I’m part of our service operations team, where I’m responsible for service continuity. My team are the people who work evenings and weekends providing 24x7 support for our customers. There are six of us in total. I’m the one who’s less of a vampire as I’m actually at work during the day!
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One of the ways in which ITIL 4 differs from its predecessor is in its increased emphasis on supplier management. ITIL V3 defined ‘4 Ps’ (People, Products, Processes and Partners) of Service Management. In ITIL 4 these become the ‘4 Dimensions of Service Management’, and there is an increased focus on partners and suppliers – an important and necessary change given the growing use of cloud-based services and increasing supplier dependencies.
With the immense pressure for organisations to get remote working services up and working many SaaS providers are offering free trials which are very tempting. Whilst these services may seem to offer a convenient short-term fix, they could have implications for your governance and compliance.
Although local authorities are increasingly moving services to the cloud, they’ve been much slower to do so than central government. After working on cloud implementations with both councils and government agencies, I believe there’s one key reason for this - the wide range of services local authorities provide.
As enterprise adoption of public cloud increases, accessing the resources and expertise to handle architecture design, security and operations can be daunting. Once live, many organisations experience problems and discover that they aren’t making the cost-savings they anticipated or experience issues such as latency. Optimising cloud post-migration can be complex and costly, so it is crucial to take time to plan and architect for the desired outcome.
The recent ransomware attack on Travelex is a salutary reminder of the constant security threat we all face. While we don’t know whether or not a ransom was paid in this case, it’s widely understood that some organisations have been willing to pay several times to have their data restored.
How are organisations meeting the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce? In a digital world, users may be able to work from any location at any time, but they need much more than a laptop or tablet to be productive. They have to be able to access corporate documents and applications securely whenever they need them, from whichever endpoint device they’re using. (That includes legacy applications, not just documents.) They expect self-service and self help – they don’t want to have to call up IT Support for every small query or problem, or when they forget their password. And all of this has to be totally reliable and available at any time.
With cyber threats from malware and cyber attacks to phishing and social engineering continually in the headlines, it can be difficult to assess the actual risks to your organisation so you can take appropriate action to mitigate them. In my view, you can’t manage anything that you don’t understand – so what is actually out there, and how vulnerable is your organisation to the different threats?
This week the Government launched a review to find out what’s needed to make UK business leaders take cyber security seriously. In our view, a good place to start is the government’s Cyber Essentials scheme, which is based on advice from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ.
