Cloud-Native Technologies and Environmental Impact – Olga Lykova, Workspot

This is Techstrong tv. Hi everyone. I'm Bonnie Schneider with Techstrong tv.

Today we are talking about the critical intersection of cloud technology and sustainability. Joining us is Olga La Cova, who is the head of Go-to market at Workspot, and the founder of Women in Industries Network. With an extensive expertise in cloud technologies and a commitment to sustainability, Olga is here to share valuable insights that will help us understand the impact of cloud adoption on driving positive environmental change.

All it is a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to chat with you today, Bonnie.

Great. Well, can you share it with us more about your background and the work that you're doing at Work Spot and women in industries? Yes, absolutely.

So I've been with Workspot for two years. Um, as I came in, I've been exploring end user computing space, and it's an actua, actually a really interesting intersection between everything that's going on in Theno technology space, what's happening in the on-prem world and the cloud world. And of course, one of my passions is how do we actually take technology, profits, revenue and impact the globe in a better way?

And one of those questions that I've been asking across all of our customers is, what are you doing around sustainability? So I think today we'll be actually sharing some interesting statistics and data from our recent customer interactions. And I'm really excited.

There's, there's a lot of awareness that needs to happen on how to bridge it together, and I think you and I can, uh, achieve that today. We'll see what we get. Yeah, I think that's a great, uh, point.

And I, I just have to tell you offhand, like I've been hearing so many of the guests that I've had say that they've been hearing from their clients more and more about sustainability and how do we address this and we're gonna get into it. Well, first of all, I wanna talk about what do you attribute to be the driving force behind the growing importance of sustainability in the tech industry? We talked about how it's a topic of discussion, but what do you think is behind it?

I think it is, uh, talked at a board level. I think the CIOs understand the importance of putting metrics around it. So as we were doing research, we saw that 50% of CIOs are saying this will be a metric tied to their overall performance by 2025.

So it is an awareness thing that's raising, I think the challenge is how do you quantify something you can't see. Mm-hmm. And, um, I have, you know, we, we can get into the, a little bit more of details of what I'm seeing in the market, but I think the awareness is coming.

The news are also helping us saying that the, the entire world is burning versus heating up at this point, right? We've seen in the news that we're now in a boiling state, the ocean's boiling. So I think people are concerned, and if, if we're looking at it from corporate level, it seems like a much bigger thing, much bigger thing to attempt to address.

We actually almost dumb it down to what can you do as a person today as an individual to actually impact what's happening around the world. So we can address both and we can go into it. Yeah.

I mean, um, let's first talk about cloud technologies. Um, that is, uh, we have a lot of viewers that work in that field. So how can cloud technologies be leveraged to minimize the environmental footprint of organizations?

Yeah, I think, so. We, we partner with Google Cloud and, um, their initiative around, uh, overall, you know, sustainability is really, really strong. They're aiming to be a net zero, um, emissions platform by 20 th uh, 2030.

I think the biggest part in where we are playing a role is the data centers. Um, for us it's extremely important to having people. So what we're used to pre pandemic is you go into the office, your data center is closer to your office.

If you go in there, it's super hot. All these machines are overheating. So now that we're migrating in this to this hybrid world, world of work, our recommendation to organizations is to take a look at your data center and migrating your data center to a public cloud.

From numbers perspective, let me just give you guys a number from sustainability and translate it what it means in our terms that we can understand. So if you migrate your public, uh, data center to public cloud, you reduce your c o two emissions by about 59 million tons per year. To us, it's a very large metric.

What does it mean? It equates to about 22 million cars, gasoline operated cars off the road. So that's the impact of migrating wine data center to the cloud.

What a great way to put that so people can visualize that. I don't think I've heard that before. I think that's the biggest challenge, right?

It's, it is important. We're seeing it all over the news. We know it's a corporate initiative, but unless it gets down to an individual understanding of what that means, there's not much impact we can drive.

I also think there's a lot more regulations in Europe versus anywhere else in the world. Um, and that's the piece that needs to come in play as well, to drive that change. I think that cloud and cloud technologies are definitely addressing it because of how we're building technologies today, but we're not necessarily addressing what's been built in the past that's still being used by customers.

So they, the the way we need to help our customers understand is if you're looking into cloud, it's not only the cost efficiencies, the speed of deployments, speed of use, user experience, it's also the fact that you're helping the world and help helping the sustainability metrics being addressed. It's interesting that you mentioned, um, you know, Europe that just July 31st, they just announced about the adoption of, um, um, in the eu of, of new, new regulations that are coming in. And it's only going to affect more companies as we go forward over the next, uh, four years or so.

Do, do you find that, um, that some of, that the mindset is coming to the us? Some of it, but I would say it's a much bigger hunger road for us here, just because there's so many opinions on what's, what's possible and what's not. But I do think it's a, it's really good for organizations that are global.

For example, we're, we'll be discussing our customer Landis and Gear today. It's 125 year old, uh, organization that's seen it all, right? And they're all over the world, probably everyone who has a meter in their house.

I would encourage any, any of the, or go check it where it's from. Lend and Gear is the industry standard. Who's tracking your energy consumption and how has it evolved?

Right? So we had energy in our homes for as long as we know. Uh, but how do you collect that data?

How do you actually make that data available to improve your energy consumption to actually address energy needs around the world? And they're, because they're a global company, they are taking advantage of the regulations set in Europe, regulations they can implement in the us and they're pulling it, um, their metrics around the entire value chain. And I think that's a set, that's a really good example of how companies can take a look at what they're doing.

It's not just saying we're sustainably aware, we're recycling. I feel like that's kind of like standard in our world now, but it's, it's the recommendation of taking the look at the entire valley chain of what you're doing today, um, and how you can impact it from the, uh, from the sustainability angle. Um, how would you describe, uh, Landis and, and gear, and I'm gonna pronounce it wrong, gear's, uh, journey to achieving sustainability goals through end user computing modernization?

Yeah, there's, there's a lot. So I had the pleasure, uh, to work with Steve Crawford, their IT director, um, and he's taking a look at their entire infrastructure globally and, and user experience and user computing. And they've tried multiple technology.

They've tried, tried on-prem solutions. They've tried, um, cloud solutions, but for them, when they were making a decision on which technology to use, it was actually sustainability that was driving some of the decisions behind it as well. So when they're taking a look at the overall strategy, so whether it's design raw material components and semi-finished products, their actual production, their transporting and packaging installation of solutions, all of that is important, um, to impact their value chain and their sustainability metrics.

Um, so when they were taking a look at Work Spot as a solution, because we're cloud native and we built in the cloud, and because we addressed a data center, um, being migrated to the cloud, that that was a big part of the decision, um, as to why they chose Work Spot. That makes sense. How can other companies adopt similar strategies to achieve their environmental objectives?

Yeah, I mean, we can address it from, um, you know, metrics perspective. Um, I like to talk about, you know, investment in the right technologies. What are you, what is your entire organization used and how does that contribute to your sustainability goals?

Taking a look at all your vendors will be the first step, um, understanding how to quantify, you know, Bonnie, you and I were talking about what is a metric, what does it mean, right? So 59 million tons of c o two emissions seems very drastic. Does, we can't visualize it, but we can visualize it by removing 22 million cars off the road.

Um, that's, that's, I think that's the metrics level of metrics we need to start using to understand and quantify it a little bit better. I think organizations like Landis and Gear is making it a company standard and everything that they do in terms of investments, solutions, internal vendors, everything is uh, uh, correlated to the metrics they're trying to drive through sustainability. I think that's an important driver as well.

Well, the partnership between workspot and industry leading providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft as, um, has transformed IT infrastructure. So how do you view these collaborations, um, in terms of the effort to drive innovation and elevate sustainable practices? We do a lot together.

We try to, so recently we've spent quite a bit of time educating the Google Cloud customer community. Um, we partner together with Google, Intel and workspot, our, you know, there's Chief Sustainability officers. And I think this is the unique part of bridging the gap between my job at Work Spot and my women, uh, in, um, women in Industries Network, is being able to educate audiences of what they can impact.

You know, when I was growing up or our roles were be a engineer, be a mathematician, be a doctor, but now you can be chief sustainability officer, you could be, um, you could be anything. So it's understanding if you have passion behind it, if you know how to drive metrics, if you, uh, know how to help companies quantify, you can contribute to their efforts around the world. And I think that, um, there's a level of interest across many organizations and corporations to get that going because of the board, uh, board level interest because of the vendor's interest.

I think it's a mutual interest to drive. And in our partnership with Google Intel and Work Spot, we're trying to educate people where they can get started. That is, that's great.

Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm super excited. There's certain things like start with the data center. Um, minimize your waste on having a physical data center.

Um, minimize your waste by having, you know, data center running 24 by seven, that's, you know, that's incredible amount of energy being put out and you don't need it running when your users are not active when they're asleep. So there's little things that companies can start thinking about, um, that they can implement on solutions they have today, uh, that can drive a major impact. That, that's really good.

I, and I'm sure there's a lot of solutions that, that almost seem obvious, but if you don't know, you know, you don't know. So, uh, very helpful to hear that. Um, can you share some of the best practices that organizations can follow, um, specifically for their IT processes, uh, to enhance environmental responsibility?

Early this morning I was on a webinar with people from all over the world basically asking this question, you know, what can we do? Because a lot of the corporations are looking to their IT departments to lead the way. Yep.

I think, um, even Gartners and IDCs research were saying that digital solutions will play a huge role in, uh, reducing c O two emissions and getting to the net zero economy. Um, I think the very conservative estimate is 20 to 25% impact. So the recommendation is take a look at cloud native solutions when they're built in a cloud native with cloud native architecture in mind, you're removing a big chunk of c O two emissions.

So that's number one. We actually, um, with collaboration with Google and Intel, we went down a lever deeper, said actually, what are the five things you as an individual can do today to impact? So your IT department can take a look at the applications, review your vendors, review your stack, but as an individual you play a huge role.

So, um, I'd love to share five things we are recommend Yeah, please, for the cloud customer community. So number one, simple there. All of these are very simple.

This is why this is so cool and how much you can drive impact immediately. So number one, reducing your energy consumption by just simply turning off, uh, electronics that are not in use. So if you go into the office or you're at home, unplugging that or turning off the lights is immediate impact.

Um, when setting up your energy bill, many don't know, but you can actually request clean renewable energy. So take a look at your energy bill at home, your IT team can take a look at the energy bill, whoever pays those bills within your organization. Finance, um, take a look at it.

Are you using renewable energy? You can request that from your provider watching high network bandwidth consuming, uh, content. So that's a tough one.

We all get on planes, we all travel, we are all on the beach. Everyone's streaming, right? Everyone's streaming, but if you can download it at home and then watch it when you're away, that's also a huge contribution.

So those are very small things. Number four, supporting your local farmers. Very simple.

Buy locally grown food, uh, and uh, produced food that's supporting local economies, supporting local, uh, farming. And it doesn't require as much as much energy resources as you would on a bigger, bigger farm. And then, um, if you can, which is also a really important one is hybrid electric vehicles.

So if you, you have an ability to bike somewhere or you can invest in a electric car or just using public transportation instead of driving everywhere, take advantage of it. Um, and also is really good for resetting your stress levels, not just, not just our sustainability practices. That's great.

Um, and it kind of leads into my next question. You answered half of it already, but, um, what about waste reduction? You know, if we're dealing in the IG department, there's just so much stuff here and then, and people don't know what to do with it and how, what's the best way to dispose of it or repurpose it?

What would you say about that? I think that's the biggest part of what we do here at Work Spot. It's, you know, in our world end user computing can be done on any device.

So the biggest conversation we have is your physical PC refreshes. So every company, you know, when you join an organization, an IT organization, any organization nowadays is that you get a laptop and you of course want the new shiny thing and that's fine, that's perfect. However, typically they last two to three years at most.

That's a very kind of the, the longest term you can keep your laptop for. What Workspot provides is that you can keep that laptop and the way you provision your desktop is via cloud. So we're leveraging cloud infrastructure, the speed being able to give you the highest power machine via cloud by you just simply logging in this way, you extend the lifecycle of your laptop.

We've seen that done across multiple organizations we work with. And that not only saves the budget for physical laptop refresh, but it's also giving your employees the flexibility to bring their own. It gives them flexibility to use any device.

And that's a big part about, you know, renewable energy. From a physical, you can actually feel it and see it, right? So you have your laptop by getting work spot and logging into a high powered machine, you're saving a ton of money, ton of waste for your organization.

So that's a big, big conversation we're having with all of our customers because we've shifted from just the V D I perspective, V D I has always been more of a security conversation. How do I give access to my employees in a secure manner that are not in the office, that are not a part of the company? There are consultants or remote engineers.

Now we've shifted that to how do I actually leverage this solution to one, minimize the impact of physical devices and distribution. Two, minimize my costs and three, minimize the waste. And that's a big part of the conversation.

Oh, that's great. We have time for just one more question. Um, and maybe if you can talk to what we're seeing for trends going forward towards the future.

Yes. I think there's a lot of noise and buzz around this, right? I think it's about being focused.

What are the one or two things can we achieve? Um, I think it goes both ways for our new year resolutions as well as sustainability strategies, right? Can we focus on one thing we can achieve in a year?

So what are the trends? I would say if you were to get started today, data center migration's a big project that people undertake. Um, implementing a full on, you know, cloud PC strategy was versus a physical, a PC strategy is a big conversation, but taking a look at your existing vendors or taking a look at your existing solutions and making sure that they are filling your requirements of sustainability practices is extremely important.

And you can do that to get started today. That sounds great. Well, thank you Olga Kova, head of go to market at workspot for sharing your invaluable insights.

This was a really interesting conversation. Uh, really enjoyed talking to you and I'm sure our viewers on Techstrong TV gained a lot from it. Thank you so much, Bonnie.

Thanks for having us. Alright, well stay with us on Techstrong tv. We're going to have a lot more coming up.

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