On Cloud

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.