Conversational Geek Podcast: Sustainable IT using an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Approach
One of the growing focuses of globally-minded organizations today is the adoption of eco-friendly and sustainable products. Many governments and regulatory bodies have introduced laws and regulations that compel organizations to think and act this way. The digital transformation to the cloud leveraging virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure is one example of how IT is leading the way. But what else should organizations be doing and what’s next? In this Conversational Geek podcast, we talk with Nicholas Tay, Cloud Chief Technology Officer at Sangfor and discuss IT’s involvement in the organization taking an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) approach.
Reported from Conversational Geek
Podcast Transcript
Nick Cavalancia
One of the growing focuses of globally minded organizations today is the adoption of eco friendly and sustainable products. Many governments and regulatory bodies have even introduced laws and regulations that compel organizations to think and act this way in terms of their people, their processes, their technologies, and of course, the digital transformation to cloud leveraging technologies like virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure, and so on. Those are really good examples of how IT is leading the way. But there’s still this question of what else should IT organizations be doing? And what’s next? Welcome to this episode of the Conversational Geek Podcast where we’re going to discuss IT’s involvement in the organization taking on an ESG. That is an environmental, social and governance approach to again, its people, processes and technologies as well as any of the regulatory mandates that are trying to push organizations that direction. I’m your host four-time Microsoft MVP, Nick Cavalancia. I’m also CEO of Conversational Geek. Today’s podcast is sponsored by Sangfor Technologies, they’re a provider of technologies and services that make your digital transformation simpler and more secure. My guest today is Nicholas Tay. He is Cloud Chief Technology Officer at Sangfor Nicholas, thank you for joining me today.
Nicholas Tay
Hi, good morning Nick. Thanks. Thanks for your warm welcome. is glad to be, I’m glad to be here. Thank you.
Nick Cavalancia
Glad you’re here as well, can we start by maybe having you take a moment or two? And tell our audience a little bit about yourself and the work that you do at Sangfor?
Nicholas Tay
Yes, sure. So as the Cloud Chief Technology Officer, my role is actually to oversee our cloud strategy, implement some of those strategies basing on the number of countries that we cover. So outside of mainland China, we operate about 13 other offices overseas. So my role is to cover both APAC and EMEA that houses those representative offices, we have close to maybe about 500 personnel today, in those 13 countries. Yeah, so my role is actually to, to, you know, provide strategic direction in terms of our cloud strategy, execution and implementation as well.
Nick Cavalancia
Perfect, wonderful. Glad to have you. Now, the first thing we do is a segment that we affectionately call Meet the Geek. And that is meeting you, you’re the geek and figure out what kind of geek you are. And so what I have is a series of sort of rapid fire this or that types of questions that are sort of around things that geeks are generally interested in, just to kind of get a sense of who you are. And we do this with every one of our guests here. So the first Meet the Geek question is Star Wars or Star Trek?
Nicholas Tay
Star Wars. Definitely.
Nick Cavalancia
Those you listening you can’t see his eyebrows. His eyebrows, like went up to the top of his head and Star Wars. Oh my gosh, definitely Star Wars. Okay. Star Wars, all my life. Since Star Wars is your answer. Are you Original Trilogy, the prequels or the sequel trilogy?
Nicholas Tay
The original trilogy?
Nick Cavalancia
Okay, very good. I’ll take it.
Nicholas Tay
Star wars Empire Strikes Back and Return of The Jedi, right?
Nick Cavalancia
Yes, very good. Although I think now it’s called A New Hope. The first one, which is now the fourth one, but I’m, I’m shaking my head. No, those you that are listening. But anyway, so Lord of the Rings are Game of Thrones.
Nicholas Tay
Oh, man, this is a tough cookie. I’ve got to go with Lord of the Rings.
Nick Cavalancia
Okay, any reason?
Nicholas Tay
Well, I think the manner that TRL Tolkien if I’m not mistaken, the Lord of the Rings, I mean, the manner in which he described and author, the Lord of the Rings, and he was shot into three films is just mind blowing. It’s just amazing. And he did that. Like I think 100 years ago. I think he wrote it during the First World War if I’m not mistaken
Nick Cavalancia
That’s a long time ago. That’s for sure. Playstation or Xbox?
Nicholas Tay
I gotta go with PlayStation.
Nick Cavalancia
You just lost a few folks. Listen, I was teasing you did? I’m sure you gained a few who knows. Marvel or DC?
Nicholas Tay
Oh, man, I gotta go with Marvel. Definitely Marvel.
Nick Cavalancia
Okay. And then Apple or Android?
Nicholas Tay
Hmm. Another tough cookie. I think I got to go with Android.
Nick Cavalancia
Okay, very good. And then Windows, Mac, or Linux?
Nicholas Tay
Windows. Windows for sure.
Nick Cavalancia
Okay. Very good. So now we have a sense of who you are. And some of our audience likes you more. Some of them like you less. No, nobody likes you less I’m just teasing, but it’s just a good way to kind of also, you know, loosen us up a little bit and talk about our topic today, I do want to really get into the topic here. And for those of you that aren’t really familiar with ESG, again, talking about environmental, social, and governance, it’s an approach to doing business, there are laws that are being made to try and push organizations to be thinking about that they should operate this way themselves, and that their products should also be kind of created in that same way. And so Nicholas, I think the first place we should start is just maybe talking a little bit about what is ESG and kind of giving the audience a primer on it, and you know, where it started, and kind of where it is today. Could you start there, please?
Nicholas Tay
Sure, sure. So, so what we begin to see, I mean, in this part of the world, especially, and also if you see in Europe, and as well as US, ESG is gaining pace, right? In the context where ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. So it all started in 2015, in the Paris Accord, right on climate change, that was hosted at the United Nations. So what they found out was all these talks about the climate change, as well as the how should I say, the effects of the greenhouse gas is hugely impacting the world. I mean, they saw that many years ago, it’s just that they never really sat down together, and put their minds together and come up with a framework to in somehow someway slow this down, right, but to have some control mechanisms, that is able to be accepted, adopted, executed at a country level, country by country. So what they did was they met in Paris in 2015, they came up with a framework, there were 120, plus signatories countries out of the 160 plus that signed up. And they agreed that they were going to implement a framework of ESG, that is more customized to each country, within a certain period of time, it took a little bit of time for everybody for that idea to sink down. But what we begin to see, especially in the last couple of years, a ramping up of the adoption of the ESG framework at a local level. And as you can see, especially in Europe, where they are really driving this really hard. And now we see this in especially Southeast Asia, where more and more countries at the government level are pushing through and adopting some form of ESG framework that has to be adopted by at least the enterprise level of organizations, right. So we also begin to see the impact of the adoption of ESG. For example, in Malaysia, where resign now, the Stock Exchange Commission of Malaysia, where we have something like about 1000 companies public listed companies, every year as part of their audit, they’ve got to have the ESG compliance matrix compliant to within their submission to the Stock Exchange Commission, failure to not comply with an audit will have impacted them in the sense where it will impact for example, when there’s a recommendation from the stock exchange, for particular organizations that are safe to invest for the next couple of years, right? That’s going to impact their image where the stock exchange may probably say they’re not complying to ESG framework. So in a sense, when the potential investor will say, hey, you know, if this company is not complying to ESG, then if anything happens to the organization, for some, for some reason, whatsoever, our investment is not going to be fairly secure. Right? So what we begin to see is that governments are now putting their minds together in how to adopt and execute the ESG at ground level, and it’s been gaining momentum is what we’ve seen here. Yep.
Nick Cavalancia
So and the topic is sort of adoption and this gaining ground, you mentioned 120 countries, signatories originally, right? 120. And of those, I don’t know that you’d actually know the answer. But I’m going to ask anyways. And you can say most of them or you have a number, but do they all have some kind of either whether it’s a law or regulation, maybe some kind of implementation, like Malaysia has for the stock exchange, specifically, do you find or is it more, some of them just have frameworks, and it’s more suggested? Where are we at in sort of the the realm of adoption to these principles?
Nicholas Tay
Yes, that’s that’s a very good question. So, for example, if you were to compare in Europe, they have been very strict about this. Right. So Europe is actually in terms of implementation, execution, and compliance is the most mature globally. Right now in Southeast Asia, because we are more of a developing nation status, we are second world. The execution or implementation is still at in various stages, right. So the main reason why the public listed companies were were targeted as the first line of adoption is because in order to implement the ESG, you’ve got to have a fair amount of stability, for example, in terms of your financial capability, right? Because all of this implementing ESG, at the ground level is going to involve some form of investment. Right. So when you take a look at the segment of industries, the mid level and entry level are probably focusing more on building their business. So whatever finance that they may have, is going to be used as allocated to advance their business. Whereas on the public listed side, they’ve got more funds allocated probably to improve some of the processes to be in line with the ESG compliance matrices, for example, right. To answer your question is that, sorry, the answer to your question is that out of those 120 plus countries, your right is not very clear. How many have taken this like, really, very strictly as part of the compliance where there is penalties or fines, right, I think Europe is doing that in a form where they deduct probably certain points, it’s going to affect their investment status, like what I mentioned early on, certainly in this point of the world in Southeast Asia like Singapore, Malaysia, and I’m not not mistaken, I think Indonesia or Thailand are implementing the same. So they’re probably going to implement some kind of demerit points, that’s going to impact the investment status.
Nick Cavalancia
Interesting. So getting kind of practical here in terms of what an organization can do. I’m going to use a term that you used, but I’m going to sort of define it. You mentioned ESG compliance, and I’m gonna use that term. But obviously, what that actually means depends on what country we’re talking about, maybe even what size organization we’re talking about, depending on how if rules and regulations have been written. And in some cases, I’m going to guess that there are some countries that were part of the Paris accord, where they said, Yes, we agree, but they haven’t yet written a law, but they maybe have a framework, and it’s published somewhere. And then if it’s just an environmentally concerned, eco friendly type organization that wants to adopt, I’ll call it the principles of ESG, then compliance and you know, sort of doing air quotes, if you will, like compliance is more about simply meeting the demand of whatever’s in those principles. So when I say ESG compliance, I’m thinking of it in all of its various ways that can be implemented, right? So we think about organizations trying to be ESG compliant, again, whatever that looks like for a given organization in a given country. Let’s talk about the role of sustainable IT technologies because I think there has a it’s one thing to build a sustainable product. And we’re not here to talk about products because obviously Conversational Geek audiences IT professionals and so on, and when thinking about it from a standpoint of what can IT do to help the organization meet those compliance? So let’s let’s talk about that. What is the role look like for IT to utilize sustainable technologies in order to help the organization be ESG compliant? What does that look like?
Nicholas Tay
Okay, that’s, that’s a very good question Nick. So, we get that all the time as well. So, as I mentioned within the ESG framework, you have environment, social and governance. So governance is mostly more on compliance, audit, etc, etc. Social is more on for example, adopting a more fair equity implementation, for example, having more maybe a different gender representing in the board or in the C-level, as well as more diverse racial makeup of the management of an organization right, as an example. Now, when we talked about environment for large organizations, so as we know in the 21st century, almost every organization’s utilizes IP, some form of factor of IP, right. Now, all of these IP equipments are being housed somewhere. So it could be I mean, it’s definitely housed in a data center. The question now is whether that it’s big enough to be housed in a data center located on the premise of an organization, or is big enough to be located in a data center that’s either owned by the organization or co located at a data center provider, right? Or if an organization is fairly mature, and everything is on the cloud, most of all of their workloads are housed in a hyper scalar data center in the case of Amazon and Azure, Google and so on and so forth, right? Now, if we look towards these three different types of housing infrastructure facilities, right, they are the highest consumption of IT or electricity, right? For an organization. Hence, that’s where you see the interrelation, between environment and carbon footprint, because the density of the infrastructure requirement consumes a lot of power in two form factors, number one, consumption for the equipment itself. And number two, the heat that’s been created by the equipment, hence, you need higher cooling, right? To cool those equipment in that particular environment. So what this translates to is that you need a higher power generation or higher power consumption for both functions to keep the data center running for the equipment’s right. Hence, if you look at how the data center is being made up today, although there, there have been breakthrough in terms of replacing hydrocarbons, the predominance of fuel that’s actually powering all of the data centers come from hydrocarbons in the form of either, you know, diesel, or LNG, you know, some form of fossil fuel. Right? Now, if we look at the makeup of the carbon footprint, most of it comes from hydrocarbons, humming the equipment, right? So so that, so we’re looking at the angle of let’s take a first step, looking at how to actually decrease your carbon footprint. So for example, in IT technology we look at, for example, a customer says, Hey, Nicholas, I’m actually have 50 racks of equipment, right? Or most of them are silos, most of them are co-inside, one to one, etc, etc. So what we tried to do is we tried to first look at how can we consolidate out of having 50 racks that consume, for example, five kilowatts per rack, into maybe 20 racks, they probably could consume six or seven kilowatts per rack. So ideally, we try to lessen the carbon footprint, ie the consumption of electricity for that particular IT estate As a first step, right. As you know, most infrastructure or most landscape is not so easily to be consolidated due to many factors like the IP application landscape, the database, the number of users, the distribution of the infrastructure, etc, etc, right. And then, once it’s already stabilized, consolidated into, for example, hyper converged infrastructure, then we’ll look at modernizing the landscape, and probably look at moving to a Cloud or a cloud infrastructure for them, right? So they could probably even further decrease from maybe 20 racks to maybe five or six racks, right? So what we see in the long run, right, Nick, is that a decrease from 50 racks to maybe 20 racks ultimately to five racks. Now, if you look at the power power consumption from 50 racks of five kilowatt per rack, right down to maybe five racks, that’s consuming maybe seven, eight kilowatts per rack, you would have decreased at least a minimum of 50% of the consumption. Right? So that will then be added within the ESG framework when they do their carbon footprint reporting that, okay, for the year 2023, what we’ve done is, we have reduced our carbon footprint from X amount to this amount, right? So then, that’s a form of compliance, right? A spot on the ESG audit framework. So these are some of those on the ground kind of implementation of how the ESG framework is being done from the IT sector segment.
Nick Cavalancia
So just a question for those that are listening, that are sort of wondering, does this apply to my organization? And I’m thinking about it in terms of based on what you’re saying, we can think about it, the starting point. And my question is thinking about, let’s say, the carbon footprint of a given data center. But then the question I’m kind of asking is, can you give the audience listening Any kind of guidance, if they’re just sort of wondering, maybe they don’t have any of the ESG compliance mandates? They don’t have any documents yet. They’re just simply thinking about this. Maybe they’ve been tasked by a C suite member in the organization to take a look at what the organization’s carbon footprint looks like. Is there a rule of thumb is there some some general guidance you can give around? Okay, if your data centers at least this big, there’s an opportunity for you to reduce the carbon footprint or this is the minimum size you should start worrying about. Obviously, everyone can worry about, you know, what their carbon footprint is if they want to, but where’s that line drawn? Where organizations should really start taking a look at their carbon footprint, and then therefore, in compliance, again, using my generic term compliance with ESG try to help reduce some of that.
Nicholas Tay
Well, what we see right Nick is that we start fairly with, like what I mentioned earlier on, right? For example, I’ll just use a use case like in Malaysia, there’s three segments, right? You have Enterprise, which are the large organizations, public listed organizations, you have the mid tier, and then you have the small organizations, right? Or we call it the SMEs, small and medium enterprises. So if we look at how the ESG framework was designed, and implemented, the stock exchange of Malaysia, for example, have implemented a framework, a guidance framework and has embedded ESG as part of the yearly compliance, sorry, the reporting, audit reporting compliance, right. ESG is part of it. So it started with, for example, all the public listed companies, because publicly listed companies generally, in terms of volume and size, are huge, right? They’re probably 5000 personnel and above and can run up to 40,000 personnel. So the amount of IT that’s been consumed by these large organizations are fairly large, right? They can run into megawatts, right. And those are very the larger consumers of carbon footprint, as opposed to, for example, the medium that’s below 5000 personnel. And of course, the smaller one that’s probably below 100 personnel. So I would look at as a rule of thumb, basing on this guidance is to look at those larger enterprises, we start with those first. But we’re not restricting the smaller and medium ones, too, they can do their part as well, right? Perhaps the answer to your question is, in order to reduce the carbon footprints, try to look at how to consolidate your environment. Right? Instead of them having many types of different infrastructure lying about lying around, where you need to house them in different locations, for example, where you need a higher amount of electricity, for example, for cooling for power, for, you know, dissipating the heat, and even having manpower to man, those are going to locations, probably to decrease it to consolidated, try to move things to cloud, right, because at the hyperscale data center, they are also doing their best to decrease their carbon footprint as well. So it’s an entire ecosystem, right? getting everybody to look at it from a holistic point of view, and not just targeting a particular segment of users as well. Yep. So the answer to your question is, everybody can play a role, just decrease, take a look around and try to decrease the amount of your power consumption will help us in a long way, as well.
Nick Cavalancia
So let’s walk through the scenario that you talked about a little bit as the example. And you mentioned two things. One was trying to figure out how to consolidate and the other one was maybe looking at leveraging cloud technologies, what I would do is I want to talk about leveraging cloud computing a little bit, that’s sort of one of the focuses here. And I see that as if an organization’s worried about their cloud footprint, obviously, organizations like Amazon, and Microsoft, with Azure, and Google Cloud, and so on, and other cloud service providers, not just the big three, but other cloud service providers have figured out how to run a data center in a way that is sustainable, because they do operate in those very same countries that you were talking about earlier. Right? They obviously want to be compliant with the ESG, and so on and so forth. So can you talk a little bit about how if somebody was listening today, if their organization was to leverage cloud computing, how does it make a difference for them? And what are they going to benefit from that? Whether it’s when we talk about this from either an ESG standpoint, or even just operationally standpoint, it’s better for them in the cloud? And why?
Nicholas Tay
Sure. So let’s use a typical use case, right. And this is what we see. Because I cover both areas, Asia Pacific and EMEA. Right. So now as we look at, for example, a typical organization that’s been around maybe 30 years, or 20 years or so, now, from the point where they started their business up until today, when you look at the application landscape, it is totally changed, right? 20 years ago, you did not have a lot of microservices or cloud native applications being built, right, as opposed to today, or the last 10 years right. Now, when you look at that typical legacy application like legacy landscape, most of those applications run server site one to one meaning to say for example, one application per server right. Now if you look at how the Cloud applications today are being designed using a microservices platform. There are a lot and a lot of types of different applications that’s already been built and run. And so as a service, in, for example, those three or four major clouds, Amazon Azure Google Alibaba, you know, and so on and so forth. Right? So those hyper scalars have already built, they’ve invested in manpower and resource developers to build all those types of different applications that you see that’s running in those hyper scalars. And they offer it as a service. So all they got to do is just register, give you a credit card, and boom, you can consume it, right. And it’s everything is on a cloud, all you got to do is plug in and just be sure that you’re connected, right, some form of connectivity, right on any device, right? Now, when you look at the traditional old legacy landscape, like what I mentioned in silverside is going to be in the office is going to be co located there, everything’s plugin, you’re going to, you know how that setup was 20 years ago. Now, most organizations today because of the global environment, are more and more moving towards cloud native applications design, right, because of the agile methodology, the CI&CD, constant improvement, constant development concept, right, and so on, and so forth. So what you have is that from the legacy environment, when it’s one to one, you need to hire maybe 10 People manning 10 servers, or 10 databases or 10 storages. For example. Now you’re moving to an environment where everything is consolidated on one or two particular platform, right. So just think about the amount of reduction from manpower, to infrastructure, to hardware, to consumption, moving to a platform, one or two platform where everything is taken care for you, all you got to do just focus on business, and probably develop or improve or enhance some of your application landscape. So instead of having now you multiply that by 10, a factor of 10, or even 20, right, now, you’ve already gone down, you’ve reduced probably 90%. So on a wider scale scale of things, right? What we see organizations today, they’re beginning to see that benefit, like, now, I don’t need to hire, for example, you know, 100 skill set 100 talents, which in the first place today is difficult to find, anyway, right? Because, because those guys don’t know how to do whatever they did 20 years ago, 10 years ago, right? They themselves have enhanced and upskill themselves doing something else, right. So the organization’s in a fix, they can’t operate in that old environment. And now they’ve got to adopt new, which means that they’ve they themselves got to transform the new landscape, right. So we begin to see all of this happening rapidly, right. So organizations, they they need to adopt transformation to move to digitalization, which is such a common word today. Now digitalization in in a way means to us in the IT field, meaning to transform to modernize, and to move a platform that allows you agility, and in this case, it’s cloud. Right? So that is how clouds fit in the scheme of things where it allows scalability, it allows, you know, modernization, it allows you to move faster, especially right. And of course, there’s a consumption model, everything is tied together. Right?
Nick Cavalancia
Let me ask a question about practically how, as somebody who’s thinking about doing this for the organization, let’s just talk about, let’s say the scenario is they have their own data center somewhere, and it’s not in the cloud, it’s maybe it’s a private data center, maybe it’s on premises, maybe they have a private cloud somewhere, whatever the case is, and they want to move to the cloud, but they also want to consolidate. And so what is your just just really thinking about the customers that you’ve helped as an example? What does that practically look like? Yeah, is it is something as simple as you made the example before of like, you know, you have 10 racks, and they have this many servers, and then they consolidate, you know, is it that was what it sort of looks like initially, or, because I’m thinking there’s some people that haven’t yet tried to make this. I think every organization has gone through the digital transformation by now to some degree, I mean COVID Just, you know, accelerated that for everyone. But this idea of we still have a data center, I’m thinking about trying to, you mentioned cost savings just from people, maybe they’re trying to figure out cost saving selfishly, for their infrastructure. And then yes, ESG as well, you know, so does it look like where they have to, you mentioned, like, for example, embracing new platforms, and microservices, which in my mind gets probably somebody in the audience thinking like, do I have to re architect my the entire business to accomplish this? Or can I just take what I have, and it’s a sort of a lift and shift, but there’s a consolidation, there’s a shift to maybe using hyper converged infrastructure, something along those I mean, what does that look like practically from a technical standpoint, do they have to do all this is it lift and shift so thing as simple as that was some consolidation? Or do they have to think about immediately things like we have to re architect, we have to reinvent, we have to build new platforms, new processes, you what should our audience be thinking about? If they’re going, Okay, I got a mandate, we have to figure out how to help be ESG compliant, I get the cloud, we understand that how do I do that? What’s the first step look like for them? Is it gonna be something complex? Or can it be something really simple?
Nicholas Tay
So yeah, that’s, that’s a pretty good question to me. Yeah, you’re right. A lot of organizations, they kind of think, how do I actually take that first step? Right. So the environment can be crazily complex, right? Or it can be a simple sort of environment, right. So we’ve gone through, we’ve seen all kinds of different types of landscape. So but the basic building block of framework of that first step starts first with an assessment of the environment, right. So as what I mentioned, if the application is as legacy the older far back it goes, chances are, it’s going to be kind of difficult to move to the cloud because of how the architecture of that particular application has been designed. Right. So normally, our first step is to do an assessment to try to discover what level at what grade are those application or databases set at the present moment, right? Now, assuming even it’s all okay, and we’re able to do that migration, then the first step will be to do purely lift and shift. So the lift and shift can come into too many two form factors. Either you just plug out the commission box, the hardware, and do a physical lift from data center, one two data center two right to a more modern data center, which is easily complying to ESG framework, right? Or you do a virtual migration, that means virtual machine to virtual machine, right. So what we begin to see is that there are less and less of organizations that are stuck with the physical lift and shift. Most organizations today are in some form of virtualized environment, right. So we could do probably a partial, but then there are also organizations that have partial physical and partial virtualized, right. So we can do either both, sorry, three types of migration as a first step, a purely physical lift and shift, we call it P2P or physical to virtual P2V, or virtual to virtual, which is a V2V. Right. So that would be a first step, right. And then it will lead us to discovery during that assessment phase. Now, if the application, for example, is a cloud native application, then it makes it much more easier for us to a virtual to virtual migration. Right. Now, if if it is not, then we have to fall back probably on the partial P2V, physical to virtual migration, right. So, it can come in various types of form factors, I’ve seen large organizations that have spent a lot of money transforming to do to move to cloud native applications may still be stuck in terms of for example, the finance applications are still stuck in legacy, which they are unable to transform, they’re unable to purchase new, because the existing production is still running on those legacy applications they are unable to shut it down and migrate to a clean cut core. Right. So it has to be in a core existing environment. Right. So hence, which I mentioned earlier on, from maybe 50, racks, to maybe 20 racks, and ultimately, to five racks because they still got to have some form of infrastructure to house some of those legacy applications were not able to be transformed, right. But some of those non core applications probably could be migrated into one of the hyper scalars. So hence, you have a multi cloud environment. So the answer to a question Nick is that there’s many form factors, right. But this type of all of these initiatives will usually begin with an assessment of the environment assessment of the landscape. Before you can look at what are the various ways where you can migrate to the cloud, which normally comes in three form factors, which I mentioned earlier?
Nick Cavalancia
Let’s talk about that’s sort of the in my mind, as part of the discussion around, let’s say, this digital transformation, this consolidation, this migration that has to happen in order to be ESG compliant. The one aspect that’s like the from like, where’s it coming for? What do we have that we’re bringing to be to make it ESG compliant? Then we know what we’re talking about cloud computing is the target. But I know there’s different cloud models that an organization might use. Would you talk a little bit about some of the various cloud models that could be leveraged to to help achieve ESG compliance
Nicholas Tay
Sure, so basically, there’s three main models Infrastructure as a Service, which is fairly common, is just a pure consumption of, for example, virtual machines or resources. And then you have platform as a service. And then you have software as a service. So software as a service, a pretty basic description is like your office 365, or even Gmail, your Google Mail, right. So that’s software as a service where you do not own anything, you’re just purely consuming it, you’re just paying for it and you consume it, there is no infrastructure, there is no setup that is required on your premise, right? It’s a pure consumption model. Now, we’re asked for platform which the service is slightly different, where you can actually, for example, migrate your database onto a particular hyper scalar infrastructure as a service model. So I’ll give you an example. A lot of lot customers today, instead of running the Oracle and SAP on prem, they’re moving it to a particular cloud platform, right? For example, in Amazon, so Amazon also offers SAP on a AWS or Oracle on AWS or even VMware on AWS, for example. Right? So what you do is you can lift and shift your database to the hyper scalar and consume it there. So it becomes platform as a service. Right? So the same goes for any other applications, for example, right? So you consume it as a platform, whereas Infrastructure as a Service is just purely just what your machine resources, right? So we have customers who actually consumes all three different types of models, right, as what I mentioned earlier, it pretty much depends on their landscape. So for their email, probably they’re consuming office 365. So that’s software as a service. They are databases, probably, they’re using platform as a service, right. And for the virtual machines for distributed location, they just need the computational and storage or compute at various sites, or, you know, various locations, geographically, they will consume the infrastructure service. So depending on the needs of the organization, they have these three main options to consider, right for their cloud utilization.
Nick Cavalancia
What’s sort of interesting about this is, conceptually, if you think about this at the scale of let’s say, one server, right, just one, everything you’re talking about, you’re talking about sounds really, really simple, right? Very basic, right? You lift and shift or you migrated PTV. Or you know, I mean, super easy. I’m assuming that the challenge comes into play when you’re talking about 1000s of servers or multiple locations globally. And then you start worrying about things like data globalization, or data localization, and all those other things that come into play, in addition to this idea of Oh, yeah, we’re trying to be ESG compliant, which for some organizations is in the forefront. But for others, it’s more like, oh, we also have to have that as well, because we’re trying to, we want to be listed on the stock exchange in Malaysia or whatever the case, is. How true is that statement, I guess just that it’s going to be very complex, when you’re talking about entire data centers. And I’m using multiple data centers by you know, pluralizing it, kind of implying that as well, is it becomes significantly more complex. And obviously, you know, then the simple, I’ll just go ahead and migrate up that to Amazon, I’ll stick the make it a virtual machine in the cloud and checkbox I’m done. I mean how complex is it really get when we’re talking about an entire organization?
Nicholas Tay
Yes, I mean, that’s, that’s fairly true as well. So again, like what I mentioned earlier on, right, the higher the level of the organization, the more equipment, the more complex the environment. So like you mentioned, we have some organizations, for example, they’re running 1000s of virtual machines, housing, hundreds of applications, right? Or maybe organizations that run several 1000 servers right now, in all manner of speaking to migrate, or to transform from those kinds of environments to cloud, it’s not going to be very easy. It’s not going to be like a couple of months, it could take them years, I’ve seen organization that actually has a five year plan implementation plan to get from point A, where they are in a legacy environment into, for example, C, which totally cloud as a service, right? They have projected a five year plan, right? And in between their plan, like what you mentioned, they’ve also got audit, they’ve got compliance checklists, they’ve got, you know, all kinds of processes that’s in place that needs to be complied to as part of that migration framework. Right. So it can get really complex. I’ve also seen organizations that actually fail, you know, for example they put out like a three year plan, and they reach a halfway mark. And they were unable to achieve the goals that they set out in year one, year two, year three, right. So it can be fairly complex. So again, it goes back to the assessment, usually, typically how we do is in that assessment will then identify which are the, we call it low hanging fruits, right, and a very tough nut to crack. And we’ll try to explain to the organization or recommended organization, let’s start with the low hanging fruits once, we’ll do that easy migration first, and then we’ll take a look probably on the harder ones were probably need to refactor or, you know, build new environment, and so on and so forth. So that essentially phase is fairly critical, because that will actually provide the right blueprint or framework for an organization to achieve the goal of the ESG compliance, right? Doing It Wrong from the start, is going to have all kinds of different impacts for the organization, wastage of resource, wastage of effort, time, and so on and so forth, right. And we’ve seen this happen several times. So you got to get it right from the start. Reach out to any organization, there’s a lot you can Google that actually does IT assessment, IT assessment can come into form factor, one can be agnostic, so you pay for a service they provide you agnostically independently tell you how it is and what you need to do. Or you can go with some of the technology or we call it global service integrators, which actually, you pay them, they can walk you through the journey, they can actually recommend you some of the infrastructure or even cloud services that fits your organization. So these are fairly common two types of engagement that we see for the assessment. Or you can also engage with technology providers, we also typically provide this kind as a service, and it can be agnostic as well. Yeah. To be to be safe. Yeah.
Nick Cavalancia
Let’s, let’s talk about that just for a second, because Sangfor for is somewhat of a global organization. And yet I sort of see as being sort of unique, most of the organizations that have sponsored podcasts are like ISVs, they’re software vendors, they made a product, and they’re trying to pitch a product, so to speak. But you’re you guys are a bit different, because you’re more of a services vendor. Yes, you’ve got some products. But yeah, and you’re helping provide some services, would you just talk a little bit about that maybe just in the context of even maybe even talking about an example customer that you helped, or whatever makes the most sense to you, but just tell the audience a little bit about what it is that Sangfor does to help organizations in this context of becoming ESG compliant nd the changes that are necessary to get them there?
Nicholas Tay
Yes, sure. So, in a nutshell, so we have various types of business models in Sangfor. So for example, if a customer is fairly knowledgeable, and they actually know what they want, and how they want to implement it, they’ll probably say, hey, and because I need to purchase X number of products from you, I’ll do it myself. I’m gonna remind myself and so on and so forth. Right. But that is an exception rather than the rule. Right. So as what I mentioned earlier on, most organizations, especially at the enterprise, and mid level, run at a very fairly large and complex environment, right. And more often than not, they don’t really have the talent or the skill set to take a look at the entire environment. And plan for example, two year migration framework, right, or blueprint. So this is where the…
Nick Cavalancia
That’s that five year plan you’re talking about, right?
Nicholas Tay
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s, it’s really complex, right. So, so not most organizations or fairly, most organizations do not have the required skill set to actually, assess IDA, create and design, migration blueprint framework, end to end, right it’s quite an exception than the rule. More often than not, they will have to hire some form of advisory. Right. So the advisory can come in various factors, which I mentioned early on. Now in Sangfor we also do that we also provide advisory. So the advisory can come in two form factors and agnostic advisory where we come in and we assess and we don’t necessarily tell Hey, Mr. Customer, you must move to Sangfor for we can do this for you. Right, we can provide a fairly agnostic advisory and tell you, what is your landscape like today. And you know, how will it look like you know, if you were to do these things. The second form factor of advisory is that if a customer says or came because, I’m looking, this is my objective. This is my endgame, the end of three years. I would like to achieve for example, cost saving reduction of my carbon footprint reduction or my talent pool. I want to have Have you noticed scalability across geographically across, for example, 20 countries and so on and so forth, right? So then what we’ll do is we’ll have to put our thinking caps on and try to say, Okay, Mr. Customer, these are your objectives. Let us do a roll back on how we design, the assessment, the ideation and creation, and ultimately, the design of that migration blueprint, right? Or how to right fit the Sangfor Cloud products or offerings into their particular requirement. Right. And we have done this many, many times. So we begin to see more and more customers needing this sort of assistance and help, as opposed to of them just doing it themselves, like shutting down on prem and just moving everything to hyper scalar. Right? They can actually do that, too. It’s not something that’s impossible. It’s just that in the long run, you’ve got to do it, right, because we’ve also seen organizations that have probably been quite adventurous doing that. And now there’s a very new topic now, Nick, which awfully with gaining a lot of viewership, they call it cloud repatriation, where you have organizations that move fairly to the hyper scalars. And now they find that it’s not fitting their requirement, and they repatriating those clouds, or those workloads down back from the clouds on prem. Right. So what I’m trying to say is that, if you intend to do this, do it right from the start, get the right advisory, to help you save time and cost and effort. Because we’ve seen all these kinds of situations over the past number of years of being too aggressively trying to move to hyper scalar without actually knowing some of the benefits and not so good features that might impact the organization or long run.
Nick Cavalancia
This has been actually a really good discussion. Nicholas, I really appreciate it. I want to thank you for coming on to the podcast today. Because we I never thought I’ve always when I started this thing, the podcast, I thought we talked about certain kinds of technologies or certain kinds of problems. And what’s really interesting is I’m finding that the more and more of these are going into these sort of, niche is a wrong word, because it always has a negative connotation, like it’s too small, but it’s like something that people is not front of mind, but it should be. And so I’m really glad we had this opportunity to talk about this today. So thank you for joining me today. Really appreciate it.
Nicholas Tay
My pleasure, Nick. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for hosting me as well. It’s been a good session for us to at least share this to get the message out there. Everyone can actually play a role to decrease the carbon footprint globally. Right. So thank you. Thank you, Nick for allowing me in.
Nick Cavalancia
It has been an honor. And that’s all the time that we do have for today. We do want to thank Sangfor Technologies for sponsoring today’s podcast. If you do want to find out more information on Sangfor’s products and services, you can visit the visit, ‘scuze me, sangfor.com And of course, as always, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your choice of podcasts platform. And you could also take advantage of our ebooks, webinars and other types of educational content at conversationalgeek.com.
