Whilst much merriment was to be had with the unfortunate incident identified in the first story – “Q. What do you want on your burger? A. A fiver each way” – it did lead to the thought that perhaps there was some fun mileage in combining the two news pieces. So for one day only, here is a form guide to the runners and riders in the Deloitte TMT prediction hurdle.

Smartphones ship 1 Billion (nearly 2 billion devices in use globally by year end)

That’s one smartphone for every 6 people on the planet and might even be an underestimate considering how many of us now have a smartphone for work and a separate one for personal use. Katy Melua will soon be singing…“There are 9 million smartphones in Beijing.” Verdict: Smart phone adoption will continue its stellar rise, fuelled in the main by businesses playing catch up with consumers in finally recognizing the benefits of convergence. Evens.

4K kicks off with the rollout of at least 20 next generation HD sets.

HD has made a big difference to the sharpness and quality of picture we get (as well as the amount of make-up the TV presenters have to shovel on!) but the fact that only 41% of UK homes have a HDTV as of 2012 suggests that Ultra High Quality 4K might not take off that quickly. And of course the one thing that a high definition set can’t improve is the quality of the programming. I can see movies being an attractive option in 4K but how long will we have to wait for them to be mastered for this format? Verdict: Given the pricing, and the average 7 year cycle to change a TV set, can’t see a mass market rush for this particular technology just yet. 25/1

Crowdfunding portals will bring in £1.9bn more than double 2011’s £0.9bn

Crowdfunding is now accepted as a legitimate source of finance, especially for creative projects like films, music and computer games. The portals themselves have become tech start-ups. Last year Kickstarter, the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects, helped fund more than 18,000 projects with a total of $320m given by over 2 million people. From a personal point of view I used Bloom VC to successfully raise money for a charity project I’m involved with.  Why do people give their money in this way? Because it’s personal, passionate, provides proof of concept, engenders loyalty, minimises exposure and you only have to give something small to make big things happen.  Verdict: Given the current economic difficulties in raising funds/capital using traditional methods, crowdfunding is set to explode as a legitimate source of business and third sector financing. 7/2

50% of Fortune 500 companies will allow employees to bring in their own computing devices.

Look at the PC on your desk. Legacy equipment? Our smartphones and tablets have more usability and connectivity in them than most of our office PCs do, so why not use them at work too? As we work smarter and more mobile BYOC will gain ground, at the moment PCs are still predominant. The main barrier to BYOC adoption will be security and compliance across an organisation. Verdict: If the issues surrounding network integrity can be addressed then BYOC makes sense on so many levels. 12/1

TV on demand and film sub services will be provided by existing broadcasters rather than new market entrants.

‘Content is King’ has been the mantra ever since the dawn of the internet but in 2013 it will not only be king but queen and prime minister as well. We have a number of live streaming clients who have seen huge increases in demand for their services and have linked up with major broadcasters to share their content across multiple platforms. Verdict: It appears pretty logical that existing broadcasters rather than new channels are likely to be the ones in command of On Demand, given cost of entry and production costs, but the embryonic rise of local and specialist TV may provide some localised competition –  provided content is compelling. 12/1

10% of households will dual screen

Sport very much lends itself to dual screening with its passion, fan interaction and no shortage of ‘controversial events’ and is leading the charge in this area. Other TV formats offer different challenges such as a complex drama offering a demanding plot which requires full audience engagement. Verdict: An obvious choice and growth area for participative programming such as Reality shows and Question Time. 14/1 reducing to 7/2 if the X Factor runs with it.

Feature rich TVs will include gesture and voice based controls but 99% of us will revert to the remote due to technology issues.

This reminds me of the comedian Kevin Bridges’ automated telephone booking routine about his failure to buy tickets to The Taking of Pelham 123 (a movie), because the automated system cannae unnerstaun whit he sez.  Verdict: If the voice sez nah on your tv, it’ll be back to the remote. Evens.

Mobile advertising will be split into Smartphone and Tablet

Advertisers definitely need to get smarter as more of us shop smarter both in the types of advertising they create but also in the way ROI is calculated. The types of ads that work on a 7 inch screen won’t work on a smaller phone screen and tracking purchases via mobiles is not as easy as on a device that’s got a stable connection.  Verdict: Huge potential but real effort needed in areas of lack of standardisation, anti competitiveness and interoperability across OS platforms. 12/1

4G will see strong growth – Revenues projected to reach £60bn across 200 operators in 75 countries

With all major operators due to launch 4G services by the end of this year, the thing standing in the way of better adoption will be the ability to persuade us what the benefits really are. For instance, business customers understand that they get faster connectivity and bigger packets of data via fibre networks over traditional DSL circuits and can measure the benefits in terms of latency, data transfer size, disaster recovery, replication etc. Would the price increase justify opening Facebook a few miliseconds quicker on a smartphone for an average consumer?  Verdict: Once the message around benefit is stronger from mobile phone operators, take-up should increase. 33/1 dropping to 25/1 if operators introduce compelling price reductions and plans.

 The end of password only security

Security has to be a key issue not just for 2013 but beyond. Deloitte predicts that in 2013 more than 90 percent of user-generated passwords, even those considered strong by IT departments, will be vulnerable to hacking. The use of visual prompts and memorable words by banks and credit card companies has already supplemented the simple username and password login and companies are waking up to  sophisticated encryption to protect databases. No doubt biometric identification will come into play further down the road. But and it’s the big but, security is only as effective as the humans operating and applying it. Verdict: Whatever we do, hackers, phishers and criminals will always be one step ahead and it’s a constant battle. Retina scans might just be a concept too far for those people who have only just realised that using the word ‘password’ as a password is not the best defence. 150/1

So let’s agree to meet up again in 2014 to see just how we fared. Until then the predictions, just like the burgers in my fridge, are offfffffffffff.

iomart Hosting decided to tackle this head on by unleashing its inner Rebel Force and bring together some of the best minds in IT at the London Film Museum, complete with its Star Wars memorabilia, to explain to an audience of invited guests why cloud computing has a vital role to play in business.

With lightsabers at the ready, here’s what they  imparted:

Daniel Beazer, European analyst for Tier 1 Research.

Daniel described the cloud as ‘outsourcing the IT functions that could be done in-house’ and said that despite the hype we’re still in the early stages as only 1% of enterprise budgets are being allocated to the cloud. He described the cloud as an important and useful tool in the IT arsenal for a business but said that public cloud – the pay as you, credit card model – was less popular than private. Private cloud – whether on-premise or off-premise – was seen as much more secure and reliable by enterprise because of the ability to provision extra resources quickly, the need to eliminate manual administration and also its usefulness for testing. Technology, media, retail, financial services, telecommunications and banking are the biggest users of hosting, he said. While Amazon dominates in terms of the public cloud, the Enterprise space is still wide open.

Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect for Skyscanner:

Phil has direct experience of private Cloud having designed and implemented a large private dedicated  VMware platform with the help of iomart Hosting. Phil said Skyscanner had turned to private Cloud to cope with the company’s rapid expansion and explained how using the Cloud had allowed Skyscanner to solve control and cost prediction issues. Skyscanner’s IT infrastructure was now more responsive to marketing requests, it could support the business more responsively and costs could now be attributed more specifically to the IT.

He said the Cloud wasn’t something you do because it’s cheap. You do it, he said, because it allows you to make best use of your resources. He explained that by going into a private cloud, Skyscanner had so far reduced its costs per server by over 40% – that is the costs of maintaining the servers to support the growing number of customers (over 14 million per month) using the cheap flights website.  He expected that figure to reduce even further in the coming months.

Peter Robertson, Founder and Director of Chapter Media:

Peter’s agency worked with ecommerce provider Intershop to deliver the Pottermore Shop, the recently launched online store for JK Rowling’s Harry Potter digital ebooks and audiobooks. Peter said that the cloud is already accepted and adopted by the majority of his clients on their projects, and has already moved beyond a buzzword – it is already a major component of a sensible and adaptable way to operating a digital business. He explained that the cloud – in all its varieties – can be used both tactically and strategically during development and in production/operations, and that architecting ecommerce applications in a cloud-compatible fashion allows businesses to better adapt to (sometimes extreme) consumer demand as well as allowing a more agile approach to development and product lifecycles.

Peter offered up a few challenges: firstly for delivery agencies to become more skilled in architecting for the cloud, and in using the cloud throughout their development lifecycles; secondly, for ecommerce providers to ensure that their solutions are tried and tested in common cloud configurations, and that their security posture and “install” process is equally well aligned “out of the box”; thirdly, for cloud providers to become clearer on pricing and terminology, and become skilful at being a trusted operational partner and go beyond the rate-card; and lastly for brands/product-owners to be more focused on choosing the “right partner”, rather than the “right cloud”, and to engage a trusted architect to help set clear targets for key architectural goals such as security, resilience, performance and scalability.

Whilst commenting that he did not believe that security was a particular issue in the cloud, he did warn we all need to do more to create truly secure products, and take it more seriously as opposed to focusing on single issues such as PCI compliance, which are often minor complications that consume the majority of thinking time.

Then it was the turn of our vendors to grasp their lightsabers.

Bob McEwan, HP’s Chief Technologist ESSN, UK&I:

Bob said that for him behind the Cloud was a set of astounding facts and figures. He explained that by 2020 we will have created 35 zettabytes of data of which 70% will have been created by individuals not businesses. Of that data, 85% will be unstructured because of the use of portable internet-connected devices such as smartphones and tablets.  The rise of this so-called ‘Digital Native’ means that business demands are now running faster than IT can respond. So, how to keep up?  

There is a need to speed up both business innovation and business processes and the way that HP was supporting businesses to do this, said Bob, was with its Converged Cloud offerings, whereby businesses and IT managers can create portfolios of hosting services spanning colocation, managed hosting and private and public cloud – with one common information applications architecture delivering services across a business. This was the future as he saw it – developing and testing applications in the public cloud, deploying them in the private cloud, bursting workloads to the public or private cloud when necessary and managing and securing applications and services across hybrid environments via higher performing lower latency servers.

Rob Campbell, CTO North Enterprise UK&I for EMC2, continued the theme, explaining that while Big Data had the power to transform business, the Cloud was transforming the IT needed to both store and analyse it. Laptops, smartphones and tablets were providing so much data in the form of music files, social media, video clips and applications, that enterprise and data applications needed to sit on Cloud-based infrastructures which combined public, private and hybrid. These platforms were leading to reduced costs, greater efficiency and agility and resulting in faster analysis, faster decisions and new business opportunities. The need to address the creation of these enormous amounts of Big Data, Rob explained, had led to EMC buying Greenplum the database software company that specialises in enterprise data cloud solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics.

Rob posed a question: If there was a race around a supermarket between Usain Bolt and the Von Trapp family, he asked, which one would come back with the groceries first? The answer was the Von Trapp Family because they would have a backup person if one of the team tripped and fell. And that, he said, was the key to Big Data. Protection of data, reliable storage and analytical tools, so that each business could get the ‘big bang’ out of the data that it needs.

Bill Strain, CTO of iomart Group plc(iomart Hosting’s parent company), summed up the issues from a Cloud provider’s point of view.

The argument about the Cloud was over, he said.  It was just a question now of how fast the cloud was being adopted. He said all of us, businesses and individuals, were now locked into using the cloud in some shape or form and that the exponential rise of Big Data was creating increased demand for cloud storage.  He stressed that the delivery model would indeed run across combinations of managed, private, physical and public hosting models and the challenge for business was to find the combination that worked best to meet its critical needs.

Everything iomart Hosting did as a provider of cloud hosting, he explained, was ‘engineered for failure’ – meaning that every solution was delivered with built-in management layers to ensure that there could be no single point of failure . Connectivity would be key going forward, he explained, saying that iomart was continually investing in its network. He described this as the need for ‘Big Fat Pipes’ to both consume and deliver data via the highest speeds and with the biggest capacity for storage.

From a hosting point of view he said, systems had to be architected to take advantage of the Cloud by being what he described as ‘stateless’ so they can work across all the different combinations of solutions that businesses could choose from.          

The key take out from the day was that ‘cloud’ is here and it’s here to stay.

Technological efficiency and environmental impact is now at the heart of many an operational plan and CFOs are becoming much more engaged with IT decisions traditionally reserved for CIOs.

Not so long ago you’d often hear a member of the so-called C-club (CIOs and CFOs) saying, “Well we made £1m in cost savings this year and by the way we planted a few trees to offset our carbon use as well.” Today they’re more likely to be saying, “We’ve substantially increased our operational performance this year by implementing important environmental measures.”

We see it everywhere. More and more businesses are sourcing their IT from data centres powered by renewable energy; using carbon emission reduction software; building new offices been designed with their environmental impact in mind; or using recycled materials for key components. When we talk about Corporate Social Responsibility today it’s more often with the focus on the word responsibility.

Certainly this greater business emphasis on environmental benefits has been flagged up by the entrants to last month’s Green IT Magazine Awards.

Environmental performance is fundamental to many of the finalists’ strategies. Leafing through the entries highlights the more holistic approach being taken by senior management teams to promote positive change via green initiatives. Reporting mechanisms are much more focused on carbon emissions and while this is a must for many companies because of the controversial Carbon Reduction Commitment Scheme, the general feeling is of a much more integral approach to using environmental responsibility as a key financial indicator of good business strategy. This runs right the way across the public and private sectors.

One stand out feature of many of the entries submitted was the number of businesses that have appointed dedicated sustainability teams or individuals, empowered with driving through the change required for environmental best practice throughout the organisation. It would appear that the days of giving a notional ‘green remit’ to the Building Services Manager or HR guru are long gone.

Now, sustainability professionals are being recruited for specific skill sets such as cradle to grave or lifecycle analysis and carbon accounting as the benefits both fiscal and corporate become clearer to the Board Room. As this trend becomes more commonplace we will eventually see sustainability and Green initiatives breaking out into the mainstream.

That’s not to say that achieving this will not be without its challenges. A survey conducted by CompTIA, the non-profit association for the IT industry, last year suggested that among organisational priorities, green IT initiatives tend to rank around the middle. One in five firms currently has a dedicated budget allocated for green and sustainability initiatives, but 44 percent indicated that they will be moving in that direction for this financial year.

The evidence provided by the awards entries suggests that fiscal benefits and senior management buy in are the key drivers to delivering environmental change.

For instance, there’s the Government department where the Chief Financial Officer is also the organisation’s environment champion. He talks of how these two roles allow him to make best choices around the use of resources and help to embed smarter working practices which result in the cost-savings he needs to make. How important is that in these times of economic austerity!

Elsewhere a private sector company talks of how a project to rationalise and modernise its document imaging provided a huge opportunity ‘not only to derive efficiency and cost savings, but also to make a significant step forward in measurable environmental performance.’ And then there’s the sea water being used to provide an innovative new cooling system – all those drought-ridden areas beside the sea should take note of this one!

On the technology front, increased levels of cloud adoptions are playing their part too. It’s a major factor in helping businesses to reduce their internal power consumption. By outsourcing to the cloud, businesses can use fewer servers to manage their data and scale that part of their overall power consumption through peak and quiet times of demand.

Analyst firm IDG revealed in this April’s Enterprise Cloud report, that companies are investing heavily in cloud computing, with more than a third of the 1,650 companies surveyed, 34%, stating that their current IT budgets now allocated to cloud computing solutions. Interestingly close to two-thirds of all companies expect to increase cloud spending in the next 12 months with 16% being the average cloud budget hike. If we can make a definitive case for cloud technologies as an enabler for both cost reduction and greener working practices then the IT Industry will have a really powerful story to tell.

The dots are there. They just need to be joined up in a clear, coherent ‘non greenwash’ fashion.

A survey by Google earlier this year suggested that the rise in cloud computing would result in the closer involvement of the CFO in areas more traditionally reserved for the CIO. The survey concluded that this reflected the perception in the boardroom that IT has become more central to the business since the advent of cloud computing particularly in terms of innovation. One more leap and ‘being green’ will be a CEO issue.

It’s good to see CFOs banishing Waldorf and Statler’s grumpy cynical approach and treating environmental sustainability as part of their focus even it is driven by the need to cut costs. They might not architect the strategy but they are certainly integrating it into those dreaded spreadsheets of theirs much more coherently than ever before.

As Muppet fans, we’re used to a certain pink diva ‘hogging’ the limelight but perhaps now is the time for the green one to take centre stage.

The first few hours of the campaign go even better than you expect with thousands of people visiting the site and downloading the app – leads are pouring in. It’s all looking good and you’re about to give yourself a huge pat on the back for a job very well done until….the website crashes. All your brilliant work goes straight down the pan. The campaign hits the rocks and you’ve got one angry client shouting at you down the phone. The client’s brand and your reputation have been seriously damaged.

Why has this happened? Because the one boring, yet vital part of the campaign equation you should have considered – how is the campaign website going to cope with the demand?  - was neglected in the excitement of the rush to execute your big idea. No-one thought to check whether the expensive ‘bells and whistles’ website you built had enough capacity to cope with the huge increase in visits.

Now that online marketing has become the de facto marketing channel that clients are putting their money into, making sure that your campaigns are supported by the right IT infrastructure is vital.

The internet is an infinite resource and once you’ve launched a website or online campaign for a brand, you have to be ready for anything. If it takes off, you need to have planned to cope with the huge amount of hits and online interest that result.

That’s where the technology behind the campaign comes in to play. Many retail, advertising, marketing and events practitioners are embracing cloud and virtualisation technology because of the elasticity that on demand hosting offers. These two complimentary yet slightly different technologies allow clients to scale up and scale down their web capacity according to need, saving them from having to pay for servers that would otherwise lie dormant for much of the year. 

Sports events leader Nova International has embraced this way of working. Nova creates and develops some of the UK’s biggest televised mass participation sports events including the Great North Run, the world’s biggest half marathon. Nova’s ticketing and information website gets half a million visitors over the weekend that the Great North Run takes place – that’s a fifth of its total traffic for the whole year over a two day period. Nova now uses the cloud to cope. Chris Kewin, Nova’s IT Director, says using cloud technology means he gets “additional processing power during peak business periods rather than owning, managing and paying for that processing power all year

The cheap flights specialist Skyscanner, gets 14million+ visitors to its website every month. It’s totally online business is growing at a tremendous rate. Skyscanner has migrated to a fully virtualised private cloud, allowing it to reduce the number of servers it has while at the same time making the ones it does use much more powerful.

 As Phil Dalbeck, Skyscanner’s Infrastructure Architect says, “Migrating to a fully virtualised private cloud provides the business agility we need to support our exceptional growth….the business can now expect to see additional server resources deployed within minutes rather than weeks.” And, he adds, this “has allowed us to scale up as fast as possible, while still allowing us to serve our millions of customers in a professional, responsive and personal manner.”

At the end of the day the slogan ‘the customer is king’ still rules whatever devices you use in your campaign. If the customer is annoyed by the failure of whatever channel you’re using to communicate or sell, this is not going to do you or your client any good. Perception of failure reaches right through the marketing concept, right down to the IT you choose to use. Just ask the guys at this year’s Olympics. Despite creating a hugely successful London 2012 brand, they’ve still taken a kicking from customers and the media for the significant glitches around their ticketing website. 

Even the most basic IT support is necessary in this mobile marketing world we live in. Activinstinct is one of the fastest growing online sports retailers in the UK, specialising in high quality, performance sportswear and sports equipment. It’s already launched successfully in France and this year is targeting the German markets. Key to its marketing campaign has been to make sure its website is 100% available at any time of the night and day from wherever it’s being accessed.

Activinstinct CEO Mike Thornhill says, “Great marketing and customer service is of course hugely important but what has been absolutely crucial for our commercial success this year has been our decision to move to a new hosting provider. We now have a beefy hosting platform that doesn’t collapse when subject to increased demand, something that had happened to us several times before.”

Most online campaigns are pretty quick hitters. As human beings we now got such short attention spans that after a week or two, or maybe even just a day or two, we’ve moved on to the next ‘latest thing’. Having web servers that can be scaled up to cope with the initial rush of interest and then scaled back down again afterwards so you’re not paying for extra capacity that you no longer need is the way forward.

So, whatever you are planning for your clients this year, don’t forget the dull, behind-the-scenes IT.  It’ll mean that you can get on with making your campaigns the successes they ought to be, without the ‘bits and bytes’ letting you down.

Introduced under the banner of helping UK industry to become more energy efficient it seems to want to do nothing but penalise growth.

Our raison d’etre as the owner and operator of five UK data centres is to help businesses and organisations throughout the private and public sector to consolidate their IT infrastructures. By moving their servers off their premises into data centres like ours, which are efficiently run to maximise computer usage in environmentally-controlled settings, we are driving business efficiency.

MPs seem to think that because we use a lot of energy that we waste it. We don’t. In fact energy stewardship is critical to our business success. Our customers have the benefit of control panels that show them exactly what energy their servers are consuming so that they can make sound business decisions as they move forward.

Virtualisation of servers is shrinking carbon footprints by making organisations less reliant on enormous racks of hardware. And in terms of the actual consumer, the move to online retailing has lessened the need we have as human beings to always be driving in and out of town to go shopping.

The first ‘league table’ for the Carbon Reduction Commitment Scheme was published in November 2011 with Manchester United among the twenty two organisations ranked joint first. Manchester United came top alongside several NHS Trusts, OFGEM and British American Tobacco plc.

Comparing like with like? The CRC scheme rightly produced as much hair dryer treatment as Sir Alex Ferguson does in the dressing room – with Tim Yeo MP, chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee calling it ‘a straight forward theft’ after it was revealed that the decision to recycle the revenues from the scheme had raised £743m for HM Treasury.

There is a real problem for companies wanting to improve their green credentials because their ranking might not necessarily reflect their commitment to carbon reduction. Investing in more efficient technology to do this might lead to an increase in their energy consumption in the short term while trying to reduce it in the long term. A clearer picture needs to emerge and for businesses and organisations to be judged on all the different ways in which they are trying to reduce their environmental impact, not just their use of fossil fuels.

Data centre providers are making efforts to use renewable energy where possible. Iceland has opened its first 100 per cent carbon neutral data centre site to support UK and US companies in their environmental strategies. The Keflavik site taps into Iceland’s renewable energy power grid which takes advantage of hydro and geothermal energy sources and the country’s ambient temperature for cooling. And social network giant Facebook is to build its first data centre outside the US in the northern Swedish city of Lulea, close to the Arctic Circle, because of its access to renewable energy and its cold climate. In the UK even Swindon is playing host to a new data centre from Capgemini which has invested in the latest cooling technology.

Yet these are all £multi-million new builds. David Cameron pledged to make this ‘the greenest government ever’ by shifting to a low carbon economy but where are the incentives for existing data centres and their customers?

Cold aisle containment, virtualisation and the cloud can only take us so far.

The IT industry is like the development of the motorways in this country. When Harold Macmillan opened the M6 Preston By-Pass, the UK’s first motorway, in 1958, it was just two lanes of highway stretching a mere 8 miles. Today there are over 2,200 miles of motorway, connecting all parts of the country. The internet is like a super motorway, its network allowing people and businesses to connect, shop and trade like never before without having to get into their cars to do it, and yet it seems to be seen as a pariah because it uses energy.

Nobody’s saying that energy efficiency isn’t important but businesses, especially SMEs which the government says it wants to drive recovery, need to be encouraged to think about their carbon use rather than be punished for it.

Technology can help to reduce costs and provide innovative ways to work and increase revenues. This in turn points to sustainability and growth, important issues in times of economic difficulty.

Reducing the carbon footprint is not easy, but European businesses must invest in green technology that enables them to be more energy efficient and rely less on natural resources. Over the next 20 to 30 years, Europe has some specific green regulatory targets to meet and the uptake in the Smart Grid, which can generate energy through renewable resources, will be critical in achieving these goals. The investment in renewable energy will also create new employment opportunities so it is in the interest of organisations to support the initiative by utilising greener technology.

The UK Government should be considering how to supply us all with the renewable energy we would happily use, at a price that we can afford. We don’t want UK business to be driving along the back lanes while everywhere else in the western world is speeding along the digital superhighway.

So, now that outsourcing IT is officially a go-to business option, how has the notion of green IT played into this and has it moved higher up the financial agenda?

2011 has definitely been the year in which cloud computing and virtualisation really took off. As one prominent Gartner analyst said at a symposium recently, “The cloud is here and its utilisation is growing. Enough said.”  Staggering increases in the uptake of cloud services are predicted. According to one leading market research company, MarketsandMarkets, the global cloud computing market is projected to almost triple from $37.8 billion to $121.1 billion by 2015.

You only have to look at some of the recent data produced to see what a significant benefit this growth could have in terms of reducing overall carbon emissions. For instance, a recent study by the Carbon Disclosure Project showed that blue-chip companies in the UK plan to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing from 10% to almost 70% of their information technology by 2020. The study claimed that these companies could realise £1.2 billion in energy savings and 9.2 million metric tons of CO2 savings annually by 2020, that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles. A US study by the same organisation predicted even greater annual energy savings of $12.3 billion if a similar uptake of the cloud took place by companies there.

There are several issues driving businesses to consider their environmental impact: brand reputation, cost reduction and potential punitive taxation and legislation.

Green IT and sustainability are no longer topics that are the preserve of the ‘tree hugger’ or ‘eco-warrior’ but rather a fundamental element in any organisation’s strategic business plan. IT has played a major role in this attitudinal shift. The internet continues to drive the world’s economy and the demand for computing power keeps rising. The IT industry as a whole, from manufacturers to service providers, is reacting to this trend by working harder, smarter and more efficiently.

Businesses are more aware of their responsibilities to the environment however the key drivers for any business will always be revenue generation, increased efficiency and cost reduction.  The trick is to ensure that green policy is built into a business’ strategy to ensure that it makes a visible and valuable contribution. If a CIO can take an FD through a series of IT proposals that will deliver a demonstrable reduction in cost or improve business efficiency, which has an element of environmental benefit, then they are far more likely to gain buy-in.

If we are talking about greener IT in a wider sense then we have to include a whole range of elements. It is not simply a power issue. We should be considering every element of the IT supply chain. Where does your redundant kit end up? In the skip? 2011 saw many TV programs and column inches about the shameful practise of dumping IT equipment in landfill.

In 2012 we should make a huge effort to determine how we can better sweat our assets for longer and how we can re-deploy or find alternate uses for them once we have finished with them and are ready to upgrade.  We should also be considering data overload. Do we need to store everything? And returning to the power theme, we should be considering the use of renewable energy where possible. The IT industry should be using both its influence and purchasing power to demand that the energy providers deliver a constant and sustainable supply of renewables to our data centres. 

Which brings us onto the subject of ‘Greenwash’ or ‘CloudWash’. One pleasing aspect of the cloud hype these past months has been the lack of dubious ‘green’ claims.  We haven’t witnessed companies shouting “The cloud is green, come and join us!” and with good reason. Approximately 60 to 70% of data centre energy is still derived from fossil fuels. In the past, many marketing claims about being green haven’t stood up to close scrutiny and I think the cloud providers have avoided this pitfall in the main. Ultimately, the best way to avoid greenwash is to present straightforward communications and messages which highlight the business benefits of the cloud.

What is clear is that businesses have an opportunity to use the cloud to benefit from both economies of scale and expertise. If we can remove 400 separate mini-server rooms into a cloud infrastructure, which is deployed in central purpose built data centres containing the latest cooling and energy saving technologies, we will have improved the overall environmental impact of all those disparate servers. It doesn’t make us green, but it does achieve overall greater efficiency. This is where cloud computing can help.

Five years ago hosting providers were seen as the enemy of the IT department. Most organisations didn’t understand what their IT departments did, they almost had a magical/mystical quality about them and whatever they said was acted upon. If the IT department said the business needed 10 extra servers, then you needed them. But that has changed. IT is very much viewed as a business enabler now and there is a wider acceptance that virtually every technical service can be acquired, many at lower cost with greater capability, from third parties.

Today, as budgets are being pared back, the IT department has come to view the hosting provider as their friend.  This is where we have a true cloud benefit. It gives you the flexibility to make an informed choice. For example businesses such as charities which traditionally run seasonal campaigns, can use the cloud to cope with expected traffic demand at peak times rather than investing in expensive hardware which becomes redundant once the campaign is over, yet has to be left powered up and consuming energy. These are the benefits that the cloud can bring to both an IT department and the environment, and no you don’t have to be wearing open toed sandals and hessian underwear to enjoy them!

The government’s statement follows the publication in February of the Next Gen report co-authored by Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, which highlighted the poor quality of computer teaching in schools as one of the biggest obstacles to growth for the video games and VFX industries in the UK. Next Gen reported that only one-in-five ICT teachers described themselves as being able to write or modify even basic computer programmes. Ian Livingstone, who’s the life president of British video-game publisher Eidos, wrote a compelling article about the issue in this week’s Independent.

Video gaming has been the pulse at the heart of one of Scotland’s cities, Dundee, for many years but it’s not just the gaming industry that can benefit from better teaching of computing skills, it’s the whole of the Scottish economy. 

The IT industry already contributes something like £3 billion to the Scottish economy and at a time when the devolved government is making a concerted push on all things digital it’s important that youngsters hear the message about how IT skills are key to their future as well as that of their teachers.

What better message could there be at a time of economic difficulty than one that says there are jobs out there, there are opportunities to be creative and innovative and earn a decent salary in a sector that’s growing and here to stay?

iomart is one of a number of IT companies in Scotland that’s been asked to help address these issues. Along with organisations like Microsoft, Oracle, Logica and the Scottish Government, we’ve helped e-skills UK launch a new website called Big Ambition Scotland which showcases the different careers that are available in the IT industry here.

Michael Kowbel, e-skills UK’s Director for Scotland, said: “Over the next five years we need over 400,000 new IT professionals to meet the demand of Scottish businesses.  The launch of BigAmbition Scotland is just the first stage in the development of a fantastic resource to give young people in Scotland the inspiration and ambition to pursue the fantastic career opportunities IT can offer.”

At its launch some worrying figures were presented. The numbers of children taking computer related subjects at schools in Scotland has fallen by 13% in the last five years, while the number of applicants to study computer-related Higher Education courses in Scotland has fallen by 33% since 2002. Computer science it seems is a very uncool subject for Scottish schoolchildren.  

There’s also a lack of young women coming into the industry in Scotland, where two thirds of teenagers studying for computer-related Highers are boys. In the UK as a whole, women make up only 17% of the IT workforce. 

iomart has been fortunate to have a number of talented women join its technical teams. One of them is Group technical manager Anne Bryson. She says, “Women are naturally very logical and good at communication so IT should be a natural career choice.” Anne wants more girls in Scotland to consider IT as a career and can be seen talking about her role on the new Big Ambition website.

The overall problem appears to be one of perception, with many youngsters still believing that IT spells GEEK (see the great e-skills Geek video here ), combined with the poor standard of computing courses available in schools, not only in Scotland but the whole of the UK.  

The UK Government has finally woken up to that fact and Scotland too has pledged its future to a digital economy. We don’t need to dress up, spray on the tan and speak with transatlantic accents to make IT glamorous, we just need to tell it like it is. It’s exciting, it’s innovative, it has a job role for virtually everyone and it’s rewarding both financially and creatively.

As Mark Feeney of e-skills UK said at the launch: “We’ve got so much great talent in Scotland but we need to nurture it.”

At a time when some of the greatest innovations in IT are allowing our children to live, learn and play in a way we never dreamed of, we should be telling it like it really is “IT is sexy and we know it!”

These days there’s no time to sit gazing at all those glossy shots of glistening sands, palm trees and infinity pools. Instead it’s a short click to a website to punch in details of your family, your holiday dates and your budget while a quick search reveals the available destinations …in a sense the holiday probably picks you now rather than the other way round.

The burgeoning of cheap flights and price comparison sites means the internet is now the shop window for all your holiday requirements.

As the internet has created this magical way to widen your holiday or travel company’s customer base so it has meant that making sure your website is fully available every minute, of every day, from anywhere in the world, has become crucial to maintaining your revenue streams.

One trend that is becoming apparent is the steady rise in the number of travel and holiday companies looking for scalable and reliable support for their online presence. Indeed the travel sector as a whole seems to be leading the way when it comes to moving to the cloud.

Accessing flexible computing power via the cloud allows them to scale up the number of servers available at times of seasonal rush, such as for school holidays or Christmas, and scale back down again when the spike recedes and demand isn’t quite so high. It also gives them the ability to move fast to launch new products without incurring large additional costs or delays. All this means greater efficiency, lower energy use and a smaller carbon footprint.

One such travel company that has made the cloud transition is Skyscanner. The UK based company specialises in cheap flights and deals on over 600 airlines, competing for airspace with fellow search engine providers such as ebookers and expedia. The company’s website is visited by over 14 million people every month, is available in 27 languages, and has recently reached peak traffic capacity, leading to a call to arms for help with the demand for its service.

Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect at Skyscanner, explains: “Migrating from a traditional physical infrastructure platform to a fully virtualised private cloud provides the business agility Skyscanner needs to support our exceptional growth. Capacity planning is no longer the headache it once was, and the business can now expect to see additional server resources deployed within minutes rather than weeks.”

Many analysts predicted that the smaller SME would form the cloud ‘hot spot’ and that larger organisations would be somewhat reluctant to embrace the concept, but this is now appearing to be wide of the mark.

If the travel sector is indicative of other industries, then we are witnessing a sea change in attitude towards cloud computing. Not only is this sector embracing the benefits of scalability, cost reduction and flexibility for its own consumption but it also utilising the cloud for new services and products to offer its customers, as evidenced by airline giant Lufthansa. The company has developed CloudStream, a cloud-based service which enables its passenger’s to create a ‘playlist’ of assorted cached content prior to departure, which can then be enjoyed once onboard via the airline’s FlyNet Internet access.

In its 2010 Annual Report, the airline opens with: “Even as the global economy picks up again, companies in all industries are faced with the challenge of cutting their costs sustainably and improving their adaptability in a volatile economic environment. One prerequisite for doing so is further optimisation of business processes, for which the IT sector plays a key role, irrespective of the industry.”

The report then states: “Airlines are faced with a particular need to increase their efficiency and flexibility in order to combat competitive pressure and price erosion. There is nevertheless no sign that IT spending in the airline industry will increase significantly in the years ahead. The overall IT market is under considerable and sustained pressure to change as a result of many factors. Key technological drivers are cutting-edge technologies such as tablet PCs and cloud computing. However, by making targeted investments in IT infrastructure and product development, Lufthansa Systems is nevertheless creating the conditions for its customers to benefit from the advantages of new technologies.”

In a couple of paragraphs, the airline has succinctly and overtly made a case for cloud. The travel industry may have been subjected to economic pressures rather more quickly than some other sectors – many consumers consider holidays a luxury item when money is tight – but it certainly has been quick to address the situation, and cloud is forming an important element of its recovery plans.

Who would have thought a few years ago that the industry whose services we all use to seek sun, sand and sangria would be welcoming the arrival of clouds?

Hackers and outages have certainly made sure it has rained on the cloud parade in recent months. Repeated attacks on Sony’s Playstation network have rekindled the debate about the security of the cloud as have cloud failures at Amazon, Google and Microsoft.So, has the padlock come off? Is the cloud inherently insecure? Should we go back to the old days?

The answer is no, no and no.

The Cloud approach continues to offer a unique opportunity to business. Managing and maintaining complex hosting environments in-house can be time consuming and costly so handing that over to a company that specialises in hosting services not only reduces a big burden on management, it can also be an effective way of reducing costs. The key comes when that handover takes place. Like handing over your new born baby to someone else for the first time, can you trust them to protect it from harm?

Good cloud services are intrinsically secure.

They are built by experts from the ground up with scalability and reliability at the fore. Security plays a big part in that built environment. What we need to do is reassure and educate our end users and work with them to create trust around the cloud. The key to this is “shared responsibility” between cloud providers and cloud users, according to organisations like the Cloud Security Alliance.

Industry analysis suggests there are six perceived risks around the cloud that need to be addressed:

Vendor Trust
If a business is seeking cast iron guarantees over the security and location of its data assets then it needs its cloud provider to meets those requirements via the Service Level Agreement and contract. You need to seek out cloud providers who only deal with suppliers who provide best of breed hardware and software layers backed by the most stringent Service Level Agreements. You can then engage with a cloud supplier offering a SLA, with the confidence that their suppliers are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Legislation and compliance
Retention of data within geographical boundaries is becoming far more important so there is a need to comply with local standards. In the UK, ISO accreditations give clear signs to customers about the management of data and the physical infrastructure being used.

Distributed infrastructure
The key issue here is that customers must be convinced that all architecture is engineered with no single point of failure. Maintaining resilient infrastructure for all areas of the service across the data centres and cloud platforms provided is vital.

Web threats
These can only be countered with appropriate access control and management at the network and hypervisor level. What weakens defences is clients with code issues or poor internal policies on the storage and utilisation of critical system information.

Data leakage
This should be handled by Hypervisor technology. Guest operating systems within the hypervisor should be kept separate through the fundamental aspects of the hypervisor technology itself.

Shared infrastructure
There is an additional onus on service providers to ensure proper segregation of user data in other shared technologies such as the SAN and backup platforms.
Recent research by Pearlfinders has shown a big increase in the number of ICT decision-makers showing an interest in buying cloud-based solutions. For all that the Industry can do to reassure businesses though, they must realise that they have a responsibility to ensure that their own internal systems and processes are safe and secure and comply with the regulatory and audit requirements of their own sectors.

As Tier1, the US-based technology research specialist, concludes: “Moving to the cloud does not absolve an organization of its responsibility to defend itself against the inherent risks of pushing workloads beyond its own walls.”

The rules and policies for data protection don’t change because a company opts for using the cloud over other methods.

By demonstrating that we can provide a safe environment and emphasising to customers that they share that responsibility, we can banish the storm clouds and make hosting in the cloud a more attractive proposition over the next few years.

When it comes to accurately targeting existing and potential customers there can be nothing truer than the mantra that data is king – ask anyone who’s been in business for longer than 10 minutes and they’ll tell you the more information you have on your target market or customer, the easier it is to sell to them.

Businesses of all sizes are experiencing more rapid data growth than ever before; growth rates of over 100 percent per year are no longer uncommon. Driven by the three key factors of business continuity, regulation and data protection, there is no sign that storage growth will slow down some time soon, and this exponential growth is causing IT departments to re-evaluate their practises and policies….fast.

And it’s a headache that companies have identified, and are only too happy to offload, with 39% of global organisations already outsourcing data storage to third parties.

Research from Gartner suggests that businesses will struggle to keep up with the ever increasing demand for data archiving as the scale of firms’ assets grows.

From a data centre operators perspective it’s not just the obvious issues of physical space, security and hardware that are focusing the mind. It is estimated that storage accounts for 26% of the overall data centre power budget so unsurprisingly ‘doing more with less’ is the common mantra. With the average company’s storage utilisation running at 50%, it is not difficult to understand why cloud storage is at the centre of so much activity.

Anyone plugged into IT news services, can’t help but noticing the rising number of stories, and market valuations, relating to storage and data growth.

Last year’s excellent IDC titled “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” highlighted the issues that we will are now facing globally. The study suggests that the amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020, as all major forms of media – voice, TV, radio, print – complete the journey from analog to digital. But perhaps the most astonishing statistic revealed by the study was that 35% more digital information is created today than the capacity exists to store it. This number will jump to over 60% over the next several years.

So what is the solution? Is it cloud storage, is it a combination of traditional storage models, is it bigger disks? Or is it simply that we to actually have to change our behaviours and start considering what data we do need and what data we don’t? Maybe we simply need some simple housekeeping and data discipline.

Now call me an old fashioned luddite, but I still long for the days of the 12″ Vinyl LP. Life was so simple then.

You purchased your favourite album, you kept it near your hi fi and played it when you felt so enamoured. And it took up an album’s thickness of floor or cabinet space. If you lost it or damaged it, you either bought another one or if it had been discontinued, you’d happily spend the next few years hunting it down in charity shops, on eBay or in garage sales. And the feeling of pure joy when you finally tracked a copy was simply indescribable.

Not today. Today you can buy a CD (and we’ll ignore downloads for the moment) and then rip it and store it on your pc, you then sync it up with your player/devise and store it on that. You may use some of the tracks to mix the perfect playlist. The kids decide that your taste in music is surprisingly OK – not cool but OK – and they would like a copy on their players. So you load the tracks on for them. Fearful of losing all of this data, you back it up to a portable storage devise or into the cloud and then you sit back happy. And that’s when it dawns on you that you still have the original CD on the shelf and you’ve probably eaten about 400 Mb of storage space. Did you need to?

OK a pretty simplistic example granted, but one that is being replicated a billion times each day. We now take thousands of pictures, safe in the knowledge that we never have to pay for film development costs, and we back them up – even the rubbish, out of focus ones. We’ve all become budding film directors and stars, convinced that our misguided attempts to swing over a local stream on an old tyre will make us the next big You Tube hit. And all the time, we forget or are afraid, to periodically review and delete. Far easier to buy the latest gizmo with greater storage capacity then actually apply some sensible housekeeping.

A sentiment that businesses might want to consider?

Not only are businesses storing simply everything, (I know of one large organisation that archives and stores all email including every piece of spam/junk mail received) but they are compounding the situation by asking for, and accumulating, data just for the sake of it.

Storing a degree of customer and business data has always been a necessity, of course; for both operational and legal requirements But surely there are certain data gathering activities which just don’t need to be carried out.

The public sector is particularly good at requesting information completely unrelated to what one is actually trying to do. Granted, there are times when knowing a person’s gender, age, salary, ethnicity, religious beliefs, disabilities or otherwise, could be necessary. Applying for a grant to replace lead piping with copper surely isn’t one of them? And of course the more you request, the more you store and the greater the risk of a security breach.

Some would no doubt argue that such intricate detail is required to prove that these grants are being fairly distributed, or that some other function is being performed with due carefulness. But come on?

There can be no doubt that storage demands, if left unabated, will continue to grow in line with expectations, but we need to start to think and work smarter.

Once we have determined what data we need to record, and why, we must then ensure that we take the appropriate steps to protect it and store it.

And we must be brave enough to actually consider deleting some of it!