Status Go: Ep. 225 – Myth Buster: The Cloud is Not Reliable | Alejandro Otero

Summary

In this episode of “Status Go,” host Jeff Ton debunks the common myth that the cloud is unreliable. Joined by guest Alejandro Otero, CTO of NexSpec, a company specializing in cloud migration solutions, they dive into the various misconceptions and fears surrounding cloud technology. With insights from their experiences in media and entertainment post-production, they share the benefits of scalability, redundancy, and managed services offered by cloud providers. Discover the truth behind the cloud’s reliability and how it can empower businesses to embrace innovation and growth. Tune in to challenge your preconceptions and unleash the potential of the cloud.

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About Alejandro Otero

Alejandro Otero has more than 25 years of experience in the entertainment industry with a focus on post-production servicing. After graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Otero joined Sony’s DVD Center. In 2004 he joined Radius60 Studios and worked to create the company’s digital and creative servicing division. Once Radius60 Studios was acquired and became Pixelogic Media, he managed the digital distribution and mastering segments of the business before taking over the technology division.  Most recently in 2021, he joined NexSpec as CTO with the goal of creating cloud based solutions to solve challenges faced by media & entertainment companies in the rapidly evolving distribution landscape being shaped by streaming.

Episode Highlights

[00:00:00]: The Myth: The Cloud is Not Reliable

[00:02:08]: Alex Otero’s Career Journey

[00:04:48]: The Tech Stack at NexSpec

[00:12:16]: The Birth of the Myth

[00:16:50]: Advancements in Reliability

[00:24:15]: When Disaster Strikes

[00:29:03]: Choosing the Right Cloud

[00:30:54]: Busting the Myth

[00:32:31]: Actions for Tomorrow

[00:34:33]: Closing

Episode Transcript

Alex Otero [00:00:00]:

I do love these technologies because, to me, it’s a huge underpinning to reliability. I don’t need people to sit around and babysit these technologies. They’re just going to function on their own.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:00:15]:

Technology is transforming how we think, how we lead, and how we win. From InterVision, this is Status Go, the show helping IT leaders move beyond the status quo, master their craft, and propel their IT vision.

Jeff Ton [00:00:32]:

Welcome back to our continuing series Myth Busters: Cloud, Security, and Innovation. Like the much more famous MythBusters TV show, we’re going to dive into several myths and, through interviews, case studies, and data, bust that myth. Follow us over the next several months as we share blogs, infographics, and, of course, podcast episodes. On the second Monday of each month, we will interview a peer CIO CTO or business owner who has successfully busted the myth. Two weeks later, we’ll hear from an InterVision expert who will further destroy the myth.

Of all the myths that we are covering cloud, security, costs, migration, and complexity, the myth we are busting today surprises me the most. Believe it or not, there is still a pervasive myth that the cloud is not reliable. Have there been outages? Absolutely. Are they highly publicized? Without a doubt. Today we are going to dig under the covers a bit and explore the myth. And with our guest bust the myth.

Our guest today is Alejandro Otero, the CTO for Nexspec. Nexspec is leveraging decades of experience in media distribution technology to solve the fundamental challenges of migrating distribution processes to the cloud.

Alex, welcome to Status Go…and, let’s bust that myth.

Alex Otero [00:02:05]:

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Ton [00:02:08]:

I’m looking forward to this conversation. Alex, when you and I met….gosh, a week or two ago…I really enjoyed the conversation, and I know our listeners are going to walk away with several nuggets from your experience.

So, let’s start there. Could you share a little bit about your background and your career journey?

Alex Otero [00:02:28]:

Sure.

So, I work in the media and entertainment post-production space. Essentially started out during the launch of DVD for home entertainment way back in the day at Sony Pictures, and shortly after that left to become a partner in a company called Radius 60. At Radius 60, we were the largest boutique provider of a lot of those home entertainment distribution services, very much focused around DVD and then the upcoming technology of Blu-ray.

And then, we started to see the advent of the digital supply chain. So, the launch of the iTunes store and Netflix, which we helped to launch, and over the next decade-plus saw many, many more platforms and online retailers sprouting. And we again continue to help facilitate a lot of those distribution challenges for the studios.

And in 2016, Radius60 was acquired to grow into Pixel Logic Media, a very large peer competitor for a lot of other the power players in that part of the industry. And I was always interested in the tech side of how to manage things a little more efficiently by creating software and hardware solutions to the scalability challenges that were being presented. Again, this was a little bit different again as we started to see the online growth of consumer consumption of the content that the studios were producing where now things were starting to go a lot more global.

So, we hit big scalability challenges, and again I was interested in how to solve that with some technology solutions as opposed to throwing more people at the problems. And they’re very unique challenges because, especially in the M & E space, you’re dealing with petabytes of storage often like just right from the get-go, you’re going to deal with petabytes of storage and single files that are upwards of a terabyte large.

And it is worth mentioning that COVID actually helped debunk a lot of the industry’s reticence in adopting the cloud. A lot of that existed because of security concerns, and that really opened up a whole new ballgame. And after I realized the opportunities unfolding in the cloud, I joined Nexspec as CTO to help focus on creating cloud-based solutions to a lot of those same challenges.

Jeff Ton [00:04:48]:

Well, and I know we’re going to get into this here in a few minutes, kind of that difference between on-prem and now working for a company that’s born in the cloud and a little bit about those differences. Tell us a bit about Nexspec, what it does, what products and services you all have and then if you don’t mind, talk a little bit about the tech stack there at Nexspec.

Alex Otero [00:05:13]:

Sure. So, Nexspec is a two-and-a-half-year young company with a mission statement to create scalable cloud-hosted M & E solutions. We offer SaaS services for digital inventory management and also create supply chain workflow automation solutions. Again, everything pretty much cloud-hosted, and in addition, we have what I guess could best be described as a skunkworks onboarding team. That might not mean as much to folks that are less deep than this part of the supply chain, but really it’s just, again, a team that kind of tackles things in a manual way again. So even if it was on-prem or in the cloud, you just want people that kind of understand what are the processes that you eventually want to scale up and have automations work on. And we view that as being important because it helps us to understand again what are the actual business requirements, not to just charge forward with development, but to manage those business requirements, have a clear understanding of what the automation is supposed to do, what the software is intended to do. And there’s no better way to do that than just having, again, somebody do things very manually.

And again, the idea is to scale that up quickly, but we feel that if you jump straight to the software solutions, you’re going to end up with something that works for some workflows but not all. So, it’s a keen focus of ours.

Jeff Ton [00:06:34]:

It’s kind of that white glove onboarding.

Alex Otero [00:06:37]:

Exactly. And they help to define all those requirements for our software development and, again, clearly lay out those user stories and everything else. So again, they’re doing a whole mixed role, but really their fundamental purpose is to tackle those challenges the same way you would if you didn’t have a lot of the customized architected software that existed.

And when it comes to our tech stack, we’ll start there. That actually brings its own unique set of challenges because in order to help this onboarding team, they effectively need to be able to function as if they were sitting in front of a powerhouse editorial workstation, right? So again, that’s the way you do things manually, and we’re cloud agnostic, but truly speaking, most of our clients are AWS-centric, so most of our solutions tend to be geared towards AWS, including our SaaS offerings. But at the end of the day, these principles, a lot of them still apply to whichever cloud provider that you’re interested in leveraging.

And one of our goals, and again, this was particularly challenging, given that skunkworks onboarding team, was to not have any real equipment on-prem. So, if you look in our machine room, it’s basically just a firewall and a switch, and hosted. At the desk spaces, we have the equivalent of just terminals that are intended to just be a front end into cloud-hosted computers. I guess. Again, we’ll start with what we did to facilitate what again I’ll call the production environment.

And there’s a lot of security requirements that are stringent, and for good reason, because if you’re working on pre-release content like a movie or episodic content and it leaks before it’s meant to air or show in theaters, that’s obviously a lot of lost revenue. So, one of the challenges with working in these production environments is that you expect to have these two separate networks. They’re typically called like a corporate network where you’re doing your daily business work and then what is typically labeled a production network, and we call it a secure network, where again, I guess the closest equivalent would be air gapped, meaning that those editorial workstations, they can’t communicate aside from communication coming in, they actually can’t communicate out. So, you can’t even search Google or anything else because you don’t want anybody posting a file to Dropbox or whatever when they’re working on this content.

So that in and of itself was an interesting challenge to try to set that up in the cloud. Again, to quickly summarize, we just created two separate VPCs to mirror those same kind of environments in the cloud, and they were connected through to the equivalent on-prem VLANs. So, inside our production VPC, that’s communicating to the production VLAN on-prem, where we have the terminal or emulate workstations, we’re using that technology to remote into those hosted instances. And, our production VPC has a storage gateway, like an AWS-specific product deployed within there, that serves as our NAS, or Network Attached Storage. It’s backed by S3.

So really, it’s kind of beautiful because it’s infinite storage on our NAS. And we have individual EC2s that serve as our post-production workstations. Again, they’re running HP Anywherei for folks that are familiar with the software solution. And then those Emulation terminals, again, are serving as the front end.

So somebody sits down in front of an emulation, and again, they feel like they’re sitting in front of this powerhouse beefy editorial workstation that is really in the cloud miles and miles away. And again, it’s great because, using these technologies, they get the benefit of, again, a powerhouse editorial workstation with stores that meet the most demanding data I-O requirements to playback a UHD file, to edit those, and move that content around.

And then the other key thing is that we didn’t have to outlay a lot of capital to spin that up. We put our infrastructure together. But you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars usually just to get those editorial workstations and the amount of storage that would be required to deploy on-prem. And it was very easy to kind of put this together. Well, I think that maybe it wasn’t super easy to set it up originally.

Jeff Ton [00:11:24]:

Maybe not easy, but it’s easy now.

Alex Otero [00:11:27]:

That it’s in practice. Right? We went through a lot of R&D effort to make sure that everything could be tuned just right to meet…and again, these are very specific requirements for our industry, but we wanted to make sure that it could meet those challenges and requirements before we said like, yes, just the firewall and the switch sitting in the machine room, nothing else sitting there.

And it also allows us to, again, meet all the other requirements, meaning that just physical security. In order to pass certain security audits, somebody needs to badge in, go behind, get a second door, go into the secure room, and sit down on that emulation workstation. So again, they can’t access this content sitting from home through a VPN connection. Again, this has all the same security requirements that you would have if you tried to facilitate this on-prem.

Jeff Ton [00:12:16]:

I love that description, Alex, because I know a lot of our listeners…they probably don’t work in media and entertainment, but they work in highly regulated environments and have some of those same types of requirements. And this also is a great segue to the myth itself that…what we’re attacking today is this myth that the cloud is not reliable. Yet you’ve been able to build this we’ll call it infrastructure, cloud-based infrastructure that provides great response time and a feel like you’re in front of a beefed up on-premises laptop or desktop.

Where do you think this whole myth of the cloud is not reliable…where do you think that got started?

Alex Otero [00:13:07]:

Yeah, I’ll have to be honest. I guess I’m a little bit of a latecomer to the party because by the time I was a little more heavily steeped in the cloud, this is around 2016. We certainly had some services and everything deployed in there, but I never really heard as much. The label applied to it of it being unreliable. But maybe if I could choose a different word, I would say inconvenient to maybe make reliable. Right?

I guess because I do feel like maybe I’m mistaken, but that hopefully most people at this point do understand, and maybe this is again why you..you’d be a little confused by this. There’s really not much of an excuse to say that things are unreliable in the cloud, and we can get to some of the specific technologies and what’s backing that redundancy or reliability. At the end of the day, we didn’t even cover that part of our tech stack. But again, there’s a whole gamut of stuff that sits behind there.

But I can appreciate it if somebody says that I don’t know how to make something reliable, I can certainly empathize and sympathize with that. And I guess that the main thing is that the architectural principles to make something reliable, they can be a little more complicated, again, than you want to deal with or than what you’re seeing in the on-prem world. But the truth is that there’s a lot more ways to accomplish that reliability and redundancy in the cloud. And perhaps sometimes having too many options just creates that paralysis that you don’t know what to do.

So, you either don’t deploy some of the options that you have or just kind of stop there because it’s just I’ve got ten different things on the table. What’s the right choice? Right? And again, I can appreciate that, but if you’re just starting off on your cloud journey, really that’s again, why you want a partner, and we use InterVision, but you want someone to break down those options for you in layman’s terms. And the reality is that the choices that you have there typically isn’t a bad choice of what you want to do in order to achieve that reliability or redundancy. But what I can say is that a lot of times there is a best choice for you and your organization. Right?

You’re not going to make a bad choice if you again follow the principles of how you’re intended to architect things in the cloud. But based on your priority, is it the redundancy itself? Is it cost? Where is your sliding scale of where? And again, you do these same evaluations on-prem of how many hot spares do you want to have? Again, it’s a different question or a different answer to the same question at the end. Yeah, again, if you don’t have that knowledge right now, you can research it or again leverage a partner that has already gone through this and have them learn together for you.

Jeff Ton [00:16:09]:

Yeah, well, we’re going to pause right there…speaking of partners…and we’re going to listen to a short message from InterVision. As our listeners know, InterVision is the publisher of the Status Go podcast.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:16:28]:

Unlock the Power of more with InterVision Systems. We provide the cutting-edge technology and expert guidance you need to take your business to the next level. Don’t settle for less. Choose InterVision Systems and discover what’s possible. Contact us now to learn more.

Jeff Ton [00:16:50]:

And if you do want to learn more, visit InterVision.com/myths. There you’ll be able to explore some of the other myths that we’ve busted throughout this series and learn more about this specific myth.

Today we’re talking with Alex Otero. Alex is the CTO for Nexspec. And we’ve been talking about this myth that the cloud is not reliable. And I love the way he tilted that myth a little bit before break, that maybe it’s that you may not know how. It’s a little different approach to reliability. And so, understanding how to build reliable systems in the cloud can be a little different. And you may need to use a partner or do some study on how to do that.

But what I’d like to do now, Alex, getting back into our conversation, is, as you’ve seen this, you started out like many on-prem. You were focused on technology infrastructure on-prem, and now you’re in a cloud-only pretty much environment. What advancements have you seen in the time that you’ve been involved in cloud that make it more reliable, more resilient?

Alex Otero [00:18:10]:

Sure. I do think it is worthwhile to mention that again, even by the time we were in the cloud playground, there were a lot of good things that already existed. And a simple example, there is storage. Right? Like, storage has always been very reliable in the cloud, and it’s easy to take for granted how reliable and redundant it can be because it’s just a standard offering. Again, that you’re getting three copies of backups for every file that you put in the cloud. Like, again, you don’t have to think about it the moment you put it in the cloud. If you’re just choosing a standard tier, you’re getting three copies of this file. It’s spread out across. In the AWS instance, they would call an availability zone.

So just consider that this has been around for quite some time. This is like not even thinking about it, not doing anything. You’ve got two additional carbon copies to that file that are available just in case something happens without setting up any infrastructure. The moment you turn on your account and upload a file, that happens automatically. And again, there’s plenty that you can do beyond that and you can choose to actually scale that down if you want a less costly option to say, I only want that content in one availability zone.

A lot of this goes to how many nines you want to pay for of redundancy or reliability. And you can go to the other end of the spectrum and say an availability zone is all within one region. Yeah, each one of those warehouses is a few miles apart, but I want my other stuff on the other side of the continent or another continent entirely. Again, there’s easy tools that have been around for quite some time that allow you to do even that kind of redundancy without too much effort and setup.

But I think when we talk about newer things that have become more popular since, again, we started our cloud journey. I’m a big fan of serverless technologies, managed services as well, but with these technologies, you pay a little bit of a premium, but it’s not really too much to have a lot of the intensive IT functions of managing, patching, monitoring, availability, taking fine control of how the architecture scales. And again, underneath the hood, a lot of this goes to reliability. Something broke down because this didn’t scale up, or something broke down because we didn’t patch that. Again, you have to realize that reliability isn’t just about an Internet cable got cut. It’s about all the standard things that you’re going to have to deal with in an on-prem world that still applies in the cloud.

And again, you have so many more options. And again, this is why I love the serverless side, because there’s a significant investment to set things up. But after setting things up, if you don’t have to worry about that constant maintenance and the post-deployment, like just monitoring of everything, if you are able to offload that and the cost is worth it, and usually it’s a really good trade, off, it’s, again, something you want to consider, it becomes very worthwhile. And again, without having to think about it the same way that I was discussing on the storage side for S3, you don’t even think about it. This just comes out of the box.

There’s a lot of new serverless technologies and managed services that have been existing that allow you to, again, focus on what you’re providing as opposed to how you’re providing it. And we’ve also found that that helped a lot of our resources to not have to, again, become super deep subject matter experts in all these specific technologies. Again, they can help focus on the what we’re doing as opposed to how we’re doing it, by letting those managed services or other technologies, again, just offload the day-to-day responsibilities that would take several people to manage.

And I kind of liken it to a wizard approach, right, that you can just kind of have the wizard go in, set some stuff up, and then it’ll let you know if anything crazy is going on. But for the most part, you just kind of set it and forget. Maybe it’s worth mentioning. Again, I want to play a little bit of devil’s advocate because the argument that I hear against some of these options, and I absolutely understand, is a lot of those specific technologies give you a little more of what we’ll call vendor lock, meaning that, well, that’s specific to that cloud provider. So, if I deploy that technology, that means that I’m stuck in their stack and if I want to migrate over to someone else, now I have to re architect everything. And that’s correct. It’s a valid thing. We always ask ourselves, well, when is the next time that we would even consider a migration? Right? Is that like one year away, three years away, five years away?

Again, because if you’re in the three to five-year range, that probably should be in your toolkit. It’s one of those things that, again, I appreciate the sentiment behind not having that vendor lock, but we love to be able to move fast. And there’s times that it’s not appropriate and other times that it is, that it just allows us to say, again, we can build this really quickly. And more importantly, one of the things that it’s just the ugly truth in the development world, once you release something to production, you’re all of a sudden carving off a certain amount of development time for maintenance, right, of just maintaining that. And then that eats away how much new development that you can do. And I like to keep as much of that bandwidth available to the new development that our teams want to focus on as opposed to maintaining additional infrastructure. And so that’s why, again, I’d love these technologies because to me it’s a huge underpinning to reliability. I don’t need people to sit around and babysit these technologies. They’re just going to function on their own.

Jeff Ton [00:24:15]:

You want them to do more value add.

So, when we talk about reliability, we’re not saying that there’s never disruption, there’s never possible downtime. How do the cloud providers…you mentioned you are mostly in AWS, but it sounds like you’re also maybe in Azure, maybe Google Compute as well. How do they handle potential downtime or even the unexpected service?

Alex Otero [00:24:43]:

I mean, again, it’s worthwhile to circle back to something you brought up at the beginning of our conversation that you do have…and it’s once in a blue, blue moon…the big outage that happens. And it’s publicized, and everybody knows Instagram is down or whatever it is. But in a certain way, I feel like the fact that it becomes so widespread and newsworthy makes it almost a force majeure because the evidence, well, the cloud provider is down or somebody cut this cable on the Atlantic or something, and that’s what’s going on. They just have to fix it. And most of our clients are dealing with the same exact problem. Part of their infrastructure got cut off.

So, I feel like there’s a lot more understanding when something like that happens. But again, this is a rarity of this kind of stuff happening, and the service providers are always very quick to act, bringing that back online because, obviously there’s huge impact to a huge customer base. It’s not like it’s just you that is dealing with this issue. So, there’s an urgent need to get this fixed which works to your benefit that now again, it’s not just five people in a machine room trying to figure this out. You’ve got probably 1000 people trying to sort out whatever it is that’s going on to get your systems back online at that point.

And I think that there are still plenty of other situations where there is managed downtimes, meaning that the cloud provider is letting you know we expect to perform maintenance at these times, so there will be a service disruption. And again, I view this as a good thing.

One of the neatest things that we observe is that when we start to deploy our cloud infrastructure using the tools that they provide, every time we deploy an instance or a serverless technology or whatever it’s going to be, even certain software solutions. The operating system, through the tools that they’re giving to us, you’re getting the benefit of a free warranty registration card, right? Like how often do your teams actually fill out that registration card afterwards to get the notification from a vendor to say, hey, this patch is available or this or that? So, for everything that you deploy using your tools now, the cloud provider is typically sending you a notification to say you have this expected patch that is going to be applied or should be applied in case you’re fully managing it. They still know, right, in a managed service, they’re going to patch it for you. If you deployed it on your own, they still have your warranty registration to kind of say, hey, we know you installed this, you should probably update it by this date because it’s going to reach this end of life. And by the way, if you hit that end of life, it might impact you in this way of X, Y, and Z. They’ve got proactive notifications letting you know exactly what’s going to happen, and in other cases, as mentioned, when they’re going to patch it for you to plan ahead for those managed downtimes. So again, I see it as a pretty neat benefit that what people would a lot of times forget to do on their own and monitor to see.

Jeff Ton [00:27:55]:

Proactive extra set of eyes watching it, right?

Alex Otero [00:27:58]:

Yeah. And then you have a host of other options as well from the cloud providers where they have services. Again, will proactively monitor your infrastructure and environment. There’s a lot of great third-party choices there too, that will go in and monitor the environment as well. But I think that we’ve had pretty good experiences on that time.

There’s been a handful of times where I don’t even want to call it a service disruption; it’s almost again a bug that is found in a certain part of the technology stack that’s deployed, and we just reach out through the regular support channels and open that report. And again, I have to say that the support that we receive is extremely responsive. Right. So, they’re getting back to us right away, asking us for more details if additional information is required. So again, usually those disruptions are minimized like when they do occur, or again, we’re planning ahead of time because they’re letting us know there’s an anticipated downtime for maintenance. Yeah.

Jeff Ton [00:29:03]:

When businesses that are out there that are thinking about moving more and more to the cloud, what steps can they take, in your opinion, to choose a reliable cloud provider, or are they all pretty much on par anymore?

Alex Otero [00:29:23]:

Yeah, I think at this point, any of the majors are going to be a reliable provider at the end of the day for everything. And obviously, look at the details, and if there are specific things that you’re looking to leverage in the cloud, you might want to do a little bit more research, but especially for the kind of common set of solutions that you expect. All of the majors are going to be pretty reliable at this stage.

And then you have some specialty providers like storage is a good instance. There’s a lot of smaller players coming on the field for storage and things like that. And again, I would argue that many of them still have great reliability metrics. But again, all you have to do is take their data and compare it against what one of the majors would have and say, is that as many nines as I want, but data is all there, it’s publicized, and I think that you can’t really make a bad choice, it just depends on what you want to do.

And again, I’ll circle back to just…I’d recommend to have a trusted partner helping you plot your course. If you haven’t started this journey, there’s a lot of ways to achieve that reliability, but someone helping you by just saying what your needs are will help you sort through the information and uncover that best option. Often not wrong options, but there’s typically a best or right option for your particular use case, and InterVision or any other trusted partner can help boil that down and just give you the pros and cons so you can make the executive decision of what either cloud provider to go with or service to go with. Again, like that goes across the board.

Jeff Ton [00:30:54]:

I think, Alex, we’ve come to that point in time where it’s time to bust the myth. So, when you get off work today and you go, maybe you stop by the pub on the way home and you’re talking with an IT peer and they told you they were not leveraging the cloud because it is not reliable, what would you tell them?

Alex Otero [00:31:18]:

Yeah, I have to say. Because I don’t often hear this. For me the answer is pretty simple. I would just say “prove it.” Right? I think a lot of those myths just come from hearsay, and they spoke to someone that had a bad experience or perhaps tried to do too much on their own as they were just getting started on their cloud journey. They might not have a staff that is well versed in the options that are out there because maybe they’ve dealt with the on-prem.

But again, I’m just going to circle back to this, that’s when you make a choice to leverage the right trusted party to help you out to make those decisions. But I can’t imagine that there is a use case that somebody could bring to me to say here’s the data here on why this is unreliable, where again, at the very least, if you have the data, you couldn’t debunk it and to just say, well that’s because your load balancer wasn’t properly configured. It has to do with configuration, and the choices made and execution as opposed to the cloud itself, which, again, you can make those same mistakes in an on-prem environment, and you just have more choices about how to achieve that reliability in the cloud. Don’t let that paralyze you.

Jeff Ton [00:32:31]:

Yeah, I love that. Prove it. Show me the data that backs up your assertion that it’s not reliable.

Well, Alex, here on Status Go, we are all about action, and we want to make sure that we leave our listeners with one or two things that they can go and do tomorrow because they listened to us today. So, what would you recommend they go do as they’re on their cloud journey?

Alex Otero [00:32:57]:

Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on where you are in that cloud journey. If you’re already in there, I would recommend, as I mentioned earlier, I love serverless and managed services offered by some of the cloud providers. So, I’d recommend taking a look at how much you spend on maintenance and on deploying some of those solutions. The IT needs to effectively monitor them and maintain them and take a look to see if the managed service or serverless options make sense for you so that you can deploy those resources on again, more growth or other things like that. As opposed to just keeping the machine running. Because again, there’s many ways to achieve that reliability and redundancy. So it’s worthwhile to take stock with those newer technologies that are available there and there’s new ones across different products that are constantly launching. So keeping abreast of that is definitely important.

If you’re not in the cloud, there’s always barriers to that journey. But here, I just recommend that look at some of the programs that the cloud providers offer to help facilitate a migration and that’s because a lot of times there are incentives to help ease a transition to move your on-prem footprint into the cloud. But the more important part of that is those incentives usually come with pairing you with a partner that, again, understands how to do that migration, how to achieve the security that you want, the cost that you want, the reliability and redundancy that you want. So again, the cloud providers are keen to help you move into there, so take advantage of that.

Jeff Ton [00:34:33]:

Yeah, I love those actions because no matter where you are on your cloud journey, that gives people a next step to go look into. And as you were talking about serverless, I was thinking to myself, well, gosh, that could make a whole episode talking about the serverless options that are out there because I don’t think that’s anything we’ve covered specifically here on Status Go.

So, mental note, we may have you back, Alex, to talk about serverless technology.

I really want to thank you for carving out time and talking with us. I know in the midst of what, two, two and a half-year-old company, probably in startup scale-up mode, you’re probably burning the candle at both ends already. So, I appreciate you jumping on the program with us today. Alex, thank you.

Alex Otero [00:35:23]:

No problem. Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure and always exciting to talk about what’s going on in the cloud.

Jeff Ton [00:35:31]:

Well, there you have it, another myth busted! To our listeners. If you have a question or want to learn more, visit intervision.com/myths that’s m y t h s. To review the Show Notes, go to intervision.com/status-go. The Show Notes will provide links and contact information. This is Jeff Ton for Alex Otero; thank you very much for listening.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:35:59]:

You’ve been listening to the Status Go podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes or get more information at intervision.com. If you’d like to contribute to the conversation, find InterVision on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.