Day Two Cloud 194: Unpacking Flexera’s State Of The Cloud Report With Keith Townsend

When you’re deep in the trenches of operating your cloud, sometimes it’s helpful to step back and get a broader view of what’s happening in the industry. On today’s Day Two Cloud we explore the results of an annual State of the Cloud survey by Flexera to get a snapshot of trends impacting the cloud industry, including multicloud adoption, services used, cloud usage and spending, and the challenges of finding and training talent. The survey has 750 respondents. Note that this is episode is not sponsored by Flexera. Our guest to help us unpack the report is Keith Townsend, aka The CTO Advisor. Keith is a consultant and analyst and founder of The CTO Adivsor. We discuss: * The rise of multicloud * Ongoing challenges of cost optimization * Shifts in cloud use * Training cloud operators * Database usage and big data in the cloud * Why security remains an issue * More Show Links: 2023 State of the Cloud Report – Flexera The CTO Advisor @CTOAdvisor – Keith Townsend on Twitter Keith Townsend on LinkedIn Transcript: [00:00:01.240] – Ned Welcome to day two cloud. [00:00:03.330] – Ned Today we are going to be looking at the State of the Cloud through the lens of the Flexera State of the Cloud 2023 Report. But we’re not going to try to do it alone. We have brought on a special returning guest, Keith Townsend, the founder of the CTO Advisor. And we got off on a very interesting tangent, didn’t we, Ethan? [00:00:22.830] – Ethan We did. It happens kind of in the second half of the show where we get talking about people and training because one of the points in the report is the difficulty companies are having in finding talent and expertise to take their cloud practice to where they’d like it to be. [00:00:38.350] – Ned And ultimately people are what it’s all about. So that’s where we ended up focusing. Enjoy this conversation with Keith Townsend, CTO advisor. Well, Keith Townsend, welcome back to day two. Cloud. You’re a returning guest or return a repeat offender. But for those who haven’t caught you before, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do? [00:01:00.530] – Keith All right, so I am the principal of the CTO Advisor. I’ve been doing this thing almost as long as Ethan. We compared notes. Me and Ethan were at a vendor event this past week and we compared notes. I’ve been doing this since about 98 mid 90 issues. The CTO Advisor is an advisory firm where we create both content and advise customers on their hybrid cloud strategy. So this is kind of the right topic, right? [00:01:28.330] – Ned You would hope so. And the topic that you’re mentioning is we’re going to be talking about the state of the Cloud, and this is in lieu of the annual Flexera State of the Cloud Report. They do a survey of a pretty decent swath of people and ask them a bunch of questions around their cloud usage and they produce this annual report. I believe it used to be the right scale State of the Cloud and then write scale was purchased by Flexera. So if that rings a bell for anybody, it’s the same report. It’s been going on for like eight or nine years now.