governance issue that starts with an assessment of the impact cloud is having on the organi-sation to devise a strategic and work-able approach.
Colley says security professionals need to assess both planned projects to migrate particular processes over to the cloud and unplanned activi-ties. “We know any employee with a company credit card is able to access a cloud-based resource; and we know that they are, given the popularity of Dropbox, Google Docs, cloud-based collaboration software, Skype for business and the like,” he says.
Colley recommends that chief in-formation security officers (CISOs) shift their focus from managing up- »
security think tank
Phil Stewart, director of communications at ISSA UK, says cloud security considerations should include:l Effective due diligence;l Where data is hosted and replicated;l What technical, physical and procedural controls are in place to protect the
outsourced assets;l How vulnerability assessment is performed by the service provider and
how often;l Whether the supplier is certified against any internationally recognised
standard. ISO 27001-certified and PCI DSS-compliant providers are helpful in this case.
Practical steps to cloud securityPart of this risk assessment process is also identifying what current assets an organisation has, and the impact to the business should they become una-vailable or lost. Stewart stresses the importance of identifying and catego-rising data already within the organi-sation and the business processes around them. For example, storing credit card data in-house currently and outsourcing the storage would mean an increased scope for PCI DSS payment card security – although out-sourcing the payment transactions themselves to an approved provider usually makes sense. Storing personal data could have legal ramifications if stored or replicated outside the coun-try of the data subject, he warns.
Stewart says there are two pressing issues that need to be addressed by the information security community. His first concern is addressing the new threats that virtualisation poses within cloud computing. The second is the ability for SMEs to perform due dili-gence effectively for an outsourced pro-vider, given they rarely have in-house technical or legal expertise. “I suspect the answer is an assurance programme for cloud providers that effectively ad-dresses these questions,” he adds.
He says SME security itself can also be improved by innovative sup-pliers offering “security in the cloud”, such as taking enterprise-class reporting aspects and managing alerts and logs for SMEs remotely: having the expertise to alert them of threats that the SME might not be able to identify for itself.
Data sensitivity issuesCarsten Casper, research director at Gartner, urges companies to look at the sensitivity of their data and their busi-ness processes and then find the cloud computing or as-a-service model with the highest benefit and the lowest risk. “It’s something we’ve been doing in hosting, outsourcing, offshoring, etc, for many years. Some European uni-versities move their students’ e-mail to the public cloud,” he says. “Some companies have long been using CRM and HRM as a service, accepting that datacentre locations are barely known and rarely audited,” he says.
“Gartner describes three styles of cloud computing: with low sensitivi-ty, where the client accepts whatever security controls the provider has to offer; with medium sensitivity, where the client uses a trusted third party for security; and with high sensitivi-ty, where basically all information is
encrypted on-premises before it is transmitted into the cloud.”
Casper urges organisations to con-sider additional controls, which may be technical, contractual or even organ-isational. Some companies ask cloud providers to commit to a European da-tacentre location to minimise legal risk. Others would prefer to see that the pro-vider is certified against a cloud securi-ty standard, but a widely recognised standard does not exist yet, he warns.
Another option he has seen is en-crypting e-mails within the public cloud, where companies keep keys on their own premises while leveraging most features of the cloud platform. For Casper, the most critical require-ment in most scenarios is transparen-cy. “Companies – and even more so regulators – want to be able to audit cloud providers. Those who allow this to happen will have a competitive advantage for years to come.”
Risk strategyDani Briscoe, research services man-ager at The Corporate IT Forum, says an organisation’s risk appetite will largely direct the amount of cloud that is used. If an organisation has already outsourced its development, support or business process to an ex-ternal supplier in say, India or China, it is more likely to be predisposed to have a risk appetite that would wel-come investment in the cloud. Once that formula has been accepted, then cloud services can be viewed as an outsource agreement with a virtual supplier. The next stage is to under-stand the contract offered and to en-sure that all the necessary questions have been answered sufficiently – the most pertinent being data location, ownership and who is responsible for the controls around the data.
Briscoe says internal access controls are frequently stricter than those ap-plied to cloud services. “At the recent Data in the Cloud workshop hosted by the Forum in London, there was much discussion around the sensitivi-ty of data stored and country-specific legal requirements to be considered
when contracting cloud services and the financial and reputational cost of data leakage,” she says.
There was also concern about the ease with which users can circum-vent existing security policies and controls and directly contract with cloud suppliers. “This is not a con-cern where data is non-sensitive and the organisation owns the intellectual property, but of grave concern if data is not vetted before being placed out-side the organisation’s control. There has to be a business agreement on the acceptable risk,” says Briscoe.
Organisations must develop new policies and processes to take into ac-count the vagaries of data in the cloud. So, current practices not spe-cifically controlling or regulating data in the cloud could leave organisa-tions open to changes made by the provider with little or no notice.
Finally though, the question that must be asked is, “Why be worried?” If there is currently no concern about the security of data held by the organisa-tion, or if there is little security around it, is it necessary to be concerned about moving this data to the cloud? Many Forum members were candid in this discussion, says Briscoe, agreeing that there is an element of the unknown and a perceived lack of control leading the business and IT professionals working on these projects to take an ap-proach that was sometimes more risk averse than other projects with more traditional outsource providers. ■
more onlineSecurity Zone: Cloud security concerns – talk to your vendor
Private cloud computing security issues
IT security not always part of cloud decision, says IDC
13 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
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Companies want to be able to audit cloud providers. Those who allow this to happen have a competitive advantage
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this is the first of two articles on this subject. read the second part next week.
IT in education
14 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
a generation that has grown up with technology at its fingertips is forcing univer-sities to look at technology
in a different way.The hike in university fees has
presented higher education with one of the biggest competitive challenges ever to face its institutions.
Universities must invest in their IT, and particularly networks, in a more business-like manner if they are to compete. Students today frown upon any disruption in ser-vices in the same way bank custom-ers do. Chances are, poor networks will make some universities less attractive.
Businesses have already recog-nised the demands of a new genera-
John Latham, deputy vice-chancel-lor at Coventry University, says its network has become the fourth util-ity, alongside water, gas and electric-ity. “Everything revolves around the computer network,” he says. Coventry University’s network deliv-ers Wi-Fi across the entire premises, uses voice over IP (VoIP), runs its CCTV on the infrastructure, and has created a “Smart Campus” where
The network at Coventry University has become the fourth utility, alongside water, gas and electricity
Servicing the sizeable IT demands of students in higher educationKarl Flinders investigates what universities are doing to meet the technological needs of their students
students can access almost anything with a smart card. The network also provides building management func-tions, such as switching off lights when rooms are not in use.
The communications network needs to be on tap at every campus, halls of residence and on students’ own mobile devices, providing per-sonalised access to everything.
Latham says the main difference between big business and universi-ties, in terms of providing organisa-tional IT, is the fact that the user bases are so different. “A business might have 22,000 employees that it has to service with its IT infrastruc-ture, but we have 22,000 students who are customers using our infrastructure every day. Customer
tion, and they too are trying to build computing environments that suit the ways of working their staff demand.
Campus-wide Wi-FiUniversity networks are becoming critical for the provision of student services and educational resources, as well as providing university administration with efficiencies.
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IT in education
Warwick University is in the final phase of a three-year IT transfor-mation which began in 2008.
Phase one of the project saw the university embark on major infrastructure projects, including network and datacentre upgrades.
About £10m was invested in a new core network based on Cisco technology, which was built by specialist education networking supplier BT iNet during a 14-week period in 2010. The network, which is expected to save about £15m over 11 years, allowed the university to offer services including VoIP and videocon-ferencing from the desktop.
The university had also reached capacity in its datacentre and needed to address this. It has virtualised the datacentre with a ratio that saw the applications on every 10 physical servers transferred to one virtual server.
Phase two, which was completed this year, involved re-educating its IT workers, who have always focused on technology, to be services-driven. “Our internal team
was full of dedicated people with a focus on technology, and we needed to shift this to a focus on services,” says the university’s IT director, Mike Roberts. “Their interest was managing the technology, but we wanted them to think about developing a service from a user’s perspective.”
The university invested a lot of time and effort in human resources management to get
people to think about services. Methodologies such as ITIL and Six Sigma were taught to staff.
The first two phases have fixed IT and set the founda-tion for the university’s IT to become services-driven.
Phase three sees the university attempt to exploit its improved infrastructure and new skills to create lots of small, user-driven projects. “Our major challenge now is finding the interesting and innovative ideas and the problems the people in our community have, and then making technology do what they want it to do,” says Roberts.
Warwick University moves to service-driven ITsatisfaction is one of the main meas-ures of our success,” he says. These users/customers often have their own devices, work at unusual hours and require unfettered access to systems.
Universities may have been later to the IT innovation party than many in the private sector, but they are being forced to catch up quickly. Mike Roberts, IT director at Warwick University, says universities are now realising the importance of their IT, in the same way that private sector companies did 10 years ago: “There is a growing realisation in institu-tions that without IT, the organisation simply does not work.”
He says universities face major challenges in satisfying demanding students: “Students expect high standards, and will compare us against other universities and expect the same level of service they get from companies such as Google.”
Roberts adds that universities have a unique challenge of taking on thousands of new users every year: “What’s different about a university, compared with other organisations, is that we get 5,000 people turning up every year with new ideas and expectations.”
These users will also be paying through their noses for an education from these universities. As a result, they will be as demanding as a bank customer.
Lowering costsCost-cutting through IT is perhaps the next phase for universities with more back-office savings on the horizon. For instance, Anglia Ruskin University has outsourced
student-facing IT systems to help serve students across the world, 24 hours a day.
The institution, which has 32,000 students, outsourced its student-fac-ing website and information system to Bluesource to ensure systems are always available.
Assistant director of IT at Anglia Ruskin, Gregor Waddell, says the university realised it needed around-the-clock availability when it started supporting students in different time zones. The university could no longer risk systems going down out of hours. The university, which has two main campuses in Cambridge and Chelmsford, supports students in different countries, including Malaysia, China and Trinidad.
“We were not large enough to provide a 24/7 support system in-house,” says Waddell. By out-sourcing the monitoring of systems to Bluesource, the university’s 60 IT staff are able to focus on other areas.
The university’s online learning resources are not currently supported by Bluesource, but he says they may be in the future.
Once universities have got their ships in order, there are further opportunities to cut operating costs, such as by centralising IT services. Richard Oliver, director of strategy at network provider BT iNet, which has worked closely with Warwick and Coventry universities, says organisa-tions have consolidated their IT in recent years, but there could be more changes to come.
“In the past, universities had very federated IT – different faculties had different networks. Each faculty would have its own budget – differ-ent builds, different designs and dif-ferent suppliers,” he says.
But today, more and more services are across the campus, adds Oliver, and shared services with other universities could be the next big challenge.
University networks and the IT that underpins them have huge expectations placed upon them. They need the resilience to offer uninterrupted access to educational resources and must be as least as good as their competitors’ networks to meet the needs of an unforgiving user base. ■
more online› Kingston University deploys desktop virtualisation
› Warwick University enters final phase of three-step IT transformation programme
› University challenge: using IT to improve services and reduce costs
› Can apprenticeships remedy fall in IT GCSE and A-level student numbers?
› UK IT profession could suffer as course fees face huge rises
15 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
Kingston University has deployed virtualisation services across its four campuses and satellite offices. The university has provisioned 3,000 Microsoft RemoteFX desktop sessions, and aims to provide 6,000 PCs, 1,000 Macs and more than 1,000 mobile devices via a blended desktop delivery model.
The new infrastructure is made up of HP c-Class BladeSystem and HP
P4000 LeftHand Storage Systems, and will provide a virtualised platform for Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft Remote Desktop Session Host with RemoteFX virtual machines.
Roberto Volo, head of information services infrastructure at Kingston University, says the virtualised environment means the university no longer has to worry about its user devices, operating systems and hardware upgrade costs.
“The traditional model for universities is heavily managed desktops, where we deliver in excess of 1,000 applications in a managed desktop. Every year we have to rebuild each one with a number of updates, which is very time consuming,” he says.
Virtualisation delivers blended IT
Universities may have been later to the IT innovation party than many in the private sector, but they are being forced to catch up
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16 | 10-16 January 2012 Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
Is your iPhone stopping you from having a holiday romance?A not-so-extensive survey of 1,000 people by Skyscanner has revealed that you are more likely to land a lady in Lanzarote if you own an “old-school” mobile.
According to the survey, only 54% of iPhone users admit to holiday ro-mances, compared with a whopping 72% of those who have so far steered clear of the touchscreen.
Hold on a second. “Only” 54% of iPhone owners admitted to a holiday romance? When the Downtime staff were teens, we’d have given anything for odds like that.
Anyway, never ones to be left out, 61% of Android users also admitted to holiday romances, but only 36% of them went to tell all on Facebook and Twitter.
The survey goes on to suggest that the stereotypical chauvinists tend to own iPhones, with 47% of them bragging about their canoodling on social networks.
The reason Skyscanner cites for the supposed lack of lip-locking? Apps. It claims Apple fans seem to be too busy downloading apps, with 76% of them using apps on holiday,
whereas only 55% of Android own-ers do the same.
Downtime’s holiday tip: Don’t fid-dle with your mobile at all – try actu-ally talking to people.
The Nativity – like you have never seen it beforeThe story of the nativity is known by almost everyone, but Reverend Gavin
Tyte decided that it was lacking a certain something.
The vicar from Devon thought a spot of beatboxing, rapping, dressing up and video editing would do the trick, so he set to work.
The 40-year-old’s efforts are availa-ble for all to see on YouTube – and they attracted plenty of attention dur-ing the Christmas period.
Having been a beatboxer since the age of eight, Rev Tyte has judged the UK beatboxing championships, was the former editor of humanbeatbox.com, and he frequently uses beatbox rhythms in his sermons.
Last year, he produced a quick ver-sion of the nativity on video and said: “I had feedback that people wanted an HD version with subtitles, so I set about creating a new video that could be played in churches and youth clubs. I love writing, and have won-dered if it is possible to write the Bible in rap.”
Downtime thinks Tyte is obvious-ly “down with the kids” and his video editing skills don’t seem to be too bad either.
Gaming gecko is champion smartphone ant smasherDon’t you just hate it when you down-load a new game for your phone, get a respectable high score, only to then let your friend have a go and watch on as they calmly trounce you?
Well, an Australian man by the name of Philip Gith has come up with a solution. Say hello to his pet bearded dragon, Crunch.
As you can see from this video on YouTube, Crunch makes light work of the ants and other creepy crawlies in the popular smartphone game Ant Smasher.
Gith, 21, of Brisbane, said: “It was kind of really random because whenever I feed her crickets she just chases them through the tank and
Heard something amusing or exasperating on the industry grapevine? E-mail [email protected]
Not sticking to your New Year’s resolution? That’ll be a fiver pleaseWe all do it, or rather attempt to. No chocolates for three months, starting a diet and, probably the most common, joining a gym. We are, of course, talking about New Year’s resolutions.
If you hadn’t already realised, and we hate ourselves for typing this, there’s now an app for that.
However, if you don’t own an iPhone, you can breathe a huge sigh of relief now, as the “Gympact” app is only currently available on iOS. That’s your excuse right there.
Gympact essentially swaps the sweat you excrete at the gym for cash, but, if you are naughty and skip a workout you will be penalised, with Gympact hitting you in the second worst place possible, the wallet.
How does it work? You agree a pact with the app – the more days you commit the more dosh you can earn – and as long as you check in at the gym and remain there for 30 minutes, Gympact will pay out.
The rewards come from a community pot that is funded through fines incurred by users who have not stuck to their agreed commitment.
So if you are an avid gym goer, this is a surefire way to earn a little extra pocket money, but for others it could simply be the extra motivation they need.
One last thought: would it be cheating or just pure laziness if Downtime were to check into the gym and be paid to sit in the steam room and sauna for 30 minutes?
downtime
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contactsJo
Hn
Fo
xx
just smashes them.”Now, if only Crunch
could help Downtime complete Angry Birds too. ■
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