< Previoushas demonstrated the crucial need for organisations to become more agile and have the ability to scale both up and down when regional rules change. The importance of a secure and flexible workforce, one which is protected through layers of security and best practice, is key. This can be executed successfully by identifying existing weaknesses or gaps in infrastructure, which can be easily spotted by channel partners who specialise in cybersecurity. By leaning on an MSP, businesses can benefit from having access to the right support and advice, and MSPs in turn, can offer the correct solutions to combat the challenges their clients face. This has led to organisations questioning issues such as; are the emergency measures put in place during the peak of the pandemic sufficient for long term secure and agile working practises? What tools do customers need to remain secure in the new modern hybrid working environment? It is clear that now is the time for businesses to reassess and build a flexible, future-proof plan. The trusted advisor to SMBs Smaller and medium-sized businesses often do not have the resources, time or dedicated teams to focus on their IT needs while ensuring they have the right solutions in place to defend themselves against cyberattacks. They also do not think they are as much of a target for hackers as they may not have as much revenue or data compared to larger and more corporate organisations, with 66% believing a cyberattack would be unlikely. However, according to Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study, 43% of cyberattacks are aimed at small businesses and only 14% are prepared to defend themselves. Instead, by partnering with an MSP who can act as an external security partner for the SMB to help it achieve cyber resilience, the pressure and responsibility of defending the business against cyber threats will lay with the expert in the channel. This creates a unique opportunity for MSPs to guide customers on their cybersecurity journey and ensure they are receiving relevant education and have the right technology and tools in place to protect the business. It also helps the MSP to differentiate themselves from the ever-growing and competitive channel market, enabling them to become trusted IT security advisors for the businesses they support. Critical support partner Whether a business is big or small, investing in its cybersecurity foundations is not optional – it’s business- critical, especially in today’s threat landscape. By identifying channel support www.networkseuropemagazine.com 60the gaps in its cyber needs or allowing an MSP to make these judgments, a strong infrastructure can be built upon the business’s existing setup. These solutions can be custom- built and tailored to each individual organisation, including email and endpoint protection, ongoing end-user training as well as access services, such as ZTNA solutions. With security breaches showing no signs of slowing down, MSPs must be constantly vigilant and develop cyber resilience approaches that go beyond deploying security solutions. This means having not only the market-leading technology available but also the technical expertise to support business security plans and growth. MSPs must take a proactive role in understanding the current state of a customer’s ability to protect against, prevent and respond to modern cyber threats when recommending the best approaches to true cyber resilience. For example, MSPs who roll out Office365 to their client base are not tapping into their customers’ needs for peace of mind when it comes to cybersecurity. Instead, they should add value to the partnership by emphasising good cyber security practises, providing the right tools and technologies and looking at specialist vendors – rather than providing a one-size-fits-all solution. Channel partners can both capitalise and draw on the importance of demonstrating to customers the benefits they bring by continuing their role as trusted advisors – resulting in growing their revenue while ensuring their key partner status. Investing in technology An MSP’s portfolio should provide the correct tools and solutions businesses need to survive and thrive in the new normal. Businesses of all sizes prioritised their move to digital workspaces during Covid-19, including remote teamwork, learning and critical cloud infrastructure, with Microsoft’s Chief Executive saying that they’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Innovative technologies can form the backbone of a workforce’s security foundations by adding layers of technology protection alongside employee tools and security awareness. Solutions can be embedded, to prompt users to double- check their emails before a mistake is about to be made for example, mitigating the risk of accidental data loss. Additionally, security awareness training within businesses has become a security necessity. Without peer review or IT supervision, organisations need their users to be empowered to make good security decisions. Rather than a once-a-year cyber awareness course – often used to tick a compliance box – today’s businesses must invest in ongoing training, phishing simulations and solutions to help their employees make the right decisions – wherever they are working. This is an important point for channel partners to take on board, as they have the power to ensure their customers’ end users are sufficiently trained in the threat landscape. Have they engaged in phishing penetration testing? Is sending an email to the wrong person an embarrassing mistake or a data breach? These are just some of the key questions MSPs should be asking when they look to fulfil their trusted advisor role. This is an area where partners will see real growth as businesses have woken up to the idea that with the right solutions, they can switch their employees from IT risks to IT assets, and the channel needs to ensure that they have the necessary training and tools in place to help their clients make these decisions. Conclusion Organisations cannot be expected to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals and adapt to new threats on their own. Within the evolving cybersecurity landscape, it's essential for businesses, especially SMBs, to find a partner that offers a varied portfolio of security offerings, as well as the knowledge and support to keep their business data, workforces and networks secure. By addressing pain points and providing assurance around the security of their working environments, channel partners can build and strengthen their existing relationship with their customers, while recognising the opportunity of additional revenue streams for their businesses. In turn, businesses can feel confident that they have the right technology, education and tools in place to combat the risk of cyberattacks and a trusted partnership they can rely on to keep them secure and agile. n Channel partners can both capitalise and draw on the importance of demonstrating to customers the benefits they bring by continuing their role as trusted advisors – resulting in growing their revenue while ensuring their key partner status. channel support www.networkseuropemagazine.com 61This means that to truly benefit, proximity to a data centre and fast, high-bandwidth connectivity is crucial. Across the UK, the availability of such services differs greatly from region to region. A Pulsant survey of 202 UK business leaders discovered that only 42% of business leaders in the Midlands and 45% in the North viewed their location as an advantage for digital transformation, compared with 64% in the South. These findings are indicative of how London and the surrounding South region retains a sizeable advantage in terms of storage, computing and connectivity, and is unwelcome news for the North and Midlands. Greater speed, capacity and more interconnections are available to businesses in this section of the UK, with a greater choice of carriers and networks available. Particularly for businesses in London and the South East, there is also wider access to IT and data science talent, plus specialist services. For organisations with ambitious growth plans, it’s a promising list of benefits for those aiming to become data-driven and take advantage of cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) models. The opportunities presented by edge computing are vast. Across commerce, healthcare and government sectors, its emergence will accelerate the charge towards the internet of things (IoT) and work hand in hand with the rollout of 5G. Edge computing has applications in medicine, interactive gaming, autonomous vehicles and automation across the industry and agriculture sectors. The edge works by locating processing and storage closer to where it’s required, enabling faster data analysis than in cases where it is sent to a centralised location. Simon Michie CTO Pulsant The North and Midlands face losing out to the South in the edge computing www.networkseuropemagazine.com 62Ambition is no barrier in the Midlands and North However, it's not all doom and gloom for the Midlands and North. Despite the South’s advantages, businesses outside the region are refusing to let locational circumstances hold them back. In the context of the North, Pulsant’s research found that 67% are deploying new SaaS applications, and 65% are migrating traditional workloads and data into the cloud and creating their own cloud-native applications, which represents faster growth than any other region. Additionally, 58% of businesses in the Midlands are currently planning new SaaS applications, ahead of the South at 51%. More than two-thirds of Northern and Midlands-based businesses are currently undertaking customer experience improvements. While this is promising, to fully unlock opportunities around IoT, high- bandwidth, 5G and cloud-based applications, North and Midlands-based organisations need to prepare for edge computing by building the right IT infrastructure foundations and choosing the right edge computing platform. Connected by high-performance fibre and a network of regional data centres, an edge computing platform can bridge the gap between local businesses and major cloud vendors and centralised platforms. It’s only via this type of network that businesses outside of the South can embrace the edge opportunity and prevent themselves from falling behind. While the distance from the major cloud vendors’ connectivity in the South East of England is problematic for businesses in the Midlands and the North, promising developments will create edge opportunities for organisations in these regions. Hybrid cloud and colocation providers are investing significantly in national computing infrastructure across key locations. A high-performance fibre network will make essential high-speed, low-latency connectivity possible. This ensures that businesses can access high-capacity, agile connections from any location. Businesses with an HQ, office or warehouse in the North or Midlands regions will be able to tap into advanced computing and applications. Organisations will gain the ability to transform customer experiences and embed sophisticated automation into digital transformation strategies. Make sure it’s the real edge Advances in connectivity have created a North-South divide, leaving businesses in the North and Midlands worrying about the very real possibility of being left to play catch up with the South. However, in the context of the edge rollout, they don’t need to lose out, and the chasm may not be as wide as first feared. Ambitious businesses in these regions can harness edge computing platforms to supercharge their performance, opening up the opportunity for new services. Businesses undergoing digital transformation strategies and looking to take advantage of the edge computing era need access to genuinely fast, resilient and high-bandwidth connectivity. Organisations however, need to ensure they choose the right edge partner and data centre locations. A data centre may be close by, but that doesn’t mean that it is part of a resilient national edge network that has the ability to re-route traffic and bring resilient and seamless connectivity when outage or interruption occurs from the actions of third-parties or other external factors. Wherever organisations are based in the UK, ambitious businesses with aims to create new services and improve performance via adoption of edge technologies must be careful in the providers they choose and the configuration they opt for. For those in the Midlands or the North, the alternative could lead to businesses losing out in the race to the edge. Once businesses in these regions gain access to the true edge, it will facilitate operational transformation and allow for the Midlands and North to benefit from major economic advances. Rather than lose out to the South, other regions across the UK will have the opportunity to level up and place themselves firmly on the digital map. n rth and Midlands losing out to the race to the edge edge computing www.networkseuropemagazine.com 63AI and machine learning www.networkseuropemagazine.com 64 AI and machine learningAI and machine learning www.networkseuropemagazine.com 65 The promise of AI At present, the IT industry is doing itself no favours by promising the earth with emerging technologies without having the ability to fully deliver them - see Hadoop’s story with big data as an example - look where that is now. There is also a growing need to dispel some of the myths surrounding the capabilities of AI and data-led applications, which often sit within the c-suite, that investment will give them the equivalent of the ship’s computer from Star Trek or the answer to the question ‘how can I grow the business?’ As part of any AI strategy, it’s imperative that businesses, from the board down, have a true understanding of the use cases of AI and where the value lies. If there is a clear business need and an outcome in mind then AI can be the right tool. But it won’t do everything for you – the bulk of the work still has to be done somewhere, either in the machine learning or data preparation phase. AI ready vs. AI reality With IoT, many organisations are chasing the mythical concept of ‘let’s have every device under management’. But why? What’s the real benefit of doing that? All they are doing is creating an machine learning The interest in adding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to business models is fast gaining momentum as organisations look to find patterns within their data that can deliver greater business and customer intelligence and predict future trends. As Gartner highlights, the number of enterprises implementing AI tripled in the past year. Gartner also claims that data centres that don’t deploy AI and machine learning won’t be operationally and economically feasible by 2030. Peter Ruffley, Chairman at Zizo, discusses how we can best use AI and what its role is within the data centre. data centres need to differentiate themselves to survive Peter Ruffley Chairman ZizoAI and machine learning 66 overwhelming amount of low-value data. They are expecting data warehouses to store a massive amount of data. If a business keeps data from a device that shows it pinged every 30 seconds rather than a minute, then that’s just keeping data for the sake of it. There’s no strategy there. The ‘everyone store everything’ mentality needs to change. One of the main barriers to implementing AI is the challenges in the availability and preparing of data. A business cannot become data-driven if it doesn’t understand the information it has, and the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is especially true when it comes to the data used for AI. With many organisations still on the starting blocks or having not yet entirely finished their journey to become data-driven, there appears to be a misplaced assumption that they can quickly and easily leap from being in the process of preparing their data to implementing AI and ML which realistically, won’t work. To successfully step into the world of AI, businesses need to firstly ensure the data they are using is good enough. AI in the data centre Over the coming years, we are going to see a tremendous investment in large-scale and High-Performance Computing (HPC) being installed within organisations to support data analytics and AI. At the same time, there will be an onus on data centre providers to be able to provide these systems without necessarily understanding the infrastructure that’s required to deliver them, or the software or business output needed to get value from them. We saw this in the realm of big data, when everyone tried to swing together some kind of big data solution and it was very easy to just say we’ll use Hadoop to build this giant system. If we’re not careful, the same could happen with AI. There’s been a lot of conversations about the fact that if we were to peel back the layers of many AI solutions, we’d find that there is still a lot of people investing a lot of hard work into them so when it comes to automating processes, we aren’t quite in that space yet. AI solutions are currently very resource-heavy. There’s no denying that the majority of data centres are now being asked how they provide AI solutions and how they can assist organisations on their AI journey. While organisations might assume that data centres will have everything to do with AI tied up. Is this really the case? Yes, there is a realisation of the benefits of AI, but actually how it is best implemented and by who, to get the right results, hasn’t been fully decided. Solutions to how to improve the performance of large- scale application systems are being created, whether that’s by getting better processes, better hardware or reducing the cost to run them through improved cooling or heat exchange systems. But data centre providers have to be able to combine these infrastructure elements with a deeper understanding of business processes. This is something very few providers or Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are currently doing. It’s great to have the kit and use submerged cooling systems and advanced power mechanisms but what does that give the customer? How can providers help customers understand what more can be done with their data systems? How do www.networkseuropemagazine.com To successfully step into the world of AI, businesses need to firstly ensure the data they are using is good enough.AI and machine learning 67 providers differentiate themselves and how can they say they harness these new technologies to do something different? It’s easy to go down the route of promoting that ‘we can save you X, Y, Z’ but it means more to be able to say ‘what we can achieve with AI is..X, Y, Z‘. Data centre providers need to move away from trying to win customers over based solely on monetary terms. Education and collaboration When it comes to AI, there has to be an understanding of what the whole strategic vision is and looking at where value can be delivered and how a return on investment (ROI) is achieved. What needs to happen is for data centre providers to work towards educating customers on what can be done to get quick wins. Additionally, sustainability is riding high on the business agenda and this is something providers need to take into consideration. How can the infrastructure needed for emerging technologies work better? Perhaps it’s with sharing data between the industry and working together to analyse it. In these cases, maybe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The hard bit is going to be convincing people to relinquish control of their data. Can the industry move the conversation on from being purely technical and around how much power and kilowatts are being used, to how is this helping our social corporate responsibility/our green credentials? There are some fascinating innovations already happening, where lessons can be learnt. In Scandinavia for example, there are those who are building carbon-neutral data centres, which are completely air-cooled with the use of sustainable power cooling through solar. The cooling also comes through the building by basically opening the windows. There are also water-cool data centres out there under the ocean. Conclusion We saw a lot of organisations and data centres jump in head first with the explosion of big data and not come out with any tangible results – we could be on the road to seeing history repeat itself. If we’re not careful, AI could just become another IT bubble. There is still time to turn things around. As we move into a world of ever-increasing data volumes, we are constantly searching for the value hidden within the low-value data that is being produced by IoT, smartphone apps and at the edge. As the global costs of energy rise, and the numbers of HPC clusters powering AI to drive our next-generation technologies increase, new technologies have to be found that lower the cost of running the data centre, beyond standard air cooling. It’s great to see people thinking outside of the box on this, with submerged HPC systems and full, naturally aerated data centres, but more will have to be done (and fast) to meet up with global data growth. The appetite for AI is undoubtedly there but for it to be able to be deployed at scale and for enterprises to see real value, ROI and new business opportunities from it, data centres need to move the conversation on, work together and individually utilise AI in the best way possible or risk losing out to the competition. n www.networkseuropemagazine.comMatthew Margetts Director of Sales and Marketing Smarter Technologies Smart technology address the data centre energy drain Inside vast factories bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row. They stretch down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters. In an increasingly digitalised world, data centres are the information backbone with demand continuing to grow along with data-intensive technologies. Estimated to account for as much as 1% of worldwide electricity use, data centres are energy-intensive enterprises. In Ireland, data centres could account for about 25% of the country’s electricity usage by 2030, potentially leading to electricity supply challenges. Fearing the pressure that data centres place on the national grid, countries such as the Netherlands and Singapore have gone so far as to stop issuing building permits to data centres. Why do data centres require so much energy? • To provide constant power supply with minimum disruptions • Electricity used by IT devices such as servers, storage drives and network devices is converted into heat, which must be removed from the data centre by cooling equipment that also runs on electricity • Facilities must be kept at the appropriate temperature • Additional equipment such as humidifiers and monitors are also required data centre energy drain www.networkseuropemagazine.com 68chnology to the data centre rain data centre energy drain www.networkseuropemagazine.com 69Next >