CLOUDBUSTING

We are so glad to be back with a brand new season of Cloudbusting! This week we welcome new co-host, Darren Bowling, a Senior Cloud Advisor at Cloudreach, and spend some time with Floor Bleeker, Group CTO at Accor. In this episode, Jez, Darren, and Floor discuss the evolving role of the CIO, how it's changed over the last few years, and what the future holds for CIOs looking to retain influence and relevance within their organisations. 

In the final episode of the season, and part II of The Long Goodbye, the team welcome returning guest Holly Norman to discuss and recap our cloud trend predictions over the last few years. Each year at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, we record and release a set of trends episodes live from the show floor, so we wanted to take the time to review, dissect, and discuss what we've learned. The team draw on themes across our 2020, 2021, and 2022 trends including adaptable organisations, tech making it into boardroom conversations throughout the pandemic, and what it means to be a cloud native organisation.

We've got some sad news to share this week, Dave is leaving the pod! So to see him off in style, we've put together two very special final episodes - bringing back a few beloved guests, welcoming Dan Dan Producer Man back behind the mic, and having a look back at some industry trends and pod highlights throughout our time together. In Dave's penultimate episode, the team are initially joined by Nelson Wootton, CEO of SaaScada, to discuss his experience in the industry and SaaScada's cloud journey over the last few years - namely, how the conversation around cloud adoption has shifted from "what if we?" to "how can we?". We then welcome back two longstanding friends of the show for a second deep dive, Duena Blomstrom, CEO of People Not Tech, and Alastair Kidd, a Systemic Leadership Coach. Together the group reflect on how leadership styles and ways of working have evolved and shifted over the last few years, leaning in on psychological safety and the importance of focus on people throughout a transformation.

Why scissors?  Find out why this week's guest, Maggie Fox, took up interest in the scissor industry and is creating awareness around the history of the product. She describes the end to end manufacturing process and its intersection to cloud technology - “ancient process meets new technology.”  Learn about how she became an entrepreneur by starting this very new business and how the cloud enabled her ramp up time to be so quick.  Listen in to see if you will be convinced your scissors should be as good as your knives?  

Mark Ross, Lead Cloud Architect at Atos, joins the podcast to discuss the “Coaching Hub” at Atos and the importance of continuous education in retaining current employees. Find out why the coaching hub started and how employees transition through it during their tenure. He goes on to stress the importance of building a community and a cloud native culture to bridge the gap between online learning and real life.  When employees engage with other like-minded individuals and apply their work to customer engagements, they gain the experience and confidence to go further in their continuous Cloud Education.  Interested in getting into the Cloud Industry?  Mark remarks that anyone can do it, it just takes a good education program and the support of business leaders to upskill their teams. 

This week, Jez and Dave are joined by Adam Carmel, Founder and CEO of Polly, a cloud native disruptor to the mortgage industry. In this episode, we discuss how cloud is enabling greater flexibility, faster and continuous deployments of new features, and faster time to market for Polly. Adam gives insight into how building a backend from scratch, maximizing customization for users, automating workflows, and leveraging cloud based analytics, machine learning and AI are all helping drive better ROI and benefits for customers.

During today's episode, we discuss FinOps with our very own Head of FinOps at Cloudreach, Stephen Old.  Stephen made an interesting segway into the tech and FinOps industry, which he covers in the first portion of the podcast. Since his entry into the growing industry he's learned quite a bit about the real definition of financial management of the cloud.  He explains it's more than just financial optimization.  A true FinOps consultant should know what ‘good' looks like and really help customers make decisions about their spending and the business value that can be extracted from metrics. Dive into this episode to learn why FinOps is far from traditional IT Finance. 

Maggie Fox joins us to further explore what we really mean by Digital Quotient - one of our 2022 Cloud Trends.  Maggie is very experienced in the digital marketing space with credit for starting the first social media consultancy, Social Media Group, business advisor to many high-growth companies and a frequent speaker on digital transformation.  During this discussion with Dave and Jez, Maggie dives into the massive digital changes organizations experienced in 2020 and how company cultures were able to adapt and change quicker than ever before, setting the standard going forward that many projects that used to take months or even years to plan now have the expectation of being completed in a matter of weeks!  While we might still be coming up with the exact definition of digital quotient - we're all experiencing it in our daily lives.  Listen to this episode to hear why.

Jed Yueh joins us on the Cloudbusting podcast this week to discuss his journey towards engineering disruption through his previous and current companies.  He goes into describing a wide variety of scenarios to our listeners on what it takes to disrupt the digital space in a big way and how he's seen success using data.  Using examples like TikTok, Snapchat and the like, he describes why these companies are so successful in their niche.  Find out what it means for a company to be carbon negative and not just talk about sustainability but take action.  It's no longer a trend to talk about the environment but time to take real action. Of course, we wrap up the episode with some really interesting and personable ten-second recommendations this week.  Any guesses on the latest sport to take over America? 

What is the real difference between Automated Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)? This week, Dave and Jez are joined by returning guest, Phil Le-Brun, Enterprise Strategist at AWS, as they unpack data strategies, machine learning use cases, and some practical advice to get enterprises started on their data journey. Drawing on experience working with LexusNexus, Moderna, Formula 1 and more, Phil talks us through how these organizations have delivered better customer experiences through AI and ML. If you're looking to get started in the AI and ML space, listen in for Phil's guidance on your next steps.

Is your enterprise just getting started on its cloud security monitoring journey?  Hear from our guest and CEO of Panther Labs, Jack Naglieri, on some of the biggest challenges he sees in the data security space and even an example of a recent public data breach.  Panther labs provides a cloud native threat detection platform that uses services to scale up workloads as needed by customer demands. He shares with us how he got his start at some of the leading silicon valley tech companies and where the idea and need for Panther Labs came from.   Finally, he provides his view on how to implement a threat detection platform on a cloud environment and the benefits of this compared to traditional, off-the-shelf software.   Not sure where to get started?  Jack provides advice on where to get started and precautions you can take today with your employees to ensure phishing, the easiest way to hack an environment, is prevented. 

As the demand for software continues to outpace supply of people capable of delivering it, are DevOps and Agile methodologies making the situation worse? Dave and Jez are joined by Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital and DevOps enthusiast, for a fascinating discussion on whether or not we're getting too good at Agile and consequently making developers lives less efficient and more complex.

Let's talk about today's Cloud Trends! In this episode, Dave and Jez are joined by Carla Arend, a lead analyst for IDC's (International Data Corporation) European cloud research. IDC and Cloudreach recently partnered in interviewing over 610 IT leadership professionals across North America and Europe to learn their thoughts on cloud modernization topics.This discussion summarizes some of the most interesting finds, including how digital leaders feel about public cloud being essential for their organization along with the reasoning for investing in digital transformation.  Cost savings no longer appears to be the primary driver.  Listen to the episode for a summary of the research findings and check out our Cloud Trends page for a fully readout on the research.

The cloud skills gap is a well recognized reality, but are we having the right conversation to solve it?  Let's change the narrative - Are the skills needed today going to be the skills needed tomorrow? Join us as we talk with Sally Eaves, Chair of Global Cyber Trust and CEO of Aspirational Features, to discuss the talent challenges many companies are facing today.   The expectations of not only consumers are changing, but the expectations of employees are changing.  Find out what areas employers should focus on offering to their workforce.

Michael Davis, CEO and Founder at Merek Security Solutions, walks us through his journey to building his business around mindfulness and cybersecurity.  Michael uses proven mindfulness directives and exercises to best align Information Security posture for clients, taking a proactive vs. reactive approach to cybersecurity for business continuity.  Find out about how mindfulness in the corporate world can connect to an improved security posture. And get the answer to what ‘digital pausing' is along with how many times more likely you are to experience a cyberattack if not using multi-factor authentication.  Listen in to learn more.

Join Jez as he runs us through a recap of the 2022 Cloud Trends and alludes to our impending ebooks and podcasts set to publish around the research that went into these predictions imminently! This episode takes a bit of a break from our regular topic-based discussions.  Instead, we recap the Cloudy Cliffhangers from our Cloud Trends-based boothcasts at AWS re:Invent 2021 as we look ahead to release the IDC research behind the Cloud Trends.  If you want to re-listen to any of the specific trend podcasts with our cloud enterprise guests, go to the podcasts posted from Dec 1 - 6, 2021. 

What an episode!  What are containers, anyways? This episode provides an overview of not only containers, but Kubernetes, something called GitOps and Azure Arc.  Have a listen as Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager at Azure, defines this all for us. He tells us why GitOps is becoming the center of the universe and names some great resources on where to go to learn more about all of these topics.

This episode, Jez and Dave are joined by Michael Krigsman, publisher of CXOTalk, for a discussion on the impact the customer has on digital transformation.  Michael emphasizes why thoroughly understanding your customer puts you in a better place to create effective products and implement ideas that ultimately result in closing sales. The more data you have on your customers, the better customer experience can be created, and the pandemic revealed many examples of this.  Give this episode a listen to find out why Michael transitioned from consulting into the podcast space and more about his thoughts on business disruption in the world today.

In our second episode of the new season, “Cloud Migrations, What Have We Learned?” Marc Weaver joins the Cloudbusting team for a lively talk about Cloud Migrations. Marc was named one of 2020's “Top 20 Cloud Influencers” and in 2021 he was recognized as a top influencer in cloud computing by Simplilearn, the world's #1 online bootcamp. Today, Marc is an AWS cloud migration expert and top-ranked AWS solutions architect who founded the company “databasable,” after 15 years experience working for large financial institutions in London, Sydney and New York.  Join our hosts Dave and Jez as they leap into and unravel cloud migration archetypes while taking a detour through data centers, databases and close with the beloved Ten Second Recommendations. 

The new season of Cloudbusting starts with “Gaming and the Cloud” as our team chats with Theo Priestley, technology evangelist, futurist and creator of the Metanomic Engine™. Theo is also founder of Carbon Based Lifeforms whose Project Gateway, a sci-fi open-world MMO (massively multiplayer online),  looks to redefine what it means to create virtual worlds. Join Dave and Jez as they chat about Web3, Metaverse and Gaming-as-a-Service among other topics. It's a special episode complete with a Cloudy Cliffhanger and in-depth history of gaming with a twist. 

This Cloudbusting podcast season finale, "A How-To Guide for Digital Product Launches," features Todd Kiehn, Sr. Vice President, Product Management at GTT. Kiehn shares his insights on bringing products to market and, together with our team, takes a deep dive into product development as a discipline. Listen in as this episode explores the big challenges beyond the general mechanics of product development into the art and balance of speed to market versus product quality. Finally, it's our Holiday Edition with special TSRs. Happy New Year! 

This week the Cloudbusting Podcast Team meets with renowned Futurist and Humanist, Gerd Leonhard, "one of the most influential people in Europe," for Episode #125 "The Future of Technology and Humanity." Listen in and find out why The Wall Street Journal called Gerd "one of the leading Media Futurists in the World" and Wired Magazine appointed Gerd #88 of the top 100 influencers  in Europe. Leonhard has written 5 books including the best-selling ‘Technology vs Humanity" and his films on the future of technology and humanity, digital transformation and artificial intelligence have reached millions of viewers. 

In this week's episode, "Google's Sustainability Initiatives," Jeff Sternberg, Technical Director, Applied AI at Google Cloud Office of the CTO, joins our Cloudbusting Podcast Team to chat about the COP26 Conference, carbon free versus net zero, sustainable finance and we get an update on Earth Engine from Google's Cloud Next '21 announcements.

“Security Implications of Cloud Trends” is a bonus segment to our annual Cloud Trends miniseries.  Recorded LIVE from the Cloudbusting “Boothcast” at AWS re:Invent, in Las Vegas, our hosts are joined by Clarke Rodgers (AWS) Enterprise Security Strategist.

Cloud Trend #5, recorded LIVE from the Cloudbusting “Boothcast” at AWS re:Invent, in Las Vegas, is “The Talent Crisis” and features Cloudreahers Tara Tapper, Chief People Officer and Holly Norman Head of AWS Marketing. Together they offer insight into an industry-wide challenge that includes a lack of investment on the supply side as well as diversity issues for the tech sector in general. As the cloud scales, the need for talent at all levels has risen exponentially, demanding the next level of recruitment, education and services. A cornerstone responsibility of all of us is to unlock potential from all backgrounds and unleash the next generation of cloud super stars.

The Cloudbusting Podcast team delivers another LIVE "Boothcast" from AWS re:Invent, in Las Vegas, with our very own Sammy Cheung, Cloudreach Principal Technical Advisor. Listen in as Sammy chats with Dave and Jez for Cloud Trend #3 “Living on the Edge.” Scale ML models are using the power of Edge and Fog compute to drive new experience and functionality to areas the public cloud cannot easily reach.  In turn, they are driving an important evolution in the application architecture possibilities of the cloud.

"Decarbonize yr Tech" is Cloud Trend #6 recorded LIVE from the Cloudbusting "Boothcast" at AWS re:Invent, in Las Vegas.  This episode welcomes guests Keisha Garcia, VP Digital Foundations Programs (bp) & Thomas Blood (AWS) Digital Innovation Leader. Get insight on Sustainability and Decarbonisation, find out how tech allows us to measure impact and also proactively do something about it. "Decarbonize yr Tech."  Optimizing consumption is no longer about simply managing your financial expenditure, but managing your wider impacts in real time. The call to action is clear and the services and tooling are now available to deliver granular control over carbon footprint. Net Zero is just the start

Episode 4 of 7 in our Cloud Trends 2022 miniseries is brought to you LIVE from the Cloudbusting "Boothcast" at AWS re:Invent, in Las Vegas.  In this segment, hosts Dave and Jez discuss characteristics of modern leadership and digital maturity in "Developing DQ" with Enterprise Strategist and former CIO, Phil Le-Brun (AWS).  Are your leaders thinking with a digital mindset? Your Digital Quotient is not just a measure of organizational maturity but, critically, of each leader's ability to think and operate cloud natively.

The LIVE Cloudbusting “Boothcast” continues from AWS re:Invent, in Las Vegas, as Dave and Jez present “Cloud Trends 2022.” Cloud Trend #2, is “AI/Data Driven Migration & Modernisation” and features Jonathan Allen (AWS), Director, Enterprise Strategy.  Use of AI/ML and historical data removes both time and cost from migration + modernization. Automation of these underlying basic tasks allows break through cloud innovation to happen faster and at scale.

This week the Cloudbusting team is in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent, a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. Join Dave and Jez as they present “Cloud Trends 2022” through a series of seven LIVE Boothcast. The first session, Cloud Trend #1, is “The Cloud Native Enterprise” featuring guest Jake Burns (AWS) Enterprise Strategist.  Business experimentation joining up with larger scale IT transformation is good, but it's not enough. To break through to new levels of performance, both need to come together with the right level of ambition and culture.

This week's episode, "The Developer-Led Landscape," features Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, who shares his top trends in DevOps and views on how DevOps and DevOps landscapes differ. Jewell also sheds light on causes for the growing tech talent shortage and the increasing imbalance of demand for solutions in the API economy. 

This week, the Cloudbusting team is joined by Mike Pfeiffer, Founder and CEO of CloudSkills. Mike educates and advises individuals and teams on their Cloud and DevOps engineering journey using blended learning experiences. Listen in for career inspiration about cloud-native technologies and “Get in the Game!”

As a partner at McKinsey, James Kaplan helps major institutions in financial services, health care and manufacturing transform their technology capabilities. In this week's episode, Kaplan joins Jez and Dave for an insightful conversation about "How to Get Value from the Cloud." 

Maggie Fox, Board Director Consultant, Smile.io (former COO), Global CMO and Digital Marketer shares her Five-Part Process for successful digital transformation. Whether it's your work or your customers, change is hard and you only get one shot at it. Maggie's five simple tips can help you get on the right path to digital transformation - and stay there.

This week's show explores challenges organizations face when recruiting tech talent, diversity and inclusion concerns within the tech industry and what some organizations are doing about it.  Featured Guest: Michael Aghataher - Principal Partner Development Mgr - AWS  Poonam Flammarion -  Head of Talent Academy - Cloudreach

John Culkin, Solutions Architect, joins Jez and Dave to discuss utilization of AWS Solutions. Culkin talks about the genesis of AWS Solutions and how they were born out of a need to accelerate innovation opportunities through rapid prototyping and turning to the cloud as a mission critical resource. 

The team's healthcare journey continues with Diana Kennedy, Chief Technology Officer at Bupa, as they continue the conversation in part 2 of "Modernization in the Healthcare Sector.” Join them as they discuss the framework needed for transformation, centered around execution and delivery through three critical KPI's. 

This week's episode centers around cloud adoption in the SE Asian market. Our guest, Bernd Nordhausen, a 30-year resident of Singapore, offers on-the-ground observations including data residency requirements, cloud unicorns and what's driving change in the expansively growing region. 

This week's show explores challenges organizations face when recruiting tech talent, diversity and inclusion concerns within the tech industry and what some organizations are doing about it.  Featured Guest: Michael Aghataher - Principal Partner Development Mgr - AWS  Poonam Flammarion -  Head of Talent Academy - Cloudreach

This week we are once again joined by Nikki Baird, VP Retail Innovation at Aptos. Nikki builds on her observations about the future of consumer retail experiences, from contactless shopping to a new “blended” digital purchase journey. Join Jez and Dave as they explore some of the driving forces of omnichannel retail and technology challenges therein. 

The new season of @Cloudbusting is out, featuring an “Ask the Expert” panel. Enjoy this episode's lively discussion about Google Cloud, Building Digital B2B Products and more.  Our Guest Include: • John Abel - Technical Director - Office of the CTO at Google • Nelson Wootton - CEO SaaScada • Dharmesh Ghedia - Senior Solutions Architect - Cloudreach

This week we are joined by Jo Peterson, VP of Cloud & Security at Clarify 360, and Maribel Lopez, Founder of Lopez Research for a deep dive into edge computing. We discuss the business opportunities and innovations that are being driven by edge and speculate over the breakthroughs that will be made possible by layering edge with other technologies like Ai and 5G.    

This week, the team is joined by Diana Kennedy, Group CTO at BUPA. They discuss the impact of digital technology on healthcare organizations and how traditional organizations are starting to embrace change. They also consider how modernization in this sector is impacting patient experience, especially during the ongoing pandemic.

This week we are joined by Robin Sutara, Chief Data Officer at Microsoft UK. Over the past year, enterprises have been finding new ways to leverage their data and overcome disruption by creating new, innovative products and experiences. Robin tells us about some of the great work that Microsoft customers have been doing to harness the value of their data.

This week we are joined by Cloudreach's Head of R&D, Chris Williams, to discuss what the future holds for application modernization in the cloud. The team discusses the complexity and paradoxes of choice that enterprises face when they move and attempt to modernize in the cloud. Chris suggests how relying on software and automation will help organizations clearly identify modernization opportunities within their estate and continuously execute at the speed of innovation.

Duena Blomstrom returns to the show to speak about her new book: People Before Tech which focuses on the importance of psychological safety and teamwork in the digital age. Duena discusses the concept of 'human debt' and the impact it is having on digital businesses. She also explains why psychological safety is essential for high-performing, agile teams.

Paul Crichard returns to the show to address some of the cybersecurity issues surrounding the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. The team discusses how and why these attacks occur and suggest how organizations can be more cyber-aware and better protect themselves from malicious actors.

This week we are joined by Richard Robinson, Partner Migration Program Lead UKI at AWS. The team looks at some of the key challenges and business drivers that enterprises are currently facing when approaching cloud migrations. They also discuss how these organizations can create a foundation for innovation and modernization by taking a 'smarter' approach to migration that leverages powerful assessment software, automation, and analysis of historical data. 

This week we are delighted to welcome author, podcast host, and cloud computing pioneer, David Linthicum, to the show. For most enterprises tackling cloud transformation, one of the biggest challenges is bridging the technical skills gaps that emerge.  After a year of disruption, where demand for cloud talent has only accelerated, we explore how tech leaders can attract and retain the best people for their organization.

This week we are joined by Eric Lam and Pathik Sharma from Google Cloud to discuss cloud cost optimization best practices. First, the team covers the importance of understanding how IT costs are managed in the cloud next to costs organizations face on-premises. They then discuss several ways organizations can optimize their cloud spend before recommending FinOps adoption as a way to create a culture of financial accountability.

This week we are joined by Amanda Brock, CEO at Open UK, for a discussion around the growing prominence of Open technologies in both corporate and governmental digital strategies. We cover common misconceptions about Open Source and dig into how tech leaders should frame the use of Open when building their digital strategies.