On Cloud

If the results of Deloitte's 2023 Midmarket Technology Report are any indication, midmarket companies are making big bets on tech trends related to AI, cybersecurity, and modernization--and they're thriving.

Ruben Falk of AWS thinks generative AI will be transformative for FSI, but he warns that the regulatory environment for generative AI is tightening, and ethical concerns should be effectively addressed.

Forrest Brazeal, Google's head of developer media, discusses the ongoing tech talent shortage, how to address it, and how companies can use gen AI to help new talent learn the process of software development.

Cloud complexity is growing for banks. Reining it in requires managing risk, becoming more agile, and adapting the enterprise culture to cloud.

Turn cloud challenges into opportunities to boost cloud value by preparing for cloud, controlling costs, prioritizing security, and maintaining flexibility.

Edge computing is growing in power. Its capabilities are almost limitless. Companies can leverage it now to prepare for an edge-based future.

To optimize cloud costs, leverage FinOps, develop a sound cloud cost optimization strategy, and build a culture of optimization and accountability.

Companies are changing the way they use cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud are growing. So is AI and modernization of on-prem architectures for more seamless data flow. All this returns higher value to the business.

Google Cloud Next 2023 was all about innovation. Generative AI was the star of the show, with over a dozen AI tools introduced. Google also showcased its partnership with NVIDIA to leverage the power of generative AI.

Space is a new frontier for cloud and edge computing. It's a booming business with almost unlimited possibilities and the potential to advance R&D capabilities.

The space race is on, again, and it's creating tremendous business opportunities on Earth. In this episode, Deloitte's David Linthicum, Kelly Raskovich, and Raquel Buscaino discuss how deploying cloud platforms in space can provide advantages to businesses that leverage them. Reduced launch costs have already sent more satellites to space, which has led to an explosion in data and insights, especially for companies that put cloud infrastructure in space to analyze it at the point of origin.

Generative AI is here, it's powerful, and it's growing. It holds the promise to disrupt everything and play a significant role in our daily lives. Now's the time to harness its amazing power.

Each company is unique, with its own set of cybersecurity risks. So, it's essential that risk management be customized to the risk profile, culture, and vision of the organization. AI has emerged as a powerful aid.

Increased customer retention can drive increased revenue and return value to the business. Companies who leverage cloud to enhance their customer experience can significantly boost their retention efforts.

AI, especially generative AI, is the future, but how can we manage the disruption that comes with it? One way is to ensure that AI is implemented with effective governance, moderation, and balance.

Cloud adoption continues to grow among banking institutions, but their reasons for implementing cloud are evolving. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with AWS's Charith Mendis about how many banks now view cloud—and cloud-enabled technologies such as machine learning—as drivers of innovation, enhanced customer experiences, and increased business value. They are also making investments in initiatives that return the most value. Read more from AWS here:

What's happening with cloud in 2023? AI, a focus on ROI and optimization are all 2023 trends that will almost certainly carry into the second half of the year and beyond.

There are many paths to cloud career success. One solutions architect has found a unique one--building and growing a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers.

CME Group, the world's largest operator of financial derivatives exchanges, is in the midst of a successful digital transformation journey. So far, their keys to success have been rigorous change management and a focus on innovation to provide deeper customer insights.

Cloud is a tremendous force multiplier, but managing your cloud environment can introduce new challenges. Fortunately, automation, reducing multi-cloud complexity, and industry clouds can all help boost your efforts.

Achieving anticipated ROI is a key measure of cloud success. Three factors that can drive cloud ROI include tech maturity, how well technologies work together, and how technology can drive or detract from value.

Many companies find themselves looking for more tech talent, and one company has been focusing on a skills-based hiring model for our veterans transitioning to civilian life. It's a win-win. Companies find exceptional talent, and veterans learn life-long transferable skills.

Cloud powers AI, and it enables enterprises to innovate more quickly and effectively. It's no different for the US government, which is leveraging AI to better meet the demands of its rapidly changing constituency.

Different cloud roles have unique perspectives on cloud and its challenges. From a solution architect's point of view, the challenges lie in meeting customer expectations, and the future of cloud is very bright.

What's ten years down the road for cloud? It's going to be about multi-cloud, supercloud, AI, and skills specialization. Also, cloud will become so ubiquitous that we just call it computing.

Digital transformation is absolutely necessary for most organizations, but it's also probably the most challenging journey many of them will ever undertake. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with author Thomas Erl about some key elements and strategies that are critical to a successful journey. For Thomas, success results from good leadership that intuits the right pace for transformation, understanding the customer, making data-driven decisions, and continually communicating.

FinOps adoption is growing because it can help optimize cloud spend, but it can be tricky to implement. Collaboration and making business and cultural changes, along with deploying the right technology, can be keys to success.

Cloud migration has been a success for mortgage lender Ginnie Mae, driven in large part by constant communication and sound strategy. Advanced planning, a collaborative culture, and cloud governance also helped them reach their goals.

Many organizations wrestle with cloud performance and ROI issues. Data clouds can help. So can better data strategy, lower latency, collaboration, and giving developers the support they need.

Starting with a mandate to become more agile and optimize IT costs, Geisinger Health has written an amazing cloud success story with a cloud-first culture and a highly-trained workforce to help them build a cloud-native future.

Cloud costs are soaring for many companies, without any real insight as to why. For answers, many organizations are turning to FinOps—a collaborative, cross-functional approach to cost transparency, accountability, and optimization.

Repatriation of cloud apps to on-prem is a hot topic these days. But it comes with its own, often costly, issues. Instead, many organizations are choosing to optimize their cloud apps in place—which might be the better choice.

Multi-cloud complexity is growing, and it's hobbling cloud performance and shrinking value. Enter superclouds--a layer of automation and abstraction that spans the cloud ecosystem and can help manage multi-cloud complexity.

The use cases for blockchain are growing. One new disruptive use will be to change the relationship between employers and employees, as they utilize the technology to innovate and reshape the workplace.

Cloud is a mature technology, but there are still growing pains--especially around multi-cloud complexity and costs. Cross-cloud strategy and supercloud might be ways to ease the pain.

Industry clouds are trending right now, and rightly so. Their composable nature helps companies develop industry-specific solutions that enable them to get a competitive edge, and possibly get higher ROI on cloud investments.

How do you overcome challenges to achieve your cloud goals? Elevance Health, has done it by making the right combination of technical and operational decisions and building a supportive cloud culture.

The future of cloud and AI are inextricably linked, but their relationship holds both promise and peril. Companies that can manage the complexity AI adds to cloud will reap the benefit of the power of AI and cloud together.

Cloud has strong potential to improve business outcomes and foster innovation. However, to realize that potential, organizations must build an effective governance structure around their cloud ecosystem. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with Meredith Stein, co-author of Cloud Governance Basics and Practice, about how enterprises can establish effective governance for cloud, the benefits of good governance, and how cloud governance can affect sustainability efforts.

The coming year looks bright for cloud, but only if companies can take better control of their cloud ecosystems. In this podcast, David Linthicum talks with Deloitte's chief futurist, Mike Bechtel, about trends on the horizon that can help organizations brighten their cloud future. Mike's perspective is that taming cloud complexity via abstraction, leveraging observability, and taking control of data can result in better cloud operational efficiency and better returns on cloud investments.

The past year has been a mixed bag for cloud. Certainly, there have been positives like the rise of supercloud and metacloud to help reduce complexity, the growth of observability to provide deeper operational insights, and an increase in cloud native development. However, cloud has also been beset by rising costs, complexity, and other challenges. David Linthicum provides his insight and analysis on all these topics—and more—in his review of 2022.

AWS re:Invent 2022 was better than ever, and there's lots of buzz around cloud's future. In this episode, David Linthicum sits down with Deloitte's AWS alliance technical lead, Tony Witherspoon, to discuss all that was new at AWS re:Invent 2022. This year's key themes were sustainability, diversity and inclusion, efficiency, and data as a corporate asset. David and Tony also discuss two big product announcements—AWS DataZone and AWS Supply Chain—that they think will really impact cloud in 2023.

Small, cloud-native companies can profoundly disrupt their larger, less-flexible competitors via agility and innovation, but cloud complexity still looms for both large and small enterprises. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with cloud influencer Ian Moyse about how any company—no matter its size—can leverage cloud to move quickly and innovate faster. However, it's essential to reduce cloud complexity and sprawl to achieve a lean cloud ecosystem that drives innovation.Small, cloud-native companies can profoundly disrupt their larger, less-flexible competitors via agility and innovation, but cloud complexity still looms for both large and small enterprises. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with cloud influencer Ian Moyse about how any company—no matter its size—can leverage cloud to move quickly and innovate faster. However, it's essential to reduce cloud complexity and sprawl to achieve a lean cloud ecosystem that drives innovation.

Many of the problems organizations have with realizing cloud ROI and value stem from an architecture that isn't optimized for the overall business strategy, but instead for particular solutions or narrow business goals. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with Red Hat's E.G. Nadhan about how companies can take a collaborative approach to ensure that their architecture is built and optimized to reflect the strategy of the business as a whole, not just a sum of its parts.

Cloud is undergoing a philosophical and technical renaissance. Innovation and disruption have become driving goals for cloud implementation. Sustainability isn't just a buzzword anymore, and the idea of super or metacloud, fueled by open source, is gaining force across the cloud universe. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with IBM's Roger Premo about this paradigm shift in cloud and how it's driving companies to change the way they think about cloud now and in the future.

AI is reshaping the future of business, and cloud is helping make that future more affordable. The result will be greater automation, the ability to focus more on strategy, and a reimagining of how business is done.

Though the concept of a "product mindset" isn't new, over the past decade—with the ascendance of cloud—it has really started to gain traction as a better way to build cloud apps, or any app or system. In this podcast, David Linthicum talks with Twilio's Anthony Lazaro about what a product mindset is, how companies can leverage it to build apps that generate high ROI for the organization, and how to develop a product mindset and culture to build apps at the pace of cloud.

Observability is a huge help to organizations in solving systems performance issues, but some still see it as a bolt-on. In this episode David Linthicum talks with Dynatrace's Michael Allen and Deloitte's Jay McDonald about why that isn't so. The trio also discusses why companies should view Observability as a holistic process that can be built as code into every facet of their cloud ecosystem—from infrastructure, to apps, to security, to governance, to compliance, and more.

Most organizations that have moved to a multi-cloud architecture have experienced cloud complexity. In this podcast, David Linthicum tackles the complexity issue and gives advice to mediate it. According to David, abstraction and automation are essential. First, deploy an abstraction layer above and across cloud platforms for tasks like operations, security, governance, and configuration management.. Then, automate as many of those processes—especially operations—as you can.

Multi-cloud is here to stay, but for all its benefits there are hefty challenges too, such as complexity, heterogeneity, and inconsistent operations. In this podcast, David Linthicum talks with VMware's Richard Munro about the many challenges of multi-cloud and how to solve them – now and in the future. Richard's take is that right now, companies need to use cross-cloud services for more consistency. The future will be about edge computing, better data management, and decentralization.