GETTING
CONNECTED
IN TECH CITY
GETTING CONNECTED IN TECH CITY
Presented by Optimity
Welcome to the seventh of our roundtable reports from Tech City News.
Our roundtables cover topical issues that affect London’s growing technology sector. Taking place at the Eight Club in Moorgate, they bring together thought leaders, startup founders, investors and service providers for an informal discussion.
As businesses move ever closer to the cloud, with some operating entirely online, Tech City News gathered a roundtable of cloud and data security experts to discuss the challenges, risks and future of cloud computing.
There’s no doubt that 2014 will be the year that cloud computing begins to make massive strides. Not just in adoption, but also regulation. The data protection act in the UK is 16 years old and the technology environment has changed beyond recognition since then, but encouraging steps are being made to future proof legislation. In the US, the Obama administration, before the Prism revelations, had been working to introduce the US Bill of Consumer Rights, which should give consumers control over how data is stored about them on the cloud.
Over the past 12 months the EU has tried to harmonise cloud computing regulations by setting up the European Cloud Partnership. Current legislation appears disparate amongst member states, but the new partnership will seek to change and introduce national laws regarding location of data, ownership of digital content and make rules more transparent.
Whilst cloud regulation is very much on the legislative agenda, there’s still an unease amongst businesses to adopt cloud services, especially in the UK. According to research conducted by WideAngle Security, 22% of UK companies are yet to use any form of cloud computing, compared to 14% globally. What is driving this trend? Infrastructure? Fear? Lack of understanding? Tech City News posed these questions to the panel.
In this report we outline the state of the industry, demystify some of the complexities and reveal the attendee’s predictions for the future.
ROUNDTABLE ATTENDEES
John Webb - Rackspace
Cymon Eckle - Co-founder at XOYO Guy Gross - Founder at Mash Machine Jennefer Holmes - GLA
EJ Hilbert - Director Investigations & Disputes at Kroll
Nathan Sewell - Founder of Protean Risk Peter Cochrane - Former CTO at BT Anthony Impey - Optimity
Jackie Taylor - Flying Binary Arifa Khan - Genius Incubator Alex Wood - Tech City News
HISTORY OF THE CLOUD AND HIGH-SPEED INTERNET IN THE UK
Dr Peter Cochrane, a former BT executive and engineer, has been directly involved in the roll out of fibre optic broadband in the UK since the eighties, he explained to the panel how super-fast
broadband came to be in the UK.
In the eighties, 90 bits per second was considered fast. Telecommunications companies at the time couldn’t fathom anything faster and, indeed, often denied that customers would need anything faster.
By 1991, Dr Cochrane, who was working at BT at the time, had started the rollout of fibre optics in homes across the UK. However, Margaret Thatcher, who was PM at the time, stopped the roll out because she considered BT a monopoly and she wanted to bring US in. Similar operations in the Korea and Japan, countries that BT was working with, simply went ahead with the rollout, which has left the UK trailing behind ever since.
Thatcher's intervention set a precedent for other politicians who prioritised a free market ahead of a universal technical upgrade when it came to broadband. Dr Cochrane explained that, from his experience of working within cabinet and Number 10, politicians often tend to take the safe, median option, rather than the extreme one.
Now, the UK is lagging behind in terms of infrastructure, says Dr Cochrane. In Hong Kong, for example, it’s easy to get an internet connection that provides gigabyte speeds both ways, which is only available in the UK at a very high cost. He continued that if we don’t have bandwidth that is as fast to upload data as it is to download it in UK, we’re not in or sufficiently prepared for the cloud. The hope that the UK’s mobile operators will come to the rescue with the introduction of 4G, is going to disappoint. Technically, it is unable to give people the same connectivity as broadband. For a start, if 4G is to have the same penetration as broadband, there would need to be at least five times the amount of towers, which is unlikely to happen.
Dr Cochrane also dismissed the ambition that the existing copper network, that is primarily operated by BT’s Openreach, could do the job. The vast majority of broadband services in the UK use this, but it has a finite capacity, which prevents it from ever meeting the need for the more speed.
Fibre optics, as Dr Cochrane argues, is paramount and without it he UK will be on the backfoot.
IT STARTS WITH A GOOD CONNECTION
Across the startup scene, there’s an insatiable appetite for a very fast connection and it’s almost a requirement across the SME sector.
The Government, however, does not share the same opinion as SMEs. The current Government’s definition of “Super Fast Broadband” is 22Mb, whereas the EU definition is 30 MB, but the panel agreed both are just too slow.
Anthony Impey, founder of Optimity, explained that some companies in the UK are increasingly demanding minimum two-way speeds of 100Mb, all of the time. That requirement can only be met with certain types of technology.
There are, however, obstacles to building a fibre optic network. Technically it’s the smart choice.
But there are non-technological limitations that make it a costly option- frequently, multiple permits are required to dig up the road, work needs to be undertaken at the dead of night, and parking bays need to be paid for (at the full cost of a car being parked there all the time, even if it’s unoccupied). So suddenly the full cost of installing fibre optic can begin to soar. On average, it costs £30,000 to install fibre optic into a building in London.
The panel agreed that many of these costs could be shared or eliminated if companies, or even customers, simply shared optical fibre.
The point was made that five to seven years ago, the US suffered similar legislative roadblocks. But companies didn’t overcome the problem by waiting for the rules to change, they simply found other solutions. It’s a mindset issue. Whilst the US isn’t necessarily faster at amending difficult
These regulations also slow down the actual installation of fibre optic broadband, with the standard leadtime of 90 days for a connection, even in London. Whilst this may not be a big issue to a blue-chip company, for a SME it creates huge operational issues. The panel agreed that this could be forcing startups out of the UK and to the US, sheerly out of frustration and lack of support.
Anthony Impey, said that London is beginning to find its own solution to these challenges. He has seen individual companies in tech communities like Shoreditch, share high-speed internet
connections by throwing cables across roof tops. More substantial alternatives are now available in London including ultra-fast networks that links buildings together wirelessly, such as the one being built by Optimity.
WHAT ARE THE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH CLOUD COMPUTING?
There are still risks associated with cyber computing in terms of calculated attacks, on a scale that business owners do not fully comprehend, the panel agreed. This comes from a range of potential threats from amateur hackers all the way up to organised crime looking to profit by compromising someone’s systems.
John Webb, marketing director of Rackspace, explained that the underlying tech is actually very secure and that a lot of security fears are born from a lack of understanding from both consumers and businesses.
The panel agreed that the cloud is inherently more secure than anything we’ve seen before, but not if we don’t increase bandwidth to homes and businesses. Peter Cochrane stressed the ideal solution to properly secure his data would be to store it on several clouds, but that’s not possible because of a lack of bandwidth. The inability to do this causes further problems because people and businesses are faced with an expensive and less secure solution - holding their data locally on an expensive machine.
Many companies aren’t adopting the cloud due to a fear of security. This is because special
interests are peddling that fear and special interests that profit from those anxieties about security. This, in turn, means there’s no innovational leap and makes companies reluctant to move to the next level.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The panel agreed that London’s long-term position in the global economy depends on massive investment and improvement of our broadband infrastructure. It has to be considered as important as essential utilities- a building without an internet connection is like a building without electricity. If London’s business community expanded at the rate of it’s broadband infrastructure, it would be half its current size.
Because of a lack of proper infrastructure, it’s difficult to attract growth startups and if this doesn’t change then London could lose any traction is has gained as a digital city in the last decade. This responsibility, the panel thought, falls on local and central government to ease regulations that
makes it difficult to install high speed networks. But it’s also down to businesses and locals to work together to find alternative solutions if the hard anvil of time isn’t on their side.
The panel also felt that there should be more education about what cloud computing is and its relatively low risk factor, in comparison to other technologies. There’s a stigma around storing your data remotely and the panel felt that this stigma is unfair.
It was agreed that tech startup spaces should be leading the way with cloud technology. You should be able to enter a communal working space and instantly be connected to that cloud, where people can share ideas and data and it should be repeated across tech clusters in the UK.
Finally, the panel felt that the Government needed to do little more than set up some basic
guidelines and simply move out of the way and let the innovators figure the rest out. It shouldn’t be up to the government to manage, regulate and decide how we build broadband infrastructure and use cloud computing- it should be up to people who use it.
INTERESTED IN ATTENDING OR HOSTING A FUTURE ROUNDTABLE?
We hold roundtables every month on topics including immigration law, cloud computing, recruitment and connectivity.
We’re always interested in hosting new debates, to find out more contact Becky Golland:
[email protected] or call 0207 502 8220
OPTIMITY IN TECH CITY
Optimity is a dynamic technology service provider based in the heart of London. Since it opened its doors in 2002, the company has become a firmly entrenched industry player with a team that continually strives to go beyond our customer’s expectations.
Optimity are an ISP with their own LDN+ fibre and wireless network in London. They can provide fast, secure and resilient 10Mb–1Gb connections in a matter of days. They pride themselves on their unique holistic approach to their customer’s connectivity, telecoms, mobile, security and IT, ensuring that their customers receive technology tailor-made to their business requirements with a roadmap to growth.
From their offices in the City, Optimity work in partnership with their customers, who are typically small and medium-sized organisations based in London, with offices across the UK and some overseas.
