Perfect. Uh Thanks for confirming that you can hear me as well as you know, um and see the slide. So, so let's go. And uh what I'll be talking about today is how do we unlock the value of Microsoft Cloud?We are in a virtual world for the last decade or so. And with this new pa 20 even more and more organization would like to go virtual so they can allow their employers to work from home. So how do we get the maximum value we'll talk about that. So with that, I'm gonna just go ahead and see if I can transition the slides to the next. Oh, I go too fast. No, it's not showing here. So I guess I ever have to stop and maybe do it this way. See if you can see now my slide. OK. There you go. So I am RT Venkatesh. Uh I work with the Aven Art as a director of delivery management, mainly in my position. I'm helping organization innovate and digitally transform in this new virtual world. And that's been our main role in helping them how to get into cloud, how to optimize the value I'm a winner of this TV award for women in tech because not only I work for the company, but I take a lot of pride in helping younger women uh to join tech technology world, join the STEM.

So I go to the different colleges and a school in my area and give, allow them to see what the value is. Sometimes we see women's not joining as much of science or you know, technology side of the world because they think it's too technical and not uh they cannot manage with their family work. So we, I try to educate them and mentor them through this. So that's what my TV award was for. I'm a wife and I'm also a mom of two kids. I have a nine year old daughter and a seven year old son and I have continued to walk through this journey. So that's where I share my experience with everybody. So let me transition to the next slide, what we will be talking today. So today we'll talk about five different topics. Uh basically including cloud journey, how organizations are taking this journey. Uh What are the challenges they are facing in this journey as world? Why they are not realizing the value, how to overcome those challenges and how specifically Microsoft as a enterprises helping companies overcome these challenges. And I will leave the last few minutes per question and answers. So if you have any questions, feel free to put it in the chat window. I will try to answer them here. If time doesn't allow, you can always connect me through the linkedin or through my office email and I'm happy to help or connect with the right people.

So before we get started, I wanted to, uh, see if, uh, everybody is connecting to this topic or in your current organizations, how things are, you know, moving as you're migrating to the cloud. So if anyone has this connection to this topic, please put it in the chat window. So we make sure this is a valuable topic to all of you. No, OK. With that, I'm gonna go to the cloud journey. So cloud journey, as we talk about the cloud journey, I see most of the organization today are in some of the other aspect, they're already in cloud, right? Whether they have a application in a cloud or they have moved the infrastructure to the cloud, some other part is already there. Now, what we are not seeing is that uh the the most of these organizations, at least two thirds of them, we see con sharing the concern reporting saying they're not getting the maximum optimal value for the investment they made over the last say five or 10 years. I think that initially when organizations were moving to cloud, they were seeing the, you know, having the increased agility, lower cost or higher service labor. These were the main reason why they wanted to move into the cloud and which was the first good step.

But then they have kind of been concerned about so many different challenges because it is cloud is a different, different world. It's radically different than our traditional it hosting or the way we used to work in the old environment where, you know, you had all your servers and all your controls within the, within your company. Now you are working with a vendor and you're moving your critical assets or your servers to their environment. So it does raise as many concerns. And if any one of you have that consent, uh please do share and you can just put it saying yes, we are facing this challenge so we can talk about that more in detail and happy to help how to overcome those. So as you see on this slide, you know, one of the uh this most of these metrics were collected by editor's choice research and they do can say that 30% of all it budget is allocated to cloud computing and which is a pretty large amount of money that organizations are spending in their cloud journey.

However, why are they not receiving the optimal business value? Why they are failing in and is overspending in the budgets? So now we're gonna go ahead and look into more deeper dive into what are those those challenges are? So I had built some animation but I can, I can see that this may not work here. Well, given that I have to leave my slides not in the presentation mode. So, so here are the top challenges that you will see. Uh always security and compliance comes on the top of the mind for most of the organizations carter reported here last year, some data where they said cognation spent over $400 billion due to cyber threat. That's a lot of money that just been went into against the cyber threats.

And it still con organizations are concerned how they will move, you know, and and overcome all these challenges. Now, Gardner also said if you follow the research that it also says that most of these organizations are having these challenges because they don't understand security, cloud security model, they still follow their traditional approach and that's why they have challenges in adopting and configuring the new security of model.

So that is the 1st, 2nd is complexity of organizational change. So organization change is two fold. I think we all should know that one is people related because people is a big part of our organization. And second is our technology and infrastructure related. So we're gonna talk about people's side a little bit. But let's focus first on the organization infrastructure, what is the most of the nation are doing? They are lifting and shifting their current traditional it and you know, environment and they're trying to move it to the cloud, the challenge they have they don't have in approach, but they're doing it collectively or collaboratively. I mean, most of the organization that I've worked with, we see there's a one particular business unit or one team, they're trying to move into the cloud and they don't really understand how their application or their infrastructure will connect or talk to the rest of the organization and they end up either not completing the project or overspending because they didn't understand the new, you know, operating models.

And that's this connects to the operating model. Legacy operating model. Basically says that cloud environment is a very fluid and dynamic cloud is is a place where you you see new platforms getting launched regularly, new services are getting launched and this world is evolving very quickly.

So if the organizations are not ready to adopt those new services or they're not ready to understand how to integrate with them, their existing applications, they will not succeed in this journey. And that's what we are seeing it with most of my clients that I work with. They have either started a project and they did it halfway through or they could not really complete it because they started to see different challenges or push back from the other team members. So now let's start the strategy and this is where it comes with all these about three points is that not having a complete strategy defined that what is in section should move to the cloud, what application should really more be modernized if you don't have that approach and to and define most probably what you will end up doing is moving some things and the economics of clouds are very different than from infrastructure.

So when you started with infrastructure, it was a good cost saving because you don't have to invest as much Capex, right? Mostly your opex also got reduced because you are really spending on what you were using. But also at the same time, you don't know what you're using. Most of the organizations that I talked to, sometimes they don't even know how many servers they have in cloud, who's using those servers, what those servers have been used for, that's very concerning that you have an environment that you're paying for, but you're not either fully utilizing it or you don't even know what that meant for.

And that's where it comes to the last point is skill and talent deficient. So as we moved into the cloud, as an organization, I think most of the organization, as we said, we focus on the infrastructure side, people side of the problem are under addressed. If you see the report, recent report, it says 70% of employees haven't mastered the skills they need for their current job or for their future career. And this is where organization will have to play much bigger role. And I was watching a session earlier, I think what that person said was so true. The presenter that you have to keep certifying yourself, you have to keep learning new skills. If you don't, do you become obsolete in today's work very quickly. And organizations have to allow time to their employees to, to do so to go for the training classes, to learn new skills, whether it's Microsoft New Cloud technology, whether it's about vmware or Cisco or any of those, depending on what your, you know, area of expertise is, you have to constantly, you know, certify and learn new way of adopting the virtual world.

So if anyone of you think that you don't have the skill that you need for your current job or you don't get enough time to certify, please put, put yes in the chat window. Yeah. So I do get suck a few and I think that's, that's where the challenge is, right? So let's see, how do we solve these, some of these challenges or how organizations, what they should do. Um There you go, my slide was taking a second to move. So I think as we talked about the challenges, actually, in turn becomes the solution if you see, but it's just about the perspective, right, alignment across business unit. So that's the first thing, right, first and foremost in this world, if it to finance, if everybody is not aligned, what that approach should be, the chances are you will have bits and pieces in cloud, you'll have overspend and you will be justifying for that. So you need to have the alignment, what skills we need, which application should be moved, what kind of infrastructure we need that all those pieces should come together and then it feels empowered that they can move the workload or migrate it into the cloud. So that's the first and foremost. And I think that's a very simple strategy. I would say most of the things that we do if we don't have that cohesiveness and that holistic approach, we do fall apart at some point. Second is implement data security.

So as we saw in the previous life that security is a big challenge and it's a concern for most of the organization in today's world. I think also needing to understand what the cloud security is and how data should be secured. So in cloud 11 with one thing where we say very clearly that in cloud, the data should not only be secured when it's rested, but it's also secured when it's moving. And both those aspects needs to look upon and understanding what is your security need as an industry or an organization you are in? And how do we meet those using the cloud technologies? According to the Gartner research, most of the failures that we're seeing is basically most of the organizations do not understand what the cloud offerings are. So security offerings are by these cloud vendors and because of that, they failed to complete the project or they failed to completely secure their organization. Also. What I see, I'm working with few clients where we are implementing security for their organization level and we are seeing sometimes it's not and as until they get a cyber threat or they get into an issue and it's very important for organization to understand once you have an issue and you got called out and you're in, you know, CNN and CBS and every news channel because you had some kind of big blow up.

It gets very, not only it hurts the company, how they operate, but it hurts their brand. So it's very important to, to understand and implement that. So third one is understanding the compliance needs and policies is kind of connected with the data security, right? Every industry has a different compliance needs depending on if you're working with the federal, right? They have very different uh cloud requirements than if I'm working with the health organization. So depending on the industry vertical, I your organization is, it's very important for us to understand what is your, you know, needs are and how to fulfill those. And the fourth point, let's see, X applicate drive application infrastructure. So as I said initially that most of the I in the past, everything was driven by infrastructure, let's move these servers so we can reduce the capital expending that uh that approach needs to be involved. Now in today's world, it's all about what user experience I'm offering to my users and having a consistent and reliable experience is more important. So we need to change our approach and we need to have organizations say let's look at the first user experience, understand what applications needs to provide and we can modernize those application and that application should drive what infrastructure you need.

So it's a complete different thinking radically different than what we have done for years and years in the past and modernized application it's connected to that you cannot lift and shift your existing traditional you know uh applications to cloud. You have to modernize them.

When I say modernize utilizing the services like microservice container service, you know, uh looking at the serve less architecture. These are all the new services that cloud platform offers, taking your application and integrating with them so they can can provide higher skill, faster pace as well as the better customer experience. So here is what we need to look into it. So with that, now I'm gonna go into how Microsoft helps. So Microsoft has launched what they call hybrid cloud, which is a combination of your Azure and Azure stack. And what it allows it empowers the developers to develop build and deploy new applications in both environments on the cloud as well as in prom on premise. Without any extra effort, it provides automation. It lets you use a similar regulatory and compliance services across two environments with with ex no extra effort. No code changes. So that's, that's the thing, what Microsoft is doing is allowing organizations to reach that optimal value and telling them in the process that you do not need to put extra effort, but you can join it by using the hybrid cloud.

So with that, we're gonna jump to look at some of the benefits of a hybrid cloud and this will be my last slide and I'll open it to the cushions after this organizations keeps the control what that means like as we saw, most of the organizations are concerned about which if they can move the critical business application to cloud or their critical assets.

So in case of hybrid cloud businesses have that, you know, additional control in their hand, they can choose what application to move. Not only that they can move only the web interface of the application or they can move only the back end of the application, they can, they can still continue to operate between two environments seamlessly with the hybrid cloud. This also allows flexibility. So suppose if you're working in a, you know, seasonal application like tax and where you need your, you know, your four months of the year, your application will be heavily utilized by users, you can extend your application into cloud just for that period of time. So it gives you that flexibility, hybrid cloud because it is so well integrated between two environments, modern applications. So Microsoft, as I said, empowering well, you know, developers because it made it so effortless for them to build and deploy these, you know, new services into both environments.

If the process is so automated for them, they don't have to write any extra line of the code. They don't have to do any extra testing. It saves time as well as it allows a similar experience for the user. They don't even need to know where the publication resides two points. Uh Last one that identity management and preconfigured, let me address for identity management because that kind of talks to our security that we had earlier discussion, Microsoft Azure active directory allows to have one identity management system across two environments. And that's a big plus because you can now simplify your excess, you can set a smart policies across both environments and this just helps a lot. So I have worked with the clients where I've seen them, you know, kind of maintaining these two different sets of policies, not knowing what works where and at some point over the period, it becomes very hard to manage it. So now the whole management part of it has been simplified with having a single identity management system and preconfigured integrator services.

So we talk about IOTMLA I all these services are part of the platform, not only you can use them when you're in cloud, but you can also apply these to your, you know, traditional old applications with the help of Azure staff.