Can you tell us a little bit about your background and why you chose Cloud Technology as a specialism?
Having ran the BBC Micro Network from the age of 14, and with computing as a main hobby of mine, my background has always been IT and technology. As a result, moving on into Cloud technologies was a natural progression because it was the latest and greatest in the world of IT. I started working as a basic Software Analyst in the mid-90s at quite an advanced IT company, that role enabled me to be ‘ahead of the curve’ and led me to my role at Bytes Security Partnerships where I have been for the last 22 years or so!
What is Cloud Technology and can you share some practical examples with us?
To me, Cloud technology is the implementation of IT when it is not hosted ‘on-premises’. Historically businesses would need to write their own software, or buy a software from a third-party company, wait for that to arrive in the post, and then wait for the software to install itself within the hardware (which is another expense you might have to wait or pay for, as it may or may not be readily available within the server room!). With the modern Cloud approach, deploying software is far more accessible and can be as simple as going online, creating an account, and installing a software on a subscription model which could effectively be up and running within a number of hours.
What are people using this technology for?
The ultimate example would be rapid scaling of services to deal with the variation of demand within the pandemic! For instance, hospitality businesses have to run infrastructure to be able to run online ordering from the table, but, if we get locked down, they don’t want to be paying or all of that infrastructure, and therefore they can spin it back down and save needless expenditure. Conversely, when the UK Government announced ‘eat out to help out’ in summer last year, they needed far more infrastructure to cater for the demand on one day of the week than they did the rest of the week… that is what Cloud enables you to do – be flexible and pay for what you truly need.
What does the future look like and how does Cloud Technology feature?
If the pandemic and climate change have taught us one thing, it’s the requirement for us as people to be ever more reactive. The future of Cloud Technology enables us to remain agile with hospitality and fintech services as it lowers the boundary of entry in terms of investment… enabling us to react to new services, without significant upfront investment, allowing far more creativity and agility within the services that businesses need.
Another example would be looking at the software and coding that was needed to deploy the services to allow for ‘Covid passport’, track and trace, and with all the back-end being deployed in the Cloud, it means that when a Minister says we have a Covid passport, we will have one readily available to us within a matter of weeks, something that merely 5-years ago just simply wouldn’t have been possible.
What are the biggest software and technology challenges facing start-ups?
Imagination – coming up with something that is actually ‘new’! And then using the cloud effectively to realise that idea.
Anybody can sign up for the Cloud and have access to a commercial grade datacentre, via a free to make AWS or Azure account. Anyone can launch a service that can be consumed by anyone in the world, you just need to have an idea!
But the biggest challenge around that, is implementing that in a secure way… in a world where anyone can create code, its creating ‘good code’ in a way that can’t be picked apart by anyone. People’s personal data is worth money, and criminals will pay for it, making sure the solution is well secured is one of the biggest technology challenges. Securing end-user data is a skill in its own right, and anyone creating a service or application has to factor that in and invest in that appropriately.
What’s next for Bytes Technology Group?
As a business that wants to be at the forefront of technical solutions, and to be able to challenge our customers to ensure that they are making the right decisions, our biggest challenge is making sure that we are always one step ahead of the solutions that are available and making sure we understand them so that we can present them to our customers.
An example of this would be the rapid development of Microsoft’s Sentinel service and our creation of services that wrap around it which make it easy for customers to implement it.
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