Big Data

EUDCA announces new Chair, Board Members and MD

Following its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 14 December, the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) has announced the unanimous election of two new members to its board of directors. Gary Aitkenhead, replacing Michael Winterson for Equinix, and Adam Eaton, replacing Matthew Winter for Global Switch, have been welcomed with full confidence in their commitment and expertise to further the EUDCA's mission as the voice of Europe’s data centre industry. Concurrently, the newly constituted board unanimously confirmed Lex Coors, Chief Data Center Technology and Engineering Officer at Digital Realty, as the Chair. Lex takes over from Michael Winterson, who steps into a newly created position as Managing Director to oversee day-to-day operations. Lex expresses his gratitude and says, “I am truly honoured to receive the trust of the EUDCA Board and association members to take on the position of Chair. As an industry, we are facing a plethora of new regulations, and we must pool our expertise to shape the future of our sector together. I extend a warm welcome to our new board members and gratitude to Michael Winterson, who has aptly steered the organisation as Chair, and whom I look forward to working with in his new role.” Michael Winterson, now Managing Director, shares his enthusiasm by saying, “I am delighted to embrace my new role, overseeing day-to-day operations, and contributing to driving the organisation forward. We find ourselves at a critical juncture where, as an industry, regulations are transitioning from a voluntary-based model to a legal framework. Our role is more important than ever – not only to ensure our members comprehend the requirements from both a performance and reporting standpoint but also to convey to regulators and lawmakers the critical role our sector plays in facilitating a functioning, digitised, and sustainable economy.” The new board comprises: Lex Coors, Digital Realty, Chair and Chair of the Policy Committee  Laurens van Reijen, LCL Data Centres, Treasurer Andrew Harrison, Arup, Chair of the Technical Committee Matt Pullen, CyrusOne, Chair of CNDCP Board Marie Chabanon, Data4, Deputy Chair of Technical Committee Dick Theunissen, EdgeConneX, Deputy Chair of NTA Committee Géraldine Camara, France Datacenter, Deputy Chair of NTA Committee Matthew Baynes, Schneider Electric, NTA Coordination Stijn Grove, Dutch Data Centre Association, NTA Coordination Gary Aitkenhead, Equinix Adam Eaton, Global Switch

atNorth announces highest revenue to date

atNorth has announced a group income of SEK 560 million (EUR 53 million) as it publishes its 2022 annual accounts. This figure represents a 44% increase in revenue from 2021 and further growth is expected in the coming years.  The company currently operates six data centres based in Iceland, Sweden and Finland. It is planning further state-of-the-art sites in the coming years. atNorth‘s growth calls for extensive investment and it has secured access to capital for this purpose. The investment for the year 2022 amounted to about SEK 220 million (EUR 20 million), and it is already evident that the 2023 level of investment will be significantly higher. Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO of atNorth, says, "In recent years, we have built an enormous wealth of knowledge. Our customers value our services and it is core to atNorth's good reputation." He also commends the support of the company‘s sponsor, Partners Group, that acquired the majority of the company's shares at the beginning of 2022. As digital transformation and the use of AI and other big data projects escalates, businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on supercomputers to perform ever more complex calculations. The resulting need for high performance data centre and supercomputing services has led to an exponential increase in demand in recent years. atNorth continues to promote the Nordic region as a superlative location for investment in digital infrastructure, recently winning the ‘Tech Capital Location’ award for Iceland as a result of its advantageous climate, favourable business environment and cutting-edge infrastructure. Eyjólfur comments, “Iceland is truly on the map, and with our best-in-class data centres, outstanding customer service and proficient marketing communications, atNorth is proud to have created a desirable position in the market.”

Scality has announced today that Somerville has selected it to scale its data storage services in order to meet growing customer demand.   The solution combines a petabyte-scale stretched RING object storage architecture across three sites in Sydney and Melbourne. It runs on HPE Apollo 4000 data storage servers from Hewlett Packard Enterprise with immutable data protection, utilising Veeam backup software over an S3 API. This solution is delivered through the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to provide Somerville scalable performance with pay-per-use flexibility.Craig Somerville, CEO and Founder, Somerville IT Services, says, “For every MSP holding data on behalf of customers, and even the CIO of an enterprise organisation whose responsibility is to ensure that they protect the organisation’s data, Scality’s immutability features and resilience features are absolutely critical.”Since the initial deployment, Somerville has increased capacity. Scality’s object storage extends Veeam’s enterprise-grade capabilities and helps manage data with reduced cybersecurity risks and lower costs. Craig says, "We have one engineer who manages the platform day-to-day. He spends more time on improvements and developing the platform than the time the entire team used to spend just keeping the lights on. It’s completely changed the way we manage the data protection practice.” The HPE GreenLake deployment provides cost-savings, flexibility, and less hassle for the Somerville team. Scality continues to see adoption across all sectors including service providers, financial services, government, healthcare, life sciences and more.Wally MacDermid, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, Scality says, "We are excited to see what Somerville has accomplished for their clients and their own IT service offerings. They are a trusted source for bringing Australian customers into the modern era with a sovereign solution that keeps data protected. The continued growth rates around the world with both, Veeam and HPE GreenLake, keep us focused on our mission to provide customers with ultimate cyber resiliency and unbreakable data protection.”

Opendatasoft has launched its advanced new data lineage feature. Delivering detailed analysis of how and where data is being reused, it provides greater visibility into data flows, enabling organisations to improve data governance and accelerate their data democratisation strategies. Organisations today understand the importance of data sharing, both internally and externally, to increase efficiency, improve performance and drive innovation. However, currently they lack the tools to manage and report on where data is being reused, adding to workloads, and making effective decision-making difficult. In response to these data governance challenges, Opendatasoft has developed its unique data lineage feature. Easy to use, it provides detailed information on how data is being reused and the relationships between individual datasets. The data lineage feature maps data flows end-to-end, providing a complete dashboard of data usage within the data portal back office. This enables organisations to improve the governance and quality of their data, better understand user needs, and report on the value and return on investment of their data portals. Available directly in the back office of the Opendatasoft platform for all customers, the new data lineage feature delivers: Detailed mapping of data paths: Visualising the dataset journey from its creation to final destination. Providing actionable information on its origin and its internal and external reuses. A complete dashboard of every data reuse: Providing automatic analysis and management of the dynamics of the data portal. Tracking key performance indicators, such as the number of reuses, the status of relationships, interdependencies with other portals, and the most and least used datasets. "At Opendatasoft, our goal is to support our customers so they get the most out of their data. That’s why we’re constantly innovating to provide the best tools on the market and to support them in creating successful data democratisation strategies. Our unique new data lineage feature transforms the ability of customers to trace data usage, providing the information they need to analyse and accelerate their data sharing strategies," says Jean-Marc Lazard, President and Co-Founder of Opendatasoft. “From a data publisher perspective, one of the problems experienced with open data is understanding what data users are doing with the data. Whilst Opendatasoft facilitates the submission of reuses already, this new data lineage feature provides additional insight into the maps and charts that users have built whilst maintaining user anonymity, that we would not have known about. This adds to the value of open data,” says Yiu-Shing Pang, Open Data Manager, UK Power Networks.

Radiflow post record year with new products and strong growth

Radiflow has announced significant growth in revenues and bookings following the launch of new products in 2020 and continued international expansion. Business Growth “Although last year has been a challenge for many vendors due to the impact of the global pandemic reducing overall IT spending, the OT cyber security space has been relatively unaffected and Radiflow has experienced its best year to date,” explains Ilan Barda, CEO of Radiflow. “Our critical national infrastructure (CNI) business continued its consistent growth, but the biggest growth has been within manufacturing – an area that had traditionally been less active in the cyber security space and has been prompted to strengthen its defences following a number of high-profile breaches during 2019/20 – today, nearly one third of our revenues come from manufacturing.” Radiflow recorded a 2x increase in sales during 2020 compared to the previous year and a 3x increase in bookings building a strong basis to continue its growth in 2021. Regionally, Europe has been the fastest growing sales territory for Radiflow including new customers in power, oil & gas and manufacturing. In parallel 2020 did also see major deals in North America and Asia Pacific including new US power utilities and national water and transportation operators in APAC. As of December 2020, Radiflow industrial cyber security solutions for critical business operations have been successfully deployed in over 5,000 sites by major utilities and industrial enterprises worldwide. Radiflow has also grown its team and partner community to meet international expansion. A major highlight is the creation of a new sales team to cover Western Europe led by the appointment of 2 new sales directors: Jesper Nilsson, Sales Director, who brings extensive experience in cyber security including his last role in CyberX and Katrin Rabe, Channel Director, who worked in large multi-national industrial automation vendors such as GE. On a commercial level, Radiflow expanded its network of partners especially with tier-1 system integrators that can serve the new tier-1 customers and provide the suite of services around Radiflow products. For example, Radiflow announced a collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric UK to address the needs of IEC62443 cyber security standards in the Critical Infrastructure and Industrial Automation markets.  Radiflow will be announcing additional such partnerships with global system integrators during the first half of 2021. Technology Part of the surge in sales in 2020 and increased pipeline for 2021 is due to the launch of Radiflow CIARA, a new platform offering Cyber Industrial Automated Risk Analysis (CIARA) to deliver emerging best practice around risk modelling and management using the ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards. CIARA is the first fully automated tool for assets data collection, data-driven analysis and transparent risk metrics calculation, including risk scoring per zone and business process based on business impact. The unique platform uses automatic data-driven algorithms as a response to the growing digitization of the production floor. “CIARA delivered a number of industry firsts and addressed a significant sector wide need to streamline previously complex and time-consuming risk assessment processes,” explains Barda. “It not only solves an immediate tactical issue, but has also helped us to expand the conversation with our clients to the wider Radiflow portfolio which has led to significant sales growth.” On the technology research side, Radiflow has engaged in several joint projects including with the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation to apply advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to cybersecurity for industrial automation networks. Radiflow was also part of a project with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) around Cybersecurity for Distributed Energy Resources. Looking forward “Our goal for 2021 is to capitalise further on the foundation we have built during the previous year,” says Barda. “We have introduced unique technologies combined with a growing partner community and the next phase is to expand our geographic reach to meet the untapped opportunity – especially in Europe.” Barda concludes.

Panintelligence: Data for good

Zandra Moore, CEO of Leeds-based scale-up, Panintelligence, is keen to show SMEs and public sector organisations the value of the data they hold and is an advocate for data being the biggest change-maker in society at the moment. In the past three months alone, we’ve seen countless mainstream news stories on data and, let’s be honest, very few of them positive. But let’s think about this for a moment, the data economy: Facebook (for example) doesn’t physically make anything, there are no logistics involved, it’s free for ‘consumers’, it’s available worldwide and the information it holds is arguably the most valuable commodity to any business – it’s all data. It recently lost 20% of its value but that barely made a dent in Mark Zuckerberg’s Forbes billionaire listing (he went from fourth to sixth in one day), and why not? Because data is king. Organisations across all sectors are now dealing with huge volumes of data, and we’re increasingly seeing people realise just how valuable it is, whether it’s in a database, or sensor data, as manufacturing businesses move further towards automation. Businesses looking to gain meaningful insight into their operations by understanding their data often find it to be more difficult than it should be. And it’s too expensive to bring multiple sets of data together while needing a data scientist to interrogate it. Really, the people within organisations are best placed to cross-examine their own data. As the domain experts, their knowledge and understanding is unmatched - so it comes down to accelerating the accessibility of that data. We need to ensure that it can be accessed in real time by the people who can affect real change; The important insights gained from data means business decisions are based on data analysis. The beginning Panintelligence started life as a finance technology company that built end-to-end lending systems for big financial intermediaries like banks. In finance, people have been using data analytics to inform and automate decisions for a long time. We realised that we could take this technology outside the finance industry and allow a wider audience to benefit from those tools. Our product has the intelligence to provide data insights, automated decisioning, and predictive modelling, and we’re bringing an affordable model to SMEs in sectors such as Education and Healthcare. It doesn’t move any data either, so it was GDPR compliant before GDPR existed. In the business world, access to this data can have a massive impact on financial growth; in the public sector, it can help identify people at risk - it has even helped save lives. For example, the software can help radiology departments identify safe levels of exposure to radiation and adapt their practices accordingly. Panintelligence has transformed the way people use data to improve organisational performance and is working to transform what data analytics companies should be – a force for good - by breaking down the barriers and mystery around data tech and unleashing the true value of data. Healthcare The healthcare sector uses data to predict which patients are likely to miss medical appointments, the educational sector can identify students likely to miss a class and are more likely to drop out, and the finance sector can see which transactions are most likely to be fraudulent. Identifying change in this way is important as it helps decision makers manage risk and understand their customers better to drive engagement. Only by putting data into decision makers’ hands instead of techies’, can it be really understood and acted upon appropriately. It’s all about the double bottom line; data analytics for social change along with fair commercial competition and for organisational benefit, improving outcomes for learners, patients and those without big budgets. Helping SMEs and the public sector compete with the big boys. We’re fighting for data to be change maker, not just a king maker, and as a value- led business with a social conscience, we choose to put the power in the hands of the many.