Fred Olsen IT chief talks cloud, connectivity and security

IT director Damon Impett on the challenges of running IT for a business with many different divisions

Distributed office environments are the bane of many IT teams, but very few have to contend with offices which travel the high seas. But at Fred Olsen Ltd that's exactly what their IT staff have to deal with.

The company, founded in 1848, has several business units, ranging from shipping and oil and gas, to renewable energy and cruise holidays. It is the last business in this list that poses the sea-based challenges, with four ships that travel from the fjords of Norway to the shores of Australia.

For Damon Impett, IT director of Fred Olsen Ltd (pictured), this poses some tricky tech challenges, not least the fact that the satellite connections the ships often have to rely on when at sea are hardly the fastest.

"The V-Sat connection on a ship was 800KB, which was for everything, corporate services, WiFi for guests and so on. That has increased to 3Mbps but it still poses challenges," he told Computing.

While its ships have slow connections the 20 or so offices in the UK, ranging from its head office to small travel shops, are less encumbered. As such, Impett has taken the firm on a hybrid route mixing cloud and on premise services.

"Not everything works well in cloud and even when it does work well in cloud it can be expensive, so I think any strategic thinker must focus on the hybrid route."

Specifically this means the firm has some services like OneDrive and Skype for Business in Azure while others are in AWS while other key services, such as Office 365, remain on premise deployments.

However, Impett thinks it's inevitable that cloud use within the business will increase, not least because it is likely Microsoft will want to push this method of delivery over on premise services.

"I suspect we will go Office 365 in the cloud on our next round of upgrades, possibly because Microsoft may in time stop offering on premise, or offer it at a price point where we'll have to jump ship anyway."

As noted, though, Impett and his team don't just have the cruise business to manage, but also have to keep a tight rein on the devices used across all eight Fred Olsen businesses with a presence in the UK.

Fred Olsen IT chief talks cloud, connectivity and security

IT director Damon Impett on the challenges of running IT for a business with many different divisions

As part of this the team takes a hands-on approach to the management of end-users devices, covering mobiles, tablets, laptops, favouring a management setup over bring your own device.

"Generally end users have standard desktops but for those who travel quite a lot we have everything from iPads to Surface [Pros] and we're always experimenting with R&D on the latest smartphones," he said.

Impett added there are some users who are allowed to bring their own device for use at work, but these are subject to having mobile device management software installed.

With such a distributed IT estate one of the big challenges for the IT crew is keeping tabs on everything, not just at sea, but across all business units. In the UK alone it has some 1,000 devices across the country that his team have to maintain and manage.

To help with this management the firm has recently deployed Nexthink, which provides constant monitoring on the state of all end user machines, helping the team track the health of its IT estate.

"I first came across the product from a security perspective because it lets you see if something is different that may be security related. But it's not really designed for that, it's just a by-product of what it can do."

Impett said, though, that once he assessed the software for its wider set of capabilities he saw its use to the business.

"It's more powerful than just security because it's about standardising your environment and improving the end user experience, so the service desk environment becomes less reactive and more proactive."

"We have software that monitors the network but it tends to be more of a reactive process and you have to define what you are looking for. With Nexthink I can just monitor everything and if something is different to what it usually is then we can go and have a look," he said.

Impett gave an example where the systems started throwing up reports that a certain Windows 10 version was crashing and that it was made aware of the issue by the software.

"It didn't mean we knew what the problem was, but we were able to get to work on it by applying patches and working to fix it."

Fred Olsen IT chief talks cloud, connectivity and security

IT director Damon Impett on the challenges of running IT for a business with many different divisions

By being more proactive to user issues the firm can provide a better quality of service to end users and try and stop issues before they become more widespread or problematic.

Of course, while software alerting you to issues is all well and good, Impett said he pushed Nexthink hard to guarantee that the software would not require constant training and management.

"One thing we did drive home to Nexthink before we went down this route was that I didn't want more software that gives me a whole load of information but means I need three guys to understand what it means," he said.

"I only have six service desk guys so I can't spare someone to run this full-time, it needed to be simple, just pushing alerts to keep me information and help us meet the return on investment benefit it can offer."

While it is not the core offering of the product, the fact the software can flag up changes to devices has benefits from a security perspective, an area Impett says he is pushing hard to improve within the business.

"I think it's something I was mindful that we were doing well but that we need to stay on top of," he said.

He elaborated that while many current security vendors offer good protection from known threats, there is always a risk a zero-day could come out that leaves the company wide open to attack until an update is issued.

As such behavioural-based technologies, such as those offered by Carbon Black or Cylance, are on the radar at Fred Olsen because they could offer a more complete picture of the security threats the firm is facing

"The nature of our business means ships may not pick up new software updates for days, and that's not necessarily good enough now. We need to be able to spot things as they are happening and behavioural-based systems offer that," he said.

Another topic on the radar for the future is the Internet of Things, although Impett says that for now it remains more of a concept than anything likely to be actively rolled out.

"We do a certain amount of R&D every year and IoT crops up, looking at systems on ships telling us there is an issue, right down to stuff within cabins in ships, so that it would make life easier for guests," he said.

"But is it something that we are pushing actively, no I don't think so, it's just R&D at the moment."