Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, it's Agla from Precision Sourcing and welcome to her Heads in the Cloud, the podcast where we dive into everything happening in the world of DevOps cloud and site reliability engineering. With over six years in the industry, I've built a successful DevOps practice from scratch, helping companies connect with the top tier talent they need to build diverse, high performing teams. Each episode I'll be bringing you insights from some of the brightest minds in tech engineers, leaders and industry experts. Whether you're here to learn practical tips or hear inspiring stories, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Today we're bringing you live with Luke Matthews from Brisbane.
Very excited to have him as he heads up the cloud and infrastructure practice at Brennan. On that note, I'll let you do a proper introduction, Luke yeah, thanks.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: So yeah, Luke Matthews here from Brennan, Head of Cloud so managing the consulting practices across infrastructure networks, security, public cloud model, workplace and end user compute so national team of consultants doing project discovery, design, delivery documentation.
Look, formerly of moq Digital, was the Azure Expert MSP Program Manager in MOQ and also National Technical Services Manager and Head of Managed Services prior to the acquisition from Brannant.
Look worked in the cloud space for probably 20 plus years with Optus and some AWS startups as well. So got some experience and enjoyed my time at Brennan with the Cloud Projects team.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: And that kind of brings us quite nicely onto the cloud adoption trends that we're seeing at the moment. Which brings me to my first question, Luke. What are some of the current trends in cloud adoption and how do you see them evolving over the next few years?
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah, so I was pretty fortunate I think end of last year to travel to Chicago for the Microsoft Ignite conference.
And while that's a lot of product updates in there, you get to spend a lot of time with peers in the partner community and also CTOs, CIOs and IT managers in the customer landscape as well, working to understand what's going on in market and what trends and what customers are seeing generally.
So that was a pretty good use of time and it helped me understand what's going on.
Look, probably some of the resounding trends we're seeing is uncertainty around the VMware Broadcom acquisition and what that means for customers in the infrastructure hosting space, as well as Microsoft's continued investment in whether it's Azure migrate in terms of migrating to PaaS services directly and the Azure local announcement as well, meaning running Azure on premises as well. So some of the trends we're seeing I think probably related to commercial pressure inside businesses and how that's being managed in the infrastructure and cloud space.
Conversations I've had around that sort of thing. People are also talking about multi cloud and cloud brokerage and arbitrage as well, trying to bring costs down, running workloads where it makes the most sense financially as well as from a, from a right, right place, right time type circumstance. Right?
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So another exciting year for cloud, to be honest, as we move into 2025.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: And how would you say, how are hybrid cloud solutions like Azure Local changing the landscape for businesses that rely on on premise infrastructure?
[00:04:00] Speaker B: So Azure Local as well as Azure Arc? I think.
How is it changing the landscape? I think what we're seeing, I guess is Microsoft's continued investment in on premises services and maybe that was a little bit unexpected.
Yeah, it means that hey, the business itself acknowledges that on premise services aren't going away maybe as quickly as they expected or at all.
Potentially the feedback from businesses could be that sometimes it can't make commercial sense to continue to pay for subscription services.
So sweating assets makes more sense and that means, you know, buying on prem infrastructure for, for maybe legacy services or services that need to be on the edge or very low latency, that sort of thing. So in manufacturing or mining, happily, or maybe most interestingly, they talked about, Microsoft has talked about Azure Local being able to slice up gpu. So for the high data AI machine learning type processing, rather than paying for expensive cloud gpu, you could, you know, buy your own and run that without having to worry about how long you're using it for or, or for what purposes because you've spent the money once rather than continuing to spend it over time.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Similar sort of thing right. With, with running Azure virtual desktop on Azure Local getting, getting those session hosts as close to the, as close to the customer as possible rather than being in a data center on the Internet somewhere.
That's pretty important for engineering firms where it's high graphics intensity on a virtual desktop.
Yeah. And look, hybrid cloud solutions. So we're seeing the ability to manage multi cloud environments become pretty important and talking with people in Chicago around the world, that sort of thing, hearing that managing inventory is a major problem for enterprise as well.
And so if you've got Sprawl or they talked about shadow innovation not knowing what infrastructure is out there and what's costing you money, potentially Azure Arc for multi cloud management is an answer to that. Being able to manage all of your infrastructure from inside the one portal, leveraging policy for security and governance and Being able to patch all of your infrastructure from the one place is pretty huge benefits there like a multi cloud control plane that's you know, realizing the benefit there. It's you know been a long time.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Coming I think 100% and you've obviously had a lot of skin in the game, a lot of, a lot of years of experience within the cloud space and I'm sure you've definitely had your fair share of challenges.
So what would you say some of the more common challenges that organizations face when migrating to the cloud and I guess even more importantly, how can they overcome those?
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah, so I certainly know from my perspective customers challenges when migrating to the cloud often we see depending on how quickly the project goes, there may be some build shock in the first couple of months of migration. If communication channels aren't maybe as clear as they could be. If you're working with a partner just as you're doing a big migration, it's sort of a re host type conversation. Then maybe the first couple of months like oh, you know, we do need to retire some of these services we've migrated over here and we need to transform, you know, re architect re platform that to native services. But you're still spending the money on you know, virtual machines through that process. So you're, you're spending more than maybe you expected. And then over time as those things get re architected the running costs go down over time. So it's some, you can talk about that in advance and try to cover it off but until the bills start coming in, it's not really real.
And so that's one of the things. And looking at aws, we'll often talk about offering credits in the first couple of months to get over that hurdle. Microsoft treats that process a little bit differently in part, funding project services with partners sometimes also sort of alleviate some of that pain. So it's not unknown, it's generally pretty known in the community.
Yeah, potentially other challenges or things to consider in cloud migrations, it's being able to maintain the appetite to transform the business and that's about going okay, well you know, if we've got this aging infrastructure, we don't want to, you know, pay, you know, another round of warranty or refresh the service or network, then yeah, we're going to use that money for the project services to get us to the cloud or transform what we have is, you know, native apps or native IP into leveraging native cloud services, whether it's data or app modernization, that sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah. So I guess Some of the challenges or the sort of end to end process with migrations that need to be considered.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: And would you say with all the different public clouds, there's constantly new services that are coming out, Would you say, say, for example, if a company is AWS through and through, they've got a whole new bunch of new services, do you think that company should instantly upgrade or. It's not necessarily best case for everyone.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: It's interesting, right? So. So you see large microservices footprints and people that have developed against native services really, really heavily and then finding as it scales that actually there's probably a better or a cheaper or more secure way to do that same thing.
So you continue, well, maybe assessing the investment again against modernizing against what new services are coming out.
And we see that even with, I mean, Azure DNS for example, people may run legacy domain controllers in servers in Azure, but there's a native service that does that. And maybe it was relatively new and people didn't trust it or it's become easier to leverage native services over time. So you still need to assess your environment and see what services are running and how you can do things differently or better.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes sense.
And I guess on that topic as well, there is constantly new technology emerging and new trends as well.
So what innovations in cloud technology are you most excited about and how do you think that they will impact future businesses?
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Look, maybe it's not particularly sexy, but I think IT infrastructure management is being simplified over time. Right? So what used to take a lot of people and a lot of overhead is becoming easier and simpler and that's kind of exciting, right? To do more with the same output is, or, you know, the same staffing footprint or you know, technical resourcing, then great. So it's the business enabler. What other things am I most excited about or how will they impact business?
I think I'd be remiss to say if you know, the integration of AI into business services is new and exciting.
We've seen Copilot get a lot, a lot of marketing and it seems like every other software vendor has an AI fairy dust to sprinkle on things.
But for what I've seen in terms of practical use cases, the Copilot agent development is pretty impressive. I've seen good use cases of good business benefits against you're grounding it in the data that is native to your environment and not allowing it to go outside of your environment for data and then leveraging AI against sort of a policy and process, meaning you've got sort of a natural language agent running a business process for you that's pretty incredible. Like potentially looking for, you know, fraudulent insurance claims inside your business or, you know, running a annual leave, leave balance policy against your. It all depends on the integrations you can build and the data you have to grant it against. But yeah, there's, there's certainly things to be excited about and develop against in there.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: And I have to ask, just because you did mention copilot, do you, do you see yourself perhaps in the near future implementing that or using that in, in any stance?
[00:13:02] Speaker B: So we already do.
To us, to a smaller extent, we have a sort of a chatbot built internally that, that we're running proof of concepts, grounding it in customer proposal content and say, okay, well if the customer's asking me this question about what, what we can do or, you know, some policy or accreditation compliance, then a salesperson could ask the chatbot, hey, do we have, you know, this, this compliance or this? And it'll pull back all the data that we've given it and say, oh, this is where this is referenced previously and this is what you should go looking for.
So already maybe where the internal Brennan team is asking questions about, you know, potential capabilities of technology. Yeah, chatbots be able to give the answer and, you know, reference the source of where that's coming from. We're able to sort of lock down what it's referencing as well. So it's, it's not hallucinating and giving false information.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: It's awesome. It's awesome that you've got a bit of a roadmap and you've already implemented it to some extent and obviously I'm sure that will develop more so over time.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah, now we put guardrails on and we're, you know, just testing it out. So now it's good, good value at the moment.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Good, good, good. And during, obviously through all of your years of experience, Luke, would you be able to share, could you share a success story of a company that transformed its operations by adopting cloud solutions?
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, maybe not specifically company names, but, but certainly we've seen some really satisfying use cases over time. And, and you know, some of these are about, you know, mergers in, in different businesses in the health sector struggling to, you know, service customers across lines of business where there's been a merger.
You know, pretty important to, to make sure those, those customers are happy and service. Nobody's falling through the cracks as such. And so being able to build a Greenfields environment and then bring in all Three of those organizations, you know, encompassing security and identity and all of the internal business services and all the scheduling that means that that business can operate.
Huge transformation for the business itself in terms of the workforce's satisfaction but also, but also maintaining health services in that for the wider community has been, has been pretty incredible to see and that that customer is really, really happy with how that project went. One of our major ones from last year. So front of mind and also really satisfying to see that go through and deliver really well.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: No, it is, that is an amazing case study to be honest.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: And I know we've touched upon it briefly I guess the beauty of AI and how it's being used.
So that brings me onto the topic of AI and machine learning and how do you think those two are being integrated into cloud services and what benefits do you think that they would bring to businesses? I know healthcare industry in particular at the moment, AI is pretty much booming for them. It's making their lives a lot easier or the aspirations that they have for it.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Yeah, look, it's not my primary sort of role or remit but I've seen it in terms of, you know, we will put the foundation of platform and plumbing together for customers and then, and really enable a data platform to come across the top of that and you know, plug in all of this information that allows whether it's power bi reporting across the top of that and then it's about, I think the insights based on the data that's, that's, you know, being scraped from the wider business of, you know, had a number of customer conversations, maybe front of mind is, is, you know, in manufacturing and things being able to pull telemetry from the edge plant type operations into a, you know, into central data location and be able to draw insights from that. The CIO made a sort of off the cuff comment. You know, I know what's happened. I don't need reporting to tell me what's happened. I need, I need insight into what, you know, changes I can make now, what the impact of that is. Right. And enabling that with modern data services and machine learning against existing telemetry data is incredibly powerful. And that's, yeah, something that's, you know, it's enjoyable to be a part of that sort of thing in terms of the industry developments as well, making, you know, business process easier and making lives easier as well.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah, no, 100%.
There was a customer we had recently and they're heavily implementing AI and for example, if you're in the healthcare industry and you just go to do a CT scan, usually you need to weigh at least a few days, if not a couple of weeks for the result. And they're thinking of getting basically an AI tooling to be able to produce those results quicker. But then it's a very gray area because some people will be, you know, extremely pleased that they'll be able to receive results at quicker time. On the other hand, you have some people that are like, well, I don't really want to take recommendations that are written out from an AI. So it'll be interesting how it's perceived later down the line.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Right, the, the 23andMe case with the, I want to say the, the American Medical association and, and how 23andMe was saying, okay, due to these genetic markers, your propensity for this condition is, is this sort of percentage. And they were sort of shut down and excluded from that sort of commentary because they weren't medical practitioners so they couldn't give advice even though it's just, it's just genetic data. Right, yeah, I'm not sure where I really land on that, but it was an interesting sort of adjacent comment.
Yeah, AI can claim to give interpret CT scans.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: No, no, it is, it is an interesting one.
And I guess finally that brings us on to cloud adoption, which you've of course done heaps of. What advice would you give to organizations that are just starting their cloud adoption journey?
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Yeah, so generally we talk to customers potentially with aging infrastructure or they're re contracting with service providers or really feeling they're not getting the benefits of cloud in market. But yeah, cloud strategy I think is the first place to start. Right. So how are you going to measure your success?
What are the pain points you're solving for? So you're looking at, hey, I want to adopt cloud.
You can sort of say, well why?
What's the driver for that? And how do you measure success?
And so once you can do that, you can sort of say, okay, well let's play back to the wider business.
What are the benefits to the business that you're hoping to achieve? And then you can, you know, solution around that. Whether it's migrating legacy services to a, like a SaaS platform. I'm not sure anybody runs their own internal, you know, HR platform anymore. It's all sort of, it's all SaaS. Right. So even, even I think about, you know, intranets and things and teams and modern ways of working and, and all that other IS SaaS platforms now as well. So it's really about Being able to measure the success criteria of what you're trying to achieve and then okay, well let's design solutions around helping you hit targets and helping you increase your own customer satisfaction.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: And when it comes to.
If a company has zero cloud involvement and they want to adopt a cloud journey and go down a particular way but they're not sure which avenue to go down, would you, do you think in some instances it might be better just to use one single cloud provider or do you think hybrid is sometimes the way.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: It depends. So we'll often have a, it's a sort of a get out of jail answer, isn't it?
So if there's a cloud infrastructure or multi cloud conversation and yeah we'd talk about horses for courses, right. Cloud economics. So if you complete a solution assessment, what workloads need to go where or what's the future of state look like? If you need to maintain legacy data and legacy systems, then is it, you know, cheapest and easiest and the least risky to manage your own platform? Do you have the resources into the future for that?
Do you want to manage power and air conditioning and everything else that goes with that?
Potentially it could be easier to running in a, in a hosted system or in a private cloud where you just got access to my legacy systems, access to my legacy data, but I'm not developing on them. That's okay.
Do they have an API? We could, you know, connect that system's API to public cloud as well. So it may be the cheapest option in that space. Look, public cloud, you, you can reserve instances, you can set up savings plans for things that aren't changing. You can get the price right down on it as well.
And then you know, beyond that you can use archive tier or you know, cold storage for long term savings in that space as well. So there's no easy answer and it depends but that conversation generally goes into a. Yeah, cloud economics and let's pull apart the environment. Let's what's the future state look like? What's, what's the legacy requirement, what's the know data retention you need to do and what systems are you planning on developing or how can we help integrate? What are the pain points in that space as well?
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Case by case scenario.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Awesome. Well I think we will wrap it up there but thank you so much for joining us Luke and for sharing your insights. Very grateful to have had you on the show.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah, no worries. Thank you.
