Cloud Computing Changes The Game

insurance-cloud-computingCloud, mobility, and advanced analytics are transforming the way insurance companies offer value to their customers. As competitive pressures within the industry increase, insurance companies will turn to technology for assistance in this changed environment.

To prosper in this new environment insurance companies can look to the cloud, in conjunction with other technologies, to help drive reinvention of their business model to offer new services and create direct, multi-channel relationships with customers.

Real-time data collection from multiple sources will become core to carriers’ business and a primary source of innovation. Not only will it allow carriers to offer better pricing and better estimate risk but it will serve as the basis for the creation of new services and products by which carriers will reinvent themselves.

Furthermore, with competition increasing from non-traditional players, carriers must move fast. They need the computing power to handle big data. They need to bring services to market quickly and create networks of partners in which the insurance carrier is at the centre of the customer relationship. To achieve these goals, carriers will need different types of cloud services.

Customers will also be encouraged to engage more deeply with their insurance company as the public image of insurance carriers’ shifts. Many of these new services will require direct relationships with loyal customers. That requirement is a trigger for the insurance industry to evolve from a product-centric to a customer centric model. As part of that evolution, carriers are actively trying to

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Foolproofing Service Standards

cloud-service-guaranteeIn May 2011, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants issued a new set of guidelines known as Service Organisation Controls-2 (SOC-2) report, which outlines criteria for the security, availability, processing integrity, privacy and confidentiality of a service organisation’s systems and processes. Organisations that outsource functions, not relevant to financial statements, can request an SOC-2 report to assure themselves that they have requisite controls in place.

The report is similar to the older SAS 70 (now SOC-1). Under SOC-2, a Type 1 report covers only the design of controls, while a Type 2 covers design and operating effectiveness. To illustrate, a service organisation providing data centre facilities would like to assure customers that it has appropriate and effective security measures, controls and oversight to protect client information. To achieve this, it will appoint an independent auditor to evaluate the security controls and produce an SOC-2 report.

The auditor will undertake testing in line with AICPA criteria. An organisation providing data centre facilities should comply with as many as 25 security principles. For each criterion, the data centre management defines a set of control objectives and activities, which are tested by the independent auditor. At the end of the exercise, an SOC-2 report is provided to the company management.

This assurance report provides an independent opinion on the principles covered, and can be distributed to existing and prospective customers, and other interested parties.

Benefits

For a service organisation management, the report

Reduces

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How HR Can Manage The Risk Of Cloud Computing

HR-cloud-computingCloud technology is the future for the business-world. According to KPMG, it’s now used by most organisations. However, with this new technology come new risks for company information security, and it is important for HR teams to ensure that they update company IT policies to adequately protect business interests.

What’s different about cloud computing?

Cloud systems are often different from the traditional IT infrastructure set up by a company itself because they are normally provided by a third party supplier, and so businesses do not have as much control over the cloud system as they would over their own IT infrastructure.

For these reasons, cloud computing raises new risks for company information security. For example, it can be difficult to trace the web browsing history of an employee who views the internet inside the cloud (as they may be accessing web-based email to move documents outside the cloud), and it is often possible with cloud environments for documents to be copied within the cloud and then pasted outside it onto a personal desktop.

Why does this affect HR?

For companies considering moving onto a cloud-based system (or for those who have recently done so), it is vital for their HR teams to ensure staff IT policies adequately cover the company in the cloud-era against the risks of employees removing company information for illegitimate purposes.

As a first step, HR should sit down with the IT team to ensure that they understand the technology and what is involved

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Five Questions Boards Of Directors Need To Ask About Cloud Governance

BOD-cloud-questionsThe many benefits of cloud computing include helping enterprises become more efficient, agile, innovative and flexible, but achieving those benefits depends on a number of factors, including the involvement of the board of directors. ISACA, a nonprofit, independent association of more than 100,000 governance, risk, security and assurance professionals worldwide, has issued new guidance outlining key questions for boards of directors to ask to ensure their enterprise’s cloud initiative is in line with business objectives and the organisation’s risk tolerance.

“Board members need a clear understanding of cloud computing benefits and how to maximise them through effective governance practices,” said Marc Vael, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CISSP, an ISACA board member and chief IT audit executive at Smals.“This requires the board to see cloud computing not as an IT project, but rather as a business strategy.”

According to ISACA’s Cloud Governance: Questions Boards of Directors Need to Ask, boards should address the following five questions to determine the strategic value that cloud services are expected to provide and the impact that the cloud may have on resources and controls:

1. Do management teams have a plan for cloud computing? Have they weighed the value and opportunity costs?

2. How do current cloud plans support the enterprise’s mission?

3. Have executive teams systematically evaluated organisational readiness? For example, are the right skills available? Do cloud processes conflict with other established processes? Do cloud plans conflict with enterprise culture?

4. Have management teams considered what existing investments might be lost

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Embrace The Cloud, Enjoy More Revenue

embrace-the-cloudSMBs that embrace Cloud computing and business websites are much more likely to enjoy rising revenue than others, according to accounting software provider, MYOB.

The company’s March 2013 MYOB Business Monitor study, which was conducted by research firm Colmar Brunton and surveyed more than 1000 SMBs, found that the businesses that adopted Cloud technologies were twice as likely to see an earnings uplift in the past year.

However, only 16 per cent indicated to use Cloud computing and 38 per cent said to have a business website.

MYOB CEO, Tim Reed, said the research findings provide a clear cut case for embracing online technologies in business.

“It’s obvious that as time goes on, Australian business operators using Cloud computing are increasingly likely to achieve positive financial results. This ubiquitous technology has helped so many smaller businesses become better connected, more productive and more competitive,” he said.

Another key finding of the study is the widening gap in financial performance between the online-savvy and the online-cautious.

Business operators in the Cloud were not only more likely to see a revenue rise in the past year (33 per cent versus 16 per cent of those who weren’t) they were more likely to expect one in the next year (37 per cent as compared to 28 per cent).

Similarly, those with a business website were not only more likely to see a revenue rise in the past year (24 per cent versus 15 per cent), but also more likely to expect

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Cloud Computing Not Just About IT

service-deliveryThe word ‘cloud’ has been literally hanging over executives’ heads for the past two years — in the form of massive banners hanging from the ceilings of almost every hub airport they travel through. To date, the focus of cloud has been on the delivery of IT-related capabilities from IT-related providers, largely for things that the IT department is responsible for managing.

Cloud computing is expected to grow to 20% or more of the total IT budget by 2013. Gartner research shows that there is already significant non-IT involvement in decision making about cloud services, with finance, marketing, HR and other business units acting as key stakeholders 25 to 30% of the time and actually funding cloud services between 10 and 30% of the time. Although largely a technological development, many of the pertinent questions today about the usefulness of cloud computing as a business platform are non-technical. We believe over time businesses will better understand the principle that cloud computing is a means to deliver IT-enabled capabilities, not just simple IT capabilities.

As this thinking evolves, the focus of cloud computing will shift toward exploiting it as a service delivery mechanism for the provision of non-IT capabilities, such as such as payroll, printing, logistics and e-commerce. In this context, cloud computing enables these services to be delivered from organisations that are not traditionally seen as IT companies, nor have any intention of ever being seen in this way.

By 2015, Gartner predicts that

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What Is Service Virtualization?

service-virtualizationToday, most large enterprises, no matter what industry they serve, are software developers. The reason? The various ways through which employees and customers can, and want, to engage with businesses has grown exponentially; time, platform and frequency are no longer considerable barriers to achieving what you want to achieve.

Applications that are used by either staff or customers are developed internally by the development team and/or with their development partners. For many organisations, their applications, particularly those which are customer facing, are the differentiators between them and their competitors, so getting it right is crucial.

Development and testing teams are under immense pressure to speed up the testing process in order to deliver applications out to market as quickly as possible, but one of the main issues is the lack of pre-production infrastructure available to them. This is where the ability to create a virtual service, also known as service virtualization, comes into play.

Service virtualization enables developers and testers to remove these constraints by replacing dependent systems with virtual services. The virtual service simulates the behaviour, data, and performance characteristics of a dependent system whilst consuming a fraction of the infrastructure. It is then instantly available to each team as and when they need it. By removing these constraints, software can be developed and delivered faster, with lower costs and higher reliability. It is a fundamentally new technique in software development.

In July 2012, CA Technologies commissioned a research study “The Business Benefits of

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Cloud Computing Still Confusing to Small Businesses

cloud-computing-confusingOnly 28 percent of small-business owners completely understand the concept of cloud computing, while 42 percent of respondents said they are not using cloud computing at all and 35 percent said they were using it only for data storage, according to the latest “Brother Small-Business Survey,” from Brother International, which examined the role of technology in small business.

Small-business owners also noted using the cloud for document management (21 percent) as well as business applications like CRM and accounting and human resources (17 percent).

The study, conducted by Wakefield Research and based on a poll of 500 owners of U.S. businesses with less than 100 employees, revealed a surprising 75 percent of these small-business owners felt that a crashed computer was more disruptive than a sick employee, and 75 percent said that a tech malfunction had negatively affected their business through a missed deadline or opportunity.

“This year’s small-business survey found that technology is just as important as a healthy workforce,” John Wandishin, vice president of marketing for Brother, said in a statement. “The results emphasize the importance of delivering reliable and easy-to-use products to promote a productive working environment.”

When asked about business investments, 51 percent of small-business owners said that they prioritize technology tool-related capital investments, such as new software, mobile apps and cloud computing services. Machinery-related (21 percent) and facility-related investments (20 percent) were other areas of priority.

The results indicated that while technology plays a vital role in terms of office productivity,

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Running Your Own IT Systems Costly And Inefficient

do-it-yourself-ITCloud computing represents enormous opportunities for domestic transport and logistics businesses around the world, according to Ralf Moller, general manager marketing for CargoWise and WiseTech Global. While cloud technology sounds complex, it is easy to find analogies that make this evolving mainstream technology easy to understand and adopt.

“Around the world there are tens of millions of trucks in circulation, and still more drivers who hit the roads to keep supermarkets, stores, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses supplied with all kinds of goods,” said Moller. “People who benefit from this transport network aren’t interested in how goods get there – they just expect them to be available at low cost, where and when they are ready to purchase them.”

Moller points out that while consumers might pay more for premium products, which feature higher grades of raw materials, or more highly refined manufacturing processes, few if any, think about the delivery process. As a result, wholesalers and retailers turn to logistics and transport experts to move the goods and meet customer expectations for cost and efficiency.

The domestic transport industry has largely focused on achieving economies of scale – enabling specialists with large assets (trucks and warehouses) to provide transportation, storage and logistics expertise at a fraction of the cost it would take individual wholesalers and retailers to do themselves.
“So why are many transport and logistics providers running their own IT systems when it’s safer, cheaper and more efficient to take advantage of

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Seven Reasons To Get Your Head In The Cloud

head-in-the-cloudBusinesses speak up about how they’re flying thanks to cloud computing

Imagine if Frank Sinatra was an entrepreneur.

If he was in business, besides being effortlessly cool, he’d be totally nuts about cloud computing. Why? Because he’s the man who once sung: “Come fly with me”.

And not just that, he also sung in “I saw your face in a cloud”.

Jokes apart though, there are many good things that could happen if you take Sinatra’s example and fly away into cloud computing.

We asked businesses to tell us how cloud has been able to impact their balance sheets:

1. Battersea luxury floor business Harvey Maria: “We can act like a big firm even though we only three staff”

Owner Mark Findlay says:

“Back in the mid-late noughties we realised we needed to completely rethink and structure our business. Moving all of our operating systems to the cloud was a big part of this transformation and we chose NetSuite’s cloud-based SuiteCommerce solution to drive this change.

“Essentially, operating in the cloud allows us to have the profile of a big company, but operate like a lean, small company. With just three full-time members of staff, we use this software to outsource everything to keep staffing costs down. The solution also integrates accounting, CRM B2B and B2C eCommerce, including shopping cart management and check-out, which makes managing our outsourced processes really easy.

“Our annual turnover is increasing by 50% year on year and since doing so SuiteCommerce has been integral

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