Five areas that will need traceable time in 2023

Author: Richard Hoptroff, CTO and Founder, Hoptroff

ACCORDING TO FORBES, the best resolution for success in the new year is to stop being late. Just ask those who manage busy servers. Because servers deal with thousands of transactions every second, the audit trail can become extremely chaotic if a server’s time is out by even one millisecond.

To make sure they’re on time, firms have historically maintained their own grandmaster clocks and satellite receivers. But as businesses urgently adapt to an era of unprecedented digital acceleration, many are looking for services that offer them more. More security. More flexibility. More for their money. As a result, network-delivered time synchronisation tools are set to dominate the timing market. As Richard Hoptroff, our founder and CTO, explains, there are five main areas that we can expect to see impacted by smarter traceable timing solutions in 2023.

1. Digital dependence will take us to the edge

Lenin once said, “Sometimes nothing happens for decades, then decades happen in weeks.” That happened in 2020. New technology paradigms – working from home, ditching the business trips – are a better work/life balance, lower cost for businesses and better for the environment. Covid-19 forced technology adoption that would have otherwise taken decades. Central business districts will need to re- invent themselves; we’ll need better digital communications from the home; hotels and cafés will need to accommodate hot-deskers. All of this will require pushing traceable data beyond data centres to “the Edge” – our homes, our coffee shops, our cell phones.

2. Trust in data

Rocketing digitalisation means a rocketing concern about the use of digital data. In the next year, global leaders will focus on this question: how can we make data more trustworthy? A recent report by the UK’s Geospatial Commission emphasised that to use data to benefit British industry, it must first prove to be reliable. As the government collects enormous quantities of data from distributed locations, it is vital to prove the time and location of these virtual events.

Traceable Time as a Service (TTaaS) is one solution that synchronises your time and places an accurate timestamp on every piece of data that is transferred across a server so that it is traceable back to UTC and verifiable on a time log. This ensures that your data is in an accurate sequence when it is stored in a central database. This level of precision is essential when you’re playing with public trust. It only takes one mistake to obliterate the conceptual value of data.

3. Resilient infrastructure

2020 threw us the biggest curveball of our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others to come. I predict that 2023 will bring a loss of confidence in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for the delivery of time and position data.

We have become dependent on GNSS; power distribution, mobile phones, Satnav – you name it. All derive their information from satellite timing signals. But in the past two years, monthly attacks occurred across different global industries. This creates huge issues, as much of our critical national infrastructure cannot function in the event of GNSS failure.

We originally developed TTaaS to reduce the costs of time synchronisation for financial services, media and broadcast, gaming, e-commerce, blockchain, and distributed ledger technology. But it has an unexpected benefit: it is resilient to the threat of GNSS failure and can provide accurate time even in the event of a satellite outage.

4. Cloud migration

According to Nomura Instinet’s respected biannual CIO ‘Spending Survey’, 68% of global CIOs now state that “migrating to the public cloud and/or expanding private cloud” is a top driver of IT spending, in contrast to 48% in September 2019. The slow migration to cloud-based solutions has suddenly accelerated because it doesn’t just cut costs: it makes our lives more workable when we have to work remotely with a pared-down task force. But tracking ‘where’ and ‘when’ are not easy in the cloud. Cloud providers are reluctant to provide this kind of traceability because it disrupts their economies of scale and offer of security.

Traceable Time as a Service

TTaaS is one solution that synchronises your time and places an accurate timestamp on every piece of data that is transferred across a server so that it is traceable back to UTC and verifiable on a time log.

5. SMPTE for broadcasting, media and entertainment

Traditionally, broadcast and media services have relied on the satellite model to provide time synchronisation. While satellite has worked reasonably well over the years, it comes with a lot of baggage.

If a vehicle with a GPS jammer drives past Old Trafford when you’re broadcasting the Premier League final, your broadcast will falter. The football fans who are already grumpy about pay per view would not be happy. Media services can look to mitigate these problems with a software timing solution, such as Traceable Time as a Service (TTaaS®).

Engineers will start synchronising time on their appliances to the production centre by downloading simple time synchronisation software to open up the opportunity for technicians to work remotely. The same is true for those who continue to use OB trucks and remote facilities – by using an alternative to the satellite, there is one less thing to transport around different locations.