Companies like IBM that aren’t afraid to shift and pivot that respond to changing conditions in their market and in the world at large are the successful ones. A similar more local case is Interactive, the Australian company we featured on the Tech Means Business podcast.

Interactive has always been the go-to player for technology solutions, including business continuity, APRA-compliant services, and disaster recovery for many thousands of companies in the APAC. But it was the COVID pandemic that led to the company’s recent move into secure, serviced office provision. It’s not a common-or-garden variety commercial landlord, renting meeting rooms and draughty communal spaces to roving freelancers. Instead, it’s offering facilities directly related to its APRA compliant data centre capabilities, giving financial services companies (or any security-conscious organisation) the capability to split their staff into more localised locations while retaining the cast-iron security and best standards necessary in this highly regulated vertical.

We spoke to Brett Wilson, Chief Operating Officer Infrastructure & Risk at Interactive, about the company’s new take on providing for its customers. He told us: “Being a business continuity solutions provider means that we’ve got a unique lens on the delivery of [IT] services. We reduce risk effectively which is very much complemented by the data centre service we offer.”

Ask most serviced office providers if they can host fault-resilient, highly encrypted servers on-site, and blank looks is likely all you’ll get. But Interactive’s customers have always used the company for its expertise in technology, and the provision of physical space equipped to specialist standards is the next logical step. That includes dedicated data feeds, encryption capabilities, physical security, and data centre quality provisioning. The quality extends to the basics, too: “Every single desktop in our facility sits behind a UPS [uninterruptible power supply] and diesel generator, so that power resiliency of the site comes in addition to the security,” Brett said.

Most companies now go out of their way to ensure data security, continuity, and resilience, but the government mandates these in the financial sector. Companies in the vertical operate under APRA strictures, which, for non-Aussie readers, refers to the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority. The quango regulates financial, deposit-taking institutions – that is, any company that’s a custodian of the public’s money.

In practical terms, APRA compliance translates to a whole list of obligations regarding information and physical security, system redundancy, and resilience in the IT systems used to do business. Non-compliance ends up with financial institutions losing their license to trade.

While Interactive can’t coach companies through their individual compliance application procedures, they can lend considerable experience to key personnel to ensure internal procedures and operations are on course. “Moreover, we end up helping our customers. [The] less experienced risk managers really do lean on Interactive’s expertise from having done this thousands of times with many, many customers,” Brett said.

Without getting into the weeds of acronyms, companies must aim for APRA’s accepted level of ‘sound practice’. With regards to digital information, CPS 232 and CPS 234 [PDFs] (Business Continuity Management and Information Security, respectively).

Brett told us that Interactive’s aim is “to be a part of our customers’ accreditation process. So, it’s about our facilities being a compliant part of their complete solution.”

For general ease of use of its data centre facilities, remote office provisioning, secure IT, and governance adherence, and what are actually very specialist requirements and services, Interactive offers simplicity. Brett told us, “It’s about aggregating all the aspects required to stand up a second office for staff. That relates to leases, to our furniture, […] to the technology, to power cabling and all the niceties of video conferencing and meeting rooms and breakout areas and facilities and amenities. We turn all that complexity into a single monthly service fee that has flexibility.”

In highly regulated industries, every aspect of digital interaction is considered a potential place to compromise security and resilience. That situation isn’t particularly compatible with home working, where professionals have to share networks with – for instance – teenagers’ BitTorrent-ing, kids downloading pirated games and bandwidth needed by VPNs eaten up by streaming media.

“You have staff performing regulated functions and these aren’t jobs that can be done around the kitchen table with children running around,” Brett told us. “We’re talking about institutions transferring billion dollars of superannuation fees in a single transaction and that type of requirement necessitates a regulated and controlled environment, [one] with secure access and identity management so that we know we can report on and track who was literally in the room at the time of the transaction.”

Helping companies transition from home or remote working back to offices that may be closer, smaller, cheaper, yet still compliant is all in a day’s work.

“Over the years of providing business continuity services to this customer base [the financial services industry], you go through thousands and thousands of audits and each time there’s a new audit and a new auditor, they identify opportunities for improvement. Our service just hones and improves over time.”

The list of adjectives describing Interactive’s office spaces also includes luxurious. One client allegedly told Brett that his new office space is “like being at a resort, except I have to work.”

For some commercial landlords, luxury is the sole USP. In Interactive’s spaces, it’s an add-on. The real core of the offering is APRA-compliant levels of security, connectivity, and resilience. Although those features are in the background, they need to be at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds as the company begins to get back into the workplace.

To learn more about Interactive’s unique offerings, get in touch with a representative from the company to talk through your options.

The post APRA Compliance Just Step One for Returning Workforces, with Interactive appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

For many companies, that approach is perfectly understandable. Not every technology service provider has the breadth of technical competence that covers off every single area of cloud. But what Interactive offers its customers is an approach that initially at least, has little to do with technology at all.

Instead, Interactive always starts with a full audit of your current requirements. Those requirements don’t have to be given in depth, down to a specification list of individual services needed or type of AWS buckets required. Interactive’s discovery process is a great deal more about the business requirements of your company.

That makes a refreshing change for the Australian company’s clients, many of whom are already using Interactive for its other areas of expertise, like its MSP solutions, or private data centre services. So, when considering a move into cloud computing to any degree, Interactive has the type of agnostic offerings that you can be sure are focused on you and your organisation, not that are drawn from a set menu of suppliers it has lucrative terms with.

Source: Interactive

In today’s customer-centric environment, creating better end-user experience might be the objective. Similarly, businesses might be trying to get products to market more quickly, or have an acquisition or merger in mind. Whatever the case, the strategy should lead, while the technology stack has to proactively support and empower.

Like all the variations in cloud transformation , the overall technology stack your business will deploy should depend not on your consultants’ decisions, but on your strategic choices: the decisions made for the business. The reality is that every company has, already in place, preferred suppliers, contracts covering service and hardware provisions, and notable investments in technology. Those need to be considered as part of a bigger picture, providing the detail to the picture of where your organisation wants to go. No IT professional needs to be told their last 18 months’ technology investments must be scrapped to be replaced with a suppliers’ choices: Interactive’s approach isn’t one that dictates.

Take, for example, public clouds.That non-specificity also extends to the type of cloud provisioned. For some, multi-cloud is the answer, for other organisations, hybrid topologies suit the business’s aims. Some might prefer a fully private cloud strategy, ­perhaps for security or governance reasons. The bottom line is that Interactive can recommend the best way for each of its clients, and has the in-house skillsets to migrate to and manage architectures on any cloud, irrespective.

Many cloud service consultants describe an endgame for their clients; a kind of “utopia” of business excellence that will be reached once the company has fully-migrated onto different combinations of platforms. But Interactive’s long experience shows that the endgame rarely exists, simply because of the timescales involved. The speed at which markets and businesses change means that your cloud strategy will necessarily change over time, in step with the overarching long-term goals of the business.

Source: Interactive

By optimising the organisation’s technology solutions continuously, the way forward opens up to the possibilities presented by new technologies as they appear.

There’s a further reassuring feature of the Interactive offerings, too. The company’s portfolio of services and products isn’t confined to cloud transformation management, offering services like , cyber security, disaster recovery, Office 365 roll-out and management, data centre services, and even IT support. That’s all there for the complete range of company shapes, sizes, and verticals.

The resulting collection of knowledge and experience means the company is ideally placed to help your business with its IT needs and come up with the right solutions to underpin your business’s overall aims and objectives.

You can read about how Interactive has brought meaningful and positive change to the way companies work with technology in a broad range of case studies on the Interactive website. The results: if Interactive hasn’t worked with a company quite like yours, it will undoubtably have come close in the past.

To ensure your IT partner is fully in step with your business, reach out to Interactive, Australia’s biggest, and the operators of the country’s largest private cloud. The team at Interactive has the range of skills you’ll need in today’s ever-shifting business & technology environment.

The post From on-premise to public cloud, and everything in-between: Interactive solutions appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

While many organizations are at least trying out cloud-based services, rare is the company that has upended its entire IT infrastructure to move to the cloud. In many cases, cloud not only isn’t the answer to problems real or imagined but, in fact, no-one is asking the right questions.

The “rush to the cloud” could be a rush, but there are a number of applications that may not be suitable for the public cloud, so it’s worth stressing that companies like Interactive will continue to have a significant role to play in IT provision. The Australian company provides cloud services for its many clients from all over the world, but as a business-centric supplier, it knows there’s more to the IT requirements of its clients than a one-size-fits-all solution; cloud or otherwise.

For Interactive’s clients, solutions come from what might suit your organization’s business needs, rather than from an IT department’s stipulations about what storage, compute or hosting is available or relevant.

Source: Interactive

In cloud terms, the company has extensive experience in private, hybrid and multi-cloud, with a particular emphasis on companies with highly sensitive data that demands reliable, safe storage and management in combination with a fast throughput rate.

Because there are organizations with applications and services that can’t or won’t transfer to the cloud, a significant demand for traditional co-location still exists. With Interactive’s datacenters, co-location up-times are a fraction of a percent below the elusive 100 mark, and there are multiple connections to the internet backbone, so services are reliable as well as local. Being local is attractive for many: Interactive support personnel are based in Australia and are available 24/7.

Interactive’s eight data centers (spread over Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane) provide high-volume storage and processing, with backup, failover and business continuity facilities. The high-density data centers are available as part of a broad infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering with plans that can be shared or dedicated, fully-managed or unmanaged. But like all the company’s offerings, there’s no hidden agenda to lead you to products you don’t want or need.

Locking unwary customers into particular product lines or service plans isn’t what Interactive is about. Instead you get expert help, advice and services that are designed for your organization’s needs now and into the future.

Source: Interactive

In the company’s data centers, which include those with equipment densities of up to 20kw per rack, all operations produce a PUE of 1.5, meaning the environmental footprint of your digital offerings is kept spectacularly low.

Data is hosted in Interactive’s Australian data centers, which means that governance and statutory oversight considerations are simplified, and all billing for cloud services for example (flexibly based on volume), can be combined with any other service choices your business makes.

Interactive’s service to companies across the region comes with advice and consultation on exactly what your business needs to achieve. Legacy equipment, applications or services are considered an integral part of what your organization is, and where it might want to go. Unlike some of its competitors, Interactive’s personnel don’t always recommend a “tear it down and build it again” approach – this may not be sound business practice for your circumstances. In short, no-one is going to push your IT stack into the cloud for the sake of it.

To learn more about Interactive’s unique approach to providing the best in IT, visit the company’s website or click here to learn more and get in touch with a representative to discuss your options and choices.

The post Why rush to the cloud? Wait to let your business decide, with Interactive appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.