Managing all of the clouds - Lauren Malhoit - Ep67

Tech Interviews

As the move to cloud continues we are starting to see a new development, with organisations no longer relying on a single cloud provider to deliver their key services, many now opting for multiple providers. This multi-cloud environment makes perfect sense, the whole point of adopting cloud is to provide you with the flexibility to consume your data, infrastructure, applications and services from the best provider at any given time, which would be very difficult to do if we only had a single provider. However, multi-cloud comes with a challenge, one rather well summed up at an event recently by the phrase "clouds are the new silo's". How to avoid cloud silo's is seemingly becoming a technology "holy grail" engaging many of the world's biggest tech vendors. Taking on this challenge is the subject of this week's podcast with my guest Lauren Malhoit of Juniper Networks and co-host of the excellent Tech Village Podcast. We open the discussion by trying to define what multi-cloud is and how it doesn't just mean Azure and AWS, but can equally apply to multiples of your own datacenters and infrastructure. Lauren shares her view on the importance of automation and ask, why bother? Do we really need a multi-cloud infrastructure? We wrap up looking at the importance of being multi-vendor, multi-platform and open and how that openness cannot come with a cost of complexity and how a multi-cloud world shouldn't be seen as a threat, but as an opportunity for career growth and development. I hope you enjoy what I thought was a fascinating conversation about an increasingly pressing challenge. Thanks for listening.