It’s a challenge that police forces have been looking to address, according to Rob Brind, a digital silver commander (a senior officer in the force’s Gold-Silver-Bronze command hierarchy) at Hampshire & Isle of White Constabulary, and Thames Valley Police.

“We’re able to maintain our emergency 999 call answer times, but we’d got to the point where our non-emergency 101 call rates were taking, on average, seven minutes to answer,” says Brind.

“To just handle a call now takes longer. Most crimes are digitally enabled, be they phishing scams or a stalking harassment case via social media…All this increased complexity of gathering information is usually done by the call handler, which has seen the number of calls drop from four-to-five an hour to two-to-three,” he explains.

Brind found that half of all calls coming into the police were incident descriptions after conducting analysis of the types of non-emergency demand that was coming in.  Another 20% of demand was from callers looking for updates on reported crimes, while an additional 30% of calls were harder to predict.

“In these cases, we don’t really know what the demand looks like,” Brind admits.

According to the commander, tackling the 20% of people calling in for updates was critical – as this was the category which police could anticipate and therefore cater for more efficiently using automated technologies.

“We were looking for something that could either push automated messages to these victims of crime who were looking for updates or allow them to access messages or policing services in a different way that would keep them informed and engaged,” Brind explains.

After looking at a range of technologies that could assist the force in sensitively automating a crime victim’s journey, the force chose Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud solution.

“This allowed us to create a journey, and send automated messages, text messages or emails to those victims over a period of the crime lifecycle so. So, info about the crime number, the officer assigned to the case and crime prevention advice.

“Now, instead of the victim having to call us they’re getting that info straight away over a period of time. This information is coming either from our contact management system or our record management system.”

Messaging portal

Since the force went live with the system last August, Brind says that the system has sent over 400,000 messages to victims of crime.

Thames Valley Police also worked with Salesforce to build a portal where victims can self-serve information and monitor the progress of the investigation.

“On the portal, there’s a chevron at the top that tells you what status your crime is at. Whether it’s being investigated, or whether stuff is out for forensics etc”

“We’ve also built a two-way messaging service between officers and members of the public. So instead of victims of crime having to phone up for an update or wait for the officer to contact them, they can now contact the officer and the officer can message back through the portal,” Brind explains.

Following the portal’s launch in February, it has already exchanged 8,000 messages between officers and members of the public. “We’ve also seen over 40,000 people access the portal over that period as well,” Brind adds.

The portal has also been designed to host useful information: from victim code of compliance; knowledge articles complied by the Home Office around support services; as well as a list of NGOs and specialists that victims of crime can speak with.

Brind estimates that since the technology was installed there has been a call reduction of 30,000 across Hampshire and Thames Valley in the last quarter.

“That’s a significant number of calls reduced. If that continues that’s 120,000 calls reduced to call centres which allows us to focus on other areas of demand – people who are victims or witnesses of crime and recording it and dealing with that in a timely manner.”

Brind adds that speed-to-answer times have reduced from seven minutes to three-to-four minutes over the last month or so. He enthuses: “We are giving members of the public a more efficient service because they are getting updates in a timelier way, and they are getting a choice now of how they get updated on what’s happening.”

The commander admits that not all sections of the public likes automated messages, but the aim is to address a significant portion of the demand.

“Around 90% of people are quite happy being pushed info, another 9% will want to self-serve because they need further info.  And 1% will always want to call up and ask for more. If we can tackle a portion of that 90%, we are halfway there to dealing with a much better service,” he says.

Roadmap

Of course, there are more things on the list. The automated service does not yet work in other languages, but Brind adds “AI is getting better at doing that” and he’s hopeful that this is something they can add soon.

The force would also like to extend its automated service to other parts of the law enforcement system such as witness care.

“There’s an attrition rate of victims and witnesses not going to court because they haven’t been updated. Post-Covid those waits are longer because there’s a backlog in the courts.

“So, how do we deal with those witnesses and people better, so we get those cases to court? Pushing info or self-serving on a portal could support this process better,” he says.

Another challenge the force would like to address is the 30% of calls which are harder to predict. These are calls that neither fall under the category of ‘crime’ or ‘incident’ but might be related to healthcare, mental health services or the local authorities.

“Over the next 12 months, we want to look at how to get better at diverting those calls away from 101 to the right person at the right time.”

Thames Valley Police is currently working with AI-powered speech analytics software company Sprinklr to address this challenge and create a chatbot that can deal with multiple calls at any one time.

Brind is also looking at how the banking sector uses AI-powered bots, like NatWest’s Cora, to see how it can be applied to policing.

The commander adds that these bots would also help with crime reports made online.

Bots for cops

“We use robotics to process crime reports and that info goes into our record management system. But those that can’t be processed by a robot need to be done manually. So how do we automate that process going forward? In a way using AI and running AI over the top…”

While budgets are tight, TI asks Brind what he’d like to do if he had a larger budget. Like many organisations, he replies that in an increasingly AI-driven world, a deep data cleanse would benefit the force.

He explains that much of the force’s data has been moved to a Microsoft Azure cloud, but tasks like sorting out structured data from unstructured data and releasing siloed data so that crime reports, can be brought together with contact data or HR data would be “hugely powerful”.

He adds: “I’d like to see greater investment in being able to pull together our data: how we cleanse it; use it to inform our long-, medium- and short-term decision-making.

“The vast majority of our budgets go on people so our expenditure on digital and technology is limited. But it would be great to bring together our datasets and our partnership data sets, bring that together and use it to inform our decision making.”

“That sounds simplistic but that’s all we want to do in police – be a bit more proactive around making sure we’ve got the right resources in the right teams with the right skills to do what we need to do in the future.”

The post Force for good: how CX automation is improving police response times appeared first on TechInformed.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a source familiar with the acquisition said it would be funded mostly in cash and would be the biggest acquisition the technology giant has ever made.

Founded in 2020, Wiz is led by former Microsoft exec Assaf Rappaport and has raised roughly $2 billion in funding. It was recently valued at $12 billion and is headquartered in New York.

The startup provides cloud-based cyber security solutions with real-time AI-powered threat detection.

It ingests data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, alongside other cloud platforms and then scans for security risk factors.

There has been speculation that Alphabet views the deal as a means by which to strengthen its Google Cloud business, which grew almost 30% in the first quarter of this year to just over $9.5 bn.

Customers of Wiz include technology firms such as Siemens, Slack, and DocuSign, retailer ASOS and car manufacturer BMW.

According to its website, it generated about $250 million in revenue last year, and works with 40% of Fortune 100 companies.

Alphabet and Wiz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Recently, TI spoke with fintech firm Soldo on how observability is fortifying its cloud, and why this is so crucial in protecting customer data.

To read more about the cloud, click here.

The post Google eyes cyber sec startup with $23bn price tag appeared first on TechInformed.

Customers affected include those on mobile virtual network operators that use the AT&T network such as Cricket, Boost Mobile, and Consumer Cellular.

Data from between May 1^st, 2022, and October 31^st, 2022, may have been exposed, as well as records from a “very small number” of customers on January 2^nd, 2023.

The attackers obtained the information through the firm’s cloud provider, Snowflake, AT&T’s spokesperson Alex Byers told The Verge.

The telecoms firm knew of the breach in April, but an FBI spokesperson reported to TechCrunch that itself, AT&T, and the Department of Justice “agreed to delay notifying the public and customers on two occasions, citing ‘potential risks to national security and/or public safety.’”

According to Byers, the stolen data includes phone numbers customers interacted with, counts of those calls/texts and total call durations for specific days or months.

It does not include the content of the calls or texts, time stamps, or Social Security numbers, dates of birth, or other identifiable information – however, a name can be matched to a phone number by simple actions taken with online tools.

AT&T said in a blog post that it does not “believe that the data is publicly available” and it has “taken steps to close off the illegal access point.”

“We will provide notice to current and former customers whose information was involved along with resources to help protect their information,” AT&T added.

“We sincerely regret this incident occurred and remain committed to protecting the information in our care.”

Recently, TI spoke to fintech platform Soldo on how it uses observability to make its cloud more secure: read here.

The post AT&T admits customer call and text data breached in cloud hack appeared first on TechInformed.

According to the deputy service manager at Refuge’s contact centre, Ellen Patterson, the charity’s network of employees and volunteers delivers 147 support sessions every day.

“Around 70% of the people we speak to are survivors of domestic abuse,” Patterson explains, “and 10% are from third parties – friends and neighbours etc and another 10% are from professionals from a variety of sectors who are usually looking to make a referral. Around 139 referrals are made to Refuge each week.”

In 2019 the UK government’s Home Office awarded Refuge the contract to run the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline as its sole provider – a role it had previously jointly run with allied charity Women’s Aid.

As well as the initial four-year £1.2m contract, Refuge secured additional funding to develop new digital and mobile resources to support survivors. This led to the introduction of a live chat service in 2020 and an improved email support service, which now sees the team make 430 supportive emails per month.

During this period, Refuge also introduced a dedicated referral line, so that women can enquire specifically about refuge vacancies, as well as a BSL interpreter line.

According to Patterson, while the extra platforms were a welcome addition, it did lead to a bolt-on approach in terms of networking infrastructure. Legacy systems included a disparate collection of separate applications which provided telephony, chat and reporting, including Horizon Collaborate and ResourceConnect.

“Just because of the capacity within our team and the funds that we had available, all of these things had been kind of tacked on as we’ve gone along,” she recalls.

“We got to a situation where all these platforms became quite difficult to manage, it was taking time to navigate each platform for each different part of our service – both from a management perspective but also for the helpline advisers,” she adds.

The time taken to manage the navigation of this set-up, remembering the different logins for different platforms etc, was also taking away from time supporting survivors and it prompted the charity to consider a contact centre solution capable of “bringing everything into one place.”

Another reason to switch to a cloud-based comms system was the need to cater for remote workers: during and after the pandemic Refuge staff and volunteers had transitioned from a central contact centre in London, to working remotely or hybrid, from anywhere in the country.

“We largely work remotely now, and it’s good to be able to draw from a wider pool of experienced people – but managing this can be challenging,” says Patterson.

“Workers need a dedicated space where no one else can hear, no one can come into the room, it’s confidential. The technology needs to be reliable in terms of sound deadening and ensure that the line is clear – it’s important that someone on the other end of the phone who is in a really difficult situation trusts that this line is secure and can hear you properly.”

Another requirement was to be able to keep the continuity of the number: 0808 2000 247, as Patterson explains. “Even when the contract changed, and Women’s Aid ceased to be involved the number has stayed the same. Some people commit it to memory so it was important that it couldn’t change.”

Cloud-based CX

Refuge selected Genesys Cloud CX platform, powered by AWS Cloud, which offers a full range of contact centre capabilities for remote and on-prem workers from a single platform.

Explaining why Genesys won the contract over other providers at the CX orchestration vendor’s London customer event Xperience last month, Patterson explained that, at first, they thought that the technology was beyond their budget.

“It was clear that we had champagne tastes on a beer budget! Fortunately for us (and for the survivors we support) Genesys made it possible for us to close that gap.”

She added that the fact Genesys made the effort to speak their language was also important. “It may not seem that significant but the difference between referring to our service users as ‘customers’, or even ‘victims’, instead of the survivors we know them to be was very important to us.”

Refuge’s internal team worked closely with the Genesys professional services team to implement the helpline on the platform, which the charity reports has been “highly configurable”, with “a minimum of software development needed.”

Patterson adds that staff training took place over a couple of weeks, with no real issues in terms of user take-up.  “Our team are incredible and do a difficult job, some of them for over 20 years. So, while it is easy to get ingrained in the process that we had and there was some anxiety around learning to use a new system, as soon as they start using it, they found it intuitive and not scary at all.”

Visibility

According to Patterson, there are several advantages to moving to a cloud-based contact centre system including the additional visibility of being able to see instantly how many callers are waiting and where they are calling in from.

“If a call drops while we’re speaking to a survivor, for whatever reason, we want to make sure that we can get the number back to call them (unless they’ve withheld their number) and that’s easier now we can see the customer journey.”

Managing the flow of calls and the type of calls better also has benefits for helpline staff and their managers too, says Patterson.

“We’re now able to create different pots of callers because the new system gives us more visibility as to who is calling and from where and how long they’ve been waiting.”

She adds that if a support service worker is on their last ten minutes it might not be the right time to take a call from a survivor calling in for the first time; but it may be long enough to take a call from a professional looking to make a referral.

“We can also now see if a member of staff has been on three days of taking phones every single day – which can be exhausting –  as a manager I can now make that decision to give them a break by moving them onto one of our written platforms,” she adds.

The system is also better able to deal with language barriers. The previous system did not allow Refuge to take three-way calls, and non-English-speaking survivors were referred to an interpreter service. “We would have to give them the survivors’ number – but that function now sits with us. And we hold all the data ourselves,” Patterson explains.

The system has been live now for just over a month and Patterson says that it is on track to increase the number of interactions it has with service users by as much as 30 to 40%. “That’s 300 or 400 more survivors a week being supported as a result,” she adds.

An eye on AI

Now Patteson says that the Refuge team is firmly focussed on consolidating its implementation although it is looking at a range of future AI-enabled possibilities, that it hopes to embrace eventually.

In the US,  the National Domestic Violence Hotline – another Genesys Cloud user – is using selective, survivor-centric AI support to keep pace with a threefold increase in daily calls, chats and text.

Survivors phoning in have the option of providing a voice bot with non-identifiable demographic data and the outcomes they want to get out of the conversation, taking care to use their words and language. That information is then presented on screen when the call is routed to help prepare the support worker.

For Patterson, these sorts of applications are a little further down Refuge’s roadmap  “We’re a little bit nervous about using AI – the inherent biases of those who write the data, build on that and learn. But when we first started talking to Genesys and the things it has on the roadmap for the future – then to not consider AI would be a disservice to our users

“It’s a big thing to pick up the phone, for instance, and speak to someone about something so personal and it may be that AI can help them get a little bit of info first to understand what their options and avenues are before they feel ready to speak to a person. We never want AI to replace that human interaction, but I can see a place for it.”

The post Refuge’s contact centre moves to the cloud appeared first on TechInformed.

However, some claim that this also raises security risks, much too large to monitor without automation and insights.

According to observability platform, Dynatrace, 86% of technology leaders say cloud-native technology stacks produce an explosion of data that is beyond humans’ ability to manage.

Additionally, 88% of technology leader respondents added that the complexity of their tech stack has increased in the past year, and over half (51%) say it will continue to increase.

Avoiding tech stack bloat means increased reliance on the cloud, and the use of multicloud services. However, most technology leaders (84%) say that multicloud complexity makes it even more difficult to protect applications from security vulnerabilities and attacks.

This, in turn, is where observability makes its case as a vital component in enterprise tech security.

Offering a single pane of glass view, hybrid observability goes into your tech stack, collects data – including the cloud, and any on-premises storage – and uses technologies such as AI that can identify any anomalies, suggesting a security vulnerability, and flag for better efficiencies.

“It’s really important to observe what’s going on,” says Matt Tuson, general manager EMEA at monitoring firm LogicMonitor.

LogicMonitor utilises AI to catch any problems within the cloud and raises them to “significantly speed up the troubleshooting process.”

“What does that mean to the business? We’re more efficient, I have fewer people, better time to resolution, and my mission-critical services are up all the time when our customers need,” Tuson says.

Fintechs and security

Soldo is an enterprise spending management platform used to track employee expenses.

With a goal to help companies organise and view their spending; while making expense processes more efficient, the protection of customer data is vital.

The London-based fintech began in 2015 as a cloud-native firm, working directly with AWS’s public cloud. Although, Luca Domenella, head of cloud operations and DevOps at Soldo, expresses that this was a learning curve for the founding team.

“The technical and management teams who started Soldo had a lot of experience managing on-premises data centres,” Domenella explains. “But we decided to go on the cloud because of the facility to manage initial costs and have a better ability to scale up infrastructure.”

“We had to manage new challenges because we knew perfectly how to manage on-premises security, but there are different behaviours to security on the cloud.”

Initially, AWS helped Soldo provide perimetral security in its design and provided tools to increase visibility, but Domenella insisted it needed deeper monitoring.

“Because Soldo develops our own applications, the most important thing is to create security layers and have all customer data secure,” he says.

“Since we manage payments and financial transactions, we also need to comply with many security certifications.”

Domenella adds that, as the company grew, it needed to move faster in determining the root cause of problems, whether it be vulnerability or security issues.

After spending several weeks testing other products in the market, Soldo landed on Dynatrace’s observability tool.

“After the first year, it became the best brick of our infrastructure,” he says. “It was something I was proud of because I wanted to have more visibility inside the applications.”

Observability has since relieved Soldo when risk has appeared. For example, during the Log4j vulnerability which exposed millions of computers which use the logging tool worldwide to potential attack, Dynatrace immediately alerted Soldo of the weakness in its infrastructure.

“It’s vital simply because we need to understand what’s going on in our infrastructure to protect ourselves and our customers’ data,” he says. “There’s a lot of personal information, names, emails, phone numbers, and our personal information as well.”

“Our customers need to be aware that their data is safe. This is why security is so important to us.”

Observability in financial institutions 

Stuck between an older generation with preferences for in-person banking and a digitally native younger generation, many financial institutions are forced into hybrid cloud models that can cater to each end of the spectrum.

These hybrid models make environments complex, and more than half (54%) of financial services businesses expect it to grow over the next year, according to Dynatrace.

Observability, therefore, provides an overall view, even when it’s a mix of on-premises and off, or multicloud solutions.

“We used to think that all companies would go 100% on the cloud, but that’s definitely not been the case,” says Tuson. “We’ve been seeing even some reverse and coming back to being on-prem.”

This may be because customers feel data on-prem is more secure, for cost reasons, or a lack of optimisation on their end of the cloud.

What observability can also help is tracking how much spending is going into the cloud through monitoring.

“We can look at the cloud and see if a firm is spending too much in this area with regards to cost optimisation,” explains Tuson.

“Because we’re collecting the information, we can see which ones are being utilised and which are not, and make suggestions to banks, insurance companies, fintech firms, to ensure that they’re utilising them efficiently.”

Not only does this eliminate any overspending, but also helps institutions cut back on power usage. “We can ensure your network, infrastructure and applications are running to the highest degree of effectiveness, with the least amount of energy,” Tuson claims.

The post How cloud observability is transforming the finance sector appeared first on TechInformed.

The club first announced its preference to build on the Bramley-Moore Dock site in Liverpool in 2017 and confirmed plans to build the new 52,000-seater the following year, with main contractor Laing O’Rourke beginning work in July 2021.

For Everton’s director of technology Phil Davies, a new stadium offered an opportunity to provide fans and staff with the best matchday experience possible by freeing the club from some of the restraints inherent in operating from a century-old building.

“Retro-fitting modern technology on stadiums built hundreds of years ago is a challenge,” he tells TI. “They were built at a certain point in time, so they don’t really have the necessary infrastructure to support modern systems that require an enormous amount of space and power.”

In the modern world of events, connectivity is “no longer just a nice-to-have” he adds.

For Everton, the new venue is not solely about football – though that remains the primary function – with plans to hold other events, such as music gigs, once the stadium is live.

“It is about football. It is about concerts. It is about opening up the stadium for restaurants and premium bar experiences, or for stadium tours and immersive experiences,” explains Davies.

“Moving into a new stadium, the club wants to get people in earlier, to spend more, and to have a completely different matchday experience.”

Everton worked closely with user groups, including carrying out several surveys, to build a modern stadium that could cater for the matchday experience demanded by the modern fan.

According to Davies, connectivity was high on the list. “Fans want to be able to interact socially with the game. You have traditional fans who maybe won’t use their phones during a match, but for younger fans expect that ability to interact and connect while inside the venue.”

Getting key stakeholders on board early was also important. Everton set up a risk committee for the stadium project to look at the risks and challenges not just on matchday, but also during other events, and how these could be overcome.

“We mapped the potential pain points out and then mapped the technology against each of these,” he explains. “What are the expectations of the fans, the players, the media, the stewards and police? We mapped them into different user groups and journeys and built the technology around that.

“We got all the stakeholders in a room and looked at what we wanted to deliver and worked with them to develop strategic pillars, before we went into the design phase. And that is where HPE Aruba forms quite a central piece.”

Link-up play

Last month, Everton announced that enterprise network infrastructure provider HPE Aruba would become the club’s official connectivity supplier, contracted to supply a secure and intelligent networking infrastructure solution across the footprint of the Blues’ new home.

The new network will include switches, access points, Wi-Fi and wired network management and security software, as well as network design, management and monitoring services.

The contract isn’t just limited to the Bramley-Moore Dock site, with HPE also set to work with Everton on its six other locations.

Speaking with TI about the agreement, HPE Aruba Networking CTO UK and Ireland Simon Wilson called the agreement a “great feather in our cap”.

It isn’t the firm’s first stadium gig, having fitted out Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium with connectivity when it went live in 2019. Aruba also recently announced an agreement to support Barcelona’s new renovated Camp Nou stadium, scheduled for completion in 2026.

Wilson believes that Tottenham’s new stadium is a flagship example of one that has been future proofed, with everything driven through the network.

“What that means is you can innovate in every area of the stadium and encourage fans to spend more time there both before and after the game. They can make a full day of it.”

Retrofitted and older stadiums often take an overhead approach, with antennas located above the fans among the stadium’s rafters. But this, adds Wilson, leads to a lot of reflections, especially when using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi – which only has three channels available.

This leads more fans to connect to the 5GHz band, but this has limited spectrum, meaning not every fan gets a good experience.

“Wi-Fi 6 will help with this,” Wilson explains. “The big advantage of a newly built stadium is you can future proof it. You can plan the technology and how it might develop in future while you’re designing the stadium.”

For this reason – as well as ease of access – Everton and HPE opted to use under seat access points (APs)  instead of the downward facing ones found in other stadiums.

There will be one AP for every 75 seats in the stadium long with several above ensure the connectivity is as reliable and accessible as possible.

“We’ve proven in pretty much every environment that the under-seat model is optimal,” explains Wilson.

“You get a higher density of access points, you get less interference, and it makes implementation and upgrading much easier than having to climb into a gantry. Also, it is more aesthetically pleasing than putting them above your head.”

Key to future proofing the technology – and linking it with Everton’s other sites – is building a cloud-native infrastructure that can be managed remotely.

The solution will be built on HPE’s Greenlake platform, which allows users to deploy and manage resources across private and public clouds while retaining control of their data and over how they consume and manage services, HPE claims.

“This will offer a lot of flexibility for Everton, but it also can help the team identify opportunities for improvement or to fix problems quickly,” says Wilson.

“It comes with built in telemetry which we can then compare with other sites, which can all be managed from Aruba Central,” he adds.

Game on

Everton selected HPE after an open tender process, which saw several major tech firms whittled down to just two frontrunners. This was carried out during Covid, with all the concurring concerns around supply chains.

“We worked out our key goals and put out an RFI [request for information],” explains Everton’s Phil Davies.

So, what does an organisation like Everton put into an RFI of this scale?

“Key was the connectivity element, and security was also a big concern for us,” Davies explains. “Visibility over the network was also really important, and making sure the infrastructure sits in the cloud, so we can see what is happening across all sites at all times, but especially during the matchday window.”

Davies needed to be able to centrally manage the network from Everton’s head office, located in the century-old Royal Liver Building on Liverpool’s historic waterfront.

“It’s not just the stadium – we are spread over 10 sites. We need to centralise our network because we run a small team but we need to be able to see what is happening across the entire network.”

Besides the new stadium, and traditional home Goodison Park, Davies and his team looks after networking in other sites including the club’s Finch Farm training ground, the Liver Building HQ, several community campuses across Merseyside, and even a school the club runs, located next to Goodison.

Sustainability was also a key consideration. On matchday, Everton will see over 50,000 data points flock to the new stadium, as well as managing activities going on at the other sites.

With music gigs,  this number could be higher. Yet for the other six days in a week, there will be less people in the ground, meaning the network needs to be scalable and flexible, and power sensitive for those times where it is less busy.

“We were really impressed with HPE and their approach to scalability, as it is really hands on. The company  invited us to see the technology in similar arenas and they will act much more like a partner.”

The Everton Stadium is due to open for the 2025-26 Premier League season and will be one of the UK’s host venues during the UEFA Euro 2028 championships.

For Davies, establishing the network and testing it before the season’s end—when Everton will host several trial events with fans—is a pressing yet thrilling deadline. His team will be handed the stadium in December, and then the implementation begins.

“We are on schedule – in fact, maybe a little bit ahead,” he smiles. “We are transitioning from the old network to the new cloud-based one across all of our sites, and we are already working on the operational plans for kick-off.”

With the new stadium will come an updated Everton app which aims to boost the experience of fans attending games. It is part of a wider digital overhaul at the club.

“It is important we get the experience right from day one,” he concludes. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. With everything we are putting in place, we think fans will be surprised, but they will also really enjoy the experience.

“You want your home stadium to be a fortress and I’ve been into the new ground a lot, and at pitch level, it is quite intimidating – that is nice. If we can bring that experience for the fans, then from an atmosphere perspective, it will really meet expectations.”

The post Everton FC’s tech director reports on team’s new “future proof fortress” appeared first on TechInformed.

The wider charity was founded in the US in 1980, but Make-A-Wish UK was launched in 1986. It relies on the time and efforts of internal staff and, perhaps even more so, a network of volunteers and charitable partners to deliver its wishes. Make-A-Wish UK granted more than 1200 wishes in its last published financial year.

However, behind this success was an ageing technology stack that relied on on-premises IT and outdated tools that couldn’t meet the demands of a post-COVID era.

For UK technology and workplace lead Oliver Wilson, technology was at the heart of how Make-A-Wish could continue bringing joy to its families at similar scales despite those challenges — but that meant changing the legacy infrastructure.

“We wanted to implement a bring-your-own-device strategy to empower our amazing volunteers, but we knew we needed a better day-to-day performance from our IT infrastructure; Microsoft Cloud provided that.”

In the middle of the pandemic, in August 2021, Wilson joined the charity, tasked with overhauling its legacy IT systems infrastructure to make it more scalable and manageable.

“We still had boxes in cupboards doing a lot of our compute functions, managing our legacy donor management and finance systems, and these were all held on-prem,” he explains.

“It was operating a dated Hypervisor virtual system in Reading, UK, which had been sufficient leading into the pandemic but couldn’t provide the scalability needed to support staff now working remotely.”

The charity had also used managed services providers in the past that hadn’t delivered what Make-A-Wish needed to support its network of staff, volunteers, and wish-makers.

This, he adds, was one of the biggest challenges for any partners who came on board: supporting a fluctuating set of volunteers who play such a vital role in all the charity’s operations. In the wake of Covid, this need was amplified.

“Many of the children we are dealing with have really complex needs,” adds Wilson. “So, we couldn’t go to houses as easily, which required a massive pivot so we could continue delivering wishes.”

Head in the cloud

The charity partnered with UK-based managed service provider Foundation IT to build out its cloud infrastructure and guide its digital strategy. Make-A-Wish picked Microsoft 365, and Microsoft’s cloud VDI service, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), was also selected to enable remote work and provision virtual workspaces for volunteers.”

For Wilson, the combination of the Microsoft cloud solution with Nerdio’s Manager for Enterprise platform provided the ideal management platform for Azure Virtual Desktop due to its automation capabilities and scalability of virtual machines.

“Carrying out a project like this at a charity isn’t like doing it at a giant corporation,” he explains. “You can’t just pick a platform and roll it out — you have to go through several phases of vendor selection.”

He acknowledges that one key consideration was cost. Every penny spent on things like upgrading IT systems is a penny that, in a sense, could have been spent granting a wish. So, for Wilson and his partners at Foundation, getting the most out of any vendor partner was vital.

“We could have gone for an all-singing, all-dancing platform from a massive organisation,” he says. “But a lot of them were too big for what we needed, and they wouldn’t give us the scalability, flexibility or the cost savings that Nerdio does.

“The big question was, can one of my team go in there and easily spin up new resources within the Azure infrastructure when needed? With the legacy infrastructure, that wasn’t possible.”

Cloud computing is infamously expensive, something Wilson agrees with. But for Make-A-Wish, that just meant being very careful about managing cloud costs, achieved by tailoring the infrastructure to the use case at the time.

“We could have a fairly entry-level system in the cloud, but knowing that, if all of a sudden our staff hit that limit, it is going to scale with the use case and workload in the moment was vital.”

Nerd is the word

It was Foundation IT, the charity’s managed infrastructure services partner, who first introduced Wilson to Nerdio.

So, who is Nerdio? Managed services provider Adar Inc. launched the Chicago-based Microsoft partner as one of its products. However, it spun it off into its own entity in 2020 when the parent company was acquired by private equity.

Nerdio partners with MSPs and enterprises to deploy, manage and optimise Microsoft services, including products like Microsoft 365, Azure, and Intune.

Speaking to TI, Nerdio SVP customer and partner success Susie Driscoll said the company has found that as more and more enterprises shift to the cloud, they are also looking to develop their infrastructure to be more flexible and compatible.

“Our tool allows for a lot of those efficiencies,” she adds, “not only from a cost-savings perspective but also from a time-saving element that benefits a lot of our customers enormously.”

Nerdio boasts an extensive partner ecosystem that includes over 1000 channel partners and more than three million users spread across more than 50 countries, and this opens a lot of opportunities for the vendor to come on board with these renewal projects. The size of the customer can range from those with less than ten users to those with thousands.

Of Make-A-Wish, she adds: “These are the kind of stories that feel really good because you can see how this tooling drives efficiencies and how this can directly impact the children and those who need more help.”

Prior to this project, Nerdio had worked with a few other charitable organisations, but the kind of scaling needed by Make-A-Wish gave the vendor a clear business goal.

“We really wanted to focus on understanding what that business goal meant,” adds Driscoll. “Then we could say, based on that, here are the key features we really want to home in on that will help resolve those challenges. Then we start to work closely with the client and their tech partner to build that out.”

This meant leveraging Nerdio Manager to spin up VMs in Azure and adding Nerdio’s Unified Application Management tool to further improve efficiency in providing volunteers with the resources they need to deliver wishes.

UAM allows IT to automatically pre-install applications on a machine rather than relying on the first user login to cue a group policy. In doing so, Wilson can equip a volunteer’s designated desktop with the exact tools they need — ranging from Chrome to Creative Cloud and everything in between.

Partnerships

“We wouldn’t be able to deliver the change that we have without our partners like Foundation or Nerdio,” chips in Wilson. “Ultimately relying on a lot of goodwill, potentially getting access to software support that might have otherwise been a chargeable benefit. We have to run quite a lean team, and so some of the bigger solutions on the market weren’t tenable for us.”

One of Wilson’s biggest challenges was operating on the tightest budget while still trying to bring the best user experience to Make-A-Wish’s army of staff and volunteers. He recognises that creating complex systems or additional application portals is an additional obstacle to delivering wishes — something no one at the Foundation wants.

“Nerdio just hides in the background — our users don’t even know it exists,” he explains. “And if there are any issues, we contact Foundation first, who will triage the process. The amount of support they give us out of scope makes it the kind of relationship we value so much.”

For Nerdio’s part, the company had invested heavily in its customer success team around 18 months ago. Driscoll, who leads this team, adds: “We try to find synergies with our customers and focus on our support team to make sure they have the responses that customers need to guide them.”

Wilson says there was a “massive hearts and minds piece” during the shift to the cloud, and the adoption of Azure and Nerdio’s platform aimed at convincing those who had been burned by previous, less successful attempts to upgrade the tech stack.

“You also have your super users who are always looking for the next change, and those are vital to that journey, acting as ambassadors for the tech brand.

“What has been really positive is seeing how our volunteers are engaging with the tech more than ever. Of course, we have users who are from a less technical background, but we now have solutions which are easy to access, and we have in-house support, which is easy to access, so we can always provide them help to understand the tools.”

Granting wishes

So, what has this meant for the charity overall? Put simply, they are seeing less downtime from users, allowing them to fulfil more wishes than ever before.

In total, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has helped Make-A-Wish UK remove the burden of costly hardware and reduce its Azure bill by 40% each month via Nerdio’s Auto-scaling. It has also helped decrease energy consumption.

The light-touch tools now provisioned to volunteers are two-thirds more energy efficient than physical desktops and massive laptops, generating even more savings.

There are over 63,000 children in the UK currently eligible for a wish because they have a life-limiting or life-threatening condition. Though it is impossible to measure exactly how the move to the cloud has boosted wishes granted, the numbers are up year-on-year, from around 1,000 average in the last decade to over 1,200 in the 2022/23 financial year, with the charity on track to reach as many as 1,800 in the last financial year.

“This is what I always bring it down to,” says Wilson. “It isn’t about how frustrating an issue is to resolve, but that we get the problem solved, so the team member or volunteer in question is able to go out there and deliver on what Make-A-Wish should be doing, which is delivering life-changing wishes to children with life-limiting or changing conditions.”

The post Wish upon a cloud: how a charity’s cloud strategy transformed volunteering appeared first on TechInformed.

This convenience for consumers, however, has required a heavy focus on digital transformation for travel firms, based around a relentless optimisation of their omnichannel operations.

Summer peaks and winter retreats necessitate tailored websites that align with seasonal trends, and offering the best possible flight and accommodation combinations remains a continual goal.

Moreover, the race to be at the cutting edge of technology is fiercely competitive. Consider the case of Airbnb, which entered the market and established such dominance in the rental sector that the brand has become a part of our vocation vocab.

In this context, opportunities abound in the cloud. These platforms can help firms to scale their technology stacks, adjust storage capacity according to seasonal demands, and harness enhanced computing power for more disruptive technologies.

For industry leaders such as TUI Group and Booking.com, the adoption of cloud technology has brought tangible benefits to their operations.

Moving to the cloud

Ray Siripan, global enterprise cloud architect at TUI Group explains that the firm has moved on from its cloud adoption phase and is now in an “innovation phase”.

“We started moving to the cloud seven years ago, and at that time we picked easy workloads within the UK to migrate to the cloud,” he tells TI.

Initially, the German leisure and travel firm built its foundations and trained its IT teams to support the shift to the cloud. As Covid grounded its fleet of planes, TUI accelerated its transition to AWS, completing the move within two years.

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It still runs a hybrid operation, with storage both on-prem and off-prem. Sensitive information is housed within private storage facilities in order to have complete control over the security of the hardware and software.

“TUI is a very asset-rich company,” says Siripan. Alongside “five airlines spread across 150 aircraft”, it also has over 400 hotels, and 16 cruise liners, as well as tour operators, travel agencies, and online portals.

“So, we cannot just have everything in the cloud because of the safety of our customer information,” he adds.

Booking.com also operates a hybrid approach, according to the firm’s senior engineering manager Lee Jarvis. Although it favours a public cloud infrastructure, workloads within compliance and regulatory environments are stored privately.

The digital travel agency hosts over 29 million accommodation listings and flight destinations across more than 55 countries, managing upwards of 150 petabytes of data. Initially, Booking.com managed its technology stack through on-premises data centres, but subsequently transitioned to AWS’s cloud services.

Having evolved from a modest startup in the Netherlands, Booking.com is now one of the largest online travel platforms, and Jarvis notes that the move to the public cloud is facilitating the firm’s ongoing expansion.

Monitoring the expense

While demand for cloud increases, there is a hefty price to pay for anticipated benefits, says Siripan.

“Cloud is not cheap,” says Siripan. “We have several data centres, and when you look at the cost of qualitative cloud you need to look at the lifecycle of the hardware.”

Booking.com also uses visibility tools to analyse its operational expenses, in the same vein as Booking.com which takes on observability to monitor spending across its cloud too.

“We brought in observability tooling and developed in-house tooling that notifies people when they’re approaching their forecast budgets with actions on how to reduce that,” says Jarvis.

On top of this, TUI’s Siripan says that the biggest cost for the firm was upskilling its 1,500 IT staff, spread over 12 countries, to learn how to operate in the cloud safely and effectively.

“The trade-off depends on the workload and if it makes sense to go the cloud. At the end of the day, the cost of IT cannot be higher than the product that we sell.”

According to the World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation Initiative, from 2016 to 2025, digitalization in aviation, travel and tourism is expected to create up to $305 billion in value through increased profitability.

Therefore, despite the fee, it’s evident that the return on investment is there: “We’re not doing cloud for cost,” says Jarvis. “We’re doing it to move faster.”

Silver linings

The innovation phase for TUI is in full force, thanks to cloud support, says Siripan. “The benefit is enormous,” he enthuses. “It helps our business become competitive.”

During peak booking season, TUI’s online operations handle nearly 60 billion searches, serve 400 million product combinations, and update 8 million prices per hour.

With cloud, TUI can deliver updates faster while reducing the time it takes to introduce new features to its platforms, allowing it to scale further and help its teams experiment with innovation.

Likewise, Jarvis adds that the travel industry is changing drastically.

“Innovations need to be fast,” he says. “Booking.com has a strong market position, but so was BlackBerry at one point, and now it’s all about the iPhone.”

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Public cloud storage can also help travel companies such as TUI and Booking.com scale up and down seasonally.

Jarvis explains that during Covid, this was especially favourable to help Booking.com control its operational costs when travel took a dramatic hit.

“We still had to carry lots of operational costs,” says Jarvis. “Customer behaviours do change, and we have to respond.”

“It’s very seasonal. So, to be able to scale up and down and not waste resources is probably a really big unique selling point of cloud.”

The post Why cloudy days are good news for TUI and Booking.com appeared first on TechInformed.

“We have shown for the first time that quantum computing in the cloud can be accessed in a scalable, practical way,” announced David Lucas, co-head of the Oxford University physics research team and lead scientist at the UK Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub.

While quantum cloud-based services are already offered by providers such as Google, Amazon, and IBM, scaling and expanding their use are limited due to a lack of assurance in the privacy and security of customers’ data.

The team at Oxford University believe a new approach dubbed “blind quantum computing” will address these challenges by allowing any individual, either at home or in an office accessing a cloud server, to use quantum through the cloud without their data being vulnerable to exposure.

It claims this will allow their new method to be scaled up to large quantum computations.

Everything you need to know about quantum (but were afraid to ask)

“Using blind quantum computing, clients can access remote quantum computers to process confidential data with secret algorithms and even verify the results are correct, without revealing any useful information,” explains Peter Drmota, study lead at Oxford University Physics.

“As quantum computers become more capable, people will seek to use them with complete security and privacy over networks, and our new results mark a step change in capability in this respect,” Lucas adds.

According to the experts, we are just at the beginning regarding quantum, with use cases and testing in the field happening now. Read about Finland’s bid to become the forerunner in quantum here and how Rolls-Royce uses it in its research to build nuclear reactors on the moon and Mars.

The post Oxford University brings secure quantum to the cloud appeared first on TechInformed.

Before his current role at Extreme, Bukhari spent significant leadership stints at tech firms Cisco and Seagate, culminating in a critical position at storage networking vendor Brocade.

Bukhari joined cloud-driven networking firm Extreme Networks seven years ago following the acquisition of Brocade.  Under his stewardship as chief technology and product officer, Bukhari has spearheaded the company’s rise into cloud-driven networking.

According to Bukhari, his approach to technology is grounded in the belief that technology should enhance the human condition.

Amidst the buzz of MWC24 in Barcelona, Bukhari shares how his diverse background in Technology, Fine Arts, and Business fuels his passion for making technology work for people.

Do you drink coffee? How do you take it?

Not only do I drink coffee, but the people around me would tell you I’m coffee-obsessed. I’m one of those crazy people who like to roast their own beans.

Coffee is more about an experience than just a beverage. I love every aspect of it, from roasting the beans to grinding them and then creating the perfect cup of coffee for that moment.

You expressed that you’re passionate about your work’s impact. Where did that passion come from?

People always ask me how I got involved in technology. I didn’t really. My passion is for humans. It’s all about creating a better experience and a better outcome for humanity.

I’m involved on the technology side, yes. But I studied Technology, Fine Arts, and Business. I have degrees in all of them. It was always about having a positive impact on the human condition.

In today’s world, technology seems to be the best, or at least the fastest way to accomplish that.

Impacting other humans is not about pontificating. It’s about having conversations and engaging more people in them. Then, collectively, we can find a better way of doing the same things or, hopefully, a better way of doing better things.

How do you integrate that into your work at Extreme Networks?

When we think about networks, we think about cold technology, like big names, three-letter words, etc. But the reality is that if you step away from all of that, connecting people is what we do.

Networking is at the core of everything we do as a society. The way we interact with each other, react to things, and absorb things — our whole society is centred and built around the concept of connectivity. Technology is what provides that connection.

All you have to do is look around and see what people do when they connect. When I look, I don’t see Wi-Fi; I see a kid talking to their grandparents over FaceTime.

When you go to a stadium and see the joy on a spectator’s face when their team is doing well, and they’re sharing it with friends on social media.

When you think about a healthcare system, people can talk to their doctor in the middle of a pandemic because they have Wi-Fi and connectivity. We built that Wi-Fi. We made that connection possible.

I like to look beyond the technology and more towards what we enable with it. That is powerful.

What excites you about the connectivity space?

It hasn’t traditionally been the industry that’s exciting and hot and sexy. But there are a lot of new developments right now.

When I consider the next 12 months, I think of Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchy.

First, enterprises are still trying to respond to the need for infinite connectivity. We’re connecting every device, every person, and every application.

Secondly, the connection you provide needs to be secure.

Thirdly, how can you provide that secure connection within your resources? Once you do that, you can focus on delivering a great customer experience.

Then, how can you enhance and create new experiences using technologies like AI? And, of course, it’s not sequential. You look at them all at the same time.

What’s the most challenging aspect involved in getting a product to market?

Creating a product is a bit like creating art. It should not only serve a purpose but should evoke an emotional response from the customer and improve their quality of life.

We must innovate with that in mind, not just for innovation’s sake. The most difficult part of product design is keeping that in mind — you must marry the right technology with the right emotional need.

Tell us about the product you’re most proud of

Creating a suite of solutions that put customer experience first — and that specifically rings true with the ExtremeCloud portfolio we’ve developed at Extreme.

The network is the connective tissue of everything we do at work, at home, at an event. It moves society. It must work. That’s why I take immense pride in creating a better way for enterprises to connect people and applications securely and simply, no matter where they are.

Also, during my time as CPO and CTO at Extreme, we’ve acquired technology from multiple companies and quickly integrated them into our portfolio to reduce complexity for our customers. This is a significant differentiator in our industry — as competitors make it very complicated to use their disjointed hardware and software solutions — creating multiple networks to manage.

What does it mean to be part of the C-suite?

For me, making it to the C-suite was about consistency: in leadership, in being courageous but also humble. Fail fast, learn objectively, and adapt and move forward.

From my perspective, leadership is about enabling your teams to do their best work and helping to guide them through those chaotic moments to create something that everyone can be proud of — and it must be built on a foundation of trust.

One mind plus another mind is exponential growth. Two minds together can create way more than the sum of their parts. So, the more minds we connect, the more exponential growth we can have, which relies on connectivity.

The post A coffee with… Nabil Bukhari, CTPO, Extreme Networks appeared first on TechInformed.