European banking firm UniCredit to introduce cloud in its datacentres

European banking and financial services firm UniCredit has signed a multi-billion dollar agreement with IBM to introduce cloud-based infrastructure within its datacentres and to create new IT service models.

The 10-year deal also involves the creation of a joint venture firm between the two companies, which will sell cloud-based IT services to other European companies and institutions.

The long-term IT agreement is aimed at transforming UniCredit’s IT infrastructure that supports all its commercial and private banking activities in Europe. By introducing cloud-based services to its datacentres, UniCredit will gain dramatic IT efficiency and flexibility, according to the financial services firm.

As part of the agreement, a joint venture between UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions – the global service company of UniCredit – and IBM will market and deliver IT infrastructure services to other European companies and institutions.

The joint venture will have employees in Italy, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Czech Republic representing both companies.

Together, IBM and UniCredit will establish a “Value Creation Center” that will aim to harness innovation to provide superior service and drive success for clients on a continuous basis. The centre will monitor trends in the banking and IT industries and identify emerging disruptive technologies to be rapidly introduced into UniCredit’s infrastructure, according to the financial firm.

Cloud-based analytics will enable UniCredit to better predict and understand trading in financial markets, manage spending and provide innovative services to its customers, according to IBM.

“UniCredit’s innovation-driven approach to sourcing reflects changing motivations in the strategic sourcing marketplace,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice-president of IBM Global Technology Services.

“When making sourcing decisions, organisations like UniCredit are moving beyond basic needs, such as cost-cutting, to higher-order business outcomes, such as growth, competitive advantage and, of course, innovation.”

According to the IBM Center for Applied Insights study, Why partnering strategies matter, which questioned more than 1,300 business and IT sourcing decision-makers worldwide, organisations that have made that shift are outperforming on a host of financial measures, including revenue and gross profit growth.

UniCredit operates in 20 different European countries. Its deal with IBM comes as the blue chip reported second quarter revenues of $24.9bn, missing market estimates. IBM’s $3.23bn profit was down by 17% compared with the same period in 2012, but its cloud revenue was up 70%.

In the previous quarter too, IBM's revenue and profit fell short of analysts' forecasts – for the first time in eight years. As a result of the poor first quarter, the company cut 3,300 jobs and turned its focus on cloud computing and data analysis to revive its business.

As part of its focus on cloud computing, IBM bought Israel-based virtualisation management provider CSL International to expand its cloud offerings by adding management capabilities.

It marked IBM’s second acquisition in two months as the company aims to achieve its objective of reaching $7bn annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015. In June, it acquired cloud computing infrastructure provider SoftLayer Technologies for a reported $2bn.

UK datacentres vulnerable to BYOD risks, shows Ponemon study

A Ponemon Institute research into the bring your own device (BYOD) trend has found that about 60% of UK businesses have no personal device policy in place and are putting critical data at risk once it leaves a company, whether through BYOD or public cloud-based file-sharing.
By ignoring simple security steps and employee BYOD education, companies are jeopardising their confidential data, exposing it to theft, corruption, hackers, malware and more, the research report has warned.

The study, 2013 Data Protection Trends Research, found that 58% of the 570 UK IT chiefs surveyed admitted to not having a BYOD policy in place to manage employee-owned mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.

A wide majority (80%) of organisations have not educated employees on BYOD privacy risks, while 31% of IT teams said employee-owned devices were not allowed, illustrating that organisations are still in denial when it comes to consumer IT trends.

Another 23% have opened up the company network to make exceptions for executives, who may be handling sensitive data. This puts businesses at an increasing risk of data loss and serious compliance issues, according to the research firm.

The report, commissioned by backup provider Acronis, revealed that currently, only 21% of the respondents mandated a device password or key lock on personal devices, and only 18% performed remote device wipes when employees leave the company.

The study stated that employees commonly share corporate files through third-party cloud storage solutions such as DropBox, but as many as 69% of organisations do not have a policy in place around public cloud use and 80% have not trained their employees in the proper use of these platforms.

Experts have previously warned that BYOD and IT consumerisation are not just passing fads and that they are here to stay.

While 59% of UK organisations said they will support Apple’s Mac machines in the next year, more than half (61%) said compatibility and interoperability are still big obstacles to making Macs compliant with enterprise IT, which puts data stored and shared across the corporate network and on Apple devices at risk.
The study’s findings are in line with a previous YouGov report which revealed that many UK employers are failing to provide guidance on the usage of personal devices at work – potentially putting personal information at risk.

“Personal devices have permanently and positively changed the workplace, particularly in the way employees collaborate, work remotely and interact with company data,” said Rick Powles, managing director UK and Ireland at Acronis.

“BYOD is a huge opportunity for companies, but our research shows troubling signs of negligence in the face of these dangers. However, with policies and solutions that manage the flow of data between multiple devices and environments, companies can practice safe BYOD with confidence.”

To optimise BYOD and to avoid data loss and compliance issues, organisations should take immediate steps to ensure employees are trained in safe BYOD practices, that personal device and public cloud use are monitored and managed, and that effective data protection strategies are in place to prevent data loss, Powles advised. These are the critical steps to achieving safe BYOD.

The study was part of Ponemon Institute’s global survey of 4,374 IT practitioners which included more than 570 respondents from the UK, spanning from mid-sized to large enterprises.

It also showed that, despite many UK companies lacking in devising a BYOD strategy, the UK was ahead of the US in embracing BYOD and planning policies around employee device management. This finding echoed Citrix’s European chief’s remark that BYOD strategies are being adopted much faster in Europe than the US.

Government awards £1m fund to help UK datacentres cut carbon footprint

The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the ministerial department that aims to reduce UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and promote energy efficiency, has awarded almost £1m funding to assist UK datacentres minimise their carbon footprint.

The funding was won by a consortium led by Cambridge-based datacentre energy monitoring company Alquist and involving Verizon and Schneider Electric.

The funding comes after it emerged that datacentre energy requirements grew by 63% in 2012, suggesting that rising energy costs and stricter regulations are not helping to limit datacentre power use and cut carbon emissions.

Alquist will help the two consortium members achieve significant CO2 reductions by integrating its Celsius temperature monitoring system in two refurbishment projects in London.

The funding award from DECC, follows the consortium’s success in the “Invest in Innovative Refurbishment” DECC competition organised by the Technology Strategy Board in April 2012.

Alquist’s datacentre temperature monitoring tool Celsius uses advanced laser technology and fibre optics to create high-definition temperature maps of datacentre server racks and power transmission equipment.

The real-time information will enable datacentre managers to optimise airflow and air-conditioning settings more actively. This will help improve the datacentre facility’s energy usage, offering a mid-size datacentre about 10-30% reduction in electricity bills and carbon emission reduction of up to 2,000 tonnes per annum, according to Alquist.

 “Datacentre managers have very limited visibility of temperature fluctuation across their data halls. Celsius offers real-time visibility to enable IT professionals cool equipment far more efficiently and make significant energy savings," said Alquist founder Andrew Jones.

“We are delighted that DECC is investing in an area with huge potential for CO2 reduction.”
Alquist’s temperature monitoring tool targets a high-growth market where the UK, with over £3bn invested in 2011, is the world’s third largest green datacentre player. The global market for green datacentres will grow from $17.1bn (£10bn) in 2012 to $45.4bn (£28bn) by 2016, according to a study.

Datacentres are forecast to consume 6% of UK electricity by 2020 and UK suppliers lead globally in developing green datacentre solutions. Government funding will help refine the Celsius range of tools and provide hard evidence of actual savings at two London demonstrator sites owned and operated by Verizon and Schneider Electric.  

"Operating cooling systems efficiently whilst avoiding hotspots is one of the key challenges faced by datacentre operators,” said Natalie Hooper, Verizon’s technical facilities lead in Europe. Using datacentre energy metrics will help it gather necessary temperature information and take aggressive steps to reduce its energy consumption worldwide, she said.

Meanwhile, Schneider Electric’s director of business development, Andy Roberts said: “Our customers want to optimise energy usage and use available power for powering IT equipment rather than for cooling. Schneider Electric’s StruxureWare management suite, together with Celsius’ monitoring capability, can help them achieve this.”

The DECC funding is the latest government initiative in Europe aimed at cutting IT’s carbon footprint. Earlier this year, green IT project CoolEmAll – funded by the European Commission – released the first prototypes of advanced tools designed to help improve the efficiency and sustainability of datacentres.
The tools will be ready for general release in 2014 after feedback from early adopters.

Today’s datacentres are not fit for the cloud, shows study

Many enterprises continue to depend significantly on antiquated datacentre infrastructures which are ill-equipped to serve user demands in the cloud and virtualisation era, a study has found.

A wide majority (91%) of IT decision-makers admitted that their current IT infrastructures still require substantial upgrades to meet the ever-changing and unique networking requirements created by virtualisation and cloud computing.

This was despite three-quarters of respondents saying they have updated their IT infrastructures in the past three years.

The study of more than 1,750 IT decision-makers, commissioned by networking service provider Brocade and carried out by research firm Vanson Bourne, also found that multiple network failures each week was common among one-third of the respondents.

As today’s organisations interact with data and applications constantly, whether through video-conferencing or accessing database applications on remote devices, the datacentre network has never been placed under greater strain, according to Brocade.

But still, 61% of IT professionals admitted that their corporate networks are not fit for the cloud era, with 41% saying that network downtime has caused their business financial hardship either directly – through lost revenue or breached SLAs – or from their customers’ lack of confidence.

“Many datacentres that exist today are based on 20-year-old technologies and they can no longer keep up with demand,” said Jason Nolet, vice-president datacentre switching and routing at Brocade.

“Virtualisation and cloud models require greater datacentre network agility and performance, as well as reduced operational cost and complexity.

“The findings clearly show that despite apparent investment in the past few years, most organisations are still ill-equipped for current business demands,” he added.

Datacentre hardware must be refreshed often to ensure that server utilisation is optimised and that workloads do not fail, experts have said.

Consulting engineer and datacentre energy expert Ian Bitterlin had previously argued that while web giants such as Facebook refresh server hardware every nine months, UK enterprises refresh theirs about every five years and the public sector organisations, on average, update their hardware once every eight or 10 years.

Some enterprises are beginning to deploy more scalable and resilient datacentre network infrastructures.

About 18% of IT decision-makers cited the use of fabric-based networks, while 51% said they are planning to roll out Ethernet fabrics next year to support their virtualisation strategies.

The study also revealed that some enterprises are looking at deploying software-defined networks (SDNs) by 2015 to increase productivity, deliver better access to real-time information and improve service delivery.

While SDN providers such as Brocade and Juniper Networks claim it offers benefits for the business, datacentre SDN is still in its infancy, according to experts.

A TechTarget study found that although 43% of respondents indicated that they plan to evaluate SDN technologies over the next 12 months, 78% believe SDN is not mature enough for their environments today.

Over two-thirds of respondents also expressed interest in on-demand datacentres – where physical and virtual networking elements are combined to provide the necessary capacity to deliver different applications rather than a standard capacity provided by legacy datacentre networks to deliver apps.

On-demand datacentre strategy provides a pragmatic route for the adoption of SDN, according to Brocade.