Selecting the right storage architecture is essential for organisations that are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Big Data and IoT analytics. For example, AI applications that involve scientific and medical research create and interact with numerous large files, and therefore need a storage system that can scale to a petabyte level, with zero restrictions. Similarly, ML applications and Big Data projects require a scalable, cost-effective storage solution to accommodate the high volumes of data that will be produced. This raises the question of which storage solution enterprises should use to underpin their overall analytics strategies.
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The past decade has been a challenging one for the Retail sector, to say the least. Much has already been written about the impact of online shopping and streaming services on the high street, and the rise of COVID-19 and recent supply chain disruptions have only compounded the challenges facing even the most established brick-and-mortar retailers.
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The way in which we consume content has changed forever. Physical media and prescheduled TV and radio have rapidly given way to the convenience, accessibility, and range offered by streaming services. Independent content creators share the digital stage with the most well-established industry leaders, and numerous organisations have embraced the mantra that 'content is king', utilising online video as a key tool for building engagement with their prospects and customers.
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The past few years have been challenging for the global Manufacturing sector, with both Brexit and COVID-19 creating a wide range of operational disruptions whose impact is still being felt. Indeed, as recently as January 2023, we saw UK manufacturing shrinking for the sixth consecutive month1.
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Manufacturing workflows are evolving at an unprecedented rate, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. The increasing effectiveness and affordability of 'smart' technologies and the Internet of Things means IT and OT are increasingly interconnected, with increasing volumes of data flowing between sites and devices on an ongoing basis.
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Like many fixtures of our lives, Britain's pubs were heavily impacted by COVID-19, with their familiar patrons unable to come in for a post-work drink, or meet with friends at the weekend. But while it was undoubtedly a difficult period for the industry as a whole, this great British institution did as it has always done, and adapted to suit its patrons' evolving requirements.
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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is rapidly establishing itself as the solution of choice for the next generation of enterprise networks, where optimal control, visibility, and scalability are essential. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, the SASE market experienced a 23% surge, as more and more organisations began taking advantage of its capabilities.
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As part of an ongoing effort to offer greater consistency and transparency across their full range of solutions, Microsoft have recently announced several pricing updates.
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What a time to work in the Legal sector! There's so many new technologies to think about; perhaps too many. There's cloud, there's automation, there's AI/Machine Learning, there's agile working, there's digital transformation… any more buzzwords you care to think of?
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In light of numerous dramatic shifts in the geopolitical landscape in recent months, this blog has reiterated the need for organisations across all sectors to strengthen and - if necessary - reconsider their cyber security postures, in order to prepare for the anticipated attacks by global bad actors. The legal sector is no exception, particularly as these attacks are anticipated to specifically target the most high-value data.
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Saving money with SD-WAN (part three)
Having debunked some of the myths surrounding SD-WAN’s money-saving properties in part one, and having provided some hypothetical examples of how it can actually save you money in part two, in the final part of this series I want to really ‘get real’ about SD-WAN.
Because once the hype has died down, and the ‘magical box’ myths are a distant memory, SD-WAN will still be there, generating tangible benefits for businesses across all industries and making them real money. A Google search will show you that SD-WAN is already a trend – there’s no getting ahead of that. But even though everybody’s talking about it, relatively few businesses are actually making the most of it. But some are – and here are three ways in which they’re doing it.
1. Economise while you globalise
For businesses, globalisation is a wellspring of opportunity, but it also creates new challenges. Many businesses have international offices that they need to connect-up - securely, reliably and cost effectively. And of course, it’s the cost effectiveness that often presents the biggest problem.
Why? Because security and reliability costs. Historically, those wishing to connect an international site or sites with full resilience have had to shell out for not one, but two international MPLS circuits (the second acting as a backup). Given the cost of international MPLS circuits, doing this isn’t exactly cheap.
Thanks to SD-WAN, though, businesses can now take a hybrid WAN approach to connecting international sites. This means using an international MPLS circuit backed up by an Internet circuit – and saving a pile of money in the process.
Before SD-WAN, running an MPLS circuit backed by an Internet circuit would have meant compromising your service. By cleverly using SD-WAN, however, we can now guarantee as good a service as an all-MPLS set-up, with as much resiliency, across a lower cost-based setup.
We do this by taking advantage of the application steering SD-WAN enables. This functionality allows us to put priority applications on the main MPLS circuit – thereby retaining the SLA and quality of service required – while mapping non-critical stuff onto an Internet line – thereby saving money.
2. Maximum security, minimum cost
With threat vectors multiplying as the Internet of Things emerges and businesses move more and more of their operations into the Cloud, cyber security has arguably never been so important to get right - or so challenging. And for businesses in possession of more than one office or site, there are obviously additional challenges; security can be extremely complex and expensive to set-up and maintain across multiple sites.
If you’ve got twenty offices, for example – that’s twenty physical firewalls that need to be installed and supported, with twenty different support contracts. And even once those firewalls are set up, if you want to roll out a new policy or software upgrade, that’s twenty separate upgrades you need to devote money and man-hours to. It’s making me tired just thinking about it! By the way, twenty offices might sound like a lot to some businesses, but could actually be quite a modest number by the standards of (for example) some retailers, some of whom have hundreds of sites to oversee and secure.
Transferring to a cloud-based security service will eliminate many of these headaches, and SD-WAN is arguably the best way to go about it. With SD-WAN, you get single-pane-of-glass visibility and control over your entire network, including all devices and endpoints (which SD-WAN networks authenticate with scalable key-exchange functionality and software-defined security). You’ll be able to roll out updates, configurations, patches and policies at the touch of a button, and - what’s more - you won’t even have to set-up physical firewalls in the first place!
3. An access all areas pass for businesses
For many businesses, there are times when sites need to be set up so quickly that connecting them up to the business’s main network isn’t an option. For construction and retail businesses, this is an increasingly familiar challenge: both routinely have to set up a porta-cabin site or pop-up store without access to fixed-line connectivity. In these situations, there’s unlikely to be space for hardware. Very likely there’s no IT staff on-site. It could also be a short-term implementation, making it difficult to install hardware in time to make it cost effective.
Once again, SD-WAN comes to the rescue! Because SD-WAN can be accessed through just about any access mechanism – from Ethernet to 4G data – you can use it to get up and running in no time at all. A retailer armed with SD-WAN can set up a pop-up shop and connect via 4G, and can switch to a more robust access point – at which time 4G becomes the backup as and when it becomes available.
Supplementing the savings in hardware costs will be the increased revenue businesses can expect to generate by eliminating delays in setting up. The agility SD-WAN’s flexibility gives to businesses also means they can set-up in a wider range of locations – and that equates to even more potential revenue.
The bottom line: the sky’s the limit
So there you have it – three examples of how businesses are proving that SD-WAN is more than just hype, and that the savings you can make using it are real and tangible. And these are only three examples, and this is only really the beginning. Ultimately, the control SD-WAN gives businesses over their network management means that the only limit to the ways in which it can save them money is the limit of network experts’ ingenuity.
Thanks for reading this blog series. We would love to hear your feedback on the blogs, any questions you might have, and any thoughts you yourself have on SD-WAN and its capacity to positively impact a business’s bottom line. Please leave comments below this blog or on social media, and let’s get the conversation started!
In the meantime, you can learn more about SD-WAN on our website
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Saving money with SD-WAN (part two)
"SD-WAN is an exciting, transformative technology that can do a lot of amazing things for your business – but it needs to be used correctly."
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Saving money with SD-WAN (part one)
Software Defined WAN, or SD-WAN for short, is the new big thing in business networking. Everybody's talking about SD-WAN, and about what it can do for businesses. Well, there's no doubt that SD-WAN can do a lot for your business; in fact, we'll be talking about exactly that in part 2 of this 3 part blog series. But before we do that, we need to talk about what SD-WAN can't do. Right now there's a popular misconception among businesses concerning SD-WAN - a misconception fed and sustained by headlines and marketing hype - that could lead them to take damaging shortcuts in incorporating SD-WAN into their business.
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New health secretary Matt Hancock has been beating the technology drum. As well as announcing that almost £500 million would be made available for technology, he's also asserted that the service needs more apps. However, it’s fair to wonder: is this the right avenue to funnel resources?
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A common perception of contact centres is that their callers - be they customers, patients or end users - only contact them if something is wrong. Nonetheless, throughout 2020, we have seen this underrated (but nonetheless essential) part of the overall customer experience enter a new stage in its evolution.
But with distributed workplaces and the way organisations communicate with customers and colleagues irrevocably changed, what will the contact centre of the future look like and what does this mean for organisations and their callers?
A great agent experience means a great caller experience
Contact centres of any sort are very much social environments, where the human touch is everything. And that engagement must be maintained throughout every point of contact between agents and callers, whether it's face-to-face over a video link, over the phone, or through online chat.
But throughout 2020, we have seen a shift in how this is accomplished, with the opening up of a wide range of new channels of communication through which callers can engage with agents. This includes voice, online chat and video - all of which provide the agent to access sophisticated Unified Communications platforms that not only deliver a consistently high-quality customer experience, but through Cloud technology and intelligent automation, are fully integrated with the rest of the IT ecosystem. This way, with the full range of caller data at their fingertips and direct connections to internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), contact centre technology becomes invisible, and agents are free to focus on delivering successfully resolutions.
Beyond reducing the average time spent on calls and increasing the number of quick, successful resolutions, this model of Unified Communications ensures agents can continue interacting with their colleagues when working remotely, just as they would in the traditional contact centre environment, leading to a smoother, less stressful environment that enhances their performance and wellbeing. And this, in turn, leads to better employee retention, by ensuring agents are properly supported in their daily work and ongoing development.
A model for future contact centre environments
It's often argued that the move to a Cloud-based model for contact centres was a reactive one, in direct response to COVID-19, and to a certain extent this is true. But while it's true we could not have envisaged such a fundamental transformation taking place so rapidly and such a scale just one year ago, Cloud adoption has been steadily on the rise for a number of years now. In other words, the technology needed to implement remote working at scale has been available for some time.
Nonetheless, once the required standard of connectivity was achieved, there were still numerous challenges to consider. By their very nature, contact centres work with a high volume of personal information, which means privacy, data security and compliance are all key requirements. Overcoming these depended on close collaboration between organisations and their technological partners, with many longstanding partnerships across the UK revealing their true value. In particular, technology partners who could integrate multiple channels of communication within single platforms - true Unified Communications solutions – proved invaluable to the success of many organisations' Cloud transformations.
Bringing together customer service and business growth
With the move towards a distributed workforce now very much complete, organisations in both the public and private sectors are shifting their focus from implementation to long-term growth and sustainability. Historically, gathering actionable customer data is often time-consuming and inefficient, especially when working with multiple channels of communication. Unified Communications and Cloud-based contact centres solve this problem, allowing call data to be consolidated within a single platform, with all sensitive information stored securely, in line with all applicable data protection regulations.
Streamlining and automating this process provides contacts with a steady stream of valuable call data, ensuring targets are consistently met, opportunities for improvement are identified and acted upon, and agents enjoy ongoing professional development. But beyond that, this provides the wider organisation with a real-time view of how their products and services are being delivered 'on the ground', and how their customers, patients or end users view them. As this model becomes more and more established across a range of sectors, we expect to see contact centres shift from a purely reactive role, to playing a major role in organisations' ongoing business growth.
A model for future contact centre environments
While we are still very much in the early days of the 'new normal', the principles we have explored in this article are far from theoretical. At Exponential-e, we have participated in these contact centre transformations numerous times throughout 2020. An excellent example of this was our partnership with the NHS in South-East London, in which we successfully helped GPs and frontline staff transition to a remote working environment, continuing to engage with their patients through multiple channels from wherever they are based. Our UC-ONE for Health solution was deployed across six boroughs and 206 GP sites, integrated with existing EPR systems, with the first 1,000 users online in just 48 hours. The system was subsequently extended to more than 5,000 frontline staff over the course of three weeks, ensuring the usual high standard of patient care could successfully co-exist with social distancing requirements. All this was accomplished completely remotely, thanks in part to Exponential-e's deep experience with Cloud migration and well-established network.
This approach is by no means confined to the healthcare sector. The beauty of the Cloud is its flexibility and scalability, which means similar strategies could be used to execute Cloud transformations in contact centres across a range of challenging industries, to the benefit of organisations, agents and callers alike.
Afshin Attari, Exponential-e's Director of Public Sector & Unified Platforms, discussed these topics in greater depth at the recent Servion webinar, "Realigning CX to the New Normal with Best of Breed Service Providers". Click here to watch it.
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Secure, scalable IT infrastructure for one of the UK's leading IP attorneys
About J A Kemp
Based in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, with international offices in Munich and Paris, J A Kemp are a leading firm of UK and European patent, design, and trademark attorneys, offering industry-leading services to a diverse range of clients.
The Challenge
World-class IT that supports the seamless delivery of legal services depends on infrastructure that is both highly available and highly secure, designed with the sector's rigorous security and compliance requirements in mind. To ensure their infrastructure provides the very highest standards of security, performance, and availability, with a consistent experience for staff across all their branches, J A Kemp selected Exponential-e as their trusted technology partner.
The Solution
Exponential-e provides the underlying connectivity between J A Kemp's three offices across the UK, supporting seamless communication and collaboration between more than two-hundred end users, secured by a centralised firewall. To further optimise the resilience of their IT infrastructure, their primary on-premises servers are complemented by dedicated backups, stored in a dedicated private Cloud in a colocation environment, with Exponential-e's data centre teams managing the hardware and firmware layers, including ongoing testing, while J A Kemp's own IT team retain full control and visibility of their VMs.
With this as the foundation, a dedicated account team work closely with the internal IT team, providing proactive monitoring and alerting to ensure any potential disruptions can be identified and resolved, with zero effect on day-to-day operations.
At the same time, J A Kemp's account team work closely with them and multiple specialists from across Exponential-e to ensure new opportunities for enhancement and optimisation can be identified and acted up as soon as they arise.
Our account team haven't just been proactive in terms of renewing what we've got. They've also helped us validate what we need and ensure our infrastructure continues to evolve as the business does.
Hemel Vaja
Head of Technology,
J A Kemp
Solution Benefits
- Proactive support from a dedicated account team, ensuring the IT infrastructure delivers the highest standards of performance, availability, and security for more than two-hundred end users.
- Highly available, highly resilient connectivity between sites in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.
- Ongoing consultation from multiple specialists, helping drive regular improvements and optimisations.
- A managed disaster recovery solution, ensuring critical data and infrastructure can be restored as quickly as possible, whenever necessary.
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