> White Paper Best Practices in Digital Transformation for Multi-Tenant Data Centers November 2017 Sponsored by: www.DCD.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Management Summary Introduction The growth of digitalization will impact the core of the global economy in terms of the value of e-Commerce, transactions between businesses, in terms of operational efficiencies, supply chain management and the cultivation of client relationships. Companies that have used data technologies to disrupt how services and products are sold and delivered can gain competitive advantage and dominance very quickly.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation u So, what does digital transformation mean for MTDCs? The Analytics impacts will be far reaching in terms of changed requirements and expectations customers have for more demand-driven, scalable and efficient infrastructure that operates on the basis of intelligent management and real time modeling, where the company and the partners it may need to bring in are synchronized around data and analytics.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Security The operators of MTDCs are faced with the tasks of securing growing and evolving network architectures against increasingly sophisticated and targeted attacks, while at the same time meeting ever more stringent compliance and regulatory requirements to protect the data with which they are entrusted.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation uenormous amounts of data in real-time, many in the industry believe that it is not enough, and that human input is needed to refine the findings. Threat intelligence seeks to detect anomalies, by establishing a baseline of normal behavior so that abnormalities can be detected through the use of user behavior and user analytics. Threat intelligence also looks to identify “indicators of compromise”.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation DCD Comment The ongoing digital transformation of economies globally should represent a major opportunity for multi-tenant data centers across both the enterprise and shared data center sectors. The data center is the cornerstone of digital transformation processes since at least in a post-legacy configuration it offers the processing, storage and network capacity to enable those processes to occur.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Contents 2 Management Summary 6 DCD Comment 8 Introduction 9 Analysis & Discussion Why ‘Best Practice’? 11 Why Multi-Tenant Data Centers? 14 ‘Digital Transformation’ 18 The Internet of Things & MTDCs 21 Analytics 23 Security Introduction The Threat Environment The New Security Focus Techniques for Threat Reduction Software-defined Security & Analytics-driven The I
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Introduction This White Paper has been written on behalf of Siemens in order to identify and analyse key trends in digital transformation as these relate to multi-tenant data centers [MTDCs].
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Analysis & Discussion Why ‘Best Practice’ The statistics that herald the continuing rise of the digital age are well-known. To pick a selection of the most quoted: 4 billion searches a day (Google), 500 million tweets (Twitter), 254 million orders in a day (Alibaba), 350 million new photos per day (Facebook), 235 million messages per day (Tencent QQ).
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Surveys conducted on the extent to which businesses are prepared for or are confident about the digital era indicate a guarded optimism about what the era will mean for business but considerable room for improved understanding and preparation across different areas of the world: • A survey conducted by Siemens among 300 executives of client companies in the UAE and Qatar indicate that 45% consider themselves familiar with what digital transformatio
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Why Multi-Tenant Data Centers? This White Paper has been prepared with a focus on multi-tenant data centers. These are service data centers run either for clients external to the provider (‘commercial’) or clients within a company (‘enterprise’). These facilities share raised-floor space, power and cooling between tenants. The portfolio of such facilities may include a variety of standalone data centers, server rooms and disaster recovery sites.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Figure 4: Investment in IT & Cloud Services & Solutions 2015 & 2016: % Sample of MTDCs 45% 30.3% 20.6% 11.2% models and is rarely straightforward or the same journey between different companies. It is made more complicated by three factors: 25% 20% 22.4% 35% 30% uThe transition from colocation towards IT and cloud based service 32.4% 40% Source: DCD Census 2014 & DCD Solutions Survey 2016 2016 37.9% 6.4% 4.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Figure 6: Components in MTDC Service Level Agreements & Contracts 2014 & 2016: % Sample of Commercial MTDCs 7.4% 10.2% 6.8% 8.1% 6.5% 9.2% Maintenance of Accreditation Legislative compliance Technological upgrade 12.1% 13.2% Access to changed cost model 10% 11.1% 13.2% 14.4% 16.5% Location (facility) 31.2% 44.4% Energy efficency 30% 20% 19.8% 26.5% 32.1% 44.2% 40.7% 46.5% 50% 40% Security assurance 70% 60% 34.6% 46.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation ‘Digital Transformation’ No two definitions of ‘digital transformation’ are quite the same but most definitions share the following elements: • It is a process involving change. • The type of change is usually underwritten as profound or new – it is a new way of doing things not just a tinkering with the way things have been done before. • It involves the deployment and application of digital technologies.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation uDigital transformation is considered as a long term proposition therefore best practice can be used as a means to progress through the steps through which a strategy to coordinate the requirements of the company with the capabilities of technology can be developed and implemented.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation So, what does digital transformation mean for MTDCs? As with any other commercial organisations, the impacts will be far reaching: 1. Most critically the requirements and expectations of customers will change. The foundations for digital transformation will be the business strategy and usually these are based on meeting customer requirements profitably. Just as the customers of the MTDC will be facing disruption so will the MTDC itself. 2.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation A number of factors are holding back progress: 1. The age and specification of the facility. Particularly for facilities built in the legacy era to offer space, racks, power and security, there is concern as to whether the data center can be upgraded to meet the requirements of digital transformation and still offer a reasonable return on investment.. 2.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation The Internet of Things & the MTDC “In a few decades’ time, computers will be interwoven into almost every industrial product”. [Karl Steinbuch, 1966] Dealing with IoT and capitalising on the opportunities it presents is a core element of digital transformation. As a subset of ‘big data’, it is far more important than humans as a source of data traffic.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests that companies consider two crucial data typologies when defining the methodology for working IoT: non-relational data representation, that is when data is semi-structured rather than fully structured and tabular, and horizontal scalability which is valuable when the amount of data coming in increases very quickly since the data on one particular subject (a user or a device) is held
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation uIn addition to the operational deployment of IoT, since the data center is the source of business rather than just the enabler and the clients are inside the facility rather than outside, so the IoT needs to be related back to individual customer, budgetary and contractual objectives.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Analytics Analytics is the exhaustive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models, and data-driven management to drive decisions and actions. Analytics can be the input used for human decision-making or it may drive fully automated decisions. In short, analytics enables decision-making based on data and evidence, rather than speculation and ‘hunch’.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation ubusiness but also for clients by ensuring we maximise the use of cloud systems that have proven to reduce costs and maintain high service availability”. [Financial Services] The scarcity of data related to the data center will no longer be the characteristic that defines MTDC provider’s efforts to understand their data centers. Increasingly the issue will be how to define what constitutes useful information.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Security Introduction Breaches of data center security are reported regularly in the media although these breaches are likely to be only the tip of the iceberg as companies are reluctant to publicise failures. Those reported indicate that the financial costs of disruption can be considerable.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation The Threat Environment The operators of MTDCs are faced with the tasks of securing growing and evolving network architectures against increasingly sophisticated and targeted attacks, while at the same time meeting ever more stringent compliance and regulatory requirements to protect the data with which they are entrusted.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation The New Security Focus The protection of the environments in an MTDC that are and will be created as digitalization evolves will differ from the requirements of protecting a legacy data center.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation u All of these technologies and environments are mentioned as part of the process of MTDC digital transformation and they therefore will be deployed across the multi-tenant data infrastructure portfolio. This creates the potential for greater vulnerabilities across the network as it presents more opportunities for attackers to compromise a facility as its increased complexity and dispersion creates a far wider attack surface.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Software-Defined Security & The Role of Analytics Cyber-security has always been, by definition, software-based. It include any type of software that secures and protects any network or computing device from the range of viruses, malware, unauthorised access attempts and other security vulnerabilities listed earlier in this chapter.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation uoutcomes to determine the most suitable reaction - for example, speed, proximity of other vehicles, road and weather conditions, local road rules, physical condition of the vehicle, IT and network health to determine safety outcomes. Where the situation is outside the boundaries of the car’s learning it will need to collect more data about the situation and/or transmit it to the core processing unit for analysis and instruction.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation The Importance of Physical Security Much recent attention on data center security has focused on disruption caused by threats to cybersecurity. Yet focusing efforts purely on this source of threat can draw attention away from the threat of physical attacks on, or accidental damage to, premises and equipment. For the MTDC, the standard of physical security is one of the key criteria by which they are chosen and judged.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation The Siemens Point of View The research and analysis in the Paper raise some important and complex issues raised by preparing an organisation for digitalisation. With this in mind, DCD spoke with Urs Iten, Director of Global Portfolio Management Data Centers at Siemens about some of these issues.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Therefore it is certainly possible to apply best practice but only to a certain level of abstraction. Beyond that, it is very much on the basis of an individual organisation.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Glossary ACL Access control lists – the list of permissions attached to an object whereby access is granted or denied. Digital Transformation The change at a core level of business and organisational activities, culture, processes and models to optimise the opportunities of digital technologies. AI Artificial intelligence – the demonstration of intelligent behaviour by machines usually on the basis of machine learning.
> White Paper | Best Practices in Digital Transformation Malware Malicious software including Trojans, viruses, worms and other forms of hostile or intrusive software. MTDC Multi-tenant data center. These are service data centers that share raised-floor space, power and cooling between tenants. They may be shared facilities leased out commercially or data centers run for client groups within a single organisation.
