In this short series we take a look at public cloud and the enterprise, we discuss the challenges, from optimization to security and control, we look at dealing with integration of your on-prem environment and moving workloads between them - and a whole lot more, as I get to chat to some of the most innovative tech providers in the public cloud market.

The Move to Public Cloud

The move to public cloud is nothing new, many companies have moved or attempted to move key workloads into the big hyperscale providers, AWS, Azure, Google and IBM, but for some it has been a mixed success.

We have probably all heard of cloud projects (or maybe even had projects) that have not gone to plan, this can be for a range of reasons, cost, technical difficulties, performance. There is a long list of reasons that cloud projects don’t go the way that’s expected. But at the heart of many of those projects is the presumption that cloud is both cheap and easy. It comes as quite the shock we we discover it isn’t!

However, things may be about to change as a new wave of technology companies are emerging that are starting to address, what is, the highly complex world of public cloud platforms.

This week is the first in a few shows where we look at the complexity of using public cloud and chat with some of the technology companies who trying to address some of these challenges by taking fresh approaches to the problem and aiming to make the cloud experience better, both technically and commercially.

In this first show I’m joined by Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of Densify. Densify have taken a fascinating approach to the problem, built on Andrews long and strong analytics background.

Densify uses a robust analytics platform to build a full understanding of the workloads that have moved to the cloud, develop a performance profile then automatically modify those applications to fully take advantage of the cloud platform they are running on, ensuring they are optimised for the right services and right commercial cost models.

If that sounds interesting then dive in as we discuss a wide range of topics including why public cloud is complicated, why it should never be about the money alone, the limitations of first generation approaches to optimisation and how one of the biggest reasons cloud project fails Is people buy the wrong cloud stuff!

Andrew provides some valuable insights and shares what is a pretty smart approach to the problem.

For full show notes :-

Tech Interviews Podcast

Optimising the public cloud - Andrew Hillier - Ep71

As the desire to integrate public cloud into our organisations IT continues to grow, the need to ensure we maintain control and security of our key assets is a challenge but one that we need to overcome if we are going to use cloud as a fundamental part of our future IT infrastructure.

The importance of security and reducing our vulnerabilities is not, of course, unique to using public cloud, it's a key part of any organisations IT and data strategy. However, the move to public cloud does introduce some different challenges with many of our services and data now sitting well outside the protective walls of our datacentre. This means that if our risks and vulnerabilities go unidentified and unmanaged it can open us up to the potential of major and wide-reaching security breaches.

This weeks Tech Interviews is the second in our series looking at what organisations need to consider as they make the move to public cloud. In this episode we focus on risk, how to assess it, gain visibility into our systems regardless of location and how to mitigate the risks that our modern infrastructure may come across.

To help discuss the topic of risk management in the cloud, I'm joined by Darron Gibbard. Darron is the Managing Director for EMEA North and Chief Technology Security Officer for Qualys with 25 years' experience in the enterprise security, risk and compliance industry, he is well placed too discuss the challenges of public cloud.

We discuss the vulnerabilities that a move to cloud can create, the importance of visibility and how cloud, when managed correctly, is no riskier than any other part of our enterprise IT.

We also get some tips from Darron on building a risk based approach to cloud, Qualys's 5 principles of security and transparent orchestration.

Darron provides some great information on managing risk in the public cloud.

Enjoy the show.

Full show notes are here :- https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1At

Assessing the risk in public cloud - Darron Gibbard - Ep72

This show was recorded pre the announcement on August 27th, 2018 of CloudHealth Technologies acquisition by VMware.

This is the 3rd in our series looking at the move to public cloud, the challenges involved and some of the tips and technologies that can help you to overcome them. In this episode we look at perhaps the biggest challenge facing most organisations moving to public cloud, the issues of multi-cloud.

To discuss this I'm joined by Joe Kinsella CTO and Founder of CloudHealth Tech, a company that have built a platform to pull together information from numerous environments, consolidate it into one place and allow you to make informed, proactive decisions to ensure you use your technology in the best way you can.

During the episode we explore some wide-ranging topics, we look at why complexity is an issue, how multi-cloud was initially "stumbled upon" but is now becoming a chosen strategy. We ask why don't we expect cloud to be complex when much of what we do in our datacentres is very complicated? Joe also confesses that 3-4 years ago he was predicting the death of the on-prem DC and why he has revaluated that with hybrid becoming the deployment reality.

We wrap up discussing the CloudHealth Tech platform, what it does and how it helps to manage a multi-cloud environment by pulling together clouds, on-prem and automation platforms, connecting all the information to provide the business insights needed for proactive decision making. Finally, we look at the maturity of cloud management and how it needs to move beyond cost control and embrace security and governance as the evolution of multi-cloud management.

Joe gives some great insight and CloudHealth Technologies deliver a very powerful platform, so powerful that VMware saw fit to acquire them.

Enjoy the show.

For show notes visit :- https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1AH

Tech Interviews

Managing multiple clouds - Joe Kinsella - ep73

In the last of this series looking at the shift to public cloud we discuss getting the best from your cloud and the value of understanding the behaviour of your cloud infrastructure.

On this show I’m joined by Sumo Logic’s Colin Fernandez as we look at public cloud, the value of what it delivers and how an understanding of its performance is crucial to not only help achieve desired outcomes, but to do so while meeting those ever-critical security and governance requirements.

Colin is a self-proclaimed IT veteran with 32 years’ experience in the industry, starting out at ICL and arriving at Sumo Logic via the likes of IBM and VMware and that longevity in the industry puts Colin in a great position to comment on what he sees in today's market and how cloud has and is disrupting our use of technology.

As always, cloud means we discuss a wide range of topics as we chat about new platform paradigms such as serverless and containers, we discuss the impact cloud has on security and compliance and why security has to be a major part of the cloud design cycle.

We wrap up with a chat about Sumo Logic’s platform and how their data and analytics engine is helping their customers to achieve their desired business outcomes.

Enjoy the show.

Full show notes are here :- https://wp.me/p4IvtA-1AM

Logging and learning your public cloud – Colin Fernandes – Ep 74

Welcome to the Tech Interviews podcast. 
For the very latest in business focussed tech. We chat with tech community leaders on wide range of topics from containers to cloud, from data to DevOps, you can find them all here! Enjoy the show and if you do, tell your friends!