CIO Exchange Podcast - Managing Across Multiple Clouds and Taming the Chaos - Guests: Jeffrey Shaw, CIO and Dale Ramsey, VP of Cloud Infrastructure for Employers

Managing Across Multiple Clouds and Taming the Chaos - Guests: Jeffrey Shaw, CIO and Dale Ramsey, VP of Cloud Infrastructure for Employers

Explicit content warning

10/17/22 • 17 min

What’s stopping your business from deploying applications 50% faster to increase market share and boost revenue? For Jeff Shaw, CIO of EMPLOYERS Insurance, it was finding the right place to run the right application with the agility and scalability of the cloud. This meant leveraging not one cloud, but multiple clouds to take advantage of the best tools that each one had to offer while at the same time, managing them as if they were one cloud. In this episode, Jeff is joined by his VP of Cloud Infrastructure Dale Ramsey and together they describe the journey they took to move all their applications off of aging infrastructure, and run them in multiple clouds while ensuring that everything worked together seamlessly. Throughout the conversation, we discuss the real challenges that the business faced when it came to evaluation, training teams, and executing what seemed, at first, to be impossible. During the discussion, Jeff reveals what he considers to be the key elements for successfully taking advantage of all the best tools of each cloud while ensuring that security and customer experience are not compromised.

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Links:

Jeffrey Shaw's Profile: https://www.employers.com/management-team/jeffrey-shaw

CIO Exchange on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vmwcioexchange
Yadin Porter de León on Twitter: https://twitter.com/porterdeleon
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Keywords:

cio, cio exchange, VMware, innovation, leadership, DevOps, Multi-Cloud, Cross-Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS, VMC, Developers, ops, operations, IT, information technology, business

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Links:

Jeffrey Shaw's Profile: https://www.employers.com/management-team/jeffrey-shaw

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Keywords:

Previous Episode

Removing Silos: Why The Developer Experience Matters - Guest: Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software

This conversation is part of our Lead/Forward series, where we talk with technology leaders about the real stories behind the themes of innovation, talent, and experience. In this episode, we interview Tihomir Bajic, CEO of LTSE Software to find out more about the evolution of DevOps, and his vision for overcoming siloed developer, ops and security teams for fast, consistent and scalable operations across environments. He explains the importance of developer lifestyle and flexibility, to ensure they can remain effective while working in a supportive culture while the barriers between teams are removed. During the discussion Tiho expresses what he considers to be newer and better ways of measuring developer productivity. He tells us what he thinks about the developer and operations relationship, shedding light on how best they can integrate and interact to be influential on productivity, progress, and profitability. Tiho also delves into how LTSE is innovating investment, experimentation, and scaling for companies, in an effort to help them find continuous success.

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Key Quotes:

“If you are a technology company, you're focusing your innovation on technology. One of the most important things that you can think about is speed of development, and how fast you can get new products or changes out in the market, into the hands of the customers. And, what matters there is the people who are creating that code, who are creating that content; their ability to do so quickly, their ability to do so reliably and to be able to troubleshoot, test, engage, and monitor how the customers are working with what's out there.”

“Software, writing code, it's a craft. You develop your own jargon, and you need to engage with people who are creating, who are craft people, who are creating this valuable thing. You need to really study and understand and appreciate what they do and what's needed for them to be successful in that craft.”

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Time stamps:

01:30 Importance of the Developer Experience

04:00 Evolution of the Developer Lifestyle

11:30 Building Companies that Support Developer Lifestyle and Culture

17:30 The DevOps Relationship, Culture, and Working Environment

24:00 Budget Authority and Responsibility

25:15 Innovation at LTSE

30:15 Developer Flexibility and Success

34:00 Developer Value

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Links:

Tihomir Bajic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tihomirbajic/

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Keywords:

cio, cio exchange, VMware, innovation, leadership, DevOps, Developer, Developers, ops, operations, IT, information technology, business, technology, cto, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, investment

Next Episode

Mindshifts for Modernizing Applications - Guest: Ginna Raahauge, CIO at Zayo

This conversation is part of our Lead/Forward series, where we talk with technology leaders about the real stories behind the themes of innovation, talent, and experience. In this episode, we interview Ginna Raahauge, CIO at Zayo to find out more about the current state and future of the expanding definition of DevOps and what application modernization really means within the new environments the applications are being consumed. She explains how Covid has accelerated the diversification of application use in the office and at home. Ginna delves into the need for enhanced internet speed and bandwidth capabilities, as well as new considerations for implementing security measures earlier in the development process. She also talks about pushing further into the edge, scaling in the cloud, and the trials and tribulations of understanding legacy applications while investing in infrastructure and talent to upskill and modernize for the future.

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Key Quotes

“When you think about the infrastructure by which the foundation you are deploying your applications, the developers are really having to think about that differently, have more immersive conversations around what that architecture looks like, what the risks in that architecture are, or the assumptions that have really changed in their development aspects of that.”

“Developers are so much more closer to the impact of the experience, whether it's consumer, partner, customer, or even end user inside like an employee experience. And, it just is becoming so much more blended and immersive.”

“We are still going through that transformation of really what is DevOps? We've been trained on the traditional or the more longstanding DevOps methods and agile taxonomy. But, I do think that it's still early given the new environmentals of hybrid and just the pure consumption demand over more wavelength and 5G types of experiences, versus hard line experiences or fiber to the house. Not everybody has that.”

“I think that the definition of DevOps is expanding and getting bigger and we're seeing where those edges are blending, and we have to think about some of those experiences in that and they have to develop differently.”

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Time stamps:

01:15 Shift in Technological Acceleration and Application Performance

04:45 Breaking down Bandwidth

07:30 Developer Redevelopment of Approach

10:15 Evolution and Reskilling of DevOps

14:15 DevSecOps Considerations with User Experience

10:15 Future Developers Understanding Legacy

25:45 Producing New Ideas Without Old Constraints

29:15 DevOps and Cloud

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Links:

Ginna Raahaug on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ginna-raahauge-9b4275/

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Keywords:

cio, cio exchange, VMware, innovation, leadership, DevOps, Developer, Developers, ops, operations, IT, information technology, business, technology, cto, devsecops, security, cloud, multi-cloud, hyperscaling, hyperscalers