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CWThe DIGITAL mAGAzIne for europeAn IT LeADers from CompuTer WeekLy november 2012

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Cyber attacks launched at London 2012 Olympic

Games every daythe it supporting the London 2012 olympics was hit by cyber attacks every day during the Games, according to London 2012 cio Gerry pennell. he said some attacks were well organised and automated and there was one in particu-lar that was a major assault.

EU advises Google to rethink privacy policy

the EU is to tell Google to change the way it gathers information on users to reduce the risk of infringing on their privacy. An investigation into Google follows con-cerns raised by the regulators earlier this year when the company consolidated 60 privacy policies into one.

Austrian hospital improves access to patient data

with Imprivataklinikum Wels-Grieskirchen hospital in Austria has improved speed of access and security of its workstations with the help of imprivata. hospital staff now gain access to workstations through keycards and face recognition technology.

Hexal is purchasing a new home for its IT

After extensive renovations to its prem-ises, the availability of hexal’s datacentre rose to tier iii (Uptime institute) and the power usage effectiveness (pUE) is now persisting between 1.3 and 1.5.

Swedish government sites targeted by Anonymous

the websites of several swedish govern-ment agencies were knocked offline after being targeted by hacktivist collective

Winners of Best of VMWorld europe 2012 user aWards announced

six european IT projects have won the best of vmworld europe 2012 user awards at the vmworld europe 2012 event in barcelona. find out the winners and read all the news coverage from vmworld europe 2012.

Anonymous. Affected sites included Riksbank, the Riksdag, the swedish institute, the svea court of Appeal, the swedish police and security service säpo.

2,500W/m2 and KyotoCooling datacentre delivers ROI

the datacentre of German company noris network was in need of more pro-cessing power, but this meant more heat would be generated. the firm decided to use water cooling for a better return on investment.

From document management to the cloud via TNT

paul Ballabene, it director of the italian branch of tnt, said the demands for managing social media are growing within italian companies. he said despite the headaches that come with data security, consumer solutions enable better busi-ness processes. n

additional resources

› vmworld europe 2012 coverage

› rsa conference europe coverage 2012

› ip expo 2012 coverage

› citrix synergy 2012 coverage

› snw europe 2012 coverage

› emc momentum 2012 coverage

› spotligHt on women in uK it

› How to comply witH tHe eu cooKie law

› guide: eu data protection regulation

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240168945/Cyber-attacks-launched-at-London-2012-Olympic-Games-every-day










http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240166271/EU-advises-Google-to-rethink-privacy-policy









http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240166100/Austrian-hospital-improves-access-to-patient-data-with-Imprivata









http://www.searchdatacenter.de/themenbereiche/physikalisches-umfeld/design-und-umgebung/articles/370332







http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240164618/Swedish-government-sites-targeted-by-Anonymous





http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240164674/Winners-of-Best-of-VMworld-Europe-2012-user-awards-announced









http://www.searchdatacenter.de/specials/energie-effizienz-rz/rz-design/articles/373359








http://www.01net.it/dal-document-management-la-via-al-cloud-di-tnt/0,1254,1_ART_147801,00.html









http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/VMworld-Europe-2012-Coverage

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/RSA-Conference-Europe-coverage-2012

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/IP-Expo-2012-conference-coverage

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/Citrix-Synergy-Barcelona-2012-coverage

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/SNW-Europe-2012-coverage

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/EMC-Momentum-Vienna-2012

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/Spotlight-on-women-in-UK-IT

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/How-to-comply-with-the-EU-cookie-law

http://www.computerweekly.com/guides/Essential-guide-What-the-EU-Data-Protection-Regulation-changes-mean-to-you


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Disaster recovery: Would you survive?

It systems and company data are the lifeblood of any business, so it is crucial to have a plan B in place in case of a disaster. there are numerous

causes of it disruption – natural disaster, human error, hardware failure, criminal behaviour – each of which present challenges to businesses.

European it managers are taking no risks when it comes to their company’s data and business continuity, according to research from the service Desk institute. in a survey of more than 15,000 European it directors recently, the study found that 80% of service desks now have a business conti-nuity plan in place. of these, 61% test their plans every six months – this figure was just 9% in 2011.

Despite these encouraging figures many Euro-pean businesses are still stuck in a time warp when it comes to protecting their company against data loss or systems downtime. Analysts have been known to predict that a business could fail if it suffered a major outage for more than 24 hours – would your business survive a disaster?

Regardless of how you choose to implement a disaster recovery strategy it is important that you have measures in place – preventive, detective and corrective – instead of these becoming an afterthought.

in this issue of cW Europe we examine cloud disaster recovery and what questions to ask a cloud provider. For example, ensuring you have enough bandwidth and network capacity to redirect your users to the cloud, in case of a disaster, and how to make sure your plan clearly shows how to restore your data if it is lost – this includes expected recov-ery times too.

in addition, find out how disaster recovery boosted business continuity at multinational recruitment firm hudson after it consolidated the back-office it infrastructure of all its European offices into its London datacentre. n

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Before server virtualisation, the stand-ard approach to implementing disas-ter recovery (DR) was to establish a

secondary site that duplicated the primary datacentre’s hardware and software. But, with such duplication of infrastructure came a doubling of operating and capital expendi-ture (opex and capex), so only the very larg-est organisations opted for this route.

now, virtualisation has made servers and applications independent of hardware so there is no need for the duplicate iron. Add the ability to run apps from someone else’s servers and even the need to own the hosts disappears. this is cloud disaster recovery.

Many cloud DR services use a hybrid model. An on-site appliance provided by the cloud provider receives your data and stages it to the cloud. should disaster strike, you

could work from servers and data held on the appliance or work from the cloud, depending on the severity of the outage. the key advan-tage of the hybrid model is that it overcomes a key limitation of working in the cloud – lack of bandwidth.

there are also pure cloud DR services that see data transferred immediately to the cloud without the intermediate staging appliance. Restoration in this model can be by remote working from the provider’s cloud or by receipt of a data disk from which servers are rebuilt. pure cloud models will incur smaller upfront and ongoing costs, but are only really suited to the smallest organisations.

All cloud disaster recovery services are priced on a per-use basis, with rates varying according to your recovery point and time objectives (Rpo and Rto).

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Cloud disaster recovery can be complicated to get your head around. This breakdown of the technology offers advice for working with cloud providers and a short case study. Manek Dubash reports

Cloud disaster recovery explained


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You also need to ensure you have enough bandwidth and network capacity to redirect users to the cloud. A DR plan should also detail how you will restore data, including expected recovery times.

Your due diligence should include research into reference sites, case studies of real-world disasters and the provider’s response. contact the provider’s customers to find out what happened. Your DR plan must also be regularly tested.

Like the cloud storage model, in which you store data in the cloud and pay for what you use, a key benefit of cloud DR services is that they can reduce your physical infrastructure and so save on capex and opex.

But there are key questions to ask your DR provider. You will need to be sure the service provider will transfer data securely in the event of a disaster, authenticate users prop-erly, and ensure compliance with any appli-cable regulatory requirements.

disastEr rEcovEry

tip: HoW to deVelop a disaster recoVery strategy

regarding disaster recovery strategies, Iso/IeC 27031, the global standard for IT disaster recov-ery, states: “strategies should define the approaches to implement the required resilience so the principles of incident prevention, detection, response, recovery and restoration are put in place.”

strategies define what you plan to do when responding to an incident, while plans describe how you will do it. once you have identified your critical systems, you should create a table to help you formulate the disaster recovery strategies you will use to protect them.

you will need to consider issues such as budgets, management’s position with regard to risks, the availability of resources, costs versus benefits, human constraints, technological constraints and regulatory obligations. There are also some additional factors in strategy definition.n People. Availability of staff/contractors, training needs of staff/contractors, duplication of criti-cal skills so there can be a primary and at least one back-up person, available documentation to be used by staff, and follow-up to ensure staff and contractor retention of knowledge.n Physical facilities. Look at availability of alternate work areas within the same site, at a dif-ferent company location, at a third-party-provided location, at employees’ homes or at a trans-portable work facility. Then consider site security, staff access procedures, ID badges and the location of the alternate space relative to the primary site.n Technology. Consider access to equipment space that is properly configured for IT systems; suitable heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (hvAC) for IT systems; sufficient primary electrical power; suitable voice and data infrastructure; the distance of the alternate technology area from the primary site; provision for staffing at an alternate technology site; availability of failover (to a back-up system) and failback (return to normal operations) technologies to facili-tate recovery; support for legacy systems; and physical and information security capabilities at the alternate site.n Data. Areas to look at include timely back-up of critical data to a secure storage area, meth-ods of data storage (disk, tape, optical, etc), connectivity and bandwidth requirements to ensure all critical data can be backed up, data protection capabilities at the alternate storage site, and availability of technical support from qualified third-party service providers.n Suppliers. Identify and contract primary and alternate suppliers for all critical systems and processes, and even the sourcing of people. Areas where alternate suppliers will be important include hardware, power, networks, repair and replacement of components, and delivery firms.n Policies and procedures. Define policies for IT disaster recovery and have them approved by senior management. Then define step-by-step procedures to, for example, initiate data back-up to secure alternate locations, relocate operations to an alternate space, recover systems and data at the alternate sites, and resume operations at either the original site or at a new location.

finally, be sure to obtain management sign-off for your strategies. be prepared to demonstrate that your strategies align with the organisation’s business goals and business continuity strategies.


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plan b recovers individual servers every night, just in case they are needed, tests recovered systems overnight, and promises to repay a year’s fees if it misses its guaran-teed recovery time. n

Cloud DR providerskey cloud DR service providers include:

rackspace, which offers host-based repli-cation services and support for physical and virtualised environments at the low-cost end of its price range, and datacentre-to-data-centre replication for mission-critical data on storage arrays.

Amazon Web services underpins the cloud DR services of a number of providers, and offers its systems as the basis for a DiY approach to cloud DR.

cloud and managed services provider savvis offers a cloud DR service that includes cold, warm and/or hot site provision.

phoenix offers geographically dispersed workplace as well as it DR services, the lat-ter including a ship-to-site service for when the building is intact but equipment has been lost through damage or theft.

Manek Dubash is a business and technology journalist with more than 25 years’ experience.

surVey results: Virtual MacHine Back-up and disaster recoVery top european storage prioritiesThe two joint highest priorities in storage and back-up among european IT departments this year have been virtual machine back-up and disaster recovery. With a score of 39% each from 225 european IT professionals in the TechTarget worldwide IT Priorities Survey conducted in late 2011, these two fields emerged as top of the storage to-do list for 2012.

Third in the list of storage-related IT department priorities was storage virtualisation, which 28% of those questioned said they would deploy in 2012. next on the list of priorities were cloud storage or back-up (21%), data deduplication for back-up (20%), and data reduction for pri-mary storage (17%).

Cloud computing also emerged as a “broad initiative” for a significant portion of those questioned (27%). of those, 28% said they would use the cloud for storage and 30% for disas-ter recovery. by way of perspective, 58% said they would use the cloud for application provision.

When questioned on their main reservations about working with external cloud service pro-viders, security was ranked highest, with reliability and protection of data behind that.

so what is driving these priorities? There are two key constraints in play: the need to cut costs and the need for legal and regulatory compliance.

Those questioned admitted they were feeling the recessionary pinch. A majority of respondents said they were in recession (28%) or slowly recovering from it (40%). Compliance was also a driver. Just under a quarter of respondents (24.5%) said complying with legal and industry regula-tion – large chunks of which dictate data protection and disaster recovery standards – was a priority.

server virtualisation was also a high priority for those questioned (58%). This too is arguably ultimately an exercise in cost cutting as it aims to vastly reduce numbers of physical servers in the datacentre. but, once embarked upon, server virtualisation brings the need for a number of associ-ated projects that cost money, such as optimising storage and back-up for virtual machines.

some questions must be raised regarding storage virtualisation, which emerged as the third highest storage priority among respondents. storage virtualisation is where heterogeneous stor-age capacity is pooled to provide one shared reservoir of capacity. Interest in it has been spurred by server virtualisation, but take-up has not yet been very widespread.

A key benefit of cloud dR seRvices is thAt they cAn Reduce youR physicAl infRAstRuctuRe And so sAve on cApex And opex


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Disaster recovery boosts business continuity for recruitment firm

Areview of disaster recovery capabili-ties has made multinational special-ist recruitment firm hudson more

resilient in its day-to-day business.“We have improved hudson’s business

continuity by modifying our disaster recovery strategy,” said Bas Alblas, it director Europe at hudson.

“the back-office it infrastructure of all our offices across Europe has been consolidated into a London datacentre, and we plan to build a mirrored datacentre for complete redundancy,” he said.

once this project is finished, the European datacentre will be fully redundant and hudson’s infrastructure will be able to sur-vive a complete outage of one of the data-centres, said Alblas.

the disaster recovery review was con-ducted in the light of a couple of datacentre outages in the past 10 years as a result of

external factors. these included a wide area network (WAn) outage as a result of local construction works, a cooling system failure in a datacentre, and a water leakage.

hudson, which operates in around 20 countries, has chosen hp servers and stor-age to ensure full recovery of all applications, expanding the firm’s existing relationship with the it supplier beyond printers and desktops.

Asked why hudson had chosen hp, Alblas said it had offered the best value for money. “A simple but working solution, preventing hudson from paying for functionality we do not need or would not use,” he said.

“hp storage ensures uninterrupted avail-ability for all our users, and virtualising all our physical servers onto hp proLiant blade servers has cut hudson’s datacentre power usage and floorspace in half,” said Alblas.

A review of disaster recovery capabilities has made multinational specialist recruitment company Hudson more resilient in its day-to-day business. Warwick Ashford reports

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A single unified storage pool now supports hudson’s virtualised environment, business applications and services, at a lower cost and with greater flexibility.

“the total percentage of cost savings is hard to calculate as it includes simplified management, better server usage with more VMs [virtual machines] per host and data-centre costs as a result of lower footprint and power,” said Alblas.

“Using a second datacentre is an increase in costs, obviously. however, basic analysis convinced hudson this solution would be cheaper or cost neutral in the long term, pro-viding more power, disk space and resiliency at the same time,” he said.

“one other advantage is that we’re much more flexible in choosing datacentres and WAn suppliers because we can easily move one datacentre to another location without scheduling an outage as during the relocation of one datacentre the other will take over.”

According to Alblas, a storage area net-work (sAn) based on an hp Lefthand storage system provides 61tB of secure, eas-ily managed storage for hudson’s business-critical data.

“thin provisioning has already saved 43tB of physical disk space, and performance can be scaled linearly to grow with hudson’s business,” he said.

hp Virtual connect simplifies the con-nection of the sAn to a virtualised server platform of hp proLiant Bladesystem c7000 enclosures with 26 hp proLiant BL490c server blades running VMware 4.1.

“hp integrated Lights-out (iLo) makes it possible to manage the hp servers remotely,” Alblas said.

hudson’s it environment is centrally man-aged through hp systems insight Manager. hardware-level management and auto-mated remote support for the hp servers and storage enable the it team to maxim-ise system uptime. hp snapshot software maintains system performance by allowing i/o-intensive applications such as zero-

downtime back-up to run concurrently with-out affecting the performance of hudson’s primary applications.

Alblas said hp partner softcat provided advice and testing for the hp system prior to deployment. n

Hudson’s VieW on disaster recoVeryAs hudson migrated all local server infrastructure to one central datacentre in the past five years, a disaster recovery (Dr) solution for that datacentre started to make sense to mitigate the single point of failure. Initially the scope was to have a Dr solution for the most critical applications, covering a maximum of 50% of the total user base.

“During the investigation we found out we would be able to create a Dr set-up covering all applica-tions, able to accommodate all european users,” said bas Alblas, IT director europe at hudson. “As a result, we were able to get project buy-in/budget without much effort. hp’s solution allowed us to do much more than originally required, with little budget increase. The project also involved replacing all existing servers and network equipment with the newest technology, offering more central processor unit power, three times more disk space and an upgrade from a 1Gbps network to a 10Gbps network.”

virtualising all physical servers also allowed hudson to address its back-up strategy, improving back-up and restore times by moving from tape-based back-up to disk-based back-up and backing up virtual machines using agentless technology instead of agent-based file level back-ups to tape.

Warwick Ashford is security editor for Computer Weekly.

casE study

“viRtuAlising All ouR physicAl seRveRs onto hp pRoliAnt blAde seRveRs hAs cut hudson’s dAtAcentRe poweR usAge And flooRspAce in hAlf”bAs AlblAs, hudson


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Enterprises have long lived in a world where storage meant buying in bulk, prepar-ing for possible influxes of data and signing cheques to make even the wealthiest of businesses wince. however, with the growth of cloud computing, a shift has been occurring where rather than stockpiling terabytes of hard drives “just in case”, a more

flexible option of utilising other people’s datacentres on demand and paying only for what you use has emerged.

Box is one of the companies that have been driving this change. Based in california, with humble beginnings in a dorm room like many of the best silicon Valley start-ups, its founder and cEo, Aaron Levie, has regularly been voted one of the upcoming techies to keep an eye on. the company was founded in 2005 and has raised over $265m in venture capitalist funding, with analysts now valuing it at around $1.5bn.

it started as a predominantly consumer-focused business, enabling individuals to upload their files and share them with family and friends around the world. But that world is chang-ing, and now enterprises want to get a slice of the action.

Consumers driving business technology advances“if you think about how enterprises traditionally bought technology, it was very much a process where a cio – or somebody at the top of the organisation – would decide what technology is going to be applicable for the entire organisation,” said Levie.

“they would purchase it and spend years implementing the technology into your organisa-tion, only to eventually find out that either the technology doesn’t get used or that they need some new update to be far more relevant for how their organisation works. this was the paradigm that the enterprise lived off and thrived on for decades.”

Yet, employees were using the likes of Box and its rivals – Dropbox, Google, Facebook, etc – in their personal lives and wanting to make the change at work to use these simpler tools to boost productivity.

“What has finally happened is users are having a much better time with technology in their personal lives and they are starting to bring that technology into the workplace,” said Levie. “it is changing the demand and the needs for the enterprise and the enterprise can no longer ignore it and adopt technology that does not give all users an amazing experience.”

Suppliers must rise to customer demandthe cEo also claimed these circumstances put pressure on the more traditional suppliers to up their game and give better-performing technology to their customers.

“the natural trait of the technology ecosystem is if you are a really big company, you don’t have a lot of incentive to break the status quo,” said Levie. “in fact, you make the vast major-ity of your money on the status quo, so there are not many reasons why an enterprise soft-ware company would want to deliver cloud sharing of information if it was making billions of dollars from on-premise collaboration software.

“so finally there is demand from within the enterprise. suppliers have to change, and that means they are looking at what we are doing.”

And that they are. From old incumbents such as oracle and hp, to the newer enterprise

European datacentres key to enterprise success, says Box CEOFounder and CEO of cloud storage firm Box talks to Jennifer Scott about why enterprises are embracing this type of technology


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firms of salesforce.com, it seems every technology firm wants to offer cloud storage to keep their customers signing up. But is that not frustrating for a company such as Box which was doing it first?

“Box is not the only one. they are looking at what Workday is doing, looking at what a bunch of companies are doing, and realising that they have to build better software for enterprises – and that is what’s so exciting,” he said. “Ultimately, enterprises are going to win because they are going to get much better technology and it is going to make them much more productive and that is a good thing for the market in general.”

Greater awareness means business opportunitiesRecently, salesforce.com launched its own enterprise cloud storage/collaboration system called chatterbox, meaning Box has yet another competitor with a similar name, but a more traditional, enterprise focus. however, despite some of Levie’s comments at the time, he sees it as positive for his firm.

“salesforce.com has a much larger footprint than we do,” he said. “that means it can [get a better view of] the criteria that customers are looking for in their technology. We think salesforce.com and others talking about having your data in the cloud and being able to share it easily will help educate the market that this is a very important category, and when that happens, we think Box is in the strongest position to take advantage of it.”

Levie is clear that regardless of how some view his firm as consumer-driven, it is doing everything to make itself an enterprise-ready option. Box recently announced two-factor authentication, a partnership with email security specialist proofpoint, and a new appli-cation programming interface enabling enterprises to extract data from the service and run it through their own business intelligence and big data platforms to get the most out of the information.

“We don’t think the traditional suppliers can solve the problems customers have,” he said. “customers are having challenges around how to access information on mobile devices, how to collaborate with people anywhere they are in the world, and how to get their data in different kinds of applications, not just the ones that are on-premise and not just the ones that are sold by their traditional go-to suppliers.”

Levie claimed few traditional options could address those issues so customers would need to turn to cloud solutions. in that landscape, he said, Box has the best technology.

European datacentre essentialBut one thing that is still an issue for compa-nies in Europe is Box’s lack of a European data-centre. the company has introduced a feature called Box Accelerator to speed up the data transfer in countries around the world, but the fact remains, data is stored in a datacentre in california, and many enterprises will not be happy with that from a security and regulatory point of view.

Levie said some data, such as marketing files or product brochures, did not need to be held within the boundaries of the European Union, but he did concede his firm would have to address this issue to make real headway in the enterprise market.

“Ultimately, to be successful, we do think our technology will have to be resident in Europe somewhere,” he said. “i would say that on the long-term roadmap, you are going to see it happen with that technology footprint of storing data in a global way.

“in the near term, we can get tremendous growth opportunity for how we do things today, but in the long run you will see us solve that problem in a much broader way.” n

“enteRpRises ARe going to get much betteR technology And it is going to mAke them much moRe pRoductive”AARon levie, box


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nEtworking

The Ftth (fibre-to-the-home) council of Europe has blamed the tradition of one large incumbent provider and the lack of ambition from the government for the Uk lagging behind when it comes to fibre broadband.

the council recently launched its rankings of those investing the most into Ftth, which brings fibre broadband connectivity straight into homes and businesses, rather than sharing cabinets or copper connections with neighbours, providing much faster speeds for users.

in the global rankings – which list countries with a minimum of 1% of its households with Ftth connections – the Asia-pacific region scored the highest, with south korea, the United Arab Emirates and hong kong claiming the most subscribers.

however, even when compared with the rest of Europe, the Uk did not even rank, as less than 1% of its households have such connections.

nadia Babaali, communications director for the Ftth council of Europe, said it was not only the Uk at fault, as other large economies, such as Germany, were similarly holding back. however, she said attitudes need to change to prepare the Uk for the future.

“in these countries, you have strong incumbent operators that have already made strong investments, a long time ago, in copper networks, and they would like to keep these networks for as long as possible as they are making money on them,” she said.

“the copper infrastructure is obsolete and the operators know it. in countries where you have a lot of competition – for example from cable operators or from alternative

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UK lacks ambition in fibre broadband strategyWith less than 1% of UK households served with fibre-to-the-home broadband, the FTTH Council is calling on the government to be more ambitious with its schemes. Jennifer Scott reports


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operators – then the incumbents have to switch technologies, but we do not see this situation too much yet in the Uk, so there is no drive from the competition,” she added.

Babaali claimed the projects that were going ahead were local ones which, although on a small scale, showed the desire for Ftth broadband in the Uk.

“it shows there is demand and in places where local communities have a say on what tech-nologies they get, then they will go for Ftth,” she added. “in most cases, people don’t have a say, they just buy whatever the operator is offering.”

Hazy regulations holding back deploymentAnother element to blame is the regulatory nature of the industry in the Uk. Babaali said a large incumbent operator – in the Uk’s case Bt – will be reluctant to invest millions into Ftth if the regulations are just going to open this up to other companies to take advantage of the money it has poured in.

“if the regulatory environment is not stable and is not clear, and the incumbent operator does not know what will happen to the infrastructure it has deployed, then this also slows [deployment] down because no company would want to make an investment and not be sure whether it would keep the competitive advantage,” she said. “in countries where the regulatory environment is clear, you can see the incumbent is more willing because it knows it has time to make a business case and to make it work.”

the president of the Ftth council of Europe, karin Ahl, sought to offer reassurance that progress was being made and that the Uk was on the right path.

“the development we see in the Uk right now is the same that we saw in the scandinavian countries 10 years ago. it starts the same way, and that is positive. it is something we should highlight and talk about much more than the negative side,” she said.

“the framework of other countries was the same, and the history and beginning of other countries was the same, so i think the development we see now is the start of something good. it is also clear that the market is there because there are consumers that take this into their own hands and there is a really big risk and investment, so that clearly shows there is business to be done.”

But Babaali concluded for all of this to come together, there needed to be more will and pressure from central government to accelerate the deploy-ments and technologies used across the Uk for better connections.

“You cannot ignore that the ambition of the gov-ernment is also quite important and we see a big gap between the so-called ambition of the Uk gov-ernment to be the leading internet infrastructure in Europe and the actual targets of the plan,” she said.

“We should be talking gigabits, not adding two or three megabits to download speeds. We are talk-ing about a revolution, not just about speed. We are talking about enabling services, such as e-health. these are all long-term goals that the European commission has really understood.”

Babaali concluded that the investment needed to be made now, not 10 years down the line – which according to current trends and predictions will be when the Uk finally starts ranking in the Ftth league tables.

“All this infrastructure needs to be deployed and ready now because it takes time for people to connect and also for the applications and services to be developed and these businesses to grow,” she said. “Let’s be ambitious, because this is our future.” n

“we should be tAlking gigAbits, not Adding two oR thRee megAbits to downloAd speeds” nAdiA bAbAAli, ftth

council of euRope

Jennifer Scott is the networking editor for Computer Weekly.


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Sandvik, a global swedish mining and construction engineering company, has simpli-fied its supply chain with a single purchase order portal. this has created information not previously available to make decisions about supplier relations, such as renegoti-ating contracts.

Dubbed supplierconnect internally, the system, from Finland-based data integration supplier Liaison technologies, has saved sandvik “a lot of time and money”, according to pro-gramme manager Lars holmström. individual buyers are now dealing with 20,000 purchase lines per month, and it was previously a fraction of that.

the engineering company, founded in 1862 and employing 50,000, has many thousands of sup-pliers with dozens of enterprise resource planning (ERp) systems and instances. supplierconnect covers 750 suppliers in 22 countries, and encom-passes 13 sandvik ERp systems.

Mikko soirola, vice-president of sales at Liaison, stressed that being ERp supplier-agnostic was crucial to sandvik Mining and construction at the beginning of the engagement in 2009.

in the existing system, when Liaison receives purchase orders from sandvik’s ERp systems, it sends them to suppliers via electronic data interchange (EDi), or using supplierconnect. to suppliers, the portal looks the same; the sandvik buyers work in their own ERp.

single supplier e-procurement portal tightens supply chainSwedish mining and construction giant Sandvik has simplified its interface with thousands of suppliers using an enterprise resource planning data integration web portal from Liaison. Brian McKenna reports

Aerial view of the sandvik industrial area in sandviken, sweden

undeRlying the need foR A unified supplieR pRocuRement poRtAl is sAndvik’s oRgAnic And Acquisitive gRowth pAtteRn


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Cutting costs, supporting growthholmström confirmed that a need to cut costs in the wake of the 2008 crash was the initial impetus for the project, but that this gave way to a need to support business growth, as its mining and construction markets picked up sharply.

Underlying the need for a unified supplier procurement portal is sandvik’s growth pattern – organic but also by frequent acquisition, said holmström. the company has a variety of different processes and multiple ERp systems throughout its dozens of global locations.

“our supply chain was fragmented around the world. some areas were really good, others were not,” said holmström. “that put us in an awkward situation. it got to the point where we really needed a better way to conduct business with our suppliers.”

previously, the company had used a lot of manual processes, including fax and email. “our choices were either to go for unique implementations for each location or a standardised shared process,” he said.

the selection of Liaison was as much to do with established advisory relationship as with technology, said holmström, referring to a rela-tionship with sandvik, in Finland, since 2000.

After the 2009 pilot programme – focused on the initial cost-saving phase – sandvik Mining and construction’s senior business leadership approved a plan to implement supplierconnect globally within 18 months.

sandvik and Liaison chose a roll-out approach in which basic functionality would be imple-mented in multiple locations while, at the same time, developing and implementing additional functionality – such as advance shipping notices and electronic invoicing – in pilot locations.

“A key component of each roll-out is what is called an ‘acceptance test’, performed in each location to prove that the integration solution is extremely stable,” said holmström. “i am very calm with every go-live. We can focus on our business, which is mining and construction, not data integration.”

holmström’s advice to others considering similar projects to streamline a global corpora-tion’s transactions with its supplier base is to keep things simple and focus on the process, not the ERp. his team’s procedure was to identify “lowest common denominators” in the procurement business processes at 10 locations and “go from there”.

now that the system is established, the company has seen unintended benefits. “For example, we have one Australian supplier which delivers to three locations there, but also to singapore and china. there are four different ERp systems on our side, but they see one interface. And they are pushing our other locations to adopt the portal,” he said.

having one uniform supplier portal makes new common and shared key performance indicators (kpis) possible, which are starting to reveal the best or worst suppliers, said holmström. “We can also see how our sites and factories are performing.”

this means business decision-makers in the sourcing function at sandvik have “new decision material” to use in sacking suppliers, renegotiating contracts, and the rest, he said.

And since the corporation as a whole is committed to a one-sandvik ethos, the supplierconnect portal is a good fit, he said. n

“ouR supply chAin wAs fRAgmented ARound the woRld…we ReAlly needed A betteR wAy to conduct business with ouR supplieRs”lARs holmstRöm, sAndvik

Brian McKenna is business applications editor for Computer Weekly.


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Spanish bank Banco santander has pulled out of its multibillion pound agreement to take over 316 Royal Bank of scotland (RBs) branches, and the customers associated with them, because of it integration problems.

But sources say that it problems can always be sorted out and suggest the claims might be an excuse to pull out of the deal.

partly nationalised RBs has been forced to sell assets by the government, after being saved from collapse during the bank rescue package in 2008.

Banco santander is no stranger to huge projects to migrate customers to its system. it has gained huge advantages by standardising its operations on its partenon core banking plat-form. Acquisitions in the Uk – including Abbey and Alliance & Leicester – were migrated to the platform.

Integration targets not metchris skinner, chairman of the Financial services club, said that RBs has claimed all the data has been separated and it is a case of putting it on Banco santander’s core banking platform partenon.

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Are IT problems to blame for Santander’s exit from RBS deal?Spanish bank Banco Santander has pulled out of its £1.7bn agreement to take over 316 RBS branches because of IT integration issues. Karl Flinders reports


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he said an Accenture report has revealed that the migration of the retail customer details will take until 2014 and business customers 2015. “they could be making excuses not to go ahead with the deal,” said skinner.

the banks made the agreement in August 2010. A year later, a new target completion date for the final quarter of 2012 was set.

While not commenting on it directly, Banco santander said in a statement that integration targets would not be met: “it is now apparent that this revised target will not be achieved. santander Uk confirms that it has therefore notified RBs that it does not believe the conditions to the transfer of the business from RBs to santander Uk will be satisfied by the agreed final deadline of February 2013, and that it is not willing to agree a further extension to that deadline.

“in that case, the agreement will automatically terminate in accordance with its terms and the transfer of the business to santander Uk will not take place.”

Partenon integrationBanco santander had a strategy to grow by acquisition and integrate the it operations of the firms it buys to partenon, which uses in-house middleware called Banksphere.

As well as rationalising it, this creates cross-selling opportunities and improves customers satisfaction and operational performance. the platform uses a single database so all of a customer’s relationships with the bank are auto-matically linked through a single view of customers.

santander bought Abbey in 2004 and acquired Alliance & Leicester in 2008. it set a target of £300m cost savings after integrating Abbey with partenon and it planned to make efficiency savings of between £30m and £50m by integrating Alliance & Leicester with its core banking system. n

the bAnks mAde the AgReement in August 2010. A yeAR lAteR, A new tARget completion dAte foR the finAl quARteR of 2012 wAs set. it is now AppARent thAt this Revised tARget will not be Achieved

Karl Flinders is services editor at Computer Weekly.

regulators Must force Banks to oVerHaul it

regulators must force banks to overhaul complex IT infrastructures which risk causing further large-scale system outages, IT trade body Intellect has urged.

The uk’s financial IT infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose and risks damaging the econ-omy by creating more glitches such as the recent rbs outage, said the body in its report Biting the bullet – why now is the time to rebuild the foundations of the financial system.

“banks are willing to spend money on cutting-edge technology that facilitates high-frequency trading or reduces the time it takes to process a transaction in the capital markets – where every cut millisecond means more profit – but not on modernising the infrastructure that allows them to deliver better customer services, act as a catalyst for the economy or allow regulators to perform their roles,” said the report.

This attitude means banks are currently spending 90% of their IT budgets on managing legacy systems, it said.

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