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KPN, the largest infrastructure provider in the Netherlands, offers a high-performance fixed-line and mobile network in addition to enterprise-class IT infrastructure and a wide range of cloud offerings, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Security-as-a-Service. Drawing on its extensive track record of success providing VMware Cloud Verified services and solutions, KPN is now one of a distinguished group of providers to have earned the VMware Sovereign Cloud distinction.

“With the exceptionally strong, high-performance network we offer, this is truly a sovereign cloud. Government agencies, healthcare companies, and organizations with highly sensitive and confidential data can confidentially comply with industry-specific regulations such as GDPR, Government Information Security Baseline, Royal Netherlands Standardization Institute, and the Network and Information Security Directive,” said Babak Fouladi, Chief Technology & Digital Officer and Member of the Board of Management at KPN. “KPN places data and applications in a virtual private cloud that is controlled, tested, managed, and secured in the Netherlands, without third-party interference.”

KPN’s sovereign cloud, CloudNL, reflects a rapidly changing landscape in which many companies need to move data to a sovereign cloud. Reasons why include a dramatic increase in remote or hybrid work, evolving geopolitical events and threats, and fast-changing international regulations.

“The more you digitize an enterprise, the greater the variety of data and applications you must manage,” says Fouladi. “Each requires the right cloud environment based on the required security level, efficiency, and ease of use. On the one hand, this might include confidential customer information that requires extra protection, and which must remain within the nation’s boundaries. Just as importantly, the information must never be exposed to any foreign nationals at any time. On the other hand, you have workloads that are entirely appropriate for the public cloud and benefit from the economy and scale the cloud offers.”

Fouladi stresses that this is why so many organizations are embracing a multi-cloud strategy. It’s a strategy he believes is fundamentally enriched with a sovereign cloud.

Based on VMware technologies, CloudNL is designed to satisfy the highest security requirements and features stringent guarantees verified through independent audits. All data and applications are stored in KPN’s data centers within the Netherlands – all of which are operated and maintained by fully-vetted citizens of the Netherlands.

ValidSign, a KPN CloudNL customer, is a rapidly growing provider of cloud-based solutions that automate document signings. ValidSign’s CEO John Lageman notes that the company’s use of a fully sovereign cloud in Holland is particularly important for the security-minded organizations the company serves, among them notaries, law firms, and government institutions.

“The documents, permits, and contracts that we sign must remain guaranteed in the Netherlands,” says Lageman. “Digitally and legally signing and using certificates used to be very expensive. Moving to the cloud was the solution, but not with an American cloud provider – our customers would no longer be sure where the data would be stored or who could have access to it. With CloudNL they have that control.”

The Bottom Line

There are many reasons to move data to a sovereign cloud, among them an increase in remote or hybrid work, changing geopolitical events, or fast-changing international regulations. KPN CloudNL empowers enterprises to handle these challenges with ease by incorporating sovereign cloud into their multi-cloud strategy.

Learn more about KPN CloudNL here and its partnership with VMware here.

Cloud Computing

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Over the last decade, many organizations have turned to cloud technologies on their journey to become a digital business. The advantages of multi-cloud are well-documented: efficiency, flexibility, speed, agility, and more. Yet without consistent, comprehensive management across all clouds – private, hybrid, public, and even edge – the intended benefits of multi-cloud adoption may backfire. Increasingly, multi-cloud operations have become a priority for organizations to successfully negotiate cloud adoption.

Today, not only are competitors more aggressive and margins tighter, but partners, customers, and employees also have higher expectations and greater demands. As organizations continue to adapt and accelerate service delivery, they need to look to modern management solutions to simplify and speed  access to the infrastructure and application services teams need, when they need them – without increasing business risk. By deploying solutions that offer comprehensive capabilities with a common control plane, organizations can unify their multi-cloud operations to improve infrastructure and application performance, gain visibility into costs, and reduce configuration and operational risks.

Multi-Cloud Management Challenges

Almost every digital business today faces the issue of complexity when it comes to managing its multi-cloud operations. As organizations have moved away from managing single data centers to managing hybrid and native public clouds, the scope and scale of management have exploded into countless moving parts. Organizations can face complexity due to siloed infrastructure, user access policies, multiple APIs, billing, and lack of a formal operations plan that ensures processes and security remain consistent across multiple clouds.

With so many moving parts, organizations can also face siloed teams that in many cases have to contend with different cloud constructs, including different definitions of the infrastructure services provided by those clouds and different policies for security and compliance. In addition, teams often deploy different tools to manage their various clouds. A fragmented approach to operational priorities for cloud services makes it difficult to get a holistic view of how an organization uses cloud services, shares best practices, and ensures sufficient governance. Not only can disconnected operations impede an organization’s ability to run efficiently, but also impact their ability to troubleshoot problems and recover from outages quickly. Siloed teams and the sprawl of management solutions can also result in a lack of visibility into cloud costs.

As we enter an uncertain market in 2023, organizations face increasing pressure to control their cloud spending. Complexity is the enemy of cost optimization. As a result of different pricing structures across different cloud provider services and siloed teams, organizations are often struggling to predict future spend. In fact, according to a recent VMware study, more than 41% of organizations want to optimize their existing use of cloud to save on costs.

The Benefits of Unifying Multi-Cloud Operations

As organizations mature in their multi-cloud management strategies, they increasingly recognize that success depends on having comprehensive visibility. Organizations cannot manage what they can’t see. Although management solutions have been around for a very long time, comprehensive visibility has yet to be fully appreciated or achieved by businesses.

Cloud management powers your cloud operating model by helping you manage, control, and secure your cloud environments. A unified approach to multi-cloud management enables consistent and seamless operations across clouds, simplifying cloud adoption, streamlining app migrations, and accelerating modernization. An effective, efficient cloud operating model today requires a modern management solution such as VMware Aria. By bringing together a comprehensive visual map of multi-cloud environments with actionable management insights, VMware Aria enables organizations to leverage end-to-end intelligent operations across clouds to improve performance, lower costs and reduce risk.

As we enter a year of uncertainty, agility is the key to resilience and growth, and no matter where organizations are at in their cloud journey, a cloud operating model rolled out with modern, comprehensive, multi-cloud management solutions will bring consistency and efficiency to managing all types of clouds. More importantly, it will allow business leaders to quickly adapt, respond, and innovate on the fly which will prove critical to staying competitive.

To learn more, visit us here.

Cloud Computing

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

One of the most important components of data privacy and security is being compliant with the regulations that call for the protection of information.

Regulators want to see transparency and controllability within organizations, because that is what makes them trustworthy from a data privacy and security standpoint. Ideally, organizations will deploy systems that provide compelling evidence to support their claims that they are meeting their requirements to deliver the protection and performance needed by stakeholders.

Protecting data from theft and improper use has long been the domain of cybersecurity and IT executives. But today, this is really a concern for the entire C-suite and, in many cases, the board of directors, all of whom are well aware of the repercussions of a data breach and failing to comply with regulations.

There is simply too much at risk when companies don’t ensure a level of control and trust in how they handle data. This is the case because of several converging trends:

The ongoing growth in the volume of business data, including a huge amount of information about customers and employees — much of it personal and personally identifiable.The importance this data holds from a strategic standpoint. Companies rely on the insights they gain from analyzing market data to provide a competitive advantage.An ever-expanding threat landscape, with increasingly sophisticated and well-financed cybercriminals going after this data for profit.A disappearing enterprise “perimeter” with the increase in cloud services, remote work and mobile devices used by employees in various locations. The idea of a fixed perimeter protected by a firewall no longer applies to most organizations.

In the midst of all this is the increase in government regulations designed to hold organizations accountable for how they gather, store, share and use data. An organization that fails to comply with such regulations can face stiff fines and other penalties, as well as negative publicity and damage to its brand.

Gaining trust and control

One of the challenges with establishing control and trust with data is a lack of visibility regarding the data: where it resides, who has access to it, how it is being used, etc. Organizations need to know their level of risk and how risk can be mitigated, as well as their level of progress in enhancing data security and privacy.

Endpoint devices present a particularly high level of cyber risk, because of the challenges of managing a large and growing number of mobile devices and apps in the workplace, as well as desktops and laptops used for remote work. Many threat actors target corporate data for theft and extortion, and endpoint devices present potential entry points into an organization.

The endpoint attack surface has expanded quickly over the past few years,

thanks in large part to the growth of remote and hybrid work. For many organizations, there is a sense that the attack surface is spiraling out of control, because of the challenge of gaining visibility and control of this environment. They realize that just a single compromised endpoint could result in an attack that causes significant financial and reputational damage.

Unfortunately, few tools on the market are designed specifically to monitor and manage cyber risk on a unified basis. Organizations have had to stitch together point solutions to get by. And in many cases, they lack data that is current, accurate, comprehensive, and contextual.

In addition, many organizations lack the ability to measure and compare corporate risk scores with industry peers; quickly take action after risk is scored; set goals for vulnerability remediation; and prioritize which areas to spend limited security resources on.

In order to build trust and gain better control of data, organizations need to leverage technology that gives them the ability to know how vulnerable their critical assets are, whether they are achieving their goals to improve security posture, how they measure up against industry peers; and what they should be doing to become more secure.

Ideally, technology tools should be able to provide organizations with real-time comparisons with industry peers in areas such as systems vulnerability, outstanding patches and lateral movement risk.

From a visibility standpoint, tools should identify vulnerability and compliance gaps across all endpoints used in an organization, enabling organizations to prioritize those issues that represent the highest risk, visualize complex relationships between assets and collect real-time feedback. They should be able to track each asset by collecting comprehensive data on all endpoints in real time.

In terms of control, security tools need to help organizations greatly reduce the attack surface by managing patches, software updates and configurations. Metrics should provide a clear sense of progress over time and indicate where improvements are needed.

From a trust perspective, tools should provide a single, accurate view of risks, enabling risk scoring and dashboards that give executives a clear sense of the level of risks and how they can be mitigated.

When it comes to ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations, IT and security leaders need to establish trust and control within their organizations’ environments. That’s the only way to demonstrate to regulators — as well as to customers, employees and business partners — that they are taking data privacy seriously and taking the necessary steps.

The most effective ways to be compliant and at the same time enhance data security are to gain greater visibility into the organization’s infrastructure, including every endpoint device, evaluate the effectiveness of security solutions and make needed improvements, and compare risk metrics with those of comparable organizations.

Assess the risk of your organization with the Tanium Risk Assessment. Your customized risk report will include your risk score, proposed implementation plan, how you compare to industry peers, and more.

Data Privacy

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

One of the most important components of data privacy and security is being compliant with the regulations that call for the protection of information.

Regulators want to see transparency and controllability within organizations, because that is what makes them trustworthy from a data privacy and security standpoint. Ideally, organizations will deploy systems that provide compelling evidence to support their claims that they are meeting their requirements to deliver the protection and performance needed by stakeholders.

Protecting data from theft and improper use has long been the domain of cybersecurity and IT executives. But today, this is really a concern for the entire C-suite and, in many cases, the board of directors, all of whom are well aware of the repercussions of a data breach and failing to comply with regulations.

There is simply too much at risk when companies don’t ensure a level of control and trust in how they handle data. This is the case because of several converging trends:

The ongoing growth in the volume of business data, including a huge amount of information about customers and employees — much of it personal and personally identifiable.The importance this data holds from a strategic standpoint. Companies rely on the insights they gain from analyzing market data to provide a competitive advantage.An ever-expanding threat landscape, with increasingly sophisticated and well-financed cybercriminals going after this data for profit.A disappearing enterprise “perimeter” with the increase in cloud services, remote work and mobile devices used by employees in various locations. The idea of a fixed perimeter protected by a firewall no longer applies to most organizations.

In the midst of all this is the increase in government regulations designed to hold organizations accountable for how they gather, store, share and use data. An organization that fails to comply with such regulations can face stiff fines and other penalties, as well as negative publicity and damage to its brand.

Gaining trust and control

One of the challenges with establishing control and trust with data is a lack of visibility regarding the data: where it resides, who has access to it, how it is being used, etc. Organizations need to know their level of risk and how risk can be mitigated, as well as their level of progress in enhancing data security and privacy.

Endpoint devices present a particularly high level of cyber risk, because of the challenges of managing a large and growing number of mobile devices and apps in the workplace, as well as desktops and laptops used for remote work. Many threat actors target corporate data for theft and extortion, and endpoint devices present potential entry points into an organization.

The endpoint attack surface has expanded quickly over the past few years,

thanks in large part to the growth of remote and hybrid work. For many organizations, there is a sense that the attack surface is spiraling out of control, because of the challenge of gaining visibility and control of this environment. They realize that just a single compromised endpoint could result in an attack that causes significant financial and reputational damage.

Unfortunately, few tools on the market are designed specifically to monitor and manage cyber risk on a unified basis. Organizations have had to stitch together point solutions to get by. And in many cases, they lack data that is current, accurate, comprehensive, and contextual.

In addition, many organizations lack the ability to measure and compare corporate risk scores with industry peers; quickly take action after risk is scored; set goals for vulnerability remediation; and prioritize which areas to spend limited security resources on.

In order to build trust and gain better control of data, organizations need to leverage technology that gives them the ability to know how vulnerable their critical assets are, whether they are achieving their goals to improve security posture, how they measure up against industry peers; and what they should be doing to become more secure.

Ideally, technology tools should be able to provide organizations with real-time comparisons with industry peers in areas such as systems vulnerability, outstanding patches and lateral movement risk.

From a visibility standpoint, tools should identify vulnerability and compliance gaps across all endpoints used in an organization, enabling organizations to prioritize those issues that represent the highest risk, visualize complex relationships between assets and collect real-time feedback. They should be able to track each asset by collecting comprehensive data on all endpoints in real time.

In terms of control, security tools need to help organizations greatly reduce the attack surface by managing patches, software updates and configurations. Metrics should provide a clear sense of progress over time and indicate where improvements are needed.

From a trust perspective, tools should provide a single, accurate view of risks, enabling risk scoring and dashboards that give executives a clear sense of the level of risks and how they can be mitigated.

When it comes to ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations, IT and security leaders need to establish trust and control within their organizations’ environments. That’s the only way to demonstrate to regulators — as well as to customers, employees and business partners — that they are taking data privacy seriously and taking the necessary steps.

The most effective ways to be compliant and at the same time enhance data security are to gain greater visibility into the organization’s infrastructure, including every endpoint device, evaluate the effectiveness of security solutions and make needed improvements, and compare risk metrics with those of comparable organizations.

Assess the risk of your organization with the Tanium Risk Assessment. Your customized risk report will include your risk score, proposed implementation plan, how you compare to industry peers, and more.

Data Privacy

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Since the pandemic began, 60 million people in Southeast Asia have become digital consumers. The staggering opportunities Asia’s burgeoning digital economy presents are reason enough to spur you into rethinking the way you do business.

This means one thing: digital transformation. Cloud adoption empowers organisations to adapt quickly to sudden market disruptions. Back when the pandemic was at its peak, hybrid work and enterprise mobile apps ensured critical operations were able to maintain business-as-usual despite lockdowns and border closures. Today, they are empowering an increasingly mobile workforce to stay productive—on their terms.

Facilitating this transformation saw organisations dismantling legacy infrastructures and adopting decentralised networks, cloud-based services, and the widespread use of employees’ personal devices.

But with this new cloud-enabled environment of mobile devices and apps, remote workspaces, and edge-computing components came substantial information gaps. Ask yourself if you have complete visibility of all your IT assets; there’s a good chance you’d answer no. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as 94% of organisations find 20% or more of their endpoints undiscovered and therefore unprotected. 

Why you can’t ignore your undiscovered (and unprotected) endpoints

The rapid proliferation of endpoints, which increases the complexity of today’s IT environments and introduces a broader attack surface for cyber criminals to exploit, only serves to underscore the importance of knowing all your endpoints. Here’s what will happen if you don’t.

Exposure to security risk. You need to keep your doors and windows locked if you want to secure your home. But what if you don’t know how many you have or where they are located? It’s the same with endpoints: you can’t protect what you can’t see. Knowing your endpoints and getting real-time updates on their status will go a long way to proactively keeping cyber threats at bay and responding to an incident rapidly—and at scale.

Poor decision-making. Access to real-time data relies on instantaneous communication with all your IT assets, the data from which enable your teams to make better-informed decisions. Yet current endpoint practices work with data collected at an earlier point in time. What this means is that by the time your team utilises the data, it’s already outdated. This, in turn, renders the insights they derived inaccurate, and in some instances, unusable.

Inefficient operations. Despite IT assets being constantly added to or decommissioned from the environment due to workforce shifts and new requirements, many enterprises still track their inventory manually with Excel spreadsheets. You can imagine their struggle to get a complete and accurate inventory of every single asset and the resulting guessing games IT teams need to play to figure out what to manage and patch without that inventory.

Getting a better handle on ever-present security threats 

Having a bird’s-eye view of your endpoints requires you to have the right tools to manage them, no matter the size or complexity of your digital environment. These should help regain real-time visibility and complete control by:

Identifying unknown endpoints that are yet to be discovered, evaluated, and monitoredFinding issues by comparing installations and versions of your software for each endpoint against defined software bundles and updatesStandardising your environment by instantly applying updates to out-of-date installations and installing software missing from endpoints that require themEnabling automation of software management to further reduce reliance on IT teams by governing end-user self-service

You only stand to gain when you truly understand the importance of real-time visibility and complete control over your endpoints—and commit to it. In the case of insurer Zurich, having a high-resolution view over an environment with over 100,000 endpoints worldwide meant greater cyber resilience, savings of up to 100 resource hours a month, and deeper collaboration between cybersecurity and operations.

Secure your business with real-time visibility and complete control over your endpoints. Learn how with Tanium.

Endpoint Protection

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As a result of the widespread shift to hybrid working and learning brought about by the pandemic, the cloud continues to play a critical role for public sector organisations – particularly those in the education sector.

Enlightened by the accelerated digital transition over the past two years, students, researchers and staff are now demanding cloud-hosted resources and online lessons, and are vying for access to modern tools and services.

The benefits are clear for IT leaders, too. Not only is cloud technology a key enabler in the sought-after modernisation process, but it also enables organisations to innovate quickly, enjoy greater resilience, and continue to be agile in order to meet students’ ever-changing needs.

Although the potential gains are clear to see, public sector organisations looking to migrate to the cloud often face a wide range of challenges, from privacy and security concerns to a lack of in-house IT staff.

One of the greatest challenges, however, is a difficulty fitting into cloud industry-standard processes. This means cost and affordability are often cited as the main reason for hesitancy around moving away from on-premise systems.

For example, while it may be typical for a commercial organisation to sign up to a multi-million-pound cloud contract in return for a discount, such activities can prove difficult for UK public sector organisations. Even making the most out of smaller commitments in return for a discount, such as Reserved Instances or Saving Plans, can be a nightmare for public sector procurement teams.

This is why, in order to make a successful transition to cloud, organisations require the help of a financially focused cloud reseller like Strategic Blue to ensure they can better manage, control, reduce and optimise their cloud costs.

Strategic Blue, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting Partner with a specialist education competency, helps organisations to buy cloud a brighter way. Using the appropriate purchasing framework agreement and pricing models, organisations can procure cloud services in a compliant way. Strategic Blue can also put in place additional discount options from cloud providers to help reduce costs.

For example, it helps the University of California, San Diego, to save on average 17% per month, while increasing their breadth of service adoption by 14%. Similarly, it helps the University of York make significant monthly cloud savings, reduce internal time spent managing cloud costs and cut the complexity of their cloud billing.

Not only does Strategic Blue’s commodity trading approach to purchasing cloud reduce both cost and uncertainty, it also helps organisations reduce their carbon footprint and edge closer to meeting their net zero goals – by enabling cost effective and efficient use of cloud.

Ultimately, it’s clear that a transition to the cloud is a smart choice for education providers – and Strategic Blue can help ensure you’re making the most of that investment. To find out how Strategic Blue can help your business click here.

Hybrid Cloud

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Most of us have experienced breaks in supply chains recently. In the automotive industry, for example, no one can tell you exactly when a much-needed part will arrive. And, manufacturing has slowed to the point that previously-owned (used) popular cars — available now — cost more than the “new” models — on a wait list.

This lack of transparency frustrates Schnellecke Logistics SE. As one of the world’s leading automotive logistics service providers, the company not only delivers automotive parts in sync with its customers’ production processes, it also supports their process optimization.

Logistics supply inefficiency hinders process optimization

While external factors like volatile demand, employee shortages, and agile supply chains drove Schnellecke to become more efficient — what they really needed to transform business was real-time insight and transparency into the entire supply-chain process.

In their way were disparate systems that made it hard to retrieve and share vital information on shop-floor production processes and operations. And, without mobile access from the shop floor, they lacked the real-time data necessary to anticipate potential issues.

That blind spot was a driving factor in the decision for Schnellecke and its subsidiary, LOGIS GmbH IT, to build a digital control tower to manage logistics. The ability to visualize real-time data gives them (and their customers by extension) management oversight from transportation and warehousing, to packaging, assembly, and supply.

Managing supply from the digital boardroom in the control tower

Now, from the control tower’s digital boardroom, Schnellecke and its customers can make decisions based on real-time data from all their supply logistics processes. The role-specific applications and analytics drive greater efficiency and transparency with real-time operational data, automated KPI reports, digital shift protocols, and more.

“We developed a ‘digital boardroom for logistics’ to enable the integrated, end-to-end, and real-time monitoring of our logistics process. By also providing this tool to our customers, we have established a new level of customer service for our core business,” says Karsten Keil, CIO, Schnellecke and VP group IT and digitization LOGIS GmbH.

As an SAP intelligent enterprise, LOGIS built the digital control tower solution on the SAP Business Technology Platform. This solution is an important building block in Schnellecke’s digital strategy. All digital initiatives are combined and synchronised in the Schnellecke iX+ framework.

70% faster: operational insights and impact analysis

“With SAP Business Technology Platform, we have built a digital boardroom for logistics that provides us with a complete view by role and product to see what is happening on the shop floor from procurement to line feeding,” explains Denis Wirries, head of competence center IoT, LOGIS GmbH.

Schnellecke has achieved operational efficiency and excellence through process optimization. With mobile access to the dashboard from the shop floor they can see deviations easily and take action. By aggregating and processing real-time data digitally from various internal and external sources they are able to make better decisions. The automated reporting alone, saves them two hours per day. With a 70% increase in operational insight and impact analysis, both employees and customers have embraced a digital mindset.

3x faster issue resolution, 25% more issues predicted

Now, Schnellecke resolves issues 3x faster than before and predicts 25% more issues — improving operations, productivity, and customer satisfaction. All relevant logistics supply data is centralized and displayed in real time on the dashboard which is accessible from all commonly used — including mobile — devices. Manual data searches have become obsolete and operational processes are stable.

Schnellecke innovation has lit up the automotive and manufacturing supply chain and logistics processes end-to-end. Everyone benefits. In recognition, Keil was named one of the top 10 CIOs of the year 2021 by the German IT magazine Computerwoche.

“You have an idea, say it out loud and you have a team of colleagues who tirelessly and passionately fight for this idea together with you,” Keil exclaims. â€œThis is what makes Schnellecke so special for me. And that is also the reason for this success.”

Schnellecke is also a 2022 SAP Innovation Awards winner. You can read the company’s pitch deck to learn more about the digital architecture.

Schnellecke

Digital Transformation