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Cloud has strong potential to improve business outcomes and foster innovation. However, to realize that potential, organizations must build an effective governance structure around their cloud ecosystem. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with Meredith Stein, co-author of Cloud Governance Basics and Practice, about how enterprises can establish effective governance for cloud, the benefits of good governance, and how cloud governance can affect sustainability efforts.

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.

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.

Multi-cloud is here to stay, but for all its benefits there are hefty challenges too, such as complexity, heterogeneity, and inconsistent operations. In this podcast, David Linthicum talks with VMware’s Richard Munro about the many challenges of multi-cloud and how to solve them – now and in the future. Richard’s take is that right now, companies need to use cross-cloud services for more consistency. The future will be about edge computing, better data management, and decentralization.

Multi-cloud security is one of the most difficult pieces of the cloud complexity puzzle to solve for. It’s also one of the most critical. In this podcast, David Linthicum talks with Deloitte’s Ramesh Menon about how shifting security left—i.e., implementing appropriate security during application development to solve issues before systems go live—can help companies move from a reactive to a more proactive security posture and increase the effectiveness of their security program.

Why do some companies glean more value from their cloud investments than others? According to the recent Deloitte US Cloud Survey, cloud leaders spend purposefully to innovate and they use technology as a force multiplier. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with Deloitte’s Chris Thomas and Diana Kerns-Manolatos about that survey, and about what sets cloud leaders apart. Bottom line: leaders innovate, they build a strong software engineering culture, and they have confidence in cloud.

Why do some digital transformation initiatives flounder while others succeed? One answer might lie with the C-suite leadership. In this podcast, David Linthicum talks with StarCIO’s founder Isaac Sacolick about his latest book, Digital Trailblazer: Essential Lessons to Jumpstart Transformation and Accelerate Your Technology Leadership. According to Isaac, good leadership is about understanding how technology can serve the business, adapting to innovation, and building high-performance teams.

Blockchain is evolving, and use cases for it may be almost limitless if the technology is harnessed effectively. In this episode, David Linthicum talks with Edgevana’s Mark Thiele about how blockchain has evolved and how it can help solve pressing problems ranging from protecting intellectual property and personal data, to boosting IT security, to detangling global supply-chains, to democratizing computing in general. Mark also believes blockchain may someday underpin the emerging metaverse.

As cloud adoption increases and multi and hybrid clouds become the norm, operations become more complex and monitoring performance becomes more difficult. In this Knowledge Short podcast, David Linthicum talks about how the concept and practice of Observability goes beyond traditional systems monitoring to help IT teams observe, gain insight into, and maybe even predict what’s happening in their cloud ecosystem to better manage increasing complexity.

Every so often, a technology comes along that has the power to change how we view and perform in the world. One of those just might be wearable cognitive assistance (WCA) devices. In this episode, David talks with Carnegie Mellon University professor Mahadev Satyanarayanan and Deloitte’s Arpan Tiwari about how WCA, via leveraging the edge and AI to augment human capabilities, will transform the way we work and live, and open up worlds of knowledge and ability to anyone who wears a device.

Wearable Cognitive Assistance | Deloitte US

As cloud moves into its second decade, there are still growing pains. In this episode, David Linthicum and Mike Kavis discuss cloud’s most pressing issues and offer solutions. Leveraging cloud for innovation, multi-cloud complexity, a talent shortage, and slowing cloud migration are the top challenges. The solutions? Focusing on value delivery, aligning business needs with technology, changing organizational culture, and realizing that slowing down isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.

For companies that operate across geographies, IT architectures and regulatory requirements can make it difficult to access widely distributed data for analysis. Extended enterprise clouds (EEC) can help provide access to disparate data via augmenting the enterprise multi-cloud with third-party services such as vertical clouds, AI clouds, or data clouds—all with a common control plane. Building an EEC takes planning and a cultural change around data ownership, but it’s well worth the effort.