BULLETIN businessinfomag.uk magazine 08 CLOUD WHO DO YOU TRUST? Over half (55%) of UK IT professionals trust public cloud services less than they did two years ago, according to research conducted by hosting and cloud services company Leaseweb Global. Transparency, customer service and ease of workload migration were all highlighted as potential concerns by the 500 UK-based IT professionals surveyed: 57% said they had found it challenging to migrate workloads out of a public cloud environment; 49% said they had encountered difficulties in understanding their cloud usage costs; and 49% had struggled to get hold of a public cloud provider’s customer services. The research also calls into question the scale of the shift to the cloud over the last two years.When asked about the period from January 2019-December 2021, 36% of organisations described their approach to IT infrastructure as ‘cloud first’, with 19% stating their organisation was officially committed to a ‘cloud-only’ approach. Since January 2022, the proportion of respondents with a ‘cloud first’ approach has fallen to 31%, while those with a ‘cloud only’ approach has risen only to 25% of respondents. When asked about the optimum IT infrastructure for their organisation, private cloud-only (23%) and a mixture of onpremise and public cloud (20%) were the most popular options. These were followed by public cloud-only (17%) and a mixture of on-premises and private cloud (14%), with on-premises-only the least popular option at 7%. Two-thirds (66%) of respondents agree that the industry will see the end of on-premises infrastructure over the next two years. Terry Storrar, Managing Director of Leaseweb UK, said: “Although respondents acknowledge that the desire and need to look after on-premises infrastructure is dying, the results also indicate that businesses are still using it as an ongoing component of their IT infrastructure when adopting hybrid cloud. The key takeaway from this research is IT teams are looking for flexibility – there’s no one size fits all approach.” www.leaseweb.com SUSTAINABILITY LYRECO EV SURGE Office products supplier Lyreco has invested £2.3 million in 50 new Ford E-Transit vans, increasing the size of its electric vehicle fleet to 67. The company already had 17 Renault Master Z.E all-electric light goods vehicles. The Lyreco EV Fleet is being deployed across 13 of the firm’s 24 Regional Distribution Centres, including Dartford, Edinburgh, Manchester and Oxford, as well as at the Lyreco National Distribution Centre in Telford where they will be charged using electricity generated by Lyreco’s own solar panel-powered charging stations. Lyreco has invested more than £124,000 in charging infrastructure across the Regional Distribution Centre network, with plans to install charging stations at Lyreco’s remaining sites in 2023. Since 2013, Lyreco has reduced fuel consumption per delivery by over 31% through route optimisation, fleet improvements, driver training and order consolidation. It has pledged to switch completely to zero tailpipe emission vans by 2028 and aims to be carbon neutral by 2030. why.lyreco.com MFPs ITWAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY… This year marks the 50th anniversary of the SF-201, Sharp’s first copier. Joe Tomota, Vice President at Sharp Europe, describes the SF-201 as ‘game-changing’: “Most copiers at the time employed diazo technology, where copies are initially made on special photosensitive papers. Sharp used the Electrofax (EF) method, where paper is given a static electric charge before being exposed to light reflected from the original document. The EF method provided outstanding results without ammonia odour, discoloration or colour mixing and was so successful Sharp produced another 10 series models in the four years following its launch.” The rest, as they say, is history. Find out more at: https://global.sharp/products/copier/ anniversary/history/. MAILING RECORD YEAR FOR PARCELS In their different ways, China and the UK were the leading parcel generators of 2021, according to the seventh Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index of 13 major markets around the world. While China became the first country to generate more than 100 billion parcels in a year – 108 billion parcels, up 30% from 83 billion in 2020 – the UK had the highest per capita rate of 80 parcels per person, up from 74 in 2020. Parcel volumes increased in all regions covered by the report, reaching a total of 159 billion (up 21%, from 131.2 billion parcels in 2020), with an average of 41 parcels per capita or 137 parcels per household. Respective UK figures are 5.4 billion parcels (up 9%, from 5 billion in 2020), with an average of 80 parcels per capita or 192 parcels per household. The Index predicts continued growth in parcel volumes from 2022 to 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of between 5.5% and 11.5%, resulting in volumes of between 216 billion and 300 billion by 2027. https://www.pitneybowes.com/us/ shipping-index.html DIGITISATION MUDDLED THINKING Despite advances in process digitisation (see page 16), a study carried out by Quocirca for PFU (EMEA) Limited, now part of Ricoh, shows that a huge amount of documents are still paper-based. In a survey for Scanning As An Enabler for Digital Transformation, 69% of respondents said they still store customer records in paper form; more than half (52%) say they haven’t yet fully digitised payslips. Reasons given for persisting with paper include compliance (cited by 39%), customer need (29%) and employee preference (25%). The research highlights the risks associated with printed output, with 41% of respondents complaining that paper documents are left lying around the office even though 22% say they prefer hard copies for security reasons. www.pfuemea.com/en-gb/quocirca Scanning as an enabler for digital transformation September 2022 © Quocirca 2022 1 Scanning as an enabler for digital transformation Findings from research into the usage of scanning September 2022
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=