The technician who comes to fix your furnace is probably packing a smart phone. But today, it’s not just for calls. It’s also a pocket database and a place to store, analyze, document, and report your system’s performance. When the job’s done, the tech may even use it to swipe your credit card.

Now multiply this example by billions. Our connected world is different, offering unprecedented opportunities and challenges for businesses of every size and shape.

But what does it all add up to? That’s a key question we’re working to answer at AT&T Labs. We know there is value in this flood of data. But for our customers to see it, we need to help them sift, sort, and select the information they can use from among the rest.

It’s not just the growing volume of data that poses a challenge. The pace or velocity of data, and the brief instant we may have to effectively respond, gives us little time to act. And we’re not talking about data that’s slotted neatly into spaces on a spreadsheet. We’re talking variety—everything from a multi-hundred-word blog post to the single ping of a sensor.

As enterprises go to work on these issues, many are choosing to store and analyze their data and communicate the value they find using “cloud” solutions, instead of in-house data centers. Going to the cloud allows them to focus on their core goals. They don’t have to worry about obtaining real estate, buying servers, hiring staff, or a thousand other data center management minutia. The right provider will match capacity to need and deliver top quality, including world class business continuity and security.

Yet there is another performance factor that must be considered. The cost to transport data—to move raw data from a data warehouse to a separate location for analysis, processing, and visualization—can be significant. In one instance, a major government agency identified this data transfer expense as the single biggest cost of their cloud solution.

What’s the alternative? Instead of picking one cloud provider for storage and a separate operator for analysis, choose a cloud service provider capable of both providing storage and providing analytics on your information. This way you can capture important synergies. Data transfer becomes a minor issue—or none at all. And your enterprise can surf the global data tsunami like a pro.

What do you expect from your cloud provider? Could your organization benefit from a provider that’s capable of capturing, storing, analyzing, and finding value in your data?

I talk to a lot of healthcare organizations that are embracing the cloud. They see it as a practical and cost-effective way to meet the intense demands of managing the staggering amount of patient data — and of course, medical imaging is the biggest contributor. But what more and more organizations are finding is that the cloud can also be a lifesaver in the event of a disaster, or in the event their Picture Archive Communications System (PACS) goes down.

A recent survey from Healthcare Data Management (HDM) points out that the health care industry worldwide generates approximately 30 percent of the world’s data, “a massive amount that increases day after day.”  What I find interesting is that the survey goes on to report that 65 percent of respondents said their data volumes had increased over the previous year with only 26 percent reported having “robust, tried-and-tested” disaster recovery plans in place.

That means 74% have no disaster recovery plan in place.  Yikes!

The traditional backup approach isn’t enough

Now we all know disaster recovery plans are more encompassing than just a storage back-up plan.  But believe it or not, there are a lot of hospitals using tape as their disaster recovery back up.  So that means that if they lose their primary PACS and need to pull a medical image from the archive, they have to restore from tape first .Then there’s the health system whose DR plan is to have a second copy of their medical imaging data in the same data center as their primary copy—not a good plan.  These are just two scenarios that leave health care organizations and their patients vulnerable.

Now, there are “real” reasons for sticking with the old methods — and the primary one is cost.  While we spend a disproportionate amount of our GDP on healthcare, the healthcare industry has been the most financially strapped and therefore one of the slowest to adopt and innovate through the use of technology.

Cloud to the rescue

So what’s the answer to help the 74 percent of hospitals without a disaster recovery plan in place?  Clearly the only option these financially strapped health care organizations could consider is one that is cost-effective.  One that allows them to avoid costly capital investments in technology they will have to eventually replace.  One that allows them to pay as they go – incurring costs as they are reimbursed for the imaging procedure.  One that allows them to avoid the disaster of clinicians not having access to patient medical images.

To me, the only option is the cloud.  The cloud can ensure clinicians have access to patient images – in the event of natural disaster or in the event of an IT disaster.  Using the cloud, healthcare organizations can ensure clinical operations continue even during an IT disaster by having access to a highly-secure, non-proprietary, copy of their medical images.  Using the cloud for disaster avoidance and recovery can bring three benefits to health care – cost efficiency, security and true clinical continuity. The cloud may not be the only option for the many hospitals lacking a disaster recovery plan, but in my opinion, it is the best and most cost-effective option.

What do you think?

This leads to an important question: Why do some outsourcing efforts result in a quagmire while others succeed? First, consider the underlying assumptions inherent in outsourcing:

• The vendor will perform the work/service as well as you can or better
• You expect to pay the vendor less (or at least no more) than it would cost you to do the same work
• The vendor expects to make a profit

I think you can see that the math is against you, and yet many organizations make it work in their favor. The companies where I have seen outsourcing work well seem to have figured out three common success factors:

1.  Have a plan

The company outsourcing needs to have a clear reason for doing so, and it usually isn’t purely financial. They outsource something because it isn’t their core competency, or perhaps they need the flexibility that a vendor offers. In short – they know what they want. Lower cost alone is not a plan. If you keep beating up the vendor on price, which part of the equation do you think will be compromised — your quality or their profit?

2.  Vendor management is hard work

Managing the relationship with your outsourcing or services vendor is in many ways more difficult than managing your internal IT shop. You have to manage contracts, metrics, SLAs, performance, and integration with your internal processes and other vendors. You have to have people assigned to the task and they have to know what they are doing.  Enable a single owner and manage performance through meaningful metrics. Hold the vendor accountable to meeting performance targets.

3.  Purchase a service

Simply handing over your IT function, including some of your staff, to a vendor doesn’t exactly give you a head-start on the outsourcing value proposition. But purchasing a defined service is a different story. If the vendor is offering something repeatable to multiple customers then it becomes possible for them to make the quality/cost/profit equation work.  The more something you are purchasing is customized, the more you have to worry about the equation.

The companies I’ve come across who are disappointed and frustrated with outsourcing seem to have something in common. Instead of taking control, they have punted. Either because they had struggled for so long managing something that was languishing, or because they were in a hurry, they threw up their hands and just hired a vendor.

If you don’t know what you want, you will never get it.  If you do know what you want and have a plan, you start with a fighting chance.

What is your experience with outsourcing? Have you implemented strategies to ensure you are getting the desired results? Share what you’ve learned in the comments.

Do you give your employees unfettered Internet access from their smartphones and tablets?  My real life example above shows that it can become very expensive.  Sixty minutes of HD video consumes around 300MB.  If roaming internationally, that hour could end up costing hundreds of dollars.

One way to control costs is to force all cellular-based Internet traffic into your office connection using either a VPN or an Access Point Name for routing. These approaches allow you to apply your office Internet access controls to mobile users. 

These benefits extend beyond pure cost control. It enables you to screen out access to other sites that may be inappropriate or unproductive.

My son ended up following Spain’s dismantling of Italy using a gamecast application on my personal smartphone. If my fellow video-streaming guest was using his work phone, I hope he does not work at your company.

Do you have a plan for keeping tabs on your employee’s Internet access? Could AT&T’s remote access services help you keep costs under control?

Earlier this year, I wrote about the benefits of telecommuting. While telecommuting is proven to help minimize the environmental impact of the commute to work, what about those of us who commute to and work in massive, temperature-controlled buildings? These buildings can be a huge drain on increasingly scarce water resources – and one big way they use water may be surprising to you.

As temperatures rise this summer, and we duck into our offices for HVAC-cooled comfort, it’s worth pointing out that many of our cooling systems can use as much as 25 percent of a building’s water requirements. For a company like AT&T (that uses about 3.4 billion gallons of water a year), the water we use to support our operations each year is enough to fill more than 5,100 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

So we’re teaming up with our friends at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to understand how we and other building operators can do better. This isn’t our first engagement with EDF. For the past two years, we’ve participated in their EDF Climate Corps program, uncovering potential business savings through investments in lighting efficiencies and cooling efficiencies. But it was the last project that got us thinking about how we can cool our buildings with, well, less chill.EDF posted this blog in May describing the project that’s just kicked off. We’re eager to learn what will happen when we tackle water and energy efficiency together. We’re starting with some focused pilot sites, with the hope that the benefits we achieve can expand to more AT&T facilities.  This project could mean less water use (particularly important in our water-strapped communities), less waste, and lower costs.

AT&T is far from alone in wanting to understand how we can be better stewards of this most precious resource. A recent Verdantix study reveals water management has become an increasingly visible issue within corporate sustainability.  In other words, smart water management not only makes good environmental sense, but it makes good business sense as well.  And this project with EDF is targeting a way to make that business case even more compelling.

So as office workers everywhere reach for their sweaters in the middle of summer, we’ll be reaching into our cooling systems. Stay tuned for more information about what we discover.

It is imperative to keep operations going. To do this, you should have a business continuity plan in place to support the business in the event of a major (or minor) catastrophe. Think about where your critical data lives. If you had a flood in your primary data center or lost your desktops, laptops, or other means of gaining access to your data, how would you gain access to it?

Data Backup and Alternatives

At the very least, it is necessary to have a plan to switch to a backup data center site or alternative devices to access your data. Unfortunately a backup data center could be very costly, not to mention not very environmentally friendly if it is just sitting there for a “just in case” emergency. It is much more effective to share efficiently-run resources as a backup to support an emergency situation versus building redundancy. This type of redundancy causes a greater use of energy in a facility that is just awaiting use in case of a catastrophe.

I was at a conference earlier this year, where the keynote speaker shared her experience of losing her data (in this case her manuscripts). Her computer ended up being submerged under water due to the horrific flooding from Hurricane Katrina a few years ago. Unfortunately at that time, she didn’t have any backup in place. With the loss of her computer, all her files and manuscript drafts were lost.

Cloud for Continuity

There are lessons we can learn from these types of experiences. We are so dependent upon the data we need to perform our jobs that losing it even for a short duration can set operations back. Our need for data continues to grow, and so does the need for a plan to access it through alterative means should our primary method fail due to a disaster. Have you considered a business continuity plan with a more cost-effective and an environmentally-conscious backup method, such as cloud services?

Today, with a cloud services business continuity plan in place, having alternative access to your data is as easy as the flip of a switch. The files are there no matter where you may be. You can access them from your desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or any other futuristic device that may be developed.

It’s always best to have a business continuity plan in place for your business and for you personally. Getting access to your critical data through a plan is better than having to scramble in the event of a disaster. It would also be great that while you are putting that plan in place, you incorporate methods to enhance sustainability. It can be both cost-effective as well as environmentally friendly.

What would you do if you lost all of your data or files? Do you have a plan in place? If so, please feel free to share it so that we can learn from each other. 

In fact, through the use of cloud technology, it is possible to enjoy a connected world with all its benefits, while still reducing our environmental impacts. According to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Cloud computing is an economic winner that also helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study estimates that carbon emissions for large U.S. businesses can be reduced by almost 86 million metric tons by 2020 through investments in the cloud. That’s the same amount of emissions from burning 200 million barrels of oil.

In addition, CDP indicates cloud computing can:

• Help users avoid costly up-front capital investments in infrastructure
• Improve time-to-market as a new server can be created or brought online in minutes
• Provide greater flexibility as clouds allow firms to pay for excess capacity only when they need it
• Avoid the continual maintenance of excess capacity needed to handle spikes
• Improve automation that helps drive process efficiencies

For the end user, the cloud provides the almost-magical ability to store information and access computing somewhere else, but it’s really a dynamic combination of wireless connections, wired connections, and distributed computing capacity. The ability to move this functionality to a mobile device is predicted to drive its use through the roof. In fact, over 80% of firms expect to be using a cloud-like model within 5 years.

Now, that’s a packed cloud, chock full of abilities not only to enable wired and mobile needs, but also to support goals to reduce carbon emissions. That’s the kind of cloud I want to see in my future.

What do you think of the CDP report? Did you realize the sustainability benefits of cloud?

Take an Information Communications Technology (ICT) like telepresence for example. Telepresence is HD quality video conferencing technology that provides an in person type experience without having to travel cross country or around the globe. By using telepresence to hold business meetings in lieu of travel, users can save money and reduce emissions. Through our company’s use of the technology, we realized savings of more than $13.9 million in travel dollars and the equivalent emissions of more than 1620 passenger cars annually in 2011.

This week, research firm Verdantix issued a report –Green Quadrant® Sustainable Telecoms (US) 2012–that evaluates new and traditional services offered by fixed and mobile telecoms operators that verifiably help customers achieve sustainability benefits as well as fulfilling specific business needs. In the report, I’m happy to say that AT&T was listed among the Leaders.

The study concludes that we’re not there yet – even among the Leaders, as the US sustainable telecoms market is “very immature.” Yet there’s hope for the future. The study also predicts that the market is evolving in three phases and that by 2015 US-based telecom operators will have completed the transformation to making sustainability services a core part of corporate strategy.

As we seek to push the sustainable telecom market, it’s not enough to just offer these ICT products and services.  We need to be able to do a better job of quantifying the savings – both environmental and economic –which is why in 2011 we launched the AT&T Carbon Impact Assessment Tool.  Business customers can easily calculate the estimated GHG emissions and cost savings of using solutions that replace or reduce business travel and increase productivity and collaboration.

We’re making strides, and we know ICT can help all of us do more with less, and in the end save money and help minimize our impact on the environment.

How do you utilize ICT to lessen your impacts?

While employee preferences do come into play in the new work models, they are also influenced by the need to reduce costs, connect people around the globe and meet corporate sustainability goals, like Swiss Re.

Armed with their technology gear such as laptops, smartphones and tablets, people are utilizing them by working in an office, at home, on the road, as well as just about anywhere.

Although I’m not in the millennial category, I have enjoyed and embrace these new work models from telecommuting to working from anywhere. I look forward to their continued evolution, bringing us workers of the world, greater flexibility and the ability to help reduce our commuting-related carbon footprints. If you are unable to enjoy these new work models due to the need for face-to-face interaction, here’s some tips to help make your workspace more sustainable.

Do you like these shiny new work models? What’s the best part of them, flexibility, costs savings, minimizing your impact?