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NETWORKING TECHNOLOGY IS BEING RE-INVENTED TO DELIVER

BETTER PERFORMANCE AND A SMOOTHER USER EXPERIENCE

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THE WEEK IN IT

NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
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TO NETWORKING
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Financial IT

Cyber security

CA Technologies, which supplied RBS

with the software that caused the banks
IT outage in 2012, has paid it millions of
pounds. The confidential payment was
revealed by Sky News. According to the
report, the companies reached an agreement out of court. The problem resulted
when RBS attempted to upgrade its CA-7
batch processing software.

More than six in 10 UK consumers put

their data at risk by using a single password across multiple online accounts,
a study has shown. Despite the fact the
risks of re-using passwords are well documented, 62% of UK consumers re-use
passwords, according to a poll of more
than 2,000 people commissioned by
mobile identity firm TeleSign.

CA Technologies makes confidential

payments to RBS over 2012 IT outage

Poor password practices put 60% of UK

citizens at risk, according to research

Mobile networks

Banking IT

Deutsche Telekom and Orange, the owners of mobile network operator EE, have
been holding preliminary talks with BT
over the possibility of selling off the UK
business, it has emerged. The news came
barely 48 hours after BT revealed it was
in talks to re-unite with its old flame O2,
which shacked up with current owner
Telefnica in 2005 after splitting with BT
four years previously.

Dutch bank ING will cut thousands of

staff in its back offices, callcentres and IT
department over the next three years as it
reduces its number of IT systems through
automation. The bank said it is moving to
simplified IT systems and automation at
a cost of 200m for two years from 2015.
It expects to save 270m per year from
2018 and is cutting 1,700 staff.

EE in preliminary sales talks with BT

Dutch bank ING to cut thousands of

staff in digital transformation project

IT suppliers

Cyber security

HP has announced weak fourth-quarter

earnings ahead of the companys planned
split aimed at reversing its recent decline.
The plan will see HPs consumer computing and printing departments become a
separate company HP Inc. Its software,
business servers and IT services will
also be formed into a separate company
named Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

The national Computer

Emergency Response Team has called for
more UK firms to join the governments
Cyber Security Information Sharing
Partnership (CISP). Despite being ahead
of target for 2014, Cert-UK director Chris
Gibson made repeated calls for greater
participation from UK firms.

HP results disappoint ahead of split

Calls for better cyber

threat data-sharing

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NATIONAL TRUST FOR SCOTLAND OVERCOMES

LEGACY NETWORK CHALLENGE

National Trust for Scotland has implemented a core networking architecture to replace a legacy
system that was frequently bringing the IT department to its knees.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 2

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THE WEEK IN IT
HOME
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
MICROSOFT
AND AMAZONS
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Government IT

Public sector IT

Risks still remain for Universal Credit as

the Department for Work and Pensions
(DWP) continues its twin-track gradual
roll-out of live and digital services. DWP
expects significant cost savings from
its digital delivery, but a National Audit
Office report noted that if the digital
service fails, there is no contingency plan
in place.

Greater shared services in the public sector was among the issues raised in the
Unlocking the sharing economy government
report, published last week. The report
highlighted how government bodies that
use the concept of sharing cities offer
shared council buildings with community groups and create local online hubs,
where skills and assets can be shared.

Pressure on Universal Credits digital

service mounts as testing begins

Public sector will benefit from shared

economy, says government report

Business applications

IT careers

SAP customers, by a slim majority, find

the suppliers account managers insufficiently knowledgeable about their businesses, according to an SAP UK and
Ireland User Group survey. At the user
group conference in Birmingham, chairman Philip Adams said: SAP can help us,
but we need access to the right people.

Advertised job vacancies in tech startups

have increased by 80% since October
2013, as the number of positions eclipsed
the number of jobseekers for the first
time in six years. According to the UK Job
Market Report from Adzuna, there were
8,554 vacancies available in UK-based
IT startups in October 2014. The average
salary was more than 40,000.

Digital government

Banking IT

Majority of customers say SAP knows

too little about their businesses

Tech startup vacancies rise by 80%

Labour unveils Digital Government

Deloitte to investigate
Review for input to 2015 election policy BoE systems outage
Labour has published its long-awaited
review into digital government, making
a series of recommendations for shaping the future of policy-making which will
feed into the partys planning for its 2015
general election manifesto. The Making
Digital Government Work for Everyone
report is an independent review produced
for the Labour Party.

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The Bank of England

(BoE) has chosen Deloitte
to launch an investigation into a systems
outage that forced the temporary suspension of the Clearing House Automated
Payments System (Chaps) in October
2014. A technical glitch, produced during
routine maintenance, prevented payments
from being processed. n

INDIAN OFFSHORE IT SERVICES FIRMS INCREASE MARKET SHARE

UK commercial sector: market total contract value since 2010
1%
36%36%

25%

UK-based providers
Americas-based providers
Europe-based providers
India-based providers

14%
24%

Asia-Pacific-based providers

Source: Information Services Group

computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 3

ANALYSIS

NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
MICROSOFT
AND AMAZONS
CLOUD WAR
DOWNTIME

UK helping
US military
build
intelligence
software
Is BT
embedding
secret spy
equipment in
routers?

BT calls on BIS to reject links to US

drone strikes in the Middle East
BT has asked UK government officials to reject a complaint about its alleged
role in a US military network used to direct drone strikes. Mark Ballard reports

elecoms firm BT has asked UK government officials to reject a human rights

review of its alleged role in a US military communications network used to direct
drone strikes in the Middle East.
Officials at the Department of Business,
Innovation and Skills (BIS) are due to decide
whether an assessment can go ahead, under
an international agreement on business ethics, by stating whether evidence gathered
in a Computer Weekly investigation lends
weight to allegations BT supplied infrastructure crucial to a US drone programme that
has been accused of illegal killings.
BT appealed to UK officials on the basis
that questions about its role in the US programme are unsubstantiated. BTs solicitor
Miles Jobling wrote to BIS on 8 October
2014, asking it to reject a complaint from
legal charity Reprieve that quoted evidence
unveiled by Computer Weekly.
If upheld, the complaint would put pressure
on BT to answer the allegations, under rules
on corporate social responsibility adopted
by the UK government as a member of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD).
BT told officials it fully supported the rules
the OECD Guidelines for Multinational
Enterprises which require companies to
be vigilant for human rights abuses their
customers commit with the help of their
services. The company said it took its human
rights obligations very seriously.
BT has signed up to the United Nations
Global Compact, by which companies
pledge to make sure they are not complicit
in human rights abuses, according to its
annual report on corporate social responsibility on 23 May 2014.
But BT has not formally examined the possibility that a fibre-optic communications link
it supplied to the US military was used in

BT has denied any knowledge

of links to drone strikes

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alleged human rights abuses, or even

whether it formed part of the infrastructure
used to launch the drone strikes.

Defence of ignorance

BTs formal response to the complaint, sent

with Joblings letter and seen by Computer
Weekly, pleaded ignorance of evidence suggesting its communication link was used in
the strikes. BT said it was not in a position
to know whether the allegations were true,
because it had merely provided the US military with a general-purpose communications
system. It said it could not be held responsible for what its customer did with that link,
and could not presume to take a moral position on the US governments conduct.
BTs denials had previously caused the
UK National Contact Point (NCP) for OECD
rules where BIS officials handle complaints
about corporate behaviour to throw out
Reprieves original complaint in 2012. NCP
could not handle the complaint, it said in
February 2013, because it had no evidence.
Computer Weeklys investigation subsequently found several documents in the
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 4

ANALYSIS
HOME
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
MICROSOFT
AND AMAZONS
CLOUD WAR
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public domain that detailed the uses of the

US military network of which the BT link
forms a part. As a result, Reprieve resubmitted its complaint.

BT has consistently
said it could not be
held responsible for
what anybody did with
its communications
infrastructure
The new complaint does not present any
new evidence, said the BT letter to NCP
officials. Rather, it relies on a recycling of the
allegations by Computer Weekly which, in
turn, itself relies on the Reprieve allegations.
The purported new evidence in question
in fact consists of a number of magazine articles published by Computer Weekly. There
is nothing new and material in the Computer
Weekly articles. Much of the information
contained in these articles appears to be
sourced from Reprieve. The articles appear
therefore to be almost contrived for the
purposes of creating a basis for re-opening
the original complaint, said BTs official
response to the evidence.

Independent documentation

The Computer Weekly investigation was

conducted entirely independently of
Reprieve. It found documents in the public
domain, none of which were provided by or
sourced from the legal charity.
All that was known of BTs work for the US
military when Reprieve submitted its original complaint
was that it ran
How the UK connects to the US drone network
a high-grade
UK telecoms used to support US drone operations
fibre-optic
BT faces probe over link to US drone network
trunk line
between a US
communications base at RAF Croughton
in Northamptonshire and US combat base
Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti, North Africa.
The US had been accused of illegal drone

strikes in the region, against suspected insurgents and terrorists, during which innocent
bystanders were also killed, it was alleged.
Documents discovered by Computer
Weekly showed the BT line formed part
of a global US military network called the
Defense Information Systems Network
(DISN), which formed the backbone for a
global military and intelligence communications system used to track terrorists and
direct weapons such as drones.
BT insisted this did not suggest a reason to
assess its work under human rights guidelines. The complaint is wholly artificial, lacking in any foundation, it said.
BT has consistently said it could not be
held responsible for what anybody did with
the communications infrastructure it supplied. It has denied having any knowledge of
links to US drone strikes.
In response to questions about the latest
Reprieve complaint, a BT spokesman said:
Reprieves complaint is being looked at by
UK National Contact Point and, under their
rules, it would be inappropriate for us to
comment on the matter, at this stage.

Reprieves complaint
is being looked at by

UK National Contact
Point and, under their
rules, it would be
inappropriate for us to
comment on the matter
at this stage

BT
A BIS spokeswoman said: The NCP does
not comment on complaints outside of its
published assessments and statements.
The issue will be settled shortly, when UK
officials are expected to decide on whether
the OECD rules on corporate social responsibility oblige BT to look into the allegations in
light of the fresh evidence. n
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 5

ANALYSIS

NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
MICROSOFT
AND AMAZONS
CLOUD WAR
DOWNTIME

Busting
cloud myths:
Four user
instances
where cloud
computing
failed
Building
return on
investment
from cloud
computing

How resilient is the public cloud?

CIOs face a tough job in balancing public cloud benefits with potential service
failure, but there are effective ways to manage that risk. Cliff Saran reports

he recent downtime that affected

some Microsoft Azure services following a configuration update in November illustrates the precarious juggling act
CIOs must perform in the cloud era.
While public cloud operators will argue
they experience far less downtime than inhouse IT, the scale of Microsoft and Amazon
Web Services (AWS) means any hitch has
the potential to affect millions of people.
By migrating IT services to the public cloud,
organisations can benefit from lower IT
infrastructure costs, free up resources in their
own datacentres and gain the flexibility to
support spikes in demand.

Cloud is irresistible

Analyst Forrester Research predicts

Microsoft will make more profit from cloud
than onpremise software. In fact, Windows
Server 10 the next release of the companys
server operating system is being positioned
as a cloud operating system.
In the Forrester report The days of fighting
the cloud are over, analyst James Staten urged
CIOs to assess how application integration
can be achieved on Azure.
Capitalise on opportunities where you
can better leverage Microsofts latest innovations to deliver greater business value
faster, he said.
Now, it would seem, is a good time to get
a good deal from Microsoft, especially if the
purchase involves Azure or Office 365. But,
as the incident on 19 November has highlighted, Azure can fail and will fail. This
most recent downtime occurred as a result
of a software bug that was accidentally rolled
out across several Azure regions due to
human error.
Unfortunately, the issue was widespread,
since the update was made across most
regions in a short period of time, due to
operational error, instead of following the
standard protocol of applying production

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changes in incremental batches, Microsoft

corporate vice-president Jason Zander wrote
on the Azure blog.

Prepare for cloud failure

Getting a straight answer on best practices

for migrating in-house IT services across
multiple cloud providers to minimise disruption in the event of a failure remains
ambiguous.
Ovum principal analyst Michael Azoff said
users want easily transferable workloads
not just across a single providers datacentres, but across many public cloud providers,
so they can pick the best service.
Even within a single cloud provider we
see examples where a business user has no
failsafe strategy of balancing across different datacentres. Of course, that does not
help where an error affects the total service, he said.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 6

ANALYSIS
HOME
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
MICROSOFT
AND AMAZONS
CLOUD WAR
DOWNTIME

Azoff suggested the approach CIOs should

take is to expect downtime and focus on
what backup they have in place.

Challenges of mirroring

In theory, it should be easier to replicate

infrastructure as a service (IaaS), since
technology such as VMware vMotion and
Hyper-V support live migration of running
virtual machines. A business continuity
service could be run on another public or
private cloud to provide resilience if the
main IaaS provider experiences an outage.
But IaaS represents an entry-level commodity, where public cloud providers beat
each other up on price. The real value is in
platform as a service (PaaS).
Amazon has been steadily fleshing out
its AWS platform to entice developers to
build AWS-optimised applications. Splunk,
Pegasystems and Informatica were among a
number of independent software companies
that used the AWS Re:Invent 2014 conference in Las Vegas to announce that they are
building applications on top of AWS.
Microsofts strategy is a common
Windows programming model that spans
on-premise and the public cloud, giving inhouse developers and third-party software
providers a way to incorporate Azure into
their cloud applications.
While applications built on top of public
cloud application programming interfaces
(APIs) can benefit from the deep integration available from a PaaS, the risk is that
the environment is far harder to mirror in the
event of a failure.

Room for cloud improvement

Were still in Cloud 1.0, according to

IDCconsulting manager Andy Buss, with
few applications and services truly architected and written for the cloud with
associated engineering dedicated to link
failures and assumptions of fault tolerance. I expect platform and software as
a service to get steadily better as more
apps are written with these trust nothing approaches in mind and reliability is
assumed to be dodgy.
The Windows Azure Pack offers datacentre
managers Azure-like systems management
for on-premise private cloud deployments.

But clearly it is not practical to run an identical mirror of public cloud-optimised applications on-premise.
So where does a CIO go for fault-tolerant
cloud computing?
Under the leadership of its new CEO,
Satya Nadella, Microsoft has aligned its
strategy around cloud and mobile. The
Azure downtime is clearly more than just a
hitch it is deeply embarrassing for Nadella
and undermines the principles he has been
pushing for Microsoft since he took over
earlier this year.
But until Microsoft and other cloud providers offer a service level agreement with zero
downtime, CIOs will have to continue to juggle the complexities of attaining high availability whenever there is a cloud element in
their IT infrastructure. n

CLOUD AVAILABILITY
PRESENTS CHALLENGES
Despite contracts that offer three nines
availability or higher, attaining a highly
resilient cloud service is hit and miss.
In my experience, IT managers expect
the cloud service provider to cater for resilience, said Geoff Connell, director of ICT
at oneSource, the Havering and Newham
councils shared service.
Connell recently bought a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) hosted
service from Skyscape, via Capgemini, on
behalf of seven London boroughs, but he
admitted high availability has been somewhat problematic.
Although it is relatively early days, we
have not been impressed with the resilience
so far, he said.
But when Oracle hosted the councils
ERP in its Oracle on-demand service out of
Houston, Texas, availability was solid.
Oracles arrangements to failover in
the event of any service outage was excellent, resulting in really strong performance
and availability, said Connell. Ultimately,
theres no substitute for making sure the
tender specification or the cloud service specification fully covers the service
requirements.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 7

CASE STUDY

NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
TO REJECT LINKS TO
US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
CIO CHALLENGE
PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
MICROSOFT
AND AMAZONS
CLOUD WAR
DOWNTIME

Data
backup
strategy from
a disaster
recovery
perspective
Challenges
in virtual
server backup
and how to
tackle them

Pernod Ricard toasts centralised data

backup and cloud disaster recovery
Archana Venkatraman looks at how the drinks company turned to
cloud for backup and disaster recovery in its European IT systems

or a drinks company with operations

and IT infrastructures across 42 markets in Europe, the Middle East and
Africa (Emea), consolidating and centralising IT systems and business data is a substantial task. Pernod Ricard turned to the
cloud for backup and disaster recovery and
streamlined its IT systems in the region.
In each of the 42 regions in which it operates, Pernod Ricard has a network of IT
systems incorporating email, enterprise
resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and business
intelligence (BI). This network of IT systems
contains raw data vital to the operation of
the drinks company. Managing how this data
is secured, backed up and made available to
users is a major task for its IT team.
For many years the firm had a siloed
approach to backing up data, says Pernod
Ricard information systems director Simon
Bennett. The local IT teams in each of the
regions worked as a completely separate
entity and had control over their own individual network. This resulted in a variety
of backup and disaster recovery systems.
This increased complexity because each of
these disaster recovery products had different features, different processes for backup
and different contractual agreements with
service providers.

Choosing a backup supplier

When Pernod Ricard decided it was time

to adopt a more streamlined and strategic
approach and optimise backups and disaster
recovery for its Emea operations, Bennett
believed a centralised and consistent backup
and disaster recovery strategy would help
the company ensure all its business critical
data is securely protected and stored offsite.
The IT team then began a five-year roll-out
of backup and disaster recovery services.

PERNOD RICARD

HOME

Pernod Ricard decided it was time to optimise its

disaster recovery strategy for its European operations

It selected Backup Technologys cloud

backup offerings and its managed services to
optimise Pernod Ricards full backup infrastructure throughout the region, as well as to
provide a remote disaster recovery service.
For the drinks firm, Backup Technology
decided to deploy Asigra Cloud Backup
software for online data backup. The IT team
also charged the services provider to transform what had been an ad-hoc approach
into a single, highly effective backup system,
while establishing a disaster recovery strategy with defined recovery time and recovery
point objectives, Bennett says.
The IT department opted to approach the
project in a phased manner by picking the
UK and Germany as the first two locations
to implement the replacement backup and
disaster recovery services.
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 8

CASE STUDY
HOME
NEWS
BT ASKS OFFICIALS
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US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
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PERNOD RICARD
TURNS TO THE
CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
REGULATION
EDITORS
COMMENT
BUYERS GUIDE
TO NETWORKING
TECHNOLOGIES
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AND AMAZONS
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Both countries had immediate requirements for an online solution because of

their larger data sizes and server numbers,
Bennett says. They were also important
because they would provide a good proof
of concept reference point for other Pernod
Ricard offices in the region.

I know now the

critical systems
and business data
across the region are
protected and there is
a recovery solution

Simon Bennett, Pernod Ricard

Following the implementations in the UK
and Germany, the companys operations in
Russia, Turkey, Switzerland and Ukraine prepared for a backup facelift. We ensured the
new solution was in place prior to the termination of those contracts, so Pernod Ricard
was always protected, says Bennett.
Targets for each year have been met, with
75% of Pernod Ricards Emea offices set to
be using the solution by the end of 2014.

Distributed IT challenges

But the project had its complexities. Pernod

Ricard wanted different layers of backup services in different regions depending on the
regions size and revenue share.
Other challenges included poor interenet
connection speeds in some locations, difficulty in
delivering
Pernod Ricard deploys data integration platform
hardware
Drnks firm SABMiller upgrades IP network
to different
Chivas Brothers distillery upgrades data storage
regions, and
operating system language barriers, for example between
French and Russian Windows servers.
In a decentralised business with 42 markets across Emea, each with relatively small
systems and data sizes, the key challenge

for us was to find a solution and integrator which could scale effectively across this
landscape, Bennett says.
With Asigra cloud backup and the service
providers expertise, the IT team is able to
offer local backup for the local-area network
(LAN) to speed recovery of data; offsite
backup for secure long-term protection, with
long backup history; as well as a complementary virtual disaster recovery service.
All backup monitoring is performed
through Backup Technologys web portal, so
all Pernod Ricard Emea IT staff have complete visibility of their backups, 24/7, from
anywhere in the world, says Bennett. This
provides a regimented backup and disaster
recovery process across Pernod Ricards
Emea operations, he adds.
The backup project has improved the
companys ability to make sure all of its
business-critical data is quickly and securely
protected and stored offsite. The new systems protect in excess of 350TB of data
for Pernod Ricard and offer virtual disaster
recovery services to each market, securing
more than 200 servers.
The project has also freed up the in-house
IT team to concentrate on the day-to-day
running of the networks.

Real-life disaster recovery test

Pernod Ricard has had to invoke the disaster recovery system twice in a live situation
which, the company says, was executed
smoothly. According to Bennett, recovery
of files, databases and emails happens on a
regular basis. This not only quantifies the
success but also illustrates how the combination of a number of technologies has led to
a substantial improvement in our quality of
service, he says.
Based on the live scenarios, the IT team
gives feedback to Backup Technology, which
then improves recovery speeds and adds
features the company wants.
The drinks giant now has a centralised
strategy which gives it greater confidence
about managing its critical data.
I now know the critical systems and business data across the region are protected
and there is a recovery solution tested each
year. Thats a great weight off my mind,
Bennett concludes. n
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 9

INTERVIEW
HOME
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BT ASKS OFFICIALS
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US DRONE STRIKES
PUBLIC CLOUD
RELIABILITY IS
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CLOUD FOR BACKUP
DATA VITAL TO
MEETING BANKING
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Good data vital to meeting changes

to investment banking regulation
HSBC Global Banking and Markets CIO Sumeet Chabria talks to Karl Flinders
about ITs role in handling changes to investment banking regulation

CW500

s the investment
banking sector
recovers from the
financial meltdown that
began in 2008, banks
such as HSBC Global Banking and Markets
(GBM) are transforming IT. They are investing in electronic platforms in response to
regular changes to industry regulation,
while becoming digital across all areas of
the business.
And the provision and support of IT hardware and software is not the end of the story
for the industrys CIOs, with data king in the
digital era.
HSBC GBM CIO Sumeet Chabria is a
computer science graduate from Stony Brook
University in New York. He has worked at the
group for about 20 years in a range of senior
IT roles, including CIO for the Global Banking
and Markets division in the Americas.
He is now global IT head of HSBCs investment banking business, where he manages
thousands of IT staff across the world, works
with hundreds of IT suppliers and supports
hundreds of business-critical IT systems.

interview

These include trading systems and settlement systems, as well as interfaces with
clients and exchanges, to name a few. There
is no one core piece of software we run a
plethora of platforms, says Chabria.

The quality of the

information coming out
of a system is at least
as important as the
system itself
Chabrias role includes overall responsibility for data and it is this, as much as the nuts
and bolts of IT, he is focused on.
In a more connected and automated
world, where we send information to regulators, third parties, exchanges and clients in
almost real time, the quality of the information coming out of a system is at least as
important as the system itself, says Chabria.

European
banks raise
data game in
response to
regulations

MATT BUCK/FLICKR

Three in
four banks
struggle with
stress testing

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IT departments and CIOs have been worried about uptime, downtime resilience and
disaster recovery. Now is the time to spend
as much time ensuring the quality of information is as good. One of the top priorities
for me is making sure the information is correct, he adds.
According to Chabria, in the past when
things were less digital, timely manual
checks could be performed on the data quality such is the importance of getting it right.
But today, as a result of the industry becoming digital through automation and making
activity electronic, this is not possible.
We look at IT and data together. Data is
the blood in the system and we want to make
sure it is healthy, he says.

Data quality vital to meeting rules

Good-quality data is not just important to

the businesss competitiveness, but also
to meet regulatory and other obligations.
If banks cannot prove they have met the
BUYERS GUIDE
rules, hefty fines from the Financial Conduct
TO NETWORKING
Authority (FCA) in the UK or the Securities
TECHNOLOGIES
and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US
are not uncommon.
MICROSOFT
Since the banking crisis of 2008, regulaAND AMAZONS
CLOUD WAR
tion in the sector has gone into overdrive.
Thousands of pages of new regulations are
published on a monthly basis and regulaDOWNTIME
tors need banks to report activity to them
regularly. By moving to electronic business
processes there is far more data to report.
Where once only the stock exchanges were
dealing electronically, digitisation means
investment banks, dealers, brokers and customers are connected, creating more data
that needs to be sent including to financial
and banking regulators.
Regulations and the need to meet them,
combined with the incessant drive to be
competitive, means
Interview: Leandro Balbinot, global CIO, HJ Heinz
projects are
Interview: John Seglias, group CIO, Abellio
constantly in
Interview: Robert Teagle, IT director, Starbucks
progress at
HSBC GBM.
But Chabria sees these challenges as an
opportunity to make wider improvements.
He says if you are opening up a system to
customise it to meet a regulation or a mandatory requirement, that is the perfect time
EDITORS
COMMENT

to make other changes: It is like opening the

bonnet of a car. It is a good time to perform
maintenance, and an opportunity to make
strategic change.

Implementing non-core systems

The bonnet is not the only thing Chabria

wants to open up. He says different ways to
develop and implement non-core systems
can be explored, whether through third-party
suppliers, joint ventures with other institutions or working with smaller, innovative
startup firms.

We look at IT and
data together. Data is
the blood in the system
and we want to make
sure it is healthy
For example, 12 banks including HSBC
are creating a standardised language and a
messaging system, known as the Neptune
project, in the corporate bond market.
Investment banks are known for their large
in-house IT resources and developments, but
the move to modern digital technologies in
the sector is changing this.
If customers want bespoke products, we
have to customise but where the industry is
moving to simplified business models there
can be common platform sharing between
banks. I am open to that, says Chabria. Joint
ventures are another option, he adds.
For example, Chabria says HSBC was
among four banks that worked with business process outsourcing supplier Genpact
and financial information service Markit on
the creation of a centralised know-your-customer service, which verifies and identifies
clients for due diligence.
But he says the industry needs to look
beyond in-house teams and established
technology suppliers for innovation and has
identified the startup sector as a source: We
need to access talent wherever it is present
and use it for innovation. n
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Time to put Universal

Credit wrongs right

nacceptably poor management and wasted

time and taxpayers money is how Margaret
Hodge, MP, the chair of the Public Accounts
Committee, described Universal Credit last week.
The latest National Audit Office (NAO) report into
the troubled welfare reform programme simply added
to the catalogue of concerns: still unable to determine
value for money; no contingency plan should the new
digital service fail to work; lack of an overall blueprint for
delivery of the policy.
Reading through the 60-page NAO report also
revealed some startling nuggets of information. For
example, in April 2014, a software update caused an
increase in incorrect payments to benefit claimants.
The cause was an un-named supplier that released an
update containing significant changes of which the
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had not
been told about and had therefore not properly tested.
The supplier is likely to be one of IBM, Accenture,
HP or BT the four key suppliers supporting the flaky
system that will be mostly replaced by the future digital
service. Those suppliers have received far too little criticism or scrutiny of their role. Only 17% of the work they
have done will be used once Universal Credit is fully live,
according to the NAO.
In January, Computer Weekly revealed the DWP was
already struggling to recruit the skills to develop the
digital service. The NAO revealed this has been the key
reason for delays in the progress of the digital system,
and that DWP was offering maximum salaries between
8% and 22% lower than the market average.
The real problem is that DWP chose to ignore the
warnings and recommendations of the Government
Digital Service for too long blundering along with poor
project management and misfiring suppliers. Now digital has been placed at the centre of the programme, its
been a case of catch-up in a recruitment market where
digital experts are in short supply and high demand.
The risks around Universal Credit remain and the cost
to the taxpayer of those risks being realised could be
significant. With full roll-out of the new benefits now
put back until 2019, there is time to get things right,
but only if the DWP has finally learned its lessons over
implementing modern, large-scale government IT. n

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networking technologies
emerging in
the enterprise

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Steve Broadhead
takes a look at the
latest networking
technologies on
offer, and those
being adopted in
the enterprise

BUYERS GUIDE

networking technologies part 1 of 3

he networking world has always had a tendency to get carried away with new
trends and technologies many of which, in truth, are simply re-inventions with
new names while forgetting to focus on the basics of efficiently running a corporate network.
Whether that network now resides in the physical corporate offices, some other datacentre
or public/private cloud is largely irrelevant. What is important is to see the take-up of new,
relevant technologies that improve networking beyond where it is today. Here, we look at a
few examples of these technologies, as well as what some of the more established suppliers
are doing to re-invent their offerings.

Clouds of virtualisation

Enterprise
Networks:
What are the
challenges?
The SDN
state of play:
First steps for
the enterprise

One area that partly as a result of the cloud and virtualisation has been a focal point
is the convergence of networking and storage. While the big names including Dell, IBM,
Cisco, EMC and HP have all been majorly involved, there has been plenty of activity
beyond these incumbents.
Cirba, for instance, has focused on optimising input/output (I/O) with respect to virtualisation management systems and cloud management platform deployment. The supplier
argues companies often do not consider I/O when deploying virtual machines (VMs), which
can result in uneven loads across physical hosts. When network-attached storage (NAS)
or other storage technologies send disk I/O across the network, Cirba models combine I/O
to intelligently balance workloads and minimise the stress points that can otherwise occur.
The net effect is safely increasing VM density while at the same time minimising the risk of
contention for resources.
Another move again a factor in the cloud-plus-virtualisation combination is from virtualised (hardware-to-software) systems. For example, Avere has just introduced a virtual NAS
product that provides the ability to deploy and scale compute in the cloud while using both
on-premise and cloud-based storage resources. The idea is to connect the dots between the
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compute cloud, storage cloud and on-premise storage, without sacrificing performance, worrying about security or seeing IT overspend. This is a software-only product that runs in the
compute cloud alongside applications, providing low-latency access to the active data and
enabling applications to run at maximum performance.
Pluribus Networks is another company looking to bring all network and compute elements
together, using distributed-network hypervisor operating system Netvisor for the convergence of compute, network, storage and virtualisation. It is based on open-compute and
open-networking technologies and is aimed at enabling enterprises to better support application performance service-level agreements (SLAs) while reducing operating expenditure
and capital expenditure, as well as accelerating service-deployment velocity.
One of many examples of the current move from IT-centric to customer-focused products
comes in the form of Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom4 infrastructure performance management platform for physical, virtual and cloud-computing environments. The technology
was recently introduced to the Morrisons
supermarket chain.
The retailers head of storage, Simon
he irtual
Close, says: The Virtual Instrument platform has evolved from an engineering-type
nstrument platform
system to something more customerhas evolved from
focused. Morrisons was keen to consolidate down from a large number of storage
an engineering
suppliers to a single supplier and single SAN
environment, with VirtualWisdom plumbed
type system to
in the middle of it to ensure and assure
application and data performance and
something more
response times, as well as availability.

T
I

Traditional tools go modern

customer-focused

Simon Close, Morrisons

Another transitioning technology is the

application delivery controller (ADC).
According to CTO of ADC provider jetNexus, Greg Howett, gone are the days when these
appliances were all hardware devices, designed to be configured and managed by specialist
systems engineers.
Load balancers are an essential requirement to everyday application stacks such as
Microsoft Exchange and Lync, web-based customer relationship management (CRM) and
enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, as well as external customer-facing websites. Therefore its essential load balancers are easy to deploy, simple to configure and
straightforward to manage, he says. Not only is the graphical user interface (GUI) designed
for IT administrators to use, but the product sells almost exclusively as a virtual appliance a
pure software appliance.

NEXT-GENERATION NETWORK MONITORING

UK motoring firm the AA is using Data Center Real-User Monitoring (DC RUM), a network
performance management system from Dynatrace, to ensure the stability of its network. The
product enables the company to passively collect data about the traffic on its network, automatically discovering all applications, servers and clients. This data provides visibility into how
users are interacting with the web and enterprise applications used to deliver the AAs services
to its customers. This gives the firm the ability to identify how the performance of the underlying network infrastructure that supports its applications is affecting the overall experience for
users, thereby guaranteeing service availability for its customers.
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This switch in terms of moving the network to the users, rather than the engineers, has also
been mirrored by Sunrise Software in the latest release of its IT service management (ITSM)
application, Sostenuto. Again, the interface is designed for IT administrators not IT professionals to use, while fairly radical features (certainly for network management tools) such
as gamification have been introduced.

Re-managing the network

The changing shape of the corporate network has also meant a change in the way it is managed, with performance and application management becoming increasingly prevalent. Network management is being re-invented. For instance, Sideband Networks XRE/vXRE system
for network performance management correlates live traffic with logged network traffic,
giving a single point of management regardless of wired/wireless or local area network
(LAN)/wide area network (WAN) characteristics. The system provides analytics of network
traffic up to 40Gbps, addressing both physical and virtual planes, and delivers intelligence
that notifies with real-time alerts and actions for network issues. So it combines being a dynamic network
discovery tool for network mapping with the ability to
e have a
drill down into the network performance.

Emerging SDN market

number of

Patrick Hubbard, a technical product marketing

new players
manager and head geek at Solarwinds, is ideally
in various
positioned to view what is really going on. He sees
software-defined networking (SDN) as where all the
market segments
traditional startup venture capital money is, with several companies vying to come out on top in the SDN
leading the way
controller market, with Plexxi and other pure-play
SDN companies pushing standards and adoption. At
the same time, the major suppliers are funding a variety of spin-ins, such as Ciscos Insieme,
to accelerate innovation that is often difficult for established suppliers. As a result, theres
still lots of bleeding-edge technology and supplier-specific approaches in the market, and a
de-facto standard has yet to be chosen by admins on the ground. For network-management
software suppliers, the plus point is it will be easy to extend current systems with SDN once
standards are determined by the market of actual installations.

Advances in wireless

Wireless is another area of recent innovation beyond the basic Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engingeers (IEEE) standards implementations. This is with respect to two particular aspects bring-your-own-device (BYOD) technnology and Wi-Fi in the cloud.
Network management systems must meet demands
The former has meant real wireless, wire-like infra Google joins enterprise cloud battle with additions
structures really have had to be put into place. Wi-Fi
Five commercial SDN controllers to know about
technology company Xirrus, for example, has an arraybased system designed to effectively replace a wired
network after all, a network of iPads and smartphones renders an Ethernet switch redundant. This means the size of Wi-Fi deployments is increasing enormously.
While often its the bigger, established suppliers which validate a new (or re-invented)
technology area, its the smaller, more nimble players which populate it in the first place.
We have a number of new players in various market segments including cloud, virtualisation, application management and others leading the way in getting actual products out to
the user. So, while some of the giants of networking are talking the talk regarding SDN and
cloud, for example its actually the newbies which are more focused on actually delivering
the product. n
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Microsoft and
Amazons cloud
war rumbles on

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As Microsoft and AWS battle for

cloud supremacy, Janakiram MSV reports
on the recent Azure announcements
from Microsofts CEO

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here is no doubt that both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are determined to get to the top spot by becoming the preferred enterprise cloud platform.
As the final quarter of 2014 approached, the industry eagerly awaited major
announcements from the cloud giants. Ahead of Amazons AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in the second week of November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella created
a splash by making a slew of Microsoft Azure announcements at an event in San Francisco.
Here, we take a closer look Microsofts most recent moves in the cloud market.

The beefy G-series VM sizes

AWS feels
the pressure
of cloud
competition
Microsoft
and Google
claw for cloud
market share
with AWS

Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was launched with a limited set of virtual machine
(VM) types that did not match the choice available with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2). But over the past two years, Microsoft kept adding new VM types to meet enterprise requirements. At the same time, Amazon added new compute, memory and storageoptimised instance types in the form of its C3, R3 and I2 family.
Enterprise workloads moving to cloud need powerful instance types that deliver the same
performance as on-premise servers. Unlike web-scale applications that can run on a fleet
of cheap, low-end VMs, these workloads need beefy, powerful, monolithic VMs with a lot
of compute power and memory capacity. They need high input/output operations per second (IOPS) to deliver expected throughput.
Amazons r3.8xlarge EC2 instance type has 32 virtual central processing units (vCPUs)
with 244GB RAM along with SSD storage. This is the maximum RAM that any EC2
instance type can support. Microsoft announced new G-Series VM sizes that offer double
the RAM of Amazon EC2. With 32 cores, 448GB of RAM and 6,500GB of SSD storage, the
Standard_G5 VM size beats every VM type available in the public cloud.
This is a big deal for enterprise customers running SAP, Oracle OLTP and OLAP,
PeopleSoft and other heavy line-of-business applications.
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The other important factor to note is the central processing unit (CPU). Amazon EC2 R3
is based on the Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 family of processors, while Azure G-Series is based
on the Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family. This move from Microsoft has taken Azure one
step closer to enterprises, but nothing will stop Amazon from countering this with additional instance types.

SSD-based premium storage

Azure initially suffered from IOPS issues that

prevented IO-intensive workloads from running
on its cloud. Microsoft first added SSD disks to
the VMs and has now come out with a massively scalable and performance-driven SSD
storage type called Azure Premium Storage.
Customers can attach multiple SSD disks
to a VM and stripe them to get up to 32TB of
storage per VM which can deliver more than
50,000 IOPS. This is a drastic improvement
over current Azure block storage.
Combined with the G-Series of VMs, Azure
Premium Storage makes it easy to lift and shift
legacy enterprise applications to Azure. With
this, Microsoft almost matched the performance of SSD-based elastic block storage
(EBS) provisioned IOPs (PIOPS).

With Azure
Marketplace,
Microsoft will
connect enterprises
with the product
companies hosting
their SaaS

solutions on Azure

Azure Marketplace for enterprises

According to Microsoft, 40% of Azure revenue comes from independent software suppliers. Given the strong relationship Microsoft had with these suppliers, this is not surprising to see. With all the .Net desktop applications moving to software as a service (SaaS),
Azure is becoming the preferred destination for the independent software suppliers and
product companies.
With Azure Marketplace, Microsoft will connect enterprises with the product companies
hosting their SaaS solutions on Azure. This will be a win-win situation for Microsoft as well as
its customers.
In contrast, AWS Marketplace has been operational for two years with hundreds of products available ready to be launched on AWS.
Microsoft already has a platform branded as Azure Marketplace, but it doesnt have the
ecosystem that Amazon has.

Both Microsoft
and AWS are
determined to get
to the top spot
by becoming the
preferred enterprise
cloud platform

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With the revamped strategy, Microsoft is hoping to bring its partner community closer
to the customers. CoreOS, the web-scale, lightweight Linux OS, made its debut on Azure
through the Marketplace.

Cloudera on Azure

When Microsoft decided to bring big data to Azure, it chose to go with Hortonworks, a
Yahoo spin-off. Given Microsofts friendly relationship with Yahoo, it was an obvious move.
Hortonworks is thoroughly integrated with Azure as HDInsight. In a surprising move,
Microsoft invited Mike Olsen, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera, to the stage
at its cloud event to demo the technology running on Azure.
Microsoft never previously had a relationship with Cloudera, which happens to be the biggest rival of Hortonworks. With Oracles investment and its big presence on AWS, Cloudera
was never on Microsofts radar.
It was a win for Cloudera to make its stack
available on one of the popular platforms. For
Microsoft, it made a strong statement that it is
icrosoft is in a
willing to go to any length to get the big brands on
its side.
tussle with

Cloud Platform System Azure in a box

AWS

on the public cloud

This was the biggest announcement. Microsoft

while trying to
is in a tussle with AWS on the public cloud while
trying to tackle VMware and Red Hat in the private
tackle
ware
cloud market.
In recent months, VMware has made tremenand ed at in
dous progress with its hybrid cloud strategy. It
the private
launched hyper-converged infrastructure in the
form of EVO:Rail and EVO:Rack, while also adding
cloud market
numerous features to vCloud Air.
Red Hat is moving fast in attracting enterprises
through its OpenStack-based private cloud offering. With Cloud Platform System (CPS), Microsoft has entered the niche converged infrastructure market dominated by the likes of Nutanix and VCE.
This will be the on-premise cloud-in-a-box customers can deploy in their datacentre. This
will be the gateway to Azure connecting on-premise assets to the public cloud.

VM
R H

Docker on Azure

Container technology is currently red hot in the market. Docker is riding the wave by getting
the attention of the industry.
Having announced the integration of Docker with the next version of Windows Server,
Microsoft has gone ahead with deeper integration with Azure. Microsoft will host the registry
of Docker images that developers can access from the Azure
management portal.
Why does Amazon dominate the cloud world?
Linux VMs running on Azure are getting extensions to
Microsoft strengthens Azure hybrid cloud
simplify
launching Docker containers on the Microsoft
AWS to launch second EU datacentre region
cloud. It will be interesting to see how the Docker and
Microsoft partnership will pan out.
Chief executive Satya Nadella, with support from Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president
of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, is leaving no stone unturned in making his
cloud-first vision a reality. The cloud war is hotting up and these announcements are certainly a major milestone. n
Janakiram MSV is a Gigaom Research analyst and the principal analyst at Janakiram & Associates.
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Metro Bank aims to boost customer

satisfaction with lock-in technology

Downtime believes Metro Bank has

crossed a line in the battle to improve
customer satisfaction.
Banks are throwing online apps at customers, as well as equipping staff with
iPads to make life easier for branch visitors. But Metro Bank has taken this drive
for customer satisfaction to a new level by
offering accommodation in a branch.
With rents in London going through
the roof and house prices leaving the
earths atmosphere, it seems the bank has
decided to add free accommodation to its
customer benefits.
Unfortunately, this is against its will.
A customer enjoyed three hours rentfree in the Uxbridge branch when a door
locking and opening system failed. Metro
Bank branches are fitted with a door

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system which allows customers touse

their bank cards to get in and out of the
building to make transactions outside
branch opening hours.
So although the seven-day switching system introduced by the Banking
Commission makes it easier to get out of
a current account with a particular bank,
standards are slipping when it comes to
getting outof banks. n

AHA! ALAN PARTRIDGE WAS

RIGHT NORWICH IS COOL

BENABOMB

Read
more on the
Downtime blog

A bus company is putting Norwich on the IT map by trialling

a service that sends passengers adverts from local retailers.
FirstGroup has fitted buses in Norwich with low-energy
Bluetooth beacons which pick up hot news of discounts
and offers as they travel through the city and transmit
them to passengers smartphones via an app.
The app will learn what future notifications to send as
users interact with them. So expect plenty of Rover showroom offers for Bang & Olufsen stereo systems.
Aha! How else could you get people off a bus that is
passing through Norwich?
computerweekly.com 2-8 December 2014 19