Live Coverage Blog - 26th May 2021

Telstra Purple Realise Cloud

Welcome to Telstra Purple Realise. A series of exclusive, invitation-only, business unusual events to help you realise your potential. We’re kicking off today with Realise Cloud and we'll share live coverage from some of the day’s sessions right here.

Follow our live coverage of Telstra Purple Realise Cloud

Welcome to Telstra Purple Realise – a series of exclusive, invitation-only, business unusual events to help you realise your potential. We’re kicking off today with Realise Cloud.  

Realise Cloud brings together leading experts in their fields as well as best in class partnerships, ready to unlock the best outcomes for your business. You’ll hear from Telstra Purple Executive - Chris Smith, founding Editor-in-Chief of WIRED magazine’s UK edition - David Rowan and many more. 

You can check out the full agenda here and follow our live coverage from some of the day’s sessions below. 

See you at noon for the opening performance by music technologists Uncanny Valley. Followed by a welcome from Chris Smith, Executive, Telstra Purple.

12.00pm - Opening performance and welcome.

Great opening performance crafted by music technologists Uncanny Valley, a music, sound and technology collective based in Sydney - and Winners of the 2020 AI Eurovision Song Contest.

CloudSong is a musical performance only made possible by combining our capability in cloud, AI, and the power of 5G Edge. Together with a talented group of live musicians, the technology combines for a unique performance that has never been done before. 

Chris Smith, Telstra Purple Executive has kicked off Realise Cloud, discussing the change in mindset required to realise the true potential of cloud, in a world where an increasingly distributed workforce and a digital-first customer base is here to stay. Chris shares Telstra Purple's vision of how an evolved IT infrastructure with automation at the heart will help support the adaptive, secure access needs of organisations where the threat landscape has expanded and the need for application performance and transparency across hybrid, multi-cloud environments is critical. 

The key take out today is the possibility that Cloud offers your team and your business, says Chris. “It’s the biggest game changer in technology right now.” 

Get cloud right and create the space to be more innovative and focus on your customers.

“One of the most important enablers is how we embrace and optimise our cloud requirements." 

“Telstra Purple can help you make sense of the complex ecosystem of partners you need for success… A flexible partnership that helps you maintain your IT agility at all times.”

Next up, the first panel for the day.

 

12.15pm - Exploiting the cloud advantage.

This session is about helping you better understand cloud potential - to learn who is really nailing it and find out where to go next. You can also find out how to better manage, optimise and secure your cloud and discover how Telstra Purple can accelerate your cloud transformation.  

Adam Spencer and Telstra Purple’s Chris Smith are joined by Adam Etherington (Omdia), Mark Ledgerwood (Telstra) and Anna Leibel (The Secure Board).

Adam Etherington says the Omdia research shows decision makers want to move to the cloud  because they believe it will deliver:

  • A direct and measurable contribution to innovation
  • Lift customer experience
  • Cost flexibility
 
But only 32% of organisations consider themselves “well prepared”  for the cloud journey, says Adam Etherington. The biggest concerns being that “the network is not ready for cloud services”, “compliance risks” and “outage concerns”.
 
Anna Leibel says CIOs need to present the case for moving to cloud in terms the board will understand: business outcomes and the risks and the consequences of not moving, to overcome questions of cost and security.
 
“Security is embedded into the way we control physical and systems access to our network,” says Chris Smith. “Our security experts keep up to date and draw on state-of-the-art technologies to help protect our networks from external threats.”
 
Today’s live poll around security - on premise v cloud - is showing 65 % of people believe cloud is secure. 

“Get your hands dirty, invest a little, experiment and learn a lot, says Mark Ledgerwood. “Public cloud is definitely not less secure. What we have and what we can offer to our customers is experience and productising - public cloud and managed services, including security.”

Chris Smith: “It’s all about the three pillars of Partnerships, People and Telstra.”
 
 

1.15pm - Securing your cloud workloads.

Our next panel topic is 'Securing your cloud workloads'. Adam is joined by Paul Nicholls, ICT & Security Executive, Telstra Purple; Omdia’s Principal Analyst, Adam Etherington; and Ali Salim, PO - Cloud & Network Security, Telstra Purple.

Many organisations are finding the shift to cloud challenging. Omdia’s latest Australian research focused on securing cloud workloads revealed these key concerns from 200 Australian businesses:

  • Cloud Security Preparedness 
  • Confusion about shared responsibility
  • Innovation

Adam Etherington says many companies think they are prepared but they aren’t.

“Cloud has enabled exceptional resilience and flexibility during turbulent times,” says Adam "But moving to the cloud is not without its challenges or constraints. Chief among these is security.” 

Only 32% of Australian firms are ‘well prepared’ for cloud migration on which their businesses run. 56% are not prepared for cloud migration security challenges and 79% of Australian companies have experienced a cloud related security incident in the past 12 months (this was not isolated to any industry or size of the company). 

Paul Nicholls, says businesses can drive awareness and preparedness, starting with the below:

  • Implement the Australian Cyber Security Centre Essential 8 – the base cyber security practices that all companies should follow as a minimum. 
  • Be active in validating your readiness in the event of a breach. 
  • Understand your compliance profile against relevant standards. 
  • Ask your partners to help accelerate your readiness. 

Ali Salim says tools and services are coming together and compliance is being folded into solutions being developed. 

Paul Nicholls says most companies have multi-sourced and hybrid technology systems and the distinction needs to be made between accountability and responsibility.

“We all rely on shared responsibility with our delivery partners. Accountability always stays with the business and the board.” 

Ask yourself:

  • Do you have the right controls and policies to ensure your business is secure end to end?
  • Do you understand where the gaps are between these partners?
  • Are your partners operating to the relevant and required levels of compliance that you need for your business? 

“Be clear on your role and that of your partners.'

 

2.00pm - Meaningful transformation through effective application modernisation.

Wondering when and where to begin? In this session Mehdi Khalili, Head of Services Technology Strategy at Telstra Purple and Microsoft’s Dean Corcoran, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft - discuss strategies and tips for enabling meaningful and lasting transformation through application modernisation.

Mehdi outlines 6 key strategies for app modernisation.

  • Rehost – basically lift and shift, and you mostly do it as part of a whole of business transformation. It gives you a secure landing zone and allows you to more easily modernise a suite of applications.
  • Replatform – when you’ve got an application hosted on an onprem data centre or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and you change the platform, typically to Platform as a Service (PaaS), to take advantage of cloud services natively.
  • Redesign – you redesign part of your application to improve performance, user experience, maintainability, scalability etc.
  • Rebuild – where you build the application from the ground up, typically to move away from a dated technology and enable innovation and agility
  • Replace – when you replace your application with an off the shelf solution – sometimes a SaaS offering.
  • Retire – when you retire an application that no longer serves your business.

Mehdi and Dean then dive into how to decide which strategy to choose and share some tips for the best results and a few gotchas to watch out for.

If you'd like more information - you can download our Guide to Holistic App Modernisation

 

3.00pm - Customer spotlight with VicRoads.

It’s time for a customer spotlight.

Adam Spencer’s guests for this session are: James Ormesher, Head of Sales, Tech Services Growth, Telstra Purple and Stuart Campbell,  Manager DevOps & Platforms, VicRoads

We hear how Telstra Purple partnered with VicRoads to migrate millions of transactions from service centres to the cloud during a turbulent year, cutting costs in the vicinity of 75% and enabling transaction changes to be turned around in hours rather than weeks. Also how the team worked together to assess security implications and what steps were taken to lower the risk footprint. 

You can find out more about this in our case study

 

4.00pm - Non-Bull**** Innovation and wrap.

David Rowan, founding Editor-in-Chief of WIRED magazine’s UK edition, published author and innovation expert explains how emerging technologies will impact your business and what you need to do to prepare now.

In his book “No Bull**** Innovation” he defines corporate innovation as “fresh approaches that deliver new value to an organisation and its customers”.

Adam Spencer: What do you mean by “innovation theatre”? 

"A lot of organisations have people with titles like Chief Disruptive Officer and Digital Sherpa. I realised it was just box-ticking,” says David. “They were not really trying to change because revenue was coming in from old quarters. But we all know that changes.”

He says the pandemic has changed the game. “Every institution, from your doctor to your dentist, has had to develop a digital strategy. All this tech has allowed us to have a video consultation with our doctor, to see how our kids are going in the classroom. Your church can livestream services... It reaches more people. The crisis forces us to think about things that were already there but we had been neglecting them.”

“One of the things I noticed early in the pandemic …innovation became decentralised. The crowd came together to solve problems. People were sharing their designs and iterating. We’re never going back to an era of centralised innovation. We are now in a networked world where the best ideas are going to come from the edge. From people with different types of skills working together." 

“Health care and climate tech are two areas we are just at the beginning of transforming how we are doing things. Psychedelics are now becoming mainstream ways to treat mental health, anxiety and companies are going to market in a regulated way. Climate is the biggest problem we’ve had to deal with for some time. There will be trillion dollar businesses formed in the next few years to work out how we take carbon out of the air. I think we’re going to get fantastically excited about things that solve a problem we need to solve.”

 

 

Now for the wrap, with our host Adam Spencer and Telstra Purple’s Chris Smith recapping the most valuable insights and information from Realise Cloud.

Chris’s personal highlights include the technology enabled performance CloudSong at the opening of the day.

Plus, how to present the innovation aspect to your board - from Anna Leibel (The Secure Board) “Unless innovation is part of your company strategy it doesn’t come across as tangible and it sounds optional.“ The focus of a CIO needs to be to present what the board will understand.

“Executives believe we’ve got so much to do they feel like innovation is optional - I position it around flexibilty/scalability/performance. Then show them what we’ve done - the unexpected consequences.”

Readiness for the cloud - from Adam Etherington (Omdia), only 34% of organisations are ready to move to the cloud. What’s holding them back? Compliance, outage concerns and the network not being ready.

The opportunities are massive and businesses can work with Telstra Purple to realise them, says Chris Smith. “We have to come together to find solutions …That’s what Telstra and Telstra Purple wants to help unlock - to help our partners and customers move forward.”

That’s a wrap. We hope you’ve enjoyed the Realise Cloud event.

 

You can now watch Realise Cloud on-demand here

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