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S2E08: CXO Considerations: Moving to the Cloud for the Right Reasons
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
...involve Solve, evolve. Welcome to cloudCrunch The podcast for any large enterprise planning on moving to or isin the midst of moving to the cloud hosted by the cloud computing expertsfrom Second Watch, Ian will be chief architect Cloud Solutions and Skip Veryexecutive director of Cloud Enablement. And now, here are your hosts of CloudCrunch. Welcome back to Clap Crunch. I'm joined today with my co host Skip.Very Welcome back, Skip. Hey, thanks for having me again. In excited. Yeah,absolutely. This is great. I gotta be honest with you. I'm very excited aboutthis episode for many reasons, and you'll figure out why in a second, mostpeople today are familiar with the basic benefit achievable by moving tothe cloud. Of course we are. That's what we talk about all the time.Scalability to faster speed to market and cost savings to just some of theitems that we talk about frequently. But when you're considering moving tothe cloud, you should really take a personal examination of your goals formigrating. Are you trying to drive innovation, save money? Or is itsomething your boss just told you to dio? If that's the case. You shouldprobably do it to maximize the value of the cloud. You have to make sure you'removing fast for the right reasons. Today we have our very own second WatchCEO, Doug Schneider, on the podcast with us to talk just about that.Welcome, Doug to our show. Thank you in. Hello, Skip. Hello. Nice to spend time.So if you guys and I will not pull the boss card on you and tell you what todio e way were ready to migrate dog way, it Zaveri Valid point. We're going toget into that because often way joke about that the intro here. But we'veheard that before. And, you know, it's and and we we try to challenge thatthinking. So today, what we're gonna do is kind of get into a discussion aboutthe things that Doug you're seeing out there. And then what kind of balance?That with Skip and I a little bit more of the tactical in the trenches, day today type stuff. So, you know, we're excited about this, So maybe Yeah, Iwas gonna say in just a good way to start because Doug sees a lot of ourcustomers again from the the sea level. What have you and Doug maybe share withour guests? What you see from the drivers, really where we are today inthe state would be helpful for our listeners to hear your e. Appreciatethat. I was actually speaking with CTO, one of our large clients a couple ofweeks ago, and and it was interesting in the conversation because they'vebeen a longstanding client for a couple years. And while we've helped them, youknow, in things like migrations in their journey, there's a growingrecognition that sometimes the word migration or the bird transformationseems like, you know, just to start in a stock point or destination. A lot ofpeople are recognizing that it's actually you know more about gettinginto some different form of a continuous motion as a business. Um,that's really fueled by this new, you know, operating paradigm of digitaltransformation with the public. Cloud ultimately is really being theoperating system to build your business on, you know, to get the outcomes thatyou're looking for. The other interesting thing about, you know,thinking about outcomes that folks are looking for, You know, you hear thismore and more again, it's about speed and flexibility and agility. I like touse the word sometimes flexibility because you could go really fast down aone way street super fast. That's great. But you need to add into that theflexibility and the agility toe actually adapt with a lot of the risksthat are occurring on in the world. And that's actually what people arestarting to recognize. The pandemic kind of opened up that view wherepeople are starting to appreciate that...
...they weren't necessarily prepared todeal with the unknowns, Okay, But those that had been further in their cloudjourneys and we're already starting to get into this continuous motion in somesenses transformation. They were actually able to adapt better andcontinued to run faster. The last thing I'll just kind of end on it was veryinteresting. If, you know, we just sort of reinvents going on right now.Obviously, the annual show with AWS and Andy Jassy always does a phenomenal job,this keynote and he spent a lot of time talking about kind of these core thingsthat businesses, you know, these attributes that businesses really needto take on and the big big one. He talked about quite a bit, emphasizedwith speed and then need to go fast. And I think people are feeling thatMawr and Mawr now because of you know whether it's the competitiveenvironment, whether it's a macro economic environment where it's apolitical environment or something completely out of your control. Yeah,very interesting. And it rings true. Even eso those of the conversationsyou're having at your level and I'll say Ian's level in the pretty littleside and me and the delivery side It all rings true as's faras thetransformation aspect of it. You know, what are some of the struggles,challenges, opportunities there that will say the C suite is dealing with.And how do we I guess, you know, help our listeners look at some of thesethings that are, you know, give him confidence that the day old problemthat has always been there. Yeah, I think the C suite has a greaterappreciation for both. Not just the imperative. Okay, Thio, start sayingHey, we got it. Go tell that guy to get us to the public cloud, right? I thinkthere's, you know, there's that imperative that still there. But Ithink there's a greater appreciation about, you know, how do you think aboutbeing successful and that there is this aspect of, you know, the technology,Ultimately, in some ways is the easy part of the equation, and the people inthe process is, as we all know, that's that's where a lot of your risk comesin the play, right? And if you think about you know what, How you thinkabout both strategy and tactics, you may have a great strategy, right, andyou may have that strategy, right? But if you're execution is poor, you know,then you still haven't succeeded. And I think there's a greater appreciationthat when you think about you know, the execution side of it in the tacticsides, the process side and the people side people are recognizing arm or umor important. The other thing that I think is interesting too, is and thiswas just ah report came out from four or 51 research recently on this issueof skills and people, and and it was basically called out. I think the datapoint was, is that 85% of enterprises have deficits in cloud expertise. Andif you looked at the top three years, where those deficits where it was,cloud platforms cloud native engineering, insecurity. And so you seethat there's this understanding of how important those are in the execution.But there's also a recognition of the gap from the people's skill standpoint,right? So drilling into that further, you're talking to different executivesout there. And obviously we're in the cloud. I would say we're cloud, so it'sa little different for us. But the counterparts out there, how are theygoing about trying to evangelize or solve those people problems? Becauseoften we see this right? It starts. It appears to be a technical challenge.Yeah, but when you dig into the why, why, why he find out it's peoplechallenge. Yeah, well, it's interesting, I think, how some people haveapproached it. And some, I think that recognized this a couple years agoleaned into it in terms of saying, How do we actually, as an I T. Organizationreinvent ourselves a little bit...
...culturally so we can attract the typeof talent that maybe is, you know, hasn't lived in the traditional worldas much, but it's been born in the cloud more, and it is really lookingfor certain things. You know, that they want to do in terms of how they operateoutside of the company, because what we know is, you know, if you take someonewho's been in a traditional I T business, you know for decades andsomeone who's just kind of arriving into the world coming out more from aborn in the cloud, software oriented and services on demand mindset, the waythey wanna work and the things they want to do are very different. And sosome people have recognized that we actually have to just set ourselves uptoe, almost look more like a start up in a way right and create some of thatenvironment. And we've seen that some of our clients do some really greatthings to do that, to attract the right people. So that's one thing. But it'salso then this notion where we see it today with our customers, where thereoften looking at someone like this, which is saying, Hey, don't come inhere and just kind of do it for me I need you to do it with me, and you needto kind of work alongside my people so and that and And we embrace thatbecause we're big believers, that our job is to empower our enterprises tohelp him adopt leverage and optimize the cloud. So we embrace that. That'sanother thing that we see going on. It's harder. Some do, obviously in thateffort try to spend, you know, repurpose and invest in their employees,and that can be successful to a degree. But I don't think it's just one thing.It's a combination of things, e. I think reinvent this year had some veryinteresting business focused keynotes, I believe. And I just have a couple ofpoints that they made up here in my notes talent that is hungry to invent.We think we definitely would agree with that. I love the one is acknowledgementthat you can't fight gravity. Andi, I think the reality is this. This cloudor digital transformation is a freight train coming at a lot of people thatprobably terrified of it. And yeah, and I do like their model is Well, Skippytalked about doing it with him. Yeah, you know, I think we have to up skill,everybody, the whole workforce. You think this is an interesting pointbecause I think there's also Here's where I think organizationally there'sThere's broader understanding to is. Often when people talk about the cloud,they just think about it from a technical dimension. We're operatingdimension, and the reality is the cloud is a whole new kind of againconsumption based model. And so there's this whole financial dimension to thatpeople are trying to adapt to and figure out. And I think what we've allrecognized in our business with our clients and the way we've approached it.We've always looked at those three things the financial, the technicallyoperating dimension as highly dynamic and very interrelated. And you've gotto kind of think about your transformation along those threedimensions to yeah, good, good drivers all around there. How about some of theproblems that you mitigate once you get there? Let's talk about that right? Sowe're trying to give confidence to the C suite and, you know, down my levelwhere I'm in the trenches every day with delivering this, you know it's abattle, but from your perspective, Doug. You know, what's the what's theconvincing argument of the talk track around the problems, you know,migrating to the cloud once you're there that we solve. Really? At the endof the day, if you if you think about it from a executive level for C suite,Yeah, so a couple things one, You know, I'd say there's a broad category ofjust how are you helping me mitigate risk is I continue to kind of pursuethese outcomes I'm looking for in my business and and some of that riskmitigation help start getting at solving problems that you used to havebefore eso. Some of those problems...
...could be things like, How are you?Quickly scaling your resource is to deal with increasing demand that mightbe unexpected if you start to have some success with a particular applicationor how you actually really dealing with Hey, my budget is fixed, but I need to,you know, invest in other areas. So what am I going to say no to or what amI going to gain some efficiencies from, and actually what the cloud can do foryou is make you more efficient right. It can either decrease some of theinputs into the prior services you are doing or increase your outputs andeffectiveness because you're just able to get better scalability with it withthe cloud services that you have. So it does address this problem of how do Ikeep scaling without having to invest super heavily thio achieve that scale.Three other big one, too that you just can't underestimate. And it kind ofgoes back to what I was talking about earlier. Is this again this notion ofinnovation and how do we get into position so we can actually innovatefaster? And that's something that a lot of businesses it's a problem thateverybody has is how do we continue thio innovate faster and sometimes youdon't know what that innovation should be. But if you've actually gotten intothe public cloud and more of this continuous cadence in the digitaltransformation, you're then in position Thio adapt and deal with those s O.That solves that problem of kind of addressing the unknowns and the changesthat you just don't know what's gonna happen on the road ahead. What about Iknow you well. You, Ian and I all talked yesterday separately, but justabout data strategy, right is a thing. Talk about that a little bit from fromyour perspective. Yeah. I actually think we're getting into this next wavealmost where ah lot of the digital transformation motion was. You know, alot of it started with infrastructure modernization. I'll just saying, Youknow what? A base level and that's where you know, it started withinfrastructure as a service and and now you're starting to see kind of thesetwo other past start to accelerate. There's the application modernizationbecause people are evolving. Hey, migration is about lift and shift. It'sit's not its just lift, unevolved plus right, help me continue to kind of geteven deeper with my applications and being more cloud native. And then thatactually has this tangential relationship. Well, guess what? There'sa lot of data tied to those applications. So if you push mawr ontrying to say, How are we gonna modernizer applications you cannotavoid Theis, you of looking at your database architectures and how you'releveraging that data. And so in some sense, they're both interconnected. Butthey can also be on their own kind of separate transformation journey in away. And I think what we're really starting to see, these people arerecognizing the importance now saying, You know what? I have to actually startreally getting more strategic and thoughtful around my cloudtransformation with my whole data footprint, whether it's the underlyingarchitectures or the top level analytics like, Yeah, this is the dataside goes so broad and deep. It's a cornerstone of getting it right. Youknow, we're talking about database modernization, getting out from, youknow, long term licensing agreements, getting some flexibility, but at thesame time re engineering the whole data structure. Thio. Really? You know,we're starting to see customers monetize their data, which they'venever considered doing before. So I'm very excited about that one. Yeah, it'skind of, uh not only can you save some money, but it looks like you canactually drive innovation and potentially customer value in revenueat the same time. Yeah, and I think people are really starting. Appreciatethat. That you can actually unlock value in that data that was maybe justconsumed internally in a very siloed way and particularly is people arestarting to modernize your application footprint and decompose thoseapplications with micro services. The...
...reality is data starts to become thisbackbone and glue that's kind of pulled from and fed into a lot of differentapplications. And that's how you start to monetize it, either directly orindirectly. Yeah, it's not easy. I know it's not. I wish I actually wish it waseasier, but that's I guess it was easier. Maybe we wouldn't have as muchbusiness way E. Oh, yeah, you know. And that's and I think that's, you know,way were just kind of retrace what we're talking about. One of I think thechallenges with the public cloud. I mean, it creates so much opportunity.But as we talked about those three dimensions, you know, the public cloudis constantly changing. I mean, just look at what happened at reinvent thispast couple of weeks with all the new announcements, and I think that's justboth. The dilemma and the opportunity for enterprises is you're not onlytrying to transform from where you were to kind of some other state, but thatstate is constantly changing on you. And so that's where it's this motionabout It's not an event for you. It's really about getting to a continuousmotion in a digital transformation. So we often run into a situation with someof the people that we deal with that customers, and they may be a directoror senior level type person in engineering. What they struggle with isthey know these things need to be done in the future, but they have a hardtime articulating the value to the executives. Do you feel you know, whatare the hot buttons that they should be drilling in? There is a cost savings,the innovation, new revenue, opportunities E. I'm going to say thecost savings is the least important one. And I'm going to say the cost savingsand more about repurpose ing of dollars to help you achieve those other things.So you know what? All companies are starving for the end, not starving forBut at the end of the day, ah, lot of companies air really focused on, youknow, three things. How doe I get grow and keep my customers and ah, lot ofthat comes back down to you know how you innovating, um, to give them newexperiences to sell them new products and services and also delight them withyour services and products. So they stay. And so that ultimately is reallythe core folks. And that's really mawr being put on because I t is evolvingfrom being thought of. It's a cost center to a business enabler. And so itis less about how are you going to save money here? You know, I t organization.It's really more about no hiding and empower the business. Thio get newcustomers to keep the customers we have and growing more. Yeah, I just want torepeat that one more time because that is a great way of framing that up. Soit's to keep grow and obtain new customers. Yeah. Yeah, you're any bit.It's about getting customers, keeping them and growing them. Okay, so okay, sSo it's a little tactical advice to some of our audiences struggle becauseI think that's putting together business case around those threeelements is probably thio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then some of the way you mayget at that is you're able to repurpose some of the where you are spending yourmoney before you know, to help go achieve those things. So to me, thecost savings things is more of a tactic about how you achieve the strategicthings, which is really about How do you get keep and grow your customers? So let's kind of go into an antiquestion about the cloud right now. It Z Is it always the right answer? Youknow? Not always. You know, we like to. Obviously, we're always biasedourselves is a born in the cloud solutions provider, so but I've evensaved for us. Well, we sometimes no, it's not always the answer on git.Sometimes could be. It's not that the answer right now. And it could be thatthere's just some other things that you...
...know need to get addressed or dealtwith first and sometimes those air people related things or processrelated things. But, you know, again, you can't think of it is the cloud isthe answer because it's really again. It's the technology operating systemplatform that everyone's kind of going to. But even if you deploy it, I mean,it's an enabler to help you get the answers that you want. What about s soif you look at that just extended a little farther. The potential risksreally of migrating there would have, you know, again from from your vantage,you know, I could get technical day, that ideo Yeah. Yeah, And you guys, youguys can address the technical things better than I could, but I do. You knowwhat? I do believe in general? You know, the risk that used to be thought of inthere years ago or different, right? There used to be greater concerns, youknow, out of the gate around just so putting production workloads, you know,Are they going to really do what they need to do? So I think the risk in someways get back to you have to think about day two. And I think that's whatwe all recognized as well is that some people, when they're kind of goingthrough this stuff, you can kind of say, Hey, we've arrived. We've done thistransformation. But we know Day two is always there, and it's kind of like howare you going to kind of continue to leverage and optimize what you're doingwith the public cloud in a day to perspective, In the backdrop of havingthis constant change, the other risk that air really, really candidly, oursecurity and compliance. All right. And that's where you know, people just havetoe have Ah, this is where you know the skill set issue comes into play. Andthere's this aspect of people, existing associates and your company needing toelearn, but also kind of Sometimes they're learning by doing and learningby making mistakes, which is okay, right? But some of the learned by doingcan create risk when you think about just your own security and complianceposture and the public cloud, and we see that often that it's not it's kindof something wasn't configured or architected the right way. It's notthat the public cloud isn't secure or isn't compliant. It's the way it wasconfigured are architected that has created the risk right, which is theyou know, the adage I use a lot of times is it's not the panacea of all.Thank you would have had that on premise. Well, right. So again, it Zyeah, yeah. So Well, well stated, Doug. Thank you. Yeah. So one of the lastthings I'd like to ask you, Doug kind of put you on the spot here is 2021. Doyou have any predictions about the state of digital transformations? Yeah.I mean, it's not necessarily, you know, earth shattering. But the more people Italked to there is this growing feeling that things were just gonna accelerate.Right. And I think, you know, people are now, you know, putting in. I thinkthey'll probably accelerate more to once people sort out. Just, you know,kind of what the new normal is, Um, coming out of the pandemic. And they'vekind of got different budgets kind of out there to deal with that. But by andfar, there is a general feeling that, you know, people are going toaccelerate their digital transformations. They're also going tothink about risk differently. Okay. And what I mean by that, you know, beforeif you still had your own data center doing stuff, if anything, the pandemichas highlighted the question of why Why do we have that? People can't get intoit. I can't, you know, maybe get the access that you know. So there'sthere's definitely, you know, the risk profile in terms of enterprises lookingat what do we strategically keep doing ourselves versus what do we outsource?Because there's a different risk profile for us to think about that insource versus outsourced decision now.
So I think they're going to rely a bitmawr on others where they can and get very more focused on what'sstrategically core to the business. And at the end of day. A lot of that answeris in the application, and the data layer for the business makes sense.Makes sense. That's great. Well, thank you, everybody, Skip. Always good tosee your smiling face. Hey, Likewise, Ian and Doug, thank you very very muchfor joining us. Yeah, skipped. Enjoyed it, and he and thank you to absolutelythank everybody for listening. We love to hear from you. Please email us atCloud Crunch at second watch dot com with your comments, questions and ideas.Thank you. You've been listening to Cloud Crunchwith Ian Willoughby and Skip Very. For more information, check out the blogged.Second watch dot com slash company slash block or reach out to secondwatch on Twitter.
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