The Public Sector has traditionally been viewed as a slow or late adopter of technology. One could argue that this is no different for Cloud.

That being said, initiatives such as the Government Digital Service in the UK have accelerated adoption and it is easy to forget that there have been many successes in the Public Sector with the adoption of Cloud technologies and services.

The eternal question, and the reality, will always centre on budgets, culture and the winds of political change. But can Government Departments at Central and Local Government do more to achieve their outcomes?

Edge computing can be defined as a “mesh network of micro data centres that process or store critical data locally and push all received data to a central data centre or cloud storage repository, in a footprint of less than 100 square feet.”

Now there are some crystal ball gazers who are saying that Cloud is dead and Edge computing is the future.

But, where did Edge come from? A product called NATS started this trend, where enterprise messaging systems and platform technologies could be decomposed into things called microservices using the processing capacity of devices at the end user rather in remote computing.

There is clear value in utilising the processing power of devices that are close to the end user. The key factor here lies in some basic physics – so if you did not pay attention in school about the speed of light, you might have to concentrate hard now.

We all accept that we all do a form of multi-cloud (i.e. we consume several cloud services in isolation – e.g. on your phone we use different social media, email, etc all separate clouds) – but that is not the point of this discussion.

The point of the debate is whether it is realistic for organisations to run on two or more cloud services to run a business process or set of workloads.

Here is the argument against Multicloud:

No-one can agree what it is in the tech industry, organisations struggle with mastery of one major cloud provider – so how can they do it for many? It is basically impossible to consolidate and manage multiple cloud costs onto the famed single pane of glass and the cost and effort of managing multiple clouds is unproductive.

But what about the argument for Multi-Cloud:

It is about using the right tool for the right job, it can allow you to use the best athletes in the market for what your business wants to do.

This topic is arguably the least understood both by businesses and the technology industry itself.

Cloud economics is more than just cost optimisation, more than helping organisations when they move to cloud and see their bill come in and recoil in horror as they see the extent of their cloud sprawl.

Every organisation hits a point in their cloud journey where they really start to care about their spend, especially when it is operational spend and this normally happens after they complete a reasonably large migration to cloud services. Be the pounds and pence of line items in the bill or getting to predictive analytics to forecasting spend based upon reasonably assumed points of peak usage.

There is a veritable smorgasbord of analytics solutions out there that offer this but they get to a certain point and just stop or offer beta services and claim no responsibility for things that are more complicated that clients want to do with their services.

Telecom carriers and their role in cloud.

For last 20 years, it is fair to say that continuous technical transformation and information waves have driven a high level of growth in the telecom industry.

However, where find ourselves in a situation where the telecoms industry is facing a series of challenges.

Connectivity is capturing a smaller proportion of the information value chain while content, service, and products capture more. I don’t think it is that much of a bold prediction to see that that one or more major telecom companies could be acquired by a content company within the next 3 – 4 years.

Further, trends such as IoT and mobile are adding billions of new connected data sources globally every year – with that comes an astronomical growth in data volumes.

Telecoms companies are also in the heart of the security challenge.

As custodians of the networks, carriers play a pivotal role in fighting the new threats that are emerging.

The future of IT organisations has always been a hot topic, but the rules of the game are changing in a cloud first world. Our host, Jez Back, is joined by David Newbould from Tech Data and Simon Ratcliffe from Ensono to explore this difficult topic.

Digital transformation is in full swing in the technology sector. But decision makers are now being challenged to go further and create digital and technology ecosystems that encompass customers, employees, developers, suppliers, and even extended networks of related businesses.

Hosts Jez Back and David Organ are joined this episode by Carolyn Mumby who is the CEO of Eledecks and Nathan Lowis from DataDog.

With guests – Jason Taylor, Think IT and Mark Mulvany, EMEA Hybrid Cloud Lead at Dell EMC.

This episode asks the question of IT debt in the cloud. Joining Jez and David are guests Matt Lovell, COO at Centiq and Matt Watts, Director, Technology and Strategy at NetApp.

Are Cloud Service Providers Doing Enough for the SMB Market? Compare the Cloud are peeling the layers back on the Cloud Industry. Answering the questions on the lips of both providers and customers - hosts Jez Back and Andrew McLean will cover the latest trends and best interviews in this space.

With guests Nehal Thakore, OneClick and Vera Loftis, Bluewolf.