Our Insight

When starting with public cloud services in an organisation, the first conversations normally take place at a strategic level and are based around shifting from a CapEx to OpEx cost model. This is a great place to start, but it can create a lot of uncertainty around what those month-to-month costs are going to be for any given infrastructure footprint. 

The direction of travel for IT infrastructure is undoubtedly - and quite rightly - towards automating as much as possible of deployment and maintenance. Automation is the driver towards real business benefits such as increased visibility, operational effectiveness and guaranteed compliance in technical operations, but like any approach it’s not a panacea. Successful approaches to automation require pragmatism rather than ideological inflexibility to really make it add value within an organisation.

At the top of the year, Mike set out the challenges and opportunities we're all facing in 2018. More than a month in already, and I wanted to talk about the exciting ways Ideal is rising to meet those challenges, and help you seize and deliver on opportunities.

This year's going to be an exciting one for Ideal as we expand our managed services portfolio and grow our cloud offering and expertise. We already apply best-practice security across our core architectures - enterprise networking, data centre and unified comms - and we wanted to ensure we could offer the same level of security expertise and reassurance as we expand our range of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions.

We've looked before at how the public cloud, for all its benefits, isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. From concerns about data security and sovereignty, to my own thoughts about the challenge of managing data and applications across providers, it's clearly not a panacea.

We've talked a lot about software-defined networking (SDN) and the increasingly intelligent network hardware that enables it. Lately, fellow solutions architect Daren Vallyon and I have been trying to provide a bit more detail about how Cisco is innovating in both areas, with technologies like Digital Network Architecture (DNA) and Campus Fabric.

Our take on the details might be interesting to fellow technologists, but what if you're trying to build the business case for your organisation to invest in new networking technologies?

Although we can't predict the future, security trends, threats and weaknesses need to be anticipated so they can be defended. Part of my job is to to build a clear picture of cyber threats and challenges - both now and on the horizon. With that in mind, here are five of the biggest security issues for 2017, and how Ideal will be helping our customers respond.

Last week saw me flying out to Barcelona for the European branch of VMworld - VMware's annual conference on data centre, cloud infrastructure and business mobility. It's a big, interesting event, made all the more so this year by the announcement, just before, that VMware vSphere can now be integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As part of the research for our recent customer briefing, The rise of the Apps, fellow solutions architect Richard Harvey and I locked ourselves in a room with a voice recorder and discussed networks - specifically the increasingly app-centric way that corporate IT operates, and the resulting impact on the way networks are provisioned.

The Ideal blog is the perfect outlet for us to reflect on what's going on in our sector, but some trends and concepts are just too important or complex to boil down into a 300-word post. It's these topics we aim to discuss in our customer briefings: two-page, downloadable documents giving our steer on key trends and changes we're seeing in the technology sector, and the opportunities and challenges they present for our clients.

Last week I attended Cisco’s Partner Summit and Marketing Velocity conference in San Diego. Marketing Velocity is an inspiring day full of speakers and workshops focused on marketing best practices. Here are five things that I took away from the event.