Data & Data Governance

Spending money on cyber security, we are told, has become the most important investment a company can make. It is said that companies large and small are not investing the right amount or, indeed, in the right things.

This guidance has been published by the Information Commissioners office in March 2017 to help organisations to prepare for the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation which takes effect in the UK in May 2018.

Organisations all over EMEA are waking up to the transformative possibilities offered by public cloud computing deployments. The drive for greater IT efficiency, business agility, and productivity has become an increasingly urgent one—especially since those businesses that tap the cloud effectively begin to pull ahead of their rivals. Yet, anecdotal evidence and quantitative surveys tell us that security is still a major barrier to greater cloud adoption.

Despite Britain voting to leave the EU, little in reality will change from a data protection and privacy perspective. In order to trade freely with the world’s largest single market, the UK government will have to enforce regulations on a par with the forthcoming regulation. The message is clear for UK IT security professionals: stay on the path towards GDPR compliance.

Demand for cloud-based applications is growing in both the consumer and business spheres. Hybrid cloud computing combines private and public cloud resources. This model will radically change the design and management of corporate networks – as hybrid cloud computing also requires a hybrid network infrastructure.

This paper from Atos describes the structural challenges enterprises are facing when establishing an outsourced SIaM function. Several Best Practices such as a functional blueprint, tooling considerations and partner alignment prerequisites (Commonly Shared KPIs, a SIaM Information model and the Service Catalogue) provide guidance for anyone on the SIaM journey. Finally the Outlook chapter explains the evolution of Service Integration towards Business Process Agility and links this capability to underlying technical capabilities such as Service Brokerage, Cloud Orchestration and Cloud Messaging. The Conclusions chapter lists a set of key take-away.

A recent roundtable event, organised by the Cloud Industry Forum, and sponsored by Dell, brought together a range of Cloud security experts, all happy to share their views on the topic, providing fascinating insight into the disconnect that often exists between vendors and their customers.

This is not a paper about why or if you should migrate to a cloud environment, whether for one particular application or for your entire infrastructure, or for something in-between. Nor is it a paper about which provider of cloud infrastructure, applications or services you should choose to partner with. What this paper is about are the technical considerations that you should bear in mind during the process of moving to, or implementing, products or solutions that are cloud based. Note that we are specifically concerned with technical issues rather than with any personal, political or other concerns that may arise. In other words, we are principally concerned with "what" and "how": what issues you need to think about and, how, in general terms, these can be resolved.

Are you heading for a Cloud thunderstorm? Having a QA and testing framework while selecting and implementing a cloud service can help you avoid a lightning strike

Slides from Cloud Expo 2015 keynote presentations. Richard Munro CTO – vCloud Air EMEA

Slides from Cloud Expo 2015 keynote presentations. Johan Holder. Co-founder, Kazoop

Outsourcing elements of your IT infrastructure to an external hosting provider necessarily demands a different approach to governance than with traditional dedicated environments. This paper maps out some high-level recommendations to common governance standards to ease their successful implementation in cloud environments

Inside this paper you will find an introduction to what the Cloud is about – and why you need to take it seriously, along with my four most recent columns that seek to address how the Board, together with the CIO, should give practical substance to their paranoid optimism!

How are government departments planning to deliver transformative services, previously managed entirely by a small number of major suppliers? This paper discusses the best practice steps to achieve disaggregation and how to avoid the pitfalls associated with such a significant overhaul.

“Shadow IT” presents significant threats to your information security and availability that can impact your customers, and in turn affect your revenue. In some cases, customers may leave if you have a sustained outage or loss of client data.

As more organizations establish a goal of building out internal cloud services, it becomes the responsibility of IT departments to plan and implement this transition.

The idea cloud can’t be used by regulated industries doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, there are many ways in which the technology can be deployed…

Cloud Messaging will help enterprises to achieve seamless integration of business processes spanning multiple applications, clouds and smart devices. This Ascent White Paper explains the concept and describes the learnings from a Healthcare sector Proof-of-Concept.

We discuss cloud security concerns and why businesses needn’t worry so much with Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks.

Moving to the cloud has plenty of implications for the way that data governance is handled within organisations. How should firms approach this?

The Databarracks annual Data Health Check surveys hundreds of IT professionals across 19 different fields to capture a snapshot of the way businesses use and think about IT. Here are the highlights from 2014.

The law around cloud has been confusing, particularly when national boundaries are taken into account. But that could be about to change...

Set of slides from the Cloud Expo 2014 exhibitions keynote presentations. Martin Prendergast. Member, Cloud Industry Forum. CEO, Concorde Solutions

This White Paper describes the technical challenges and potential solutions for preserving digital artifacts, for long intervals of time (several decades, centuries) in a new world of massive, distributed data.

What should your first steps be when formulating a security policy for cloud use? Davey Winder has been talking to the experts about this very subject. Read on to find out more…

Gartner projects IaaS investments will continue to grow significantly through to 2017, seeing a compound annual growth rate of 37.3%.

Businesses are beginning to make the most of their data, but they to need to ensure security issues are sorted out first...

We speak to Conor Ward, consultant with international law firm Hogan Lovells and chair of the CIF Legal Forum, about the current state of play.

Your business is ready to reap the rewards of the software defined cloud era. Is your IT organization ready to deliver?

Virtualisation plays an important part in many IT transformation plans, but few organisations take the time to investigate the effects that this strategy has on their existing software estate, licensing deployment and behaviour in the virtualised world

We speak to Martin Prendergast, CEO and co-founder of Concorde, about the changing nature of software asset management and the role cloud plays here

Is cloud the nirvana of IT deployment models? Will everything make the transition to the cloud? Are we facing the terminal demise of on-premise IT? This comprehensive e-book from CIF and CloudPro examines a broad section of topics related to the adoption of cloud in the enterprise. Advice, insight and guidance to help you make tomorrow’s tech decisions, today.

The results of this survey show that interest in the use of SaaS applications among organisations in Germany and the UK is increasing; with flexibility, access by mobile devices and always-on availability being the primary drivers. However, security is still seen as the greatest inhibitor, including the need to protect data from being accessed inappropriately. Identity and access management technologies play a key role in authenticating users according to the rights that they have been granted. Today, there are relatively new breeds of identity management services that extend identity and access management capabilities to externally provisioned applications as well as catering to the needs of both mobile and external users, such as customer and business partners. Such services provide an efficient means of assuaging some of the prime security concerns that organisations have in subscribing to SaaS services.

Cloud Computing does not scale well. Such a bold statement may seem incorrect given that according to accepted wisdom, scalability is one of the essential properties that make Cloud Computing so attractive to businesses. This Paper explores this apparent contradiction and proposes potential solutions based on research conducted by the Atos Scientific Community.

Big Data and Cloud, two of the trends that are defining the emerging Enterprise Computing, show a lot of potential for a new era of combined applications.

For law firms and corporate legal departments, the dynamics of a cloud delivery approach can be especially attractive—making it possible to increase staff productivity, deliver better client service, and improve business agility while reducing expense.

A survey by IDG Research Services reveals that organizations face confusion in researching cloud options, forcing them to adjust goals and search for more flexible and open cloud solutions that can help them prevent vendor lock-in.

A year is a long time in the cloud sector. Last year we wrote “The Real Challenges and Benefits of Cloud Computing to Law Firms”. In preparing that paper we interviewed a number of technology directors at law firms to gauge their attitudes to cloud computing, whether their firm had adopted cloud (or was looking to do so) and what type.

Cloud-based applications and services, and software-as-a-service applications in particular, are coming into widespread use by organisations of all sizes. Such applications are used to process and store sensitive information making it imperative that user access rights are tightly controlled to ensure that information is secure from loss or theft and remains private. This paper discusses recent developments in identity and access management technologies that aim to extend such controls to services provided from external sources.

In the UK today over 50 per cent of organisations have formally utilised at least one Cloud service and satisfaction levels relating to that experience grew to an astonishing 96 per cent by the end of 2011. Furthermore, 85 per cent of IT Executives stated that they now formally considered Cloud as a viable option for delivering new IT projects within their wider IT strategy, signaling that the technical model has established a mainstream status among the profession.

Software Value Management (SVM) is the practice of informed active governance over access, utilisation, licensing, and cost efficiency of software throughout its useful life within an enterprise regardless of the IT deployment models used or methods of access.

Practical solutions for the digital age of Global Communications and Mass data exchange.

Industry surveys consistently show that security is the number one concern when it comes to cloud adoption. In our related, previous report, "Secure your data - protect your business" we discussed best practice recommendations arising from interviews with a number of organisations and how they treat their data. In this follow up report, we answer key questions that people are asking us about cloud adoption and data management.