Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 23 | Page 18

NEWS Infortrend partners with demo lab in Germany Call for stricter regulations to reduce IT outages in banking sector, report finds I nfortrend Technology, an industry leading enterprise storage provider, has announced that it has installed all-flash array storage solutions at e-shelter, one of the largest data centres in Europe. The partnership with e-shelter’s innovation lab is for end-users and partners to evaluate Infortrend’s leading Edge technologies together with other innovations from hardware and cloud technology providers. From October 2019, Infortrend has partnered with Kioxia (formerly Toshiba), a leading memory vendor, by installing a proof of concept (PoC) solution, including enterprise-level SSDs and EonStor GSa all-flash array storage systems. This PoC unit aims to serve applications requiring high-IOPS, such as database, virtualisation, render farm services and surveillance. In addition, a storage server, EonServ 7000 is installed to further offload high workloads in surveillance applications. “This collaboration with Kioxia and e-shelter gives us the opportunity to introduce our high performance and high availability storage solutions. It’s also easier for our customers to test and evaluate our solutions and data services. I know we have good products so it’s exciting to know that customers can now test them and see it for themselves. I’m certain they’ll love them,” said Victor Chiang, General Manager of Infortrend Europe. A UK government committee has warned that regulators must act to reduce an increased amount of IT failures in the financial services sector. The number of incidents has been deemed ‘unacceptable’ by the Treasury Committee. With online banking so popular in the digital era, customers are relying on online services in order to manage their accounts – but they are becoming frustrated at the frequency of IT disruption, the committee stated in its report, IT Failures in the Financial Services Sector. While the committee conceded that completely uninterrupted access to banking services was not achievable, it stated that prolonged IT failures should not be tolerated and the current level and frequency of disruption and consumer harm was unacceptable. The report also stated that customers are being left ‘cashless and cut off’ and suggested ways to overcome the current 18 INTELLIGENTCIO level and frequency of disruption, as well as consumer harm. The committee highlighted the cloud service provider market as a source of ‘systemic risk’. It said the consequences of a major operational incident at a large cloud service provider, such as Microsoft, Google or Amazon, could be significant, and that there was a considerable case for the regulation of these providers to ensure high standards of operational resilience. Commenting on the report, Steve Baker MP, the Treasury Committee’s lead member for the inquiry, said: “The number of IT failures that have occurred in the financial services sector, including TSB, Visa and Barclays, and the harm caused to consumers is unacceptable. “The committee has made a series of recommendations to the government and regulators on how the impact of IT failures can be prevented and mitigated to ensure that consumers are protected.” n www.intelligentcio.com