Cloudbusting Podcast

It has been over a year since COVID-19 forced the majority of us to work from home and significantly shift how we define the barriers between our personal and professional lives. 

Duena Blomstrom (CEO of PeopleNotTech) joins us this week to discuss some of the key lessons she has learned over the past 12 months and suggest how leaders can best support and enable their teams in the new normal of hybrid working.

Stewart Fry, SVP of Digital Enterprise & Operations at bp joins us this week to discuss our fifth trend: Adaptable Organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses to adapt, challenging them to rethink and restructure their organization to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. This looks set to continue through 2021 and beyond. But what does adaptability actually look like from an organizational perspective?

Stewart pulls some fascinating insights from bp's organizational transformation that demonstrate how even the largest, most complex organizations can adapt at scale.

Ben Shepherd, Chief Strategy Officer at London Stock Exchange Group joins us this week to explore the changing role of technology within a business and the growing influence of IT leaders. 

The fourth episode in our trend series considers how vital IT became to business continuity when COVID-19 hit and whether it will cement its perception as a strategic business enabler - rather than a cost center.

This week Nikki Baird from Aptos Retail join us to cover our third trend: Next Level Robustness. During the pandemic, consumer digital has become essential, especially in the retail & groceries sector, where social distancing measures made online grocery shopping a lifeline for vulnerable people.

If consumer digital can be seen as critical infrastructure, we discuss how important it is for businesses to ensure they have robust, scalable digital platforms that can withstand future disruption.

Gordon Davey from SoftwareONE joins the team to discuss a poly cloud approach to cloud adoption and how it differs from prevailing ideas of multi-cloud.

Previously, the use of multiple cloud providers within an organization was framed as a way to avoid vendor lock-in and to achieve risk management and compliance goals. A poly cloud approach focuses on the targeted use of multiple cloud platforms, exploiting specific strengths for the functional benefit of particular use cases.

This week we are joined by Steffan Haas, Head of Infrastructure Steering at DB Schenker.

Continuing our Trends 2021 series, we discuss how many of the business continuity-led digital transformation initiatives triggered by the outbreak of COVID-19 last year will continue to accelerate over the next 12 months.

Steffan shares his insights from helping DB Schenker overcome the technical challenges of the pandemic and accelerating their cloud journey.

Richard Robinson (Partner Migration Program Lead UKI, AWS) joins us this week for another episode exploring the business value of diverse organizations.

Drawing from his academic studies as well as the work he is doing in his current role helping organizations adopt cloud, Richard discusses the three dimensions of diversity - inherent, acquired and neurodiversity.

He suggests that rather than just recruiting diversity, we should work on creating an inclusive and environment that provides equity and allows diverse mindsets, personalities and backgrounds to develop and flourish.

Over the past 10 years, we have noticed several eras of cloud distinguished by key adoption drivers, sponsors, and challenges. Cloudreach CEO, Brooks Borcherding, brings his wealth of experience in the cloud space to the team to chat through these eras and discuss if COVID-19 has proven to be the catalyst that will accelerate us into the Enterprise Modernization Era.

We are delighted to welcome Gene Kim as our guest on the 100th episode of the Cloudbusting Podcast.

Gene’s books have sold over 1 million copies — he is the author of the WSJ bestselling book “The Unicorn Project”, and was co-author of “The Phoenix Project,” “The DevOps Handbook”, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning “Accelerate”.

Gene tells us about his early career in IT, shares his fascination with high-performing IT organizations and outlines the 5 Ideals of DevOps.

Iouri Chapochnikov, VP Global Head of Data and Analytics at Accor, joins the team this week to discuss what makes a successful enterprise data & analytics strategy.

Iouri draws from his experiences leading teams at Accor and Criteo, identifying how different enterprises, with different objectives, approach their data & analytics strategy.

He also considers the challenges faced when building these strategies and the lessons he has learned along the way.