IT

Derby IT business acquired by husband and wife team with HSBC support

Cooper Parry IT has been acquired by its former Directors and husband and wife team, Vicky and Brett Critchley, under the new name Bam Boom Cloud, with the support of a seven-figure management buy-out (MBO) facility from HSBC UK. Vicky will become CEO of Bam Boom Cloud and Brett will take the position of Executive Chairman, with the company’s former 90-strong workforce all now becoming part of the new venture. Vicky’s and Brett’s future growth strategy and vision for the business includes the acquisition of businesses to help broaden the company’s product offering, including CRM and Data Analytics, as well as to facilitate their expansion plans into North America. The husband and wife team hope to create 60 new local jobs over the next two years. Vicky Critchley, CEO at Bam Boom Cloud, says: “It’s such an exciting time for our business as we look to accelerate our growth potential as a global Microsoft partner by making Microsoft Cloud technology simple to implement, effective and accessible to small and medium-sized businesses. We support a lot of small businesses and even start-ups to acquire technology in a totally different way, enabling them to grow at a faster rate. “The facility from HSBC UK not only supported the acquisition of Cooper Parry IT, but will support our future growth strategy, as we look to bring on board additional products in both the UK and US in the coming year.” Simon Woods, HSBC UK Relationship Director East Midlands Corporate Banking, adds: “We were delighted to support Bam Boom Cloud with the acquisition and to facilitate and accelerate their future expansion plans. At such a critical time for small and medium-sized businesses requiring additional IT support to meet customer demands during the pandemic, it’s great to see Bam Boom Cloud’s ambition to not only strengthen its product offering but also develop its future market plans.”

Demand for Data survey sees Tableau launch New Online Region

A recent YouGov survey found that 80% of data-driven businesses claim they have a critical advantage as the impact of the pandemic continues. Today, Tableau Software, the leading analytics platform, announces the launch of a new dedicated ‘region’ in London to harvest data insights using its fully hosted SaaS offering, Tableau Online. This region, their second in Europe after Dublin, will offer Tableau’s customers enhanced performance and more choice in data locality. It will be hosted by AWS infrastructure in London.  The fundamental change in how and where people work has made having data in the cloud more essential than ever. Rapid growth and demand for cloud solutions globally (via survey) have driven the launch of several Tableau Online regions since the start of the pandemic, with Japan and Australia launching in June 2020. IDC predicts that by the end of 2021, 80% of enterprises will have put a mechanism in place to shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and that applications will be twice as fast as before, consistent with the growing demand for Tableau services.  “Now more than ever, businesses are leaning on data to help them be more agile and resilient and we are seeing customers turn to the Tableau platform to deliver their organisations' evolving analytics needs at speed. As customers accelerate their data-driven digitisation journey, we are helping them move faster, with greater insights behind their decision making. The UK region expansion is a direct result of the record demand we are seeing across EMEA for Tableau Online, and our commitment to meet our customers where they are,” says Tom Walker, Executive Vice President, Cloud, at Tableau. International jewellery retailer, Signet Jewelers, operates over 2,900 stores across the UK, US and Canada including Ernest Jones and H.Samuel. Gary Gruccio, Director of Enterprise and Market Analytics at Signet comments: “Tableau Online enabled us to get started quickly with our visualization strategy. Providing strategic insights in hours rather than days or weeks has transformed decision making at Signet and enabled leadership to take swift corrective action during key selling periods. One example saw us using Tableau to analyse more than 75 million point-of-sale transactions, which helped identify an opportunity worth more than $10 million USD”. The region is available to both new and existing Tableau Online customers, who have the option to select their preferred location when setting up their Tableau Online site. 

Data Distance: How IT can enable a productive remote workforce

Aside from lockdowns and vaccines, distance might be one of the larger themes of of the COVID-19 pandemic. Keeping our distance from one another has fundamentally changed the way we interact – in our personal lives and in our day-to-day work activities. Social distance requirements in the workplace have led to companies implementing what we might call ‘office distancing’ - a combination of increased work-from-home (WFH) and more remote office schemes, rather than say, the traditional headquarters environment. And as a result, organisations have in turn needed to address ‘data distance,’ i.e. ensuring remote workers can access files and other necessary data with the same level of performance and security they have normally enjoyed. The Challenges of Data Distancing  Large-scale data distancing across a globally distributed workforce results in a number of IT challenges: Data security Easy access to file data is crucial for employee productivity, but it should not come at the expense of security. The exposure of an organisation’s global data fabric to remote devices creates a security challenge as these edge locations, by their nature, do not have strong physical security. It is vital for an organisation’s chosen file system to rigorously control the data that can be accessed at each remote node or endpoint. While VPNs can meet security requirements, they are notoriously clunky. What is needed is a mix of the two: a way to extend corporate file systems to remote users securely without adversely impacting the user experience. Overcoming network latency Remote working models require enterprise IT teams to provide high-performance, interactive data services across greater distances than we have ever seen before. If your file storage is consolidated in a single, centralised datacentre, it is difficult to provide a high-speed user experience. This is due to network latency, which is a direct function of distance. Traditional file storage solutions were not built to handle the latencies and connectivity issues stemming from wider enterprise data topologies. Thus, file data should be located near the users to ensure a "local" file access experience. This can be achieved by manually moving the files, or preferably, by strategically deploying caching devices (more on this in a bit).  Balancing consistency and availability Distributed data fabrics vary in their levels of consistency and the ways they deal with inconsistencies, such as when two users are concurrently editing a file. One approach is to use an “eventual consistency” model, and handle inconsistencies by creating a conflict file. Other solutions implement strict global locking, at the cost of availability and latency; a global locking service often becomes a single point of contention and is not accessible during network disconnections. This trade-off is caused by the CAP theorem which states you can have at most two out of Consistency (C), Availability (A) and Partition Tolerance (P) in any distributed storage system. Migration   Migration to modern file solutions from legacy systems is one of the most significant challenges for any enterprise organisation. To ease migration issues, choose a solution that has strong migration tools to allow for the retention of security settings such as Windows ACLs and backward compatibility with existing filers – by exposing the data using the ubiquitous SMB and NFS protocols. 5 top tips for implementing data distancing Enterprises should keep the following in mind as they tackle these data distancing challenges: 1. Anywhere Availability: Making data accessible to authorised users from anywhere – at HQ, branch offices or home – by using a global file system is increasingly becoming a necessity. In a global file system, files are cached at the edge (either at the endpoint or using regional caching nodes) to ensure low latency access from anywhere. Caching also provides for partition-safety to allow nodes to work offline in case connectivity is lost, and to re-synchronise once connectivity is re-established. This synchronisation also ensures business continuity and facilitates global collaboration among remote users. 2. Security: A zero-trust approach should be employed, in which remote nodes and endpoints can only access a strictly controlled subset of corporate information with explicit permission, rather than being granted access to the entire infrastructure.  3. Cloud Bursting: Cloud bursting is a popular use case for organisations seeking to expand on-premises storage capacity without deploying additional on-premises storage infrastructure. Cloud bursts for compute also helps overcome data distancing challenges by enabling the heavy data crunching to occur in the cloud, away from the edge device and thus improving local performance. 4. Dark Data: It is imperative that enterprises corral their dark data on unknown bring-your-own and work-from-home devices, and ensure it becomes a thing of the past. Enterprise data should be at the fingertips of all of employees, everywhere, at all times.  5. Agility: Engaging with solutions that enable agile collaboration on data between remote workers is vital so that users at the organisation’s headquarters and remote branches across the world can access the same file shares quickly and efficiently. Remote work models are set to stay put beyond the pandemic. Using the right tools and technologies, data distancing can help enterprises ensure productivity for their remote and distributed workforces while maintaining performance requirements and existing access control and security models. By Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA

Eurotech commended by Frost & Sullivan for large partnership ecosystem

Based on its recent analysis of the Internet of Things (IoT) market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Eurotech with the 2020 Global Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for its focus on IT-OT integration. The company has nurtured a large ecosystem of partners, including OT and IT market leaders, to provide IoT solutions that address real-world business needs. By bridging the gap between IT and OT, Eurotech has developed products that adopt open source and open standards to ‘uncomplicate’ IoT deployments. “IT-OT Integration is the most challenging aspect of IoT deployments. Eurotech has created processes and solutions that simplify this aspect and ensure that customers achieve their expected low total cost of ownership from their IoT deployments," remarks Dilip Sarangan, Sr. Director of Research, IoT, and Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan. "Unlike competitors that focus exclusively on technology, Eurotech places significant emphasis on risk mitigation to address customers’ challenges holistically". Eurotech's solutions provide customers with an enhanced customer experience throughout the deployment and post-deployment journey, particularly addressing the needs of organizations that demand reliable, durable products. In addition to its superior solutions, the company facilitates deployments even while adding new capabilities and applications to existing deployments. This flexibility is made possible by Eurotech’s full lifecycle management of edge systems, with a focus on security. Eurotech has built a significant presence in the high-performance edge computing market because of the traction in transportation, energy, utilities, and other industrialized environments. Applications that will specifically boost the company’s brand equity include emerging autonomous things and vehicles. Currently, Eurotech’s products provide autonomous vehicle manufacturers with the high-performance capabilities they need to process and manage the vast amount of data collected by vehicles in test and development scenarios for level 5 autonomous driving. “While Eurotech is currently well positioned to continue expanding in the IoT market, it is expected to grow exponentially when autonomous products and vehicles go mainstream in the next five to ten years," notes Sarangan. "Overall, its ability to continue expanding its ecosystem, compete effectively with significantly larger competitors, and capture emerging growth opportunities sets it apart from competitors in the IoT market." “We are very excited to receive this prestigious award from Frost & Sullivan,” comments Robert Andres, Chief Strategy Officer of Eurotech. “It is a very appreciated and also encouraging recognition for the strategic direction we took and in the development of a compelling portfolio (hardware, software, and services), designed to help global customers accelerate their digital transformation efforts”. Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has leveraged competitive intelligence to execute a strategy successfully that results in stronger market share, competitive brand positioning, and customer satisfaction. Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analyses, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

Node4 helps Loans2Go cement itself in the fintech industry

Node4 has announced that is has supplied Loans2Go with a modernised IT infrastructure and database to help its move to a fully operational online lender. The solution includes full monitoring and 24/7 proactive management of critical Microsoft SQL environments. Loans2Go was using bespoke systems running on old IBM mainframes designed by a related company based in the US. The DBAs supporting the systems were part of this company. Over time the systems were migrated over to MSSQL but still supported by the US until new stricter rules under GDPR were announced. It was agreed that DBA support should move to the UK to mitigate any compliance issues. The company runs a small IT & development team, and whilst it was clear that it needed a skilled resource to maintain and optimise the database environment, the cost of hiring a dedicated team of DBAs was prohibitive. The environment also needed urgent optimisation as the company was missing out on business opportunities due to the time-sensitive nature of the online acquisition process. If the system could respond quicker to the circa 40,000 daily applications, this would increase the volume of acquisitions. Node4 was also instrumental in helping Loans2Go overhaul and migrate its environment. This included solution design and testing. One of the key points that emerged from this was the identification of a sever bottleneck on the new infrastructure, which, had it gone unnoticed would have had severe consequences for the business. “What has stood out about Node4 the most is that we were looking for a company that gave more of a personal touch,” says James Godbold, CIO at Loans2Go. “While other companies may have just stuck some monitoring on servers and automated high-level alerts, with Node4, they will proactively investigate issues and raise up personally. As a lean IT team, it’s great being able to bounce ideas off other skilled professionals and have them feel like an extension of our team because they truly care.” Another benefit of working with Node4 is that Loans2Go can reap flexibility. “Larger suppliers mean work becomes siloed. With Node4, we get flexibility and great communication,” James explains. “Our data centre migration has been bumped three or four times due to priorities shifting and the infrastructure issues, and Node4 has been very accommodating with that. The team understands the complications with projects, and have gone above and beyond what they are actually committed to do to help us reach a shared goal.” James continues: “The way we onboard customers is through an auction panel and response time is critical to this. Without quick responses, we lose custom. It is that simple. The old environment was seeing performance degradation, and because of this, we were not responding to the bids within the 30-second time frame. The speed of our infrastructure is vital; otherwise, we miss out on huge amounts of opportunity. We are now completing the process in sub 5 seconds, whereas before we had huge fluctuations between 10 and 40 seconds. With Node4 testing the new environment and finding the flaws, we’ve also averted moving to kit that wouldn't have been able to respond quick enough either.” Loans2Go is now looking to build out new DR sites and expand into cloud solutions with the help of Node4’s data management and infrastructure expertise.

IT support specialist becomes latest reseller to find Cloud nine

IT support specialist, Camb IT Support, is the latest reseller from across Europe and beyond to offer its clients one of the world’s most advanced backup services for Microsoft 365, known as CloudCover 365. The product is the brainchild of Leeds based cloud computing and disaster recovery specialist, virtualDCS, and offers a wealth of additional features on top of the Veeam foundations that it is built on. It is also the world’s only Veeam powered self-service Microsoft 365 portal, meaning individual end users have the option of quickly and easily viewing and restoring their own data, without the support of IT specialists. Incorporating data storage technology from Zadara, CloudCover 365 is specifically designed to enable organisations to fully backup all aspects of Microsoft 365, including email, contacts, public folders, Teams and all documents in One Drive, as well as intranet service, Share Point. Cambridge based Camb IT Support is a leading supplier of innovative IT services to businesses across all industry sectors. The company deploys, supports and maintains a vast range of IT systems as well as providing consultancy, cloud and security services. In addition, Camb IT Support is widely recognised as a leading Microsoft 365 migration specialist. Mathew Burrell, from Camb IT Support, says: “There is no denying that Microsoft Office 365 is a first class tool that enables users to work almost anywhere and on a wide range of devices, which makes it extremely popular. However, its backup system is far from adequate, with big holes in it that a lot of people are simply not aware of. “In order to provide our customers with the high standard of service that we’re renowned for, we had to offer them a backup and restore service that is straightforward to use, highly secure and cost effective. We looked in depth at four other options, but CloudCover 365 ticked every box, as well as offering secure encryption, immutability and retaining data for an unlimited period. “The product is also more cost effective than the US based solution we were previously using and its simplicity and functionality means that on average it now takes much less time to restore a users’ data, which is significantly improving the efficiency of our helpdesk.” Matthew adds: “CloudCover 365 has been a gamechanger for Camb IT Support. We’ve already supplied it to 10 customers, with hundreds of employees, ranging from local schools through to a global business with teams across Europe, Africa and Asia, and the feedback we’re receiving is extremely positive. We’re now looking forward to rolling it out to more of our customers over the coming months.” Jason Newell, from CloudCover 365 and virtualDCS, which is a Veeam Gold Partner, explains: “Microsoft 365 is now a staple in today’s business world and a lifeline for organisations that are working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, most businesses have little control of Microsoft 365. “There is a common misconception that SaaS data in the cloud is inherently safe, but most users don’t realise that although Microsoft is responsible for the software, it isn’t responsible for data backups. Plus, restoring from Microsoft is far from easy. We launched CloudCover 365 last year to overcome these issues and have now incorporated secure encryption and immutability into the product, which is proving extremely popular. “Crucially, it also offers the option of being a self-serve solution, so end users can access and recover their own files and emails, rather than having to contact their IT department or reseller for support. This sets it apart from the standard Veeam software and anything else on the market. “The product is now establishing a solid reputation for its quality and simplicity, which is underpinned by strong fundamentals that include being hosted in the UK, G-Cloud accredited and ISO27001 certified, and all this really resonated with Camb IT Support. Like all resellers, the company must deliver for its clients, and provide a best in class solution, which CloudCover 365 offers. “We’re delighted that Camb IT Support has joined a growing list of resellers worldwide that we’re now working with, which already includes companies throughout the UK, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden and Egypt.” Resellers of CloudCover 365 have the option of offering it as a fully customisable, white labelled portal and a bolt-on service to existing Microsoft 365 licences or cloud solutions, as well as being able to manage and monitor customers from the central CloudCover 365 portal. Expert guidance and training, along with both branded and white labelled marketing material, is also provided.

Dunedin IT evolution accelerates move into connectivity

Dunedin IT has announced a strong performance in 2020 including a 300% increase in demand for its voice and data connectivity solutions as businesses demanded more flexibility and resilience in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To help manage this growth, the technology company recently hired Rory McEwan as Director. Rory has over 25 years of experience in the telecoms industry, including founding Orca Telecoms, which was later acquired by Arrow. Prior to joining Dunedin IT on a permanent basis, Rory worked with the company as a consultant, supporting its evolution from being solely a technology provider to a connectivity partner. Rory McEwan comments: “As we become even more reliant on digital technologies, connectivity is key to a successful business plan, particularly for businesses with remote teams. Dunedin IT may have started as a technology provider but has now made the move into network services to become a fully-fledged connectivity partner. With technology a key enabler to recovery for the business community, I look forward to helping organisations across all sectors better understand how it can play a central role in increasing business resilience.” David Inglis, Founding Director of Dunedin IT, says: “Rory has joined us at a pivotal time for our company and the wider industry in general. Our revenues and product offerings have increased, and in response we have seen a 50% growth in staff numbers over the past three years. We have been keen to add a director to help lead us in a new direction and we are confident Rory will support us on that journey. “From an industry perspective, the role of technology in ensuring business resilience and continuity has never been clearer. With remote working no longer a trend, but accepted practice within business, we have seen significant interest from clients in providing connectivity as a managed service. Rory’s expertise in telecoms will support this interest as well as help Dunedin IT to continue to grow. We expect to continue this growth in the coming year and look forward to expanding our team further.” Additional successes over the past year include achieving Microsoft Gold Certification and being named City Champion by CityFibre.

DataVita joins international pledge to drive IT sustainability

DataVita has committed to a carbon-neutral future by becoming the first Scottish IT company to sign the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact. Launched earlier this year, the pan-European initiative has seen more than 40 companies and trade organisations pledge to reduce their carbon footprint and make data centre and cloud operations more sustainable. As part of the pact, DataVita has agreed to meet ambitious 2025 and 2030 targets in areas such as energy efficiency, water conservation, heat recycling, and the re-use and repair of server equipment. The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact follows the launch of the European Green Deal, which set the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, with companies involved supporting the transition to a climate-neutral economy. The formal agreement builds on DataVita’s ongoing plans to boost sustainability, with a move already underway towards 100% renewable energy sources by generating its own electricity from wind power supported by battery-powered back-up systems. DataVita plans take its data centre off the grid next year, generating its own electricity from wind power with battery-powered back-up systems. DataVita’s data centre currently has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of just 1.18 – well below the industry average of 2.0. It was one of the first UK facilities to introduce an energy efficient, refrigerant-free air-cooling system, which uses Scotland’s natural climate to maintain optimum temperatures, instead of air conditioning units that consume vast amounts of energy. Danny Quinn, managing director of DataVita, says: “We’re fast becoming a digital and data-driven society, which means data centres are becoming an even more critical element of our infrastructure. Data centres are fast becoming the fourth utility, and with that we have a real opportunity and responsibility to focus on sustainability.  “By their nature, data centres can consume large amounts of energy, but the IT industry is also one of the most forward-thinking sectors when it comes to adopting new technology and making positive changes. The Climate Neutral Data Centre pact highlights the industry-wide focus on addressing the greatest challenge of our time, and while we’re already making progress with sustainable processes and systems, we’re want to further reduce our carbon footprint. “The global focus on sustainability is not limited to the data centre and IT industry. As businesses become more aware of their and their supply chain’s environmental impact, small changes – and their associated energy savings – can make a larger collective impact.”

Lenovo to power SURF Dutch National Supercomputer

Lenovo Data Centre Group (DCG) announced it will deliver high-performance computer (HPC) infrastructure for SURF, the ICT cooperative for education and research in the Netherlands. The €20 million project, which begins in early 2021, will result in the creation of the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the country. Supporting scientists from over 100 education and research institutions throughout the Netherlands, the supercomputer will power highly complex calculations in life-enhancing work across all fields of science including meteorology, astrophysics, medical and social sciences, and materials and earth sciences, such as climate change research. Explaining the significance of this collaboration, and the benefits to be passed on to research projects, Walter Lioen, Research Services Manager at SURF, says: “The need of researchers for computing power, data storage and processing is growing exponentially. In the design of the new supercomputer, the usability for scientific research was paramount. SURF has chosen Lenovo because of its quality, performance and future flexibility, as well as its considerations for sustainability.” Powering innovation alongside key partners Lenovo state-of-the-art HPC technology will include Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors and ThinkSystem servers powered by future generation AMD EPYC processors, and all being cooled by Lenovo Neptune water cooling technology. 12,4 Pebibyte (PiB) of Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution (DSS-G) and servers with NVIDIA HGX A100 4-GPU will also assist with the artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities required for SURF’s innovative research. NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand, with smart in-network computing acceleration engines, provide the extremely low latency, high data throughput networking. Running at ten-times the capacity of the previous system and achieving an overall peak performance of almost 13 PFLOPs, Lenovo’s smarter infrastructure will deliver a powerful, highly efficient and sustainable tool for scientists and researchers in the future. “AMD is proud to be working with leading global institutions to provide access to advanced technologies and capabilities that are critical for supporting modern HPC workloads and research that addresses some of the world's greatest challenges,” comments Roger Benson, senior director, Commercial EMEA at AMD. “We are thrilled to be collaborating with Lenovo Data Center Group on such an innovative HPC project, bringing the performance of AMD EPYC processors to scientists and research institutions in The Netherlands, allowing them to excel in their work.” Energy efficiency through water-cooling technology While optimal performance is a necessity for the SURF Dutch National Supercomputer, it is also vitally important to ensure the system is energy efficient. Lenovo’s water-cooling technology will remove approximately 90% of the heat from the system, reducing overall energy consumption, significantly increasing overall efficiency and ultimately allowing the processors to perform at their peak. Tina Borgbjerg, General Manager for Benelux and Nordics, Lenovo DCG, says, “We’re so pleased to contribute to a project that will not only enrich scientific research in the Netherlands but deliver a smarter and more energy-efficient system, thanks to our incredible water-cooling technology. The sheer power that will be delivered by this national supercomputer showcases our strength in HPC, and the scale of this deal further demonstrates our commitment to the Benelux region and the Netherlands.”  "Our partnership with SURF shows our continued commitment to delivering innovative HPC technology to empower those who help solve humanity's greatest challenges" says Noam Rosen, EMEA Director, HPC & AI at Lenovo DCG. "Harnessing the capabilities of the dawning exascale era of computing and putting them in the hands of organisations like SURF for ground- breaking research is what Lenovo's 'From Exascale to Everyscale' initiative is all about." “Our A100 Tensor Core GPUs featured in SURF are based on NVIDIA Ampere architecture, an engineering milestone that boosts performance for Artificial Intelligence (AI) training and inference, as well as easily meeting the access and power demands of the modern AI and HPC workloads,” says Ian Buck, General Manager and Vice President of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “Incorporating the world’s most advanced AI technology, all connected by high-bandwidth, low-latency NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking, into the SURF supercomputer gives researchers what they need to quickly and effectively take on the workloads of the exascale AI era.” The modernisation of the infrastructure will begin in February 2021 and phase 1 of the new supercomputer is expected to be operational by mid-2021.

Four reasons MSPs will help customers face 2021 by Matthieu Brignone

In every industry 2020 will be remembered as a year that brought immense change in both working practices, and the types of services needed by customers. The business environment shifted dramatically almost overnight; a pre-existing surge in technological innovation was pushed into overdrive by the need to adapt to an entirely new working reality. It’s no surprise that this need for business agility has resulted in higher investment in IT services, and with it, an increased need for management of these services. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have long played a role in supporting a customer’s IT infrastructure. But with a global shift to remote working and tech innovation, MSPs found themselves in an almost purpose-built situation that required remote handling of IT solutions. With their ability to help businesses prepare for change and ease them into a new era of working, there are four key things MSPs should have in their armoury to help customers grow and succeed in 2021. Multi-cloud data storage Multi-cloud has changed the game for organisations. While it has without a doubt opened up new opportunities, businesses now require infrastructure that allows for their workloads to work seamlessly in different environments. For this reason, MSPs should focus on supporting customer’s strategy, asking themselves how to best prepare their customers for an environment that will undoubtedly continue changing to keep up with the latest technological innovations. They should be looking to add value in all areas possible, and should consider the different benefits of cloud storage vs. on-prem storage: recognising that the future will continue to focus on a multi cloud strategy incorporating both. In this sense, building a customer’s infrastructure can be regarded as a strategic tool for future-proofing their data strategy. From a financial perspective, MSPs need to appreciate that the endless cycle of upgrading and implementing the latest technology is a large burden for businesses wanting to stay ahead of the game. Multi-cloud makes sense; it’s operationally efficient for customers wanting the capacity to move workloads freely without large investment every few years. As-a-service offerings support innovation Many companies and their CFOs will understandably be reluctant to implement innovation strategies with no direct link to benefits. As-a-service offerings, like Pure-as-a-Service, provide the flexibility that many will be looking for after such a tumultuous year. MSPs, and some vendors, should be looking to identify these pain points and solve them through adapted financial offerings. What’s more, they need to recognise that buying into expensive on-prem offerings has become an increasingly bitter pill to swallow. We can see a transition happening with MSPs that will sit comfortably in 2021; many are seeing an opportunity to differentiate by pushing their customers into the next age of innovation whilst taming the costs. A win-win situation. With the constant stream of new technology released, as-a-service options allow both MSPs and customers to try new tech and ‘fail fast’ - enabling them to find the solution that fits their needs without breaking the bank. Plus, as an added bonus, they won’t need to worry about the burdens of financial forecasting - offering relative flexibility in their investment. Containers In 2021 customers need the ability to move their workloads freely, and containers hold the benefit of encapsulating software into virtual self-contained units. But the complexity of cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes is driving more organisations toward consuming managed services delivered via the cloud versus deploying these technologies on their own. Forward-looking businesses are moving to containers which in a couple of years will be a widely adopted and mainstream standard for data storage. Many larger customers are further along their digital transformations and are now ready for multi-cloud, meaning MSPs that can deploy Kubernetes across multiple clouds will see increasing demand for that expertise as they look to tee up customers to realise the value from their data. 2021 will be a year of assessing how workloads are managed; they need to be in the right place for their designated application, and this will continue to be a key area that customers look for in their data assets Taking on hyperscalers with differentiation Hyperscale public cloud providers have created a new dynamic in the cloud market, offering businesses unlimited capacity, seamless updates and large geographic scope. Analysis has shown that hyperscalers dropped $99 billion in capital expenditure in the first three quarters of 2020, setting a quarterly record in the third quarter alone. It’s no wonder they raise a consistent concern. But rather than competing with hyperscalers, MSPs that want to get ahead are already starting to work with them. In this scenario MSPs must act as the metaphorical glue that brings all of these new technologies together for their customers. Only by doing this will they be seen as a true partner, having the best interest of their customers at the forefront. And where they can’t work together, MSPs need to be recognising their key attributes that differentiate them from hyperscalers. Take the ongoing challenge that Covid has presented, and how many customers haven’t been able to directly get to their data centres in the frequency they would normally have liked. For MSPs, having someone do that on the customer's behalf on a monthly basis has become an incredibly strong selling point. It’s clear that many of the pain points of 2020 will stick around for much of 2021. The business landscape has irreversibly changed in many ways. With this in mind, MSPs need to recognise that the hurdles that have been put into place for businesses represent a clear opportunity to help knock them down. By providing innovative bespoke solutions for customers, using the forward-looking tech and services above, MSPs can play a crucial role in providing the roadmap for continued business growth and success.