Riding up the IT maturity curve

The big technological shifts of 2012 – including the cloud and mobile devices – will continue to mature, as will the expectations which business and government place on their use. IT departments will hold greater sway over organisational policy, but they'll be under enormous pressure to accommodate the established employee preferences for using multiple devices at work and at home, and employees' growing expectations of instantly-available computing.

Macquarie Telecom believes these expectations will herald significant change for Australian IT in three main areas: the emergence of a dedicated government cloud; a renewed focus on customer service from cloud providers; and the coming-of-age of BYOD despite the reluctance of businesses to change their policies. As 2012's tech trends evolve into organisational necessities, 2013 is likely to contain the following:

Is the time right for the birth of the Australian Government Cloud?

The Government will adopt dedicated cloud computing infrastructure designed for highly secure and reliable public-sector use. The main benefits of this will be significant “efficiency dividends” such as reduced IT costs, increased productivity, and greater flexibility in IT services and products for government. So far, however, public sector use of the cloud has been for the most part minimal, mainly due to overbearing concern about risks to security and government reputation.

That looks set to change following new initiatives at a national level, including the Government's Lead Agency Gateway program (for which Macquarie Telecom will provide the first of eight secure gateways) and the continued rollout of the NBN. The technical and commercial foundations for a nationwide government cloud are now in place.
They'll be bolstered by growing investment from cloud service providers (CSPs), including Macquarie Telecom's Intellicentre 2 data centre with Tier III Uptime and ASIO T4 certification; and Intellicentre 4 Bunker built specifically to service Government agencies in Canberra. An emphasis from CSPs on meeting government-level security and resilience requirements will provide much-needed confidence and boost the efficiency dividends and business results for the public sector.

A return to old-fashioned customer service

2012 saw significant job cuts to IT and a myriad of other industries, leading to inevitable declines in the levels of customer service on offer. Many businesses have opted for offshore support to lower costs in an online environment, as well as shifting their IT expenditure to front-office self-service applications. However, that proposition is unlikely to prove sustainable amidst widespread demand for more personal customer care.

Businesses will be increasingly careful to avoid the frequency and volume of complaints on social media which occurred in 2012 as a result of poor customer service.

In 2013, the most successful cloud providers will be those who can fuse cutting-edge technology with highly personal customer service. That means providing old-style 24/7 support for customers, but through multiple channels like mobile, online chat, and social media; as well as investing in staff who are well-versed not only in the cloud's technical details, but how it's being used by each of the CSP's clients. Onshore customer care centres like MacquarieHUB, which cost us fivi million dollars  to establish in 2010 in the Sydney CBD, will increasingly influence how organisations choose their cloud providers.

As a critical mass of businesses transition into cloud-based IT models, step-by-step guidance will be essential to the customer experience. Many will also embrace hybrid cloud as dominant paradigm, using it to securely broker transitions to the cloud at a pace dictated solely by the user. Customer service teams which can accompany their clients through every stage of cloud deployment will become a central part of Australia's IT industry and its resurgence.

IT's reluctant acceptance of BYOD

More employees are bringing their mobile devices and applications into the organisational environment than ever before. They'll also be quicker to question why organisations say it's difficult to adapt to mobility – especially given the ease and flexibility of the mobile experience for consumers. As BYOD goes from being a growth trend in 2012 to a workplace norm in 2013, businesses will have no valid reason why they shouldn't accommodate for employee-owned devices and applications in the workplace. It's increasingly apparent that BYOD-friendly workplaces are inevitable, no matter the reluctance of decision-makers.

As a result, 2013 will herald soaring growth in demand for mobile device management tools: enterprise-wide platforms which allow IT personnel to oversee and control employee-owned devices regardless of operating system or device model. The most successful of these tools will be those which meet organisational demands for mobile security while also addressing employee concerns around privacy and choice.

They'll also become increasingly integrated with broader IT management software as more and more organisations accept BYOD as a new norm. The Macquarie Mobility Manager, for example, functions as part of Macquarie Telecom's suite of Management Tools, providing a cloud-based portal through which IT managers can patch their employees' applications, set automatic security policies, and both lock and track missing devices.

More uptime with multiple availability zones

In 2012, Australian businesses experienced a spate of high-profile outages, ranging from Click Frenzy's traffic overload to a fire at Telstra's Warrnambool exchange that left at least 60,000 customers without service. The costs of such outages to sales and brand reputation are particularly high, and 2013 will see businesses demand greater guarantees of uptime from their service providers. In addition, growing awareness of the legal implications surrounding data residency will drive demand for local data centres, owned and operated by Australian companies.

To ensure high security, reliable uptime and low latency, providers will use 2013 to invest in “Availability Zones”: multiple sets of data centres designed to run independently of outages in any one physical location. Placing these data centres onshore will become increasingly popular when selecting provider resources. As the first managed hosting provider to offer multiple AZs across Australia, Macquarie Telecom expects this model to become the norm as providers look to increase uptime and avoid the widespread backlash from outages like Click Frenzy. 

Aidan Tudehope is a co-Founder of Macquarie Telecom and serves as its managing director of hosting.