On Cloud

When digital transformation initiatives struggle, the blame often gets assigned to the technology implementation. However, in many cases, it's actually more of a people than a technology issue. Fear of change often plays a critical role in project failures. In this episode of the podcast, Mike Kavis and guests, Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel, discuss barriers to digital transformation success and how fear of change can hobble success and set the project team—and company—up for failure. Their solution is to reduce fear—and promote collaboration—by understanding what motivates people, embracing differences, building trust, and modeling behavior that produces positive changes.

Edge computing has the potential to revolutionize IT—especially the way organizations interact with customers. But the edge space is still somewhat of a wild west, and there are competing theories of where it should go and how it can be utilized most effectively. There are even competing definitions of what "edge" truly is. In this episode of the podcast, David Linthicum and Edgevana CEO Mark Thiele break down edge computing—what it is, and isn't, and ways companies can leverage it to help create better value for customers. Mark also gives his take on what an edge-enabled future would look like, and he gives some pointers on how organizations can build a path to get there.

With a shift to cloud, it's crucial for organizations to re-evaluate how they approach security—specifically how they evaluate risk. It's always been critical to take a proactive, predictive approach, but with cloud that criticality is magnified because of the distributed nature of cloud computing. In this episode of the podcast, Mike Kavis and guest, Trend Micro's Mark Nunnikhoven, discuss evaluating risk in the cloud. Mark's take is that, while cloud is more secure because of its shared-responsibility model, predicting the likelihood and type of security events is still incredibly difficult. He also argues that, even with the application of AIOps to bolster predictive capabilities, humans still need to interpret model results and make final decisions on which actions to take.

This special episode of Deloitte's "On Cloud" podcast focuses on the role an integrated core plays in recovery and lasting resilience, with examples of how companies are integrating AI, cloud and cyber today.

Once considered to be an unusual development methodology, open source has come into its own. Companies now understand that they can take advantage of different perspectives and collaboration in the open source community to drive cloud innovation and deliver better products faster than ever.

We already live in a connected world, but technologies like cloud, edge computing, ML, and 5G will profoundly reshape the way people and technology connect and interact with each other, and they will usher in a future that is scarcely imaginable now.

There are a bevy of new technologies in the market to help with IT ops in the cloud--AIOps for example. However, to get the most out of AIOps (or any tech), match the tool to the needs and define the needs--and success metrics--based on your service-level objectives.

Software testing isn't glamourous, but it's critical. It's also often misunderstood or siloed. However, DevOps has highlighted the importance of testing and the cloud has transformed the testing process, making it faster and easier and freeing up resources to focus on human-centric testing.

Using FinOps to more effectively govern cloud usage and match cost to need to value can help organizations avoid potentially costly reactions, such as overprovisioning.

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic downturn have most likely accelerated a shift to cloud for some companies. Why? Because cloud provides the agility and scalability that can help companies weather this, and other crises, more effectively.