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S1E17: 7 Tactical IT Initiatives to Enable Your Corporate Business Objectives
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Involved solve evolved, welcome tocloud crunched, the parcast for any large enterprise planning on moving to,or is in the midst of, moving to the cloud posted by the cloud computingexperts from Second Watch: Tan Willhby, chief arghitect cloud solutions andskipberry executive director of cloud enablement, and now here are your hostSel, clad crunch. Welcome back to our show anotherepisode of clack crunch this week with my cohost skip baring skip how youdoing good. How are you doing in fantastic nd? I want to welcome backMichael Eliot, who is our senior director of product marketing back tothe show for a more indepth conversation. Thank you. Ann Welcome, Michael Good,to see you again B, be seen. Yeah Yeah, recording this in the dogdays of Summer Twosan and twenty still in the midst of the pandemic. Epandemicis firing up and I think approximately forty two states at this time. So thelandscape is once again shifting not in a positive way for most of us.Unfortunately, and Thour hearts definitely go out to althose affectedby this, both economically and health and life and all those wonderful thingsit takes a deep tol, I think on all of us, but an fortunately you know.Unfortunately, business does need to go on, and so what we're going to do todayis we're going to extend the conversation that we had from ourprevious episode with Michael and wwe're talking about some of thestrategic inititives going on out there and extend that into more specifically and how our itleaders out there responding to the pandemic right now and let's just goahead and dive into this Michael. I think you you've brought someinteresting things up to his prior to the show, and I, I think, they're veryworthy of sharing with our audience. So let's talk about specifically what someof the IT leaders are doing right now to respond to the pandemic, and I wouldimagine that there's a topless of items that that we can probably dig into soMichael. What are you seeing out there? Well, let's begin with talking aboutthe recent I DG survey of Howri t leaders responding to the pandemic, solet's take from what's what the analysts are saying and really the topthree Ar there's a lot more focus on cost control. Number: two they'relooking. How can I improve my it operations and that's really directlydiedto cost control, but how coand I improve my it operations and then thethird redesigning the business process, O let's relook at the business processand how I t can support n there's always been a focus on thesethree, but these tree have really come in to play a lot more lazs or focus around these.You K wwe talk about like a tribling down o the priority. You know andthat's what I dg has kind of been talking about. I think you know EAN andskip you're, probably seeing this focus even more in the conversations you'rehaving for sure yeah Y, it seems to be m. This is where we're at right now-and I know the big question is: When will normal be from a professionalserviceas perspective? Ot Be enggaging again on sight with customers and doingwhat you were accustomed to before right, more a long way away from that,but but nevertheless, it's interesting to hear whether it's t, the big five oryou know, shops like us or others- are handling that and remotes a big part ofit. Of course, yeah definitely remote is is part of it and what I I'm seeing,though, is an interesting trend. I think there's kind of two voats thatpeople are getting into what is a little bit of paralysis, and that'sunderstandable I mean I I truly understand that it is is overwhelmingfor a lot of businesses and people, obviously in general. But secondly, youknow I think you touched on cost controls. That is a huge thing thatwe're seeing people coming back and looking and saying tellme I can savemore money. This is a great time to kind of pause, take a look at it, butthen. Secondly, when you're talking...
...about redesign that business process,I've been involved with more conversations in the last few weeksabout our three year initiatives inside these organizations, and I find thatfascinating. Because Y, U W! These are the types of conversations that we weretrying to drive before, but now they're all coming to the table. I think a lotof people have it depends on the sector, so some people are thriving in thisbusiness. Some people are steady state, obviously in summer suffering, the onesthat are are doing very well, obviously they're trying to keep the lights onand anthey'restayin very busy, but a lot of 'em also were just really saying:what can we do differently going forward? Is this the right time toreally transform our business and I think that's that's, been a reallyreally eyeopening experience and I applaud those people because I don'tknow who said it, but it was like how are you using this time because we'reall stuck at home and how are you going to come out of this better? No, somepeople obviously are' dealing with survival, totally understand that, butwonce you get asked that this is an opportunity for a lot ofpeople to to really kind of reengineer their business. So I it cant beexciting as well Ye. I think that paralysis has ended. People nowunderstand. I have to do something, and what can I do and that's what I kind ofdove into with these seven tactical it initiatives of things they can startdoing and executing upon now. Verses y? U Know the previous of what do I dowell, these seven guys or thing things start to think about now, no matterwhere they are in that state versus they're, hurting mightily and what theycan do versus. This is an opportunity for them absolutely yeah. It loks LE'talk about with some of those seven tacpical its initiatives that stickinto some of those, because I think some of teare going to be veryinteresting to people and they may have not seen it til, it's Tigk in what?What do you think the biggest one is? I don't think her is the biggest one. I Ithink it really depends on where you are in your environment, how this Covanineteen is affecting your business, whether it's creating growthopportunities or it's causing you to reduce expenses dramatically, and we talked alittle bit about that on the last pot gas. You know one of the big ones. I've.Seen, though, is migrating application to the cloud and there's been thisbelief of. If it's notbroke don't fix it, when the reality is, it is brokenow, your applications are aging having to bring in news servers thatdoesn't exist now that opportunity doesn't exist now in a OS patchingdatabases that all these things that are Sune cost now is really the time tostart looking at migrating those applications of the cloud and changingfrom that Katex to an opex model, there's a focus, a plan to MigrateApplica to not get you out of that maintenance and that's another look ofhow can I get out of the maintenance of Os of databases of security? How do Iget out of that and move an application to cloud enable you to do that? So Ithink that's the first big one people are starting to look at. How can I takeadvantage of the cloud where maybe I wasn't before ye that that's a good one, definitelyand skip? I think we're seeing a lot of this too, as far as more amodernizationinitiatives, and it also just a different way of operating, even legacyapplications in the club yeah certain to thank you Michael. I guess from thatperspective, what we're Seein, as well as the it's almost like gasoline on thefire to closed data centers to get out of that business. The the on primeinfrastructure really probably more prevalent than ever before. Right now,Y H and th re there's two ways of looking at closing data. sinters one isjust getting out of that business, completely divesting yourself with thereal estate and everything around that. The other way to look at it, though, ismore of the positive aspect of closing data, centers and report from fourfifty one group from William fellows and Milanie posy, really high lighted,that you know cloud used cloud as a weapon and bringit to the fight against variables. such as uncertainty and rapidly changingmarket conditions and cloud enables you to do that allows you to be responsive,so you can think of closing Dava...
...centers as cost reduction, or you thinkof closing your data senters of what the upside of moving to the cloud willprovide for you and the ability of taking your human capital, which wasaround maintenance now to being able to be more responsive to the market. Soyou know I look at closing data senters, not as a negative perspective, but as apositive perspective hm that's a good point. Yeah. I like a yeah a's, tough time to be Inda tosenter sales, unfortunately, but definitely is getting rid of a lot ofthe capital expenditure going on and what you K. I think it's interestingtoo is that we're in the midst of helping some clients with some ratherlarge migrations, multiple, we had a plan and that's always the best thing.You Know How do you make God laugh or make a plan right and then suddenlythings changed, so we had to go in and help reprioritize that the ability toreturn capital back to the business very rapidly more so than we everthought we would have to. And you know it's good to see that thatmotivation is there we're able to do it, and it's just really the only way we could have possiblyhave done. That is with cloud and a lot of the the technologies that around itthere's a lot of new enabling things that we can get into at some point thatkeep getting deployed by the various clcompanies. Those are just tacticalmethods, but ultimately, what they're doing is allowing h the business torealize a greater outcome much more quickly. Yeah you've seen it an across the boardand skipped as well. There is a big movement to closy datacenters, and it is accelerating looking at that and looking at how you canreturn capital of the company is important and critical, especially froma business driver enabling the business to do some more strategic things for sure yeah. All right, let's talk about itonce you're in there. How do you reduce spend what that's the opposite side of the coin,because you know once you've gone to the cloud many companies that have, andespecially the ones whot went there early all of a sudden. They see thatbill continue to tick up and up and up and a lot of the reasons for that bill growing is not about theapplications they're putting in there, but the size they're used to this modelof their own data center and how they provision, and they just find a server,get a big server, throw the applications in there and not thinkabout it anymore. When you do that e cloud, what you're doing is your overprovisioning, the the compute NU capabilities you need and the storagecapabilitites you need and you're not going back and looking at well. Did Ireally need that big of a compute capable AKE is the reduction. I can doaround that so going in and reexamining your cloud spended how you could reduce.That is something that hasn't occurred in the past. I think something thatcompanies like second watching others are looking. How can we enable that? Iknow eand you've seen some of that around that skip as well. WWHAT are youseeing as far as what of the reductions that you're able to provide people T Ain? I think you brought on the point about atornization as a gake area, justa focus on that from optimizing. Absolutely no. I think that isdefinitely a big one, particularly on a applications that have beenintellectual propertieis owned by the company. I think that's a very, verybig way of doing it too. The second part, too, is is beyond thatmodernization which you know, there's. Obviously a server cost advantageassociated with that intruly only paying for what you use in a lot ofcases, but secondly, it's that operational cost goes way down as well,because now you're using a platform as a service as opposed to a traditionaloperating system model in the cloud. So I think that's one big Area D,sometimes it's hard when we can talk about that- maybe a little bit in thefuture of this pod cast but and how to go about doing that. But the secondpart, too is data data is, is expensive. It's not only expensive to store it'sexpensive to analyze and if you look at some of thes traditional on Pram waysthat you can Y K, ow basically unlock...
...the value of your data and you justkind of lift and shift that into the cloud you truly are probably spending.I don't know I'm going to throw out a number three to five xs more than youprobably should be, while operating in the clot again you're paying for ittwenty four hours a day. There are incredible ways now acrossall the clob providers. TOSTORDATA and add hawk. Do your quaries and analysison em and do all kinds of other. You know dayawarehousing objectives with it,so those are definitely probably the two biggest areas as far as how youshift your mindset in the class, but the second part, too, is also just howdo you initiate that conversation with the clad provider and make a commitmentto them either one or three year, and they all pretty much, have that samekind of mindset associated with it, and then you start really uncovering morebasically, reduction of cost and h again, it's a commitment, there's arisk associated with it, but in three years in cloud is a long time.Sometimes one or o two years might be a lot better t to take a look at acommitment there, yenop completely agreed- and I think following along with and we youtalked about kind of that risk. I think risk is kind of that for thing that I tneeds to be looking at, especially as Y K, O we've gone to remote work force. We haven't really examined our riskprofile, both within our data senters and within our clouds. So reducingwrist is kind o that that forth ite initiative that I kind of bubbled up and that could be a risk from just anincursion and having people break into your systems, but there's also the riskof just your applications play. I love what you know. Companies like Netflixis done with a chaos, monkey and being able to go through and start shuttingoff application to say what happens and looking at the wrist profiles. F R Maround that of and and that'll start to really tell you where do, applicationsneed to live, and where can they live more impactfully and more effectivelyfor your organization, so reducing risks and doing security audits?Looking at things like that, I think are really critical for coming out of ACUV nineteen and the thepressure that it's put on companies, because, if you get hit or if you haveapplications, go down, that's another greater expense that you don't want toadd into what's currently going on. Absolutely downtime is a huge riskassociated a business, particularly if for consumer facing and operatingtwenty four hours a day, a lot of resilience could be built in mucheasier into the cloud. Secondly, too, is there's so many cloud nativetechnologies coming out now that we're seeing as far as security, so analyzingwhat's going on and getting alearting associated with that all CLO providersare are truly dedicated towards that and it just that landscape keepsgetting better and better. Now I did hear something that I thought was veryinteresting. In the last few weeks is B, PN is dying, and so this this might getus into the next category. It's. Why allow your data to really kind oftransition out of the data center and go to the Remo Work Force? Why don'tyou take the remote work force and bring them into the cloud, and I thinka lot of the virtual desktop interfaces that we have ut there now are arereally satisfying that need. So I think this kind of brings it into the nextcaterbarieis. Really, how do you enable that remote work force both foropportunity to expand? Your capabilities and then also do it issecurely way and obviously driving down this operational cost skip what youseeing out there and reduce risks. I mean that's the other thing right,Youha. One area of concern right now is how to you carry on with the projectthat is h. You know taking data out of a data center colloing, some of it andthen also migrating to the cloud, so all that all the while of enabling aremote work force to carry that through. So it's pretty interesting, I mean this.This challenge itself I'll say you know in that Eror of covet isn't going tosolve itself for the next two years...
...right. We have to work through this soand I'll. Take the you know that that's a negative side, but the you knowreduced risk and allowing that I'll. Look at that F how they can enhanceyour business by exactly of how you can bring inskillset and capabilities by enabling remote work force that I think peoplewere reluctant and resisted. Just like people were reluctant resistanct to goto the cloud because the security they don't have that concern anymore whele.They were luctant to have remote staff. I don't think this has shown us thatyou can be successful with remote staff, so ennavaling that remote staff forrecruitment and retention purposes, I think its critical for it to take on asone of those initiatives. They are actually adding value back tothe business again. Wich s the original intention of well, where we are withnot the original, but where we are with. I T right so yeah interesting talkabout the opportunity there to whether it's up level You'R your current staffor find newstaff that can work in that kind of means, as well employerecruitment retension. How does that affect that? Michael Wellwell? The hugeone around that for me is retainment. You know somebody that had to go intothe office every day, because that was a standard you had to go into theoffice and sit at Your Desk Ow this this twenty thirty something year oldgeneration. They don't that's not how they operate. That's not how they wantto work. They want to examine explorer that worklife balance so enabllingpeople to work the way they want to work and trusting that they will beable to not only do their job but grow andexpand, helps from both recruitment perspective, but also helps you retainthe talent that you want to retain, because you know trying to replace thattalent now is getting harder and harder, especially as we change applications.We change how we utilize the cloud. We look towards more things like devops.We look towards you know, cubrunettis. We look for those type of developentcapabilities. They don't want to sit in an office anymore, so enablling, remotework force enabling skill sets that people want to operate, and you knowpeople don't want to be a database administrators anymore. People won'twant to be hyprorviseor administrators. They just don't want to do that. Theywant to learn these new technologies so embracing that and encouraging that andbuilding that into your infrastructure and how you operate is going to beimportant to enabling you to grow versus being a hindreds to your both.Ah We're. Definitely seeing several of our clients encouraging their employeesto definitely get more skilled or upskilled in this area and they'reasking us how to do that. So I want to take a moment and really kind ofencourage our audience that this is something that you want to learn about.You want to become more valuable to your organization and your career.There are many ways, I'm assuming that any of you are stuck at home like weare and if you go on- and you look at some of these these platforms and itdoesn't matter which Clib provider they're all offering some type of freetraining these days and free accounts. It's a easy way to test it out. There'scompanies like quick labs that have the ability for you to go in and try labsout and really do hands on things in two hour chunks you'r. your learning will go way up.You're able to demonstrate your knowledge, there's certifications outthere, there's a great way to get. You Know Demonstrate your knowledge. Youput that on link, then people that are in high tomand. I mean I'm not tryingto make sure you know people run away in his immutiny, but the reality is yougotta? Do it you my avantage point you know from hiring within t PS, Clotonhiplement for US yeah, it's open the opportunities even wider. You know with the remote capability of going into livering and all that kind of stuff, wrapped up so yeah, it's a interestingnew world, but that should actually help employers as well for yourtraditional it staff or your Yve. What...
...would be traditional it staff? So absolutely absolutely so, but once youobviously get upskilled there's a lot of things. You can do and obviouslyobscure a Infa structure that there's also in the development area as well.There's a lot of new ways of doing things and we talked about out modernizationso kind of coming back into that. How Cam we increase the applicationdevelopment speed? Well, I think number one you Gott! You got to commit toincreasing your application development speed you now you gotta you gottafigure out. You know time to value so now traditiontal waterfall wn. We don'ttalk about that anymore, but going to more of a devopz model where you bringdevelopers, you bring operations and if you're, if you're, smart, you bringinsecurity into that as well as well as testing you bring all those together towork together instead of having egothyh one that at goes to the next and hatgoes to the next. Bring it all. Those together and devops methodology enablesyou to increase your application. Development speed were you're notreleasing on a quarterleae basis, you're not releasing on a monthlyyou're, not even releasing on the daily you're doing updates every you knowminute. Every fifteen minutes whatever makes sense, because youve created anorganization that allows and enables us to bring out development to bring outnew applications, new updates to the market that much faster and that muchmore timely that work and if they don't work, you have the ability toimmediately pull them back, make the changes and then bring forward again,no fantastic there, because there again, the cloud companies are definitelycontinuing to enhance the tooling and the capabilities of doing all kinds ofdeployments. We've all read various books, maybe the Phoenix Project orwhatever else an there there's concepts of Canary demployments, Blue Green. Allthese technologies exist now and with a minimal, much more minimal effort thanever is existed before, and it continues to get better so but offtenwe get asked people like it's a daunting task. How am I going to dothis across the board? E're, like don't start across the board, start with asmall team tstart. There start with an easy wind find that right applicationand the right team success will breed success and that's you know it doesn'thave to be across the whole organization, either. There's stillprobably three models of devops or SR E that you want to kind of contain inthere. So it's the very new you know hourly. You know on the spurdeployments, of course, but also how do you manage those steady stateapplications? It could be done B, t a much more agile fashion as well, soyeah m a there's, a lot of things out there sip? What are you seeing outthere yeah? I think every journey starts with the first step, the theproverb or whatever. That is there that H, but that is it. You know kind ofmove slowly with a purpose and with a deliverate time line to actuallyexecute on people that try to go out and just flip the switch it doesn't. Itdoesn't work out yeah the last company I worked at. They did exactly that isthere were three development teams. They took one of the development teamsto Start Tho, implement where this devops model and it took them aboutthree or four months to get it right, but once they had it right, they werethen able able to transfer how that process worked to the next developmentteam, got them up and running and then to the third development team and tothe point where they are now actually implementing changes on a daily basis.It was. It was really unique and interesting to see that transformationwherebefore. They were released it every three months to getting to thepoint where they were releasing daily, really cool to see that process. Yeahtwo customers come to mind, rename nameless but h embrace failure as yourlurn and as you push in this process, it really is Um. You O paramount toactually be successful right and be open, and you know encourage that right, Um th,the more that you can actually help. You know be iterative N in finding outthings at be inclusive, as opposed to...
...exclusive. I think en you said at theBest Youhav success freed success and it's uh tried and true, and I livingtwo customers at th at the moment going through the process, so yeah celebaryfailure, it's okay, fantastic! Well, I want to think bothof you for R Time Today. This has been. I, I think, a very interestingconversation and thank you audience. Thank you always for listening. Thisepisode will rap up our first season of clock crunch well be taken a shortbreak from podcasting and, of course, we'll be continued to research, tond,continuing to educate ourselves on current and relabic cloud issues, andwe will be back in the fall for season too. So please, please, rejoin us! Sothere'll be a little bit of a lull in new episodes, but we will be back andif there are any issues or topics you want to discuss further we'd love tohear from you and your suggestions, please email is that Clav frunch atSecond Watch, dtcom and you'll see those links in the shownotes as well.Thanks aget, everybody have a great week. You've been listening to cloud crunchwith mean willoughby and skipberry for more information check out the block.Second Watch com, slash company and slash blow or reach out to Second Watchunto it.
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