This Week in Enterprise Tech Episode 547 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Lou Maresca (00:00:00):
On this week in enterprise tech, we have Mr. Brian Chi, Mr. Kors Flank back on the show. Is burnout inevitable for IT Pros and cybersecurity professionals? Well, organizations need to figure out how to curb some of that stress, and we're gonna talk about some ways. Plus Jason McGee, GM and Chief Technology officer of IBM Cloud platform is here today. And we're gonna talk about hybrid clouds and just how might that might be the solution for hyperscale performance, compliance and portability. You definitely shouldn't miss it. Quiet on the set.

TWiT Intro (00:00:30):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tweet.

Lou Maresca (00:00:43):
This is twit this week in Enterprise Tech, episode 5 47, recorded June 9th, 2023. Dr. Con five. This episode of this week in Enterprise Tech is brought to you by decisions. Don't let complexity block your company's growth decisions. Rules driven process automation software allows you to manage a complex digital landscape, build custom workflows, visit rules, software modernized legacy systems, and improve customer experiences and decisions. Unified no code platform. Visit decisions.com/twi to learn how to automating anything and change everything. And by ZipRecruiter, did you know that hiring can take up to 11 weeks on average? You have that time to wait. Of course not. Stop waiting and start using Zip Recruiter. Ziprecruiter helps you find qualified candidates for all of your roles fast. And right now, try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/wyatt. Welcome to this weekend enterprise tech show that is dedicated to you, the enterprise professional, the IT pro, and that geek who just wants to know how this world's connected. I'm your host Lewis Maresca, your guys with the big world of the enterprise, but I guide you by myself. I need to bring in the professionals and the experts in their field, starting at your own principle analyst at andia. He's Mr. Curtis Franklin, the man who's got the pulse on the enterprise. Curtis, you're you're heading to Sin City pretty soon, aren't ya?

Curt Franklin (00:02:12):
I will be about a month from now. I'll be heading out there, going to be visiting with a vendor. So that's a major conference. And then about three weeks later, I'm back out there for the Black Cat Defcon Duo. I'm gonna be doing both of those. Next week I'm going to spend a day at Infocom here in Orlando. So getting out and amongst the industry, it's a good thing to do, to be talking to people, finding out new things. I'm excited about some of the stuff coming up, have lots more to say, but I think I'll wait until the end of the program. So we're gonna give people a reason to hang around to find out what's going on.

Lou Maresca (00:02:57):
Cliffhanger, cliffhanger. Well thank you Curtis for being here. Always great to have you. We also have to welcome back our network geek, Mr. Brian Chi. He's always cooking up something and I'm always interested to hear about it. Kurt cheaper. What's going on this week for you?

Brian Chee (00:03:08):
Actually, I'm doing science Night live at the Orlando Science Center as part of the Maker FX Makerspace. And I also will be spending a day or two at Infocom meeting with a bunch of different people because I'm looking at digital signage and projection technologies for possible inclusion at the central Florida Fairgrounds. Ought to be a lot of fun. And you know what? I'm also learning about ta da ramens spectroscopy, how to detect chemical makeups of materials at a distance. We are getting very, very close to having production devices that are very equivalent to the Star Trek tricorder.

Lou Maresca (00:04:03):
Well, thank you again for being here, Brian. We should definitely get started is burnout inevitable for it pros and cybersecurity professionals when we need to give some organizational ways for them to curb their stress. We're gonna talk about some of those ways. Plus Jason McGee, GM and CTO O of IBM cloud platform is gonna talk about hybrid clouds and just how it might be your solution for hyperscale performance and compliance. So definitely stick around lots to talk about there. But before we do, let's go ahead and jump to this week's news. Blips, according to an internal memo, recorded and reported by courts and the Verge, Google is tightening up its hybrid work policy with employees now expected to the attending office at least three days a week. That those that ac actually adhering to this schedule could face consequences in in their performance reviews. Google plans to track office attendance through badge data and workers consistently absent from the office may receive those nasty grams from their teams.

(00:04:59):
A Google's chief people officer has urged even remote workers who live near a Google office to consider switching to a hybrid work schedule stressing the importance of in-person collaboration. Now that's an opinion backed by Pew Research Centers finding that over half of Americans who work from home feel less connected to their coworkers. Now this stance is not worthy, given that these same tech companies who are moving to a hybrid policy have also been the creators and promoters of remote work tools such as Google Docs and Slack, which have revolutionized global remote work. And despite Google's earlier plans to allow 20% of its force to telecommute, the policy change underscores the tech giant's commitment to maintaining physical office presence amid increasingly competitive artificial intelligence landscape. Now, Google's hybrid work approach aims to balance the benefits of remote and in-office work while addressing the concerns about adherence to the policy. Now we hear about the new norm all the time, right? Well, the world is made up of people of all kinds in all situations and some need more connection than others. Now Google's looking to try and force everyone down that same path. The question is, what do you think about that?

Curt Franklin (00:06:10):
Well, once in a while we get a chance to look inside a criminal gangs operations and be unpleasantly surprised by just how disciplined and professional they can be. This week that looks comes courtesy of an article at Dark Reading describing how the C I O P or the Psyop gang sat on a vulnerability for nearly two years before they unleashed it to a devastating effect. Now, here at twt we've talked before about just how valuable zero day exports can be. And this case show why that's true. Cyop found a zero day vulnerability in progress. Software's move it transfer file, transfer app, and then spent two years in which it periodically launched waves of malicious activity against vulnerable systems to test their access to organizations and identify the ones to target. Researchers at Cruel Threat intelligence who investigated the recent attacks found evidence showing SIOP actors experimented with ways to exploit the MoveIt transfer vulnerability.

(00:07:13):
As far back as July, 2021. The telemetry suggests the threat actors were testing access with vulnerable MoveIt transfer clients in attempting to retrieve information that could help him identify the organizations where it was installed. Starting in April, 2022, PSYOP actors upped their technology game started using an automated mechanism for probing and collecting information from multiple organizations. At the same time, the group wasn't focusing all their attention on MoveIt though, because they have a pattern of finding vulnerabilities in file transfer programs and exploiting them for profit. Now in this new case, CYOP, which is also tracked as La Tempest and is known to be part of the TA 5 0 5 threat group, came out of stealth on June 1st. So far the list of known victims has included the B B C British Airways and the government of Nova Scotia. While SIOP itself has claimed hundreds of victims on June 7th, CISA issued a warning based on the serious nature of the attacks, the devastating nature of the vulnerability and the speed with which the campaign has spread. Move it, if you don't know, is a managed file transfer app that thousands of organizations, including giants like Disney, chase, Geico, and various US federal agencies used to transfer sensitive data in large files. Now cause this was a true zero day, there is no patch of remediation yet. So if your organization is one of those using MoveIt, well it's time to seriously up your vigilance and make sure that you're backup. And business continuity plans are world class cause the odds are better than even you're gonna need them.

Brian Chee (00:09:06):
All right, so heads up. This is not an enterprise news story. Sorry about that. This is more of a public service announcement because I've, you know, up until I retired, I was living in Hawaii and this is something we kept hearing over and over and over again. So the kill away of volcano on the big island of Hawaii is erupting again and again and again. So, Hawaii was formed by volcanoes and the hotspot is currently under the big island of Hawaii. EA in one form or another has actually been, I erupting on and off. But mostly on since 1984 when a cinder coone emerged in a banana farmer's field. Curtin is family had have actually stayed at the Volcano House Hotel right on the crater rim to join luminaries like Mark Twain who've stayed there. She bird has actually walked across the crater floor to place environmental senses, which now kind of part of the lava, sorry.

(00:10:09):
So my favorite sign on the volcano rim was the old BC caveman comic. And it went this way. See Dick and Jane vacation in Hawaii. See Dick and Jane taking the volcanoes. See Dick and Jane get too close to the edge. See the volcano taking Dick and Jane. Well, for those of you that wish to take in the volcanoes, please be aware that waiting into the surf where lava pours into the sea has already power boiled a tourist going beyond the ropes lost a tourist his legs when he broke through the lava crust and fell into the lava flow. A woman suffocated because she was asthmatic and parked her car right under a sign. At the sulfur banks that warn people with breathing issues, they should exit the area because sulfur bank really is spewing sulfur. So please enjoy the scenery and the natural beauty of Hawaii.

(00:11:03):
But heed the warning signs. Oh yeah, Hawaii is made of basalt and it's very crumbly. The county fire rescuers had to pick up a multitude of very experienced rock climbers off razor thin mountain peaks because handholds have crumbled out from under their fingers. Many people have described Hawaii as being the most different place you can go and still stay in the United States. It is a very different culture made up of a very large number of other cultures. My family lived there when it was still the kingdom of Hawaii. Have a great time, but be sensitive just how different it is from your home state.

Lou Maresca (00:11:45):
US Senators have launched two bipartisan artificial intelligence bills to address AI technology. Rapid advancement and implications according to this move comes in light of AI's transformative potential, highlighted by the release of chat G P T and the market infusion it has had over the last several months. The first bill proposed by senators Gary Peter, Mike Braun and James Langford mandates transparency when government agencies use AI to interact with the public. Additionally, it stresses the need for a humancentric approach in AI decision making processes, ensuring humans remain at the helm of control. Now, this legislation also brings and asks for a way to appeal decisions made by AI giving citizens a voice in AI governance. On the other hand, senators Michael Bennett, Mark Warner and Todd Young introduced a bill to set up a office of Global competition analysis. Now the goal of this is actually keep America at the forefront of AI development and retain its competitive edge against global players like China and strategic technologies like ai, quantum computing and semiconductors to keep lawmakers up to speed with AI advancements.

(00:12:51):
Senator Majority leader Chuck Schumer has planned three AI briefings, one of which will be the first ever classified briefing on the topic. Now, these sessions will discuss AI overview strategies for American leadership and AI in classified meaning focusing on defense and intelligence implications. Schumer has been proactive about framing rules on AI to tackle national security and education issues, especially with the adamant advent of programs like Chat G P T, which has over a hundred million active users, monthly active users. No. However, in these rules approved by Congress and the White House could take several months, maybe even several years, marking a significant step forward towards new regulations for generative ai. Well, folks that does it for the news blips. Next up we have the news bites. But before we get to the news bites, we do have to thank a really great sponsor of this week in enterprise tech and that's decisions now in today's digital landscape.

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(00:17:15):
It's real. The industry is a defensive marathon if you think about it. It's not a sprint regarding cybersecurity. However, not everyone in this marathon is a marathon runner. So job stress is always a constant companion. As, as the fallout from breaches or ransomware attacks can be immediate and damaging. It really caused some problems. But there's hope on the horizon. Tech leaders can implement strategic and strategizing ways to reduce daily stress and prevent burnout. Now, the first step, simplicity, the rush of digital transformation has left us with a lot of complex systems. I know I have some of them sometimes incompatible, increasing the risk of cyber text. Now we need to get back to the basics, identify critical business services, move them to the cloud if possible, build security and resilience around them and aim for really integrated and interoperable infrastructures. And through that, it's not new to think about this, but tools like patching and vulnerability management solutions can really simplify our systems and secure our systems.

(00:18:12):
So definitely think about that. Resilience is the second part of this equation. Now, as they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Let's not, let's not wait there, right? Let's actually start the event of happening and building out our infrastructure. Let's plan, prepare and practice. Write down the incident response plans and make sure that they're accessible even offline regularly. Practice them. Go through the flow. Use that recovery automation when it's possible and protect common targets like actor directory in your databases. The tools like cyber, cyber volts actually could help organizations recover faster from attacks. Now, one thing organizations do forget is that cybersecurity is a shared responsibility. That's right, it's all all hands on deck and it shouldn't rest solely on the shoulders of the security teams. Now the C-suite should be actively involved. They should regularly be updating and testing business continuity and recovery plans.

(00:19:00):
It should be conducting conducting risk assessments out there and ensuring recovery time and recovery point objectives are met. Now there's that whole concept of secure by design culture, and that's right, it's, it's crucial, crucial. Security must not be an afterthought. It must be an integral part of your software architecture, your services, and even your networks. And only by empowering all those security professionals in your group and prioritizing the wellbeing can really help prevent burnout. So I wanna bring my co-host in. There's lots of great stuff in this article and I think it points out some interesting things. You know, obviously it's saying that, Curtis, I wanna go to you first because it's saying that being informed and being trained and using automation and tools should relieve some of this stress. Is it, is it enough? You think?

Curt Franklin (00:19:44):
Well, obviously if you are comfortable with your skillset, if you don't feel like you're in over your head all the time, that's going to reduce some of your stress. But let's remember that one of the key sources of stress is what's known as an alert overload. In other words, a lot of people, especially in security, are in a situation where they get so many security alerts that they're just overwhelmed. It, it's like being faced with the army of fast zombies from World War Z coming at you all the time. And that's highly stressful. There are a lot of ways in which we can deal with this and companies are trying to deal with it. They range from the brutally simple, like add more people to the more sophisticated, as you said, changing architectures to make them secured by design. And those are all important.

(00:20:49):
We are seeing AI being used in different, different ways to help people, both by automating some of the basic activities and by providing more help that, that helpful, knowledgeable friend who can suggest things to you. But you mentioned one thing that I think is unlikely to happen and that is making our systems simpler. We all know that complexity is the enemy of security, and yet the standard enterprise architecture today is phenomenally complex involving not just the cloud, which is complex in itself, but cloud software as a service OnPrem hosted, all thrown together in ways where it can be difficult to track logic flows and data flows. And let's not forget that too many times, these little bits and bites are flowing through multiple jurisdictions, which adds its own level of stress and complexity. So I think the more we can do to design insecurity and the more we can do to augment the intelligence and expertise of our human security workers the less likely we are to have people sitting in the corner gently drooling into their defcon coffee mugs.

Lou Maresca (00:22:30):
That's gonna be a show tittle, I think. But I think you definitely, I definitely like to cut the call out of complexity cuz that is a true factor. In fact, we'll probably get into that when we bring our guests in to talk a little bit more about the concept of hybrid clouds and maybe how people can reduce some of that complexity. But chiefer, I wanna bring you in because, you know, there's a call out here, especially in this article, about the fact that obviously it's just not one, a one person job here, right? It's so all hands on deck. What, what can be sh what can be done to ensure that?

Brian Chee (00:22:58):
My, I'm gonna just throw out an example. I, I've been in one firm or another on call since I was seventeen, sixteen, seventeen years old. I was actually a programmer for a company that was doing guidance, maintenance and all kinds of stuff for a missile system <laugh>, which was an interesting thing for a high school kid. But one things they did was they recognized very, very early, this is back in the mid seventies, that people on call burn out really, really fast. If they think the entire world is dependent upon them, you know, if something happens. So one of the things they tried to, with some success was everybody got a pager. Everybody was on call, but they would scramble who got the pager that would get called. Now the whole idea behind this was to reduce the alert.

(00:24:03):
I guess, I guess the term would be fatigue. And so each person in the division kind of knew what the other people did. So the person that actually did get the call would then field the call and say, okay, we need to actually talk to this person. Instead of everybody getting a call saying, oh my God, everything's broke when it only needed to be one person. Now if we take this, obviously nobody uses pages anymore but it does do something interesting. The alert fatigue is a very, very real thing. And having everybody involved so that the team helps sort who, who actually deals with the issue goes a long way towards a concept I call buy-in. Everybody wants to be part of the team no matter how small. So I could easily see even, you know, I wouldn't say secretarial staff, but admin help, helping to sort out what's going on.

(00:25:20):
Maybe it's a script they have to go through, you know, just ask the script, but it kind of gives you the chance to, you know, deal with things and relieve some of the stress on the rest of the team. You know, maybe some, maybe even a oh heck, I'd even go as far as saying, you know, maybe, maybe someone that does the filing, you know, the classified filing or the sensitive filing but still knows what's going on in the team. Might be a good person to also be on call once in a while. So it's, I'm stretching a little bit and I, I can definitely see there's going to be all kinds of interesting comments out of the chat room. But buy-in, you know, making sure everybody feels like they're part of the team is a, what I think a pretty good thing.

(00:26:12):
You know, when someone feels like they haven't they have no way of directing how things go in the team is stressful in itself. And cybersecurity is definitely something that while we have experts the chances of a corporation having a an entire team of experts is gonna be probably pretty slim as there's probably gonna be within that team, people that have specialties. And I think having, you know, some crib notes so that no matter who you are in the team, you know, who to direct it to might not be a bad idea, but that's my 2 cents.

Lou Maresca (00:26:56):
Totally agree. Totally agree. Now, I I, Curtis, I wanna ask you one other question cuz I think that, you know, obviously there's this whole concept of generative ai. It's coming out, there's lots of organizations integrating it, and I'm hearing and actually seeing some examples from organizations where they're using it in the case to help reduce some of the burnout, some of the, some of the challenges they have today. Whether it's, you know, ingesting streams of data to be able to determine whether there's alerts or not. Or you may you, you know, constructing entities outta that data and, and building actual physical alerts for that kind of thing. Is, is this gonna help with, with burnout? Is this, is this, you're seeing some examples where this is actually gonna make some, some strides?

Curt Franklin (00:27:35):
I think generative AI could be a help over the intermediate to long term. It's not going to be a great help next week. And the the reasons are, are multiple. One of them is that generative AI is not yet sufficiently trustworthy to be used in mission critical situations. You still have to verify what you're getting from it. Another is that none of the people I know of in the security industry are talking about using generative AI as an automation device. They're not talking about using it to replace individuals, but to augment the effort of individuals. And in order to make that happen correctly and make it happen to best effect the human analyst, the human staff is going to have to learn how to work with generative ai. That means upskilling and that means some short-term added stress. I think that the goal is gonna be worth getting there. I think it can be a valuable tool, but I also think that anybody explain expecting it to solve the burnout problem by a labor day is going to be bitterly disappointed.

Lou Maresca (00:28:55):
Really agree. Well, I think that I'm gonna put that one to bed. We should definitely get moving because we wanna get to our guests to drop some knowledge on the twi right before we get there, we do have to thank another great sponsor of this week in Enterprise Tech and that's Zip Recruiter. Now, did you know they can take up to 11 weeks? That's a long time on average to hire for an open position. Now that's almost two and a half months. So if you are hiring for a growing business, do you really have the time to wait? Well, listening today, I've got some advice for you. Stop waiting and start using Zip Recruiter. Ziprecruiter can help you find qualified candidates for all your rules fast. And right now you can try it for free. Ziprecruiter.Com/Twi, check that out ziprecruiter.com/twi. Now, how efficient ZipRecruiter in helping you hire role ZipRecruiter uses powerful matching technology to quickly find you and send you the most qualified people for your roles.

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Jason McGee (00:30:51):
Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Absolutely.

Lou Maresca (00:30:54):
Noah, our audience is a complete spectrum of experience levels and they love to hear people's origin stories. Can you take us through a journey through tech and what brought you to IBM m?

Jason McGee (00:31:06):
Sure, yeah, I've I've actually been at IBM for a very long time, for 26 years. So my, my origin story goes back quite ways but really have spent my whole career as an engineer building platforms for enterprises to run their applications. And, you know, 20 some odd years ago, that was Java and application servers and, and that whole space and over the years spent lots of time in in virtualization and, and really thinking about how, how companies, you know, build their applications and how we can keep them focused on, you know, what real business problem they're solving unless on security and less on scaling and, and resiliency and performance. And and nowadays I run IBM's public cloud and, and drive our public cloud strategy and some of our hybrid technologies, which I think is just the, the modern version of application platforms.

Lou Maresca (00:31:59):
Yeah, we, we talked a little bit about complexity, right? We talked a little about you know, environment complexity and organizational complexity. You know, obviously we wanna get into talking about hybrid cloud. What are some of the biggest challenges organizations are facing when they are trying to adopt the hybrid cloud strategy?

Jason McGee (00:32:16):
Yeah, I, I mean, I think the challenges vary a lot. I mean, there's some of the basic ones you guys touched on. Like especially in an enterprise environment security vulnerability performance and scalability regulation and being able to meet all the kind of evolving regulation. You guys mentioned generative ai. I think that's gonna generate a whole interesting set of about evolving regulations and data, data security. So there, there's those things. I think their existing IT environment is a, a, a area for complexity. You know, most of these customers have, you know, on-prem systems, many technologies spread over many, many generations. And, and having the skill to figure out how to use technologies like hybrid cloud to move them forward is a challenge. Even just skills to their employees, right? And, and evolving knowledge for their employee base is a challenge. So there, there's many things I think are driving complexity and, and have to be solved to be able to really get the value out of technologies like cloud.

Lou Maresca (00:33:22):
So when, if you have an organization that comes to you and they're saying, Hey, we have a complex environment, we wanna move and we wanna adopt a hybrid cloud strategy, what are, what are some advice that you would give them as they get started executive move into that space?

Jason McGee (00:33:35):
Yeah, I think first, you know, you you, you're touching on hybrid, and I think when you talk about hybrid, you know, the idea of hybrid cloud is that your workloads are gonna live in multiple places. You know, you, you have on-prem data centers, you have public clouds, you probably have more than one public cloud provider that you're working with. Maybe you exist in multiple countries around the world, so you have, you know, geographic requirements. And so I think one of the first things I ask is like, what's the workload? Like, what is the application? What's the data that you're trying to deal with move to cloud or evolve? And what are some of the requirements around that application? Because that will really control what technologies you use, where you run it, you know and and how you leverage the cloud to, you know, either build that new application or to move that existing application into a cloud environment.

Lou Maresca (00:34:26):
So what about, you bring up a good point. Obviously the whole architecture of hybrid cloud could sometimes be a black hole for people or they, you know, it's a black box I guess you could say. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what are some pretty good or most promising use cases for when you wanna hybrid cloud or even hybrid cloud storage scenarios?

Jason McGee (00:34:42):
Yeah, th th there's a, there's a lot, but I'll try to boil it down to maybe two big drivers that I see for, for hybrid and when, and, and I think the drivers around hybrid are really fundamentally about kinda where does the application need to run? One driver is security and compliance and the other driver is data latency and data volumes. So like security and compliance could be, I'm a bank and the regulations say the data for my customers have to live in a certain country or a certain geography, and I have to maintain control over that data and control over who can access it and use it. So regulation might dictate where the application runs and where the data runs, and that will dictate whether it moves to a COD provider or, you know, stays in your data center or something like that.

(00:35:30):
The data example could be think about like iot you know, new data being generated by sensors or think about AI applied to video data. Like you have use cases where you're generating a lot of information or processing a lot of information. It's more efficient to kind of move the application to wherever the data's coming from instead of moving all the data into cloud, right? Or into another environment. And so like being close to data and being close to where data's generated can be a big driver. And I think lots of scenarios ultimately boil down to some flavor of those two things.

Lou Maresca (00:36:05):
Alright, well, a lot of motivation behind moving hybrid scenarios is obviously get out outside of maybe cloud lock in mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but also a lot of people's, you know, pushback from moving there many years ago. Is the fact that they're worried about performance and the fact that they have to kinda have these, these pipelines between the different clouds. What, what have you seen maybe in like hybrid cloud scenarios? How, how has it evolved over the last several years?

Jason McGee (00:36:32):
I think it's evolved in a kind of an interesting way in the sense that first off, people I think acknowledge now that they're gonna have a diverse set of environment. So if you, if you go back five or six years in the cloud conversation in the industry, it was kind of very simplistic. You know, I'm gonna move all my workload to cloud and close all my data centers, right? That's not really the reality today. And I think most people acknowledge that and recognize so, which means you're gonna have a mix of environments that are connected together. And, and if we have to be a little bit mature about thinking about how you wanna leverage you know, leverage cloud environments. So I think that's a big drivers just acknowledging the architectures that, you know, really exist today and, and being able to have a strategy about how you deal with them.

Lou Maresca (00:37:21):
So now that we've kind of talked about the general case, what, what are you seeing? How, how is hybrid some of the high hybrid cloud solutions by I B M Cloud or even with Sabi hot cloud storage, how are they gonna help?

Jason McGee (00:37:32):
Yeah, so, so one interesting, let's say use case for hybrid cloud that's come up in a few places and, and is represented in, in a particular partnership that we can talk about is is in sports and entertainment. And if you think about sporting events they, they're very localized, right? Like they happen somewhere. Data's being generated at the event. They're live, they're high scale. They happen somewhere. So for example, we, we had a partnership with the Boston Red Sox with and a partner of ours called Wasabi that was about being able to store and process data at, at Fenway Park at the Red Sox. So think about an event like that. You're, you know, if you wanted to collect data from the stadium, if you wanted to do AI analytics on live video feeds from the, from the games themselves, you probably wanna be able to do that actually close to where the event is happening.

(00:38:24):
And so being able to move the workload into into the ballpark, for example, becomes really compelling. And I think the solutions that we have in IBM cloud, like we have a technology called IBM Cloud Satellite which lets you kind of take the public cloud experience and extend it out into any infrastructure that you want. And I think that's the other big transition that's in flight right now in the industry is everyone has kind of agreed that the cloud operating model, like this idea of APIs and self-service and pay for what you use and somebody runs the service for you. Like everyone likes that model, but they wanna be able to apply that model more broadly to all of the places they need to run. And so, like in this Boston Red Sox example, they, they can have kind of all of the public cloud services, but run them in Fenway Park, keep their data local, process all the information locally, store their data in an object store, which is where Wasabi came into the picture and be able to kind of have that full cloud experience but control where the information was.

Lou Maresca (00:39:29):
We, we, we talked about a, a couple episodes ago, I think it was 5 43 about a company called Mefi and they were talking about bringing, you know, bare metal solutions like Kubernetes closer to the park so that they can run it Yeah. Directly at the park. So kind of reduce latency and that kind of thing. So when we talk a little bit about the solution, you were, you were mentioning, you know, what, what are some of the benefits of not having to be, you know, directly at the location having this more hybrid scenario is compliance. Maybe

Jason McGee (00:39:57):
Y it could be like, we had another example where this technology was used in, in Germany in a, in the, a hospital network in Germany called Minds Hospital. So it's a university hospital network. And their use case was more driven by that security and compliance thing. They needed to build new applications to do like covid vaccine scheduling and process patient data. The regulations in Germany were very strict that basically said they needed to keep the data in their data center, which in their case was in the hospital. But they needed to be able to quickly build apps and deploy. And so they were able to use satellite to basically get like a private cloud region that happened to run on hardware that was in their hospital. And it comes back a little bit also to the skills comment that I made. Like, you know, do you have experts in your team who know how to set up Kubernetes or run OpenShift who know how to manage Postgres databases and how to secure all that stuff and scale it? You, maybe you don't. So being able to have a cloud provider do that for you, but you can say it runs on these machines, or it runs in this bare metal provider near my ballpark, or it runs somewhere else, is, is a really nice combination and I think represents the evolution of where our cloud is going.

Lou Maresca (00:41:07):
I do wanna bring my cohost back in cuz they're chomping at the bit here. I wanna go to Curtis first. Curtis,

Curt Franklin (00:41:13):
You know, one of the things when we're talking about all of these various scenarios and the different applications for different use cases and the, you know, different combinations and permutations of things, what a lot of people want to know is, can it be made simple? I mean, can, can I, you know, is is there a, a recipe for when it's best to do stuff on-prem versus when it's best to do stuff in the cloud? And does such a thing exist or have we reached a point where the possibilities are so vast that there's no way to avoid doing deep analysis and getting deep subject matter experts involved before you could even start to think about how you're going to architect a solution?

Jason McGee (00:42:04):
Yeah, it's a great, it's, it's a great question and, and I do think it's somewhere in the middle, honestly. Like I, I don't think it can be simplified to the point that it's a very simple pick A, B, or C you know, kind of scenario. I think there is a lot of complexity in it and in the kinds of problems that customers solve. And, and so I don't know that you can make it really simple. However, the other side, the old world, the pre-cloud world was like, you built it all yourself. Like pick which servers you wanted and what configurations you wanted and what software stacks. And you were, you were self-assembling the entire world to solve your problems. And so I do think there's a middle here that says there's some common patterns, there's guidance, you know, I, I could take you through kind of a quick decision tree that says, answer these questions about security and regulation and policy and, and where your data lives. And I could generally point you in the right direction. And then there's some reusable patterns that say like, I wanna use, you know, Kubernetes for applications so that I can abstract across any infrastructure. You know, there's a small menu of things, so I think we can help guide, but I I, I, you know, I'm a pragmatic person, I'm an engineer and you know, ultimately there are a few questions you gotta ask and a little bit of thinking you have to do to be successful. Right.

Curt Franklin (00:43:26):
Well, you know, in the, the questions you have to ask category, I, I know in your position you obviously end up talking to a lot of customers and potential customers about Yeah. What they want to do and how they want to do it. Have you run into any common misperceptions, common patterns of thinking that are still wrong in terms of how people should be thinking about the, the addition of cloud to on-prem to services?

Jason McGee (00:44:03):
Yeah, I think one of the common misconceptions, which I think is just rooted in how fast things are moving is that it's on-prem, traditional or public cloud. Like those are my two choices, right? And I'm gonna do things in a completely different way, you know, and in fact I see customers who organize their teams that way, where it's like, I have my on-prem team and I have my cloud team, and I don't think it has to be that either. Or I think you, you have to think more about the applications you're building and not the technologies you're using. And a lot of people haven't caught up to that. Like cloud's a fast moving space. And if you look at how people have adopted clouds, this whole idea that like cloud doesn't have to just live in a cloud data center is only really true in the last two years, right? And so I think people still have, you know, they're a little farther behind that and they're thinking about how they can apply these technologies to their world.

Curt Franklin (00:45:02):
Well, speaking of that cloud, living in the cloud as you, as you say, do you find that people believe or want to ultimately choose a cloud provider and in a significant enterprise? Is that possible? Or in the same way that we once would have different flavors of hardware for different use cases within an enterprise? Are we looking at a situation where most organizations are going to end up having some level of relationship with multiple cloud providers?

Jason McGee (00:45:40):
I think people would like, they would want to pick one. I don't think they will ultimately be successful picking one. Like it, it's always sounds nice to have one. And I think a lot of people started there, honestly. But I don't think it works, and I don't think it works for a number of reasons. I think one is just the inevitable evolution of it and businesses and you, you wind up making different decisions at different parts of your company or you do acquisitions or partnerships or other things and you inevitably land with multiple solutions. And two, I think different cloud providers have different strengths and they have different capabilities and people wanna be able to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of the different providers. You know, in IBM cloud we've spent a lot of time on supporting kind of regulated industries like financial services and building in deep controls for security and compliance.

(00:46:31):
So it's really well tuned for those industries and other cloud providers have focused more on front end applications and have built, you know productivity and other front end capabilities that are really compelling. So I think the combination of like evolution of business and wanting to take advantage of the latest and greatest strengths from everybody leads people to a multi-cloud provider. I think the risk is you do it in a very fragmented way. Like you have to go into it eventually intentionally. You gotta decide what's my technology platform, what are the skills I'm building that, that's why we're so, you know, adamant in I B M that open source is the key foundation for hybrid cloud because we think open source gives you a way to have a common set of technologies that can work in any environment that can span multiple providers and on-prem. And so that's how we've built our, our technology stack and our strategy.

Brian Chee (00:47:29):
Oh, okay. I, one, I'm gonna say I miss the old IBM mainframe environment. That's where I grew up, by the way. Anyway, my new

Jason McGee (00:47:40):
Environment, you need to miss it, Brian. There's still a, a well and growing. Yeah,

Brian Chee (00:47:46):
Well one of the things that is changing in the hybrid environment, and I'm seeing the iot world driving a lot of it. In fact, one of the lasting last big briefings I got was from at and t before I retired at the University of Hawaii. And that's how the hybrid cloud is now hybridizing, I guess is a good word closer to the mobile devices. In fact, sure at and t was actually offering microservices at the apn, which I thought was pretty cool. Now, so here's, here's the real question. I'm asking you to crystal ball this a little bit. Is this going to have a big impact? And I'd like you to speculate a little bit on what, what the world's gonna look like for the iot, especially iot in the coming years.

Jason McGee (00:48:42):
Yeah, I think it's already having a big impact and these examples I've been talking through, you're already seeing them like cloud and cloud technologies pushing closer and closer to the edge, like getting all the way to the device, I think absolutely will happen from the standpoint of like the base technologies like containers and Kubernetes and OpenShift, you're already seeing start to show up in restaurants and cars and devices. But even more kind of full cloud services. Like we've done a bunch of work with at and t and other telco providers to let customers land workloads in the 5G network edge. So you could actually run the workload right where the network comes in. So all those sensors you have in the field can, you know, we can quickly process and filter that data. So I really think you're seeing cloud as an operating model take over the whole landscape of it and become the way that we consume it across all these environments. I think ai whether it's generative AI models or more traditional ML is also a driver of, you know, being able to process that data, do influencing at the edge and like take IOT data and actually run it through models before you filter that huge data stream back to your central, you know, databases or whatever. I think all those forces are converging to really unify how people consume IT technologies across all these different environments.

Brian Chee (00:50:12):
So here's one of my predictions and I'm predicting that we're going to someday see kind of a gen distributed AI world where light pre-processing is done at the edge, but fed to a backend. That's actually one a grant proposal I actually sent to IBM to use Watson mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for my undersea observatory. So are you starting to see some tools to do this? Because right now it's very cumbersome to split up the models. Yes,

Jason McGee (00:50:44):
There are, there are absolutely tools in, in use now and evolutions of those tools to enable that. I mean and, and in fact there's real world deployments of architectures like that. Like we worked with a customer at large auto manufacturer who is doing paint inspection video, paint inspection in the factory. So like pre-processing all the data, doing model application, like literally on the production line, feeding analytics back, you know, so locally controlling the paint line, like I need to stop the line because we're having defects. And also then aggregating and feeding statistics back to the central sites to say like, what's the, you know, aggregate quality of what we're doing. I mean, there's so many examples emerging where those forces are coming together. So and with AI models in particular, I think what you described is absolutely happening, which is like AI applications are really a collection of models that solve different parts of the problem and you need to be able to distribute and run those models. In clouds, we talk a lot about infrastructure for ai, like, you know, large G P U supercomputers for doing training and high performance inferencing chips for like running models, but like, think about all the technology that's embedded in mobile devices now for doing the same thing. So you can push those models, you know, all the way to, of course, your phone, but also to other edge devices.

Lou Maresca (00:52:08):
Cool. I wanna adjust one thing cuz we talked a lot about people, people in the chat room are mentioning it too, is the one thing that they're worried about is the fact that hybrid clouds, they can have performance problems. What are some suggestions that you have that you've seen actually organizations approve and make things better from a performance perspective when it comes to hybrid cloud?

Jason McGee (00:52:27):
Yeah, I mean the performance problems usually arise from people consuming, you know, capability in different places without thinking about how things interact <laugh>, right? And actually one of the drivers for hybrid cloud, like location choice is that performance and latency thing. I mentioned, I I mentioned it in the context of data, but like, you also have like what other applications do you talk to? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I also think there's been an interesting, I'll say evolution in microservice architecture where people are getting smarter about how they break things up so that, you know, you don't do it theoretically, like I'm gonna break it into fire microservices. But you think about like, what are the collections that work together? So I, I think it's an active part of how you have to make decisions about where you run things and you do have to understand how applications interact.

(00:53:19):
Y you know, if I, if I step back and I look at the 26 years I've been in a space, like the big macro change that I think is happening is we're going from being infrastructure centric. What are the components that make up a solution to being more application centric? What are the workloads that I'm building and running and how do they interact and driving the infrastructure and driving the cloud locations and all of that from the standpoint of the applications that I'm running. And I think the more customers do that the more successful they'll be at leveraging hybrid cloud and, you know, not having performance problems because they didn't put, you know, two things at talk all the time, halfway across the world from each other.

Lou Maresca (00:53:58):
And one of the forcing functions I'm seeing new people to move to hybrid cloud clouds. You know, I work with lots of scenarios where, you know, organizations need their services in government clouds or sovereign clouds in order to be able to maintain that business, right? They wanna be able to scale internationally and they wanna, they want to be able to support that. Is this just gonna be, have to become a norm that the organizations are gonna have to figure out how to componentize their services and break things down so that they can also be in a very similar situation in a hybrid scenario so that they can meet the demand of business in that case?

Jason McGee (00:54:29):
I think so especially if, especially if you're a more multinational kind of enterprise where you have to be able to operate in different places. I mean, you, you touch on an interesting point, which is I think the regulatory environment, the geopolitical environment is leading towards, I think a more fragmented cloud environment. You know, you know, today there's a, a handful of kind of global cloud providers who operate in every country around the world. I think you're gonna see more demands for local geographically bounded clouds, not only in where things run, but then in where the data stored and in some cases who operates the cloud? Like who are the people who can operate the cloud and who owns the cloud? Like all of those dimensions are out there. How it affects people I think varies a lot by industry and, and by cu by company. But I think the general trend is more fragmentation more cloud environments, more of a demand to be able to deploy your solutions in different places that might mean across different providers. And so being prepared for that and building applications to take advantage of hybrid cloud. So you have the flexibility to, to land that, I think it's gonna become increasingly important.

Lou Maresca (00:55:40):
Now, what would you say to an organization that is a standard organization, let's say a 10,000 person seat organization, and they look, they wanna basically lift and shift their services from, you know, they have some on-prem services, some on-prem data, but they wanna make it so that they can move their data to like a different regions and different locations in the world, even different government clouds. What, what do you say to them to have traditional architectures, ones that wanna move into this hybrid space? What, what's, what's a key benefit for them to do that and, and, and what's really a good guide for them to follow when it comes to that type of thing?

Jason McGee (00:56:10):
Yeah, I think if they have traditional architectures, you, you, you have kind of two paths and most people follow a combination of the two paths. You know, depending on which workloads, like one path is you, you try to lift and shift as is. So for example, lots of people have VMware environments, OnPrem, and you can lift those VMware environments straight into a cloud provider. And we do a ton of that in i b m cloud. We run a huge VMware environment for many customers. The advantage of that to me is like, you can get out of that infrastructure and you can put that work quote close to the rest of the applications you run in cloud. And so it can be a good step for people to get going on the transformation, but the more powerful transformation is you adopt a new platform, and that new platform in our world is Linux and OpenShift and Kubernetes. And by, by adopting a new platform you get the flexibility going forward mm-hmm. To run those workloads wherever you need to. And so I, I do think it, it's really important for, for companies to think about, like how do they start to transform those traditional architectures into something that can take advantage of this new platform and therefore be open to the flexibility they may need in the future.

Brian Chee (00:57:21):
Okay, I'm go, I gotta ask, IBM's been very big on quantum computing and so this is definitely speculation. Sure. Are we gonna actually see quantum computing in our lifetime as something that's useful or right now is it just a really cool research project?

Jason McGee (00:57:43):
It is a really cool research project for sure, but yes, we're gonna see it be useful. I think time horizon it's not precise, but my guess is in the next five years you'll see production use of quantum systems. I think it might be five to 10 years before you see that at kind of large scale across the industry, but it's not, you know, 20 years from now or outside of the lifetime of all of us who are working in this industry. And we actually not only have a huge research investment in in Quantum and I B M, but we actually run all of that stuff in our cloud and we've made it accessible to everybody. We have a huge fleet of real quantum systems that anyone can consume through cloud and, and you know, most of the people consuming it today are, are learning and experimenting on how quantum might be applied to different problems.

(00:58:33):
But I think we're closer than you realize to to getting to scale. And I think that's fundamentally driven by kind of how many qubits we can, we can expose in those quantum systems. And we're doing a lot of interesting research on not only how to increase the size of the quantum computers, but how do you link multiples together and how do you partition problems and get to something that you can scale by, like linking multiple systems together. And, and I think as those problems get solved, you'll see this very rapid increase in capability around quantum.

Brian Chee (00:59:05):
All right. So let's go on appeal to the parents. There's obviously a shortage of crypto specialists, shortage of security specialists and so forth. If you could go and give advice to kids in say, middle school, high school, what are the things that are missing from the people entering the job market now and that i b m or you have had to invest in fixing, you know, plugging the holes, so to speak?

Jason McGee (00:59:43):
I'll, I'll, I'll take it from, from two angles. One angle is on pure technology. I mean, this isn't gonna be surprising, but the, the impact of AI is just beginning. And I think skills in that space need to be much more pervasive. It's still a very specialized skill and I don't think there's any part of technology that isn't gonna be massively impacted by by a variety of ai developments. So I think that's a skill base, you know, people need to start to develop and, and will prove to be very valuable in the coming years. I think the other skill that's missing is being able to actually think about the connection between technology and, and business and product. Like I'm a product guy fundamentally, like I've spent my whole crew building products that people can use. And I find a lot of a lot of technical people coming into the industry.

(01:00:37):
A lot of engineers are good in a deep technology domain, but are not as good at how do all the pieces link together and how do you think as a system and do systems engineering and how do people consume what you're using? And I think, you know, give and how technology's evolving. A lot of kind of new technology will actually be how to assemble different pieces together and how do you link different capabilities. So, you know, having more of a product mindset and having more of a systems engineering mindset, I think will prove valuable. And it's something that's hard. You know, people coming in, you know, they're, they're great at, you know, certain technologies, but they're not as good at kind of linking the whole view together.

Lou Maresca (01:01:16):
Unfortunately, time flies when you're having fun. We've, we've exhausted all of our time, unfortunately. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Since we're running on low on time, do I wanna give you a chance to maybe tell the folks at home where they can learn more about I B M Cloud or can they get started or can learn about more about hybrid?

Jason McGee (01:01:32):
Sure, I mean, simple place would be ibm.com/cloud. And and all the kind of topics we touched on are there. And, and you can learn more about, you know, the space in general and of course what we're doing at IBM in that space.

Lou Maresca (01:01:47):
Well folks, you have done it again. You sat through another out of the Best Day enterprise and IT podcast in the universe, so definitely tune your podcaster to twt. I wanna thank everyone who makes this show possible, especially to my amazing co-host starting at the very on Mr. Curtis Franklin. Curtis, you teased us before we gotta know what's going on in the coming weeks.

Curt Franklin (01:02:05):
Well, I've got a lot of writing that I'm doing not only for our subscribers at amia, but things that are gonna be showing up on dark reading. I have one that'll be out next week looking at issues around free training packages. Just how far can free training p take you? You might be surprised at the answer. So that's one of the things I'm gonna be doing, gonna be doing a lot writing about the conferences coming up. And I'm hoping to get some deep thought in while on vacation. See you out coming up with some, some more ideas, lots of things happening this summer and we're gonna be roaring into the fall. So I hope people will keep up with me on the social media. I'm still on Twitter KG four gwa, I'm on Mastodon KG four gwa@sdf.mastodon.org. You can always find me on LinkedIn. Curtis Franklin follow me on Facebook. I accept carrier pigeons, you know, whatev, whatever comes across I'm game. So I look, always look forward to having conversations with members of the Twit Riot.

Lou Maresca (01:03:16):
Thanks Curtis. We also have to thank our very Mr Brian cheek. Brian, thank you so much for being here. What's going on for you in the coming weeks? Where could people find you and get in touch with you?

Brian Chee (01:03:25):
Well, I want to do a shout out though. One of my big frustrations is some of my instruments that I, I'm retired with the battery packs are going bad and some of the gears end of life, you know, especially my Fluke test equipment. This is really frustrating, especially since I can't buy them anymore. So the shout out is to a company called M T o Batteries. They will actually take old battery packs from end of life gear. You send it to them, they'll rebuild it and then send it back to you. So if I, so, like for instance, my fluke O T D R, if I could buy a new battery pack, it would cost me almost a thousand dollars because they are so rare now, however, MTO Battery is offered to rebuild it for $150, well worth it. And life could get interesting.

(01:04:22):
So I'm gonna be telling people whether or not the rebuild was worth it or not. Mostly on Twitter. My Twitter address is A D V N E T L A B advanced net Lab. Would love to hear your ideas and if people have actually found other battery rebuilding places, I'd love to hear about it. Yes, I do know how to build battery packs from scratch, but I'd like someone to that has experience to do it, especially on things like lithium batteries that have this little Bernie te tendency if you do 'em wrong you're also welcome. I'd love to hear your show ideas, especially since we try to do threads within our scheduling. I'm sheer spelled C H E E B E R t TWIT tv or you're welcome to also use TWI twit tv and that'll all the hosts look forward to hearing from you. Look forward to hearing your show ideas and would love to see you people at Infocom if you happen to be there.

Lou Maresca (01:05:29):
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So you get a lot of options. Definitely check out club twi, twi.tv/club twi. Now after you subscribe you can impress your family members, your coworkers, your friends with the gift of twi cuz we talk about some fun tech topics on the show and I can guarantee they will find them fun in industry as well. So have them join and be part of the movement and also subscribe. Now if you've already subscribed, hey we do this show live, we're doing a live right now, 1:30 PM Pacific Time, Fridays. Just go to live dot twit, do TV there. You'll get to choose any one of the streams that we have there you come see how the pizza's made, all the behind the scenes, all the fun and banter that we do before and after this show. You can watch us make all of our mistakes. It's pretty funny.

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(01:08:52):
Of course, I'm also on Masson, you can get me@lutwi.social. Of course. I have a lot of messages on there that I still have to go through. So I apologize if you're waiting on one. So I'll, should I get through 'em this weekend? Plus I also have lots of great conversations on LinkedIn. I'm Lewis Bres on LinkedIn. Please check me out there. I like post some, some articles there and as well as some some videos. So please check that out. And of course, I also wanna show you what I do during, during my normal work week at Microsoft. Check out developers.microsoft.com/office. There we post all the latest and greatest ways for you to customize your office experience. And in fact, if you have m Microsoft 365, M 365 and you gotta excel, open Excel right now, check out the automate tab that is my home that I've been living.

(01:09:33):
We built automate power, automate integrations to Excel and you record your macros right there, edit the scripts and let you power automate them to schedule them or run them as triggers. Lots of fun stuff. So check that out. It actually is a really powerful tool. So that's developers do microsoft.com/office. I wanna thank everyone who makes this show possible, especially to Leo and Lisa. They continue to support this weekend enterprise tech each and every week, and we can do this show without them. So thank you for all your support over the years. And I also wanna thank all the staff and engineers at Twitch. And of course, I also wanna thank Mr. Brian Che one more time. He's not only our co-host, but he's also our tireless producer. He does all the show bookings and the plannings for the show, and we really couldn't do the show without him. So thank you Cheever, for all your support. And before we sign out, I want to thank our editor for today, whoever that is, because they make us look great after the fact. So I also wanna thank Mr. Victor who's our TD for today? Victor, are you the editor for today too?

Victor (01:10:32):
Yeah, I'm, I'm the editor also.

Lou Maresca (01:10:34):
You're the man for today. You're gonna get rid of all of our, all of our junks, so thank you so for doing that. Appreciate it, <laugh>. But you know what, if you wanna know what's going on, definitely check out all of our Twitch streams. And until next time, I'm Lewis Mareka just reminding you, if you wanna know what's going on in the enterprise, just keep twiet!