Zero Touch IT – Thomas Donnelly, BetterCloud

This is texturing TV. hey everyone, welcome to another tech strung TV segment my guests for this segment is Thomas Donnelly Tommy Donnelly and Tommy welcome nice to have yarn. I'm glad to be here.

You know what? I I didn't do your company and everything, but why don't you we'll jump right into it. Why don't you give them kind of you company background what you do there and a little bit about Better Cloud, go ahead.

Yeah. So better Cloud was founded in 2011 where headquartered out of New York City. Our goal is to transform and Elevate the way that it teams operate and we've we have kind of a best practice that we've been trying to evangelize throughout the it Community called zero touch it.

And our our platform helps teams achieve achieve them. We're gonna talk a lot about zero trust it in just a moment. But you know in terms of better Cloud, what would and what's your kind of role in better Cloud?

Yeah. So my role is the CIO. So I manage most of our technical teams.

I also manage our security teams and really my goal was to come into the company. And really figure out a way to elevate the way that it operates. If you look at every single technology team development teams SRE teams, they've all kind of changed the way that they bring value to an organization except for it.

And the reason that it has not been able to do that is because the technology wasn't really there, you know requesting that it are very at Hawk you're dealing with people but the technology is now to a place or we can actually change the way that it operates through zero touch I zero touch it and what this can actually do is change your organization and go from reactive to proactive to even strategic for it to really become a Force multiplier for every single Department in the organization. I love this. Let's talk about the platform.

It is zero touch, but when you say the platform is What exactly is on the platform does it work with like public Cloud providers? Is it sit in front of that? What exactly does it?

Yeah, has it worked or is it yeah. So basically where better clouds is what what it's called as a SAS management platform. And so we connect to all the apis for all the different SAS providers that you would buy Salesforce, you know workday Zoom all these different softwares that we are using you can connect via API.

And so what our platform does is it can automate it task across multiple platforms at one time. And so to give you an example what that means is, you know, every employee coming into an organization has kind of a life cycle. They get their Hardware.

They've been get on board again to the you know into the company. Sums they basically make requests to the IT team for different resourcing. They change roles they get a promotion and then they get off-boarded.

And so what we do is we take this automation platform and we can actually automate all these things that employee does within the organization, you know, so what it really does is that you know for an example would be onboarding so you started at better cloud. We don't want when we're connected in the ADP. When you when that switch flips and says, hey, you are actually a better Cloud employee.

We actually run API calls out. We actually send emails to Hardware providers. You get your laptop.

It gets provisioned. You don't have to touch anything. When you start your first day that might trigger another workflow and then we're provisioning you for all the applications.

We're creating your emails. We're putting you into the distribution groups were worse. We're we're loading software onto your computer through some other third-party platforms, but we're coordinating in orchestrating all that automation to where it doesn't have to and what that enables it to do is think about bigger things to interface and embed with the organization and solve problems using technology.

Love it, excellent. Excellent, excellent, and you know It's kind of sasops, right because so many organizations that I last interview. I was doing with someone we were talking about ransomware.

And you know, I made the observation that companies like Tech strong group here, right us. Get 99% of the it of the applications of the technology. We use really it just SATs apps right that we You know, we connect to that we log on to it, but we don't maintain the infrastructure.

We don't even fit things like the off-site backups, you know, in terms of rent somewhere we count on the SAS providers doing that. Exactly and that's really the piece is that shift to you know, people used to be kind of like Hey, we're Cloud first to really work Cloud only. that is kind of the secret sauce and why the technology is into a place to where we can actually connect to everything and coordinate actions and automations across the entire organization and The benefits it's critical for organizations.

Now, especially with everybody move into the remote Workforce people are working in especially we're a medium-sized company. So we don't have 24-hour it but people work in different time zones. They're working out of Greece.

They're working out of Israel, you know, they're in Italy on vacation, but they're working. So the way people work has is fundamentally changed, you know, people are really shifting to nonlinear work days where I want to check my email in the morning. I'm gonna get a skiing and I'm gonna then work from two to you know, six pm and I might be in the French Alps and my it teams in New York, you know, so when you want to meet all this stuff when when everything kid that it does is automate you can get help it to am in the middle of the night when your it team is asleep because you're in a completely different time zone.

So it's really transformative for companies that are Cloud only Can you know that operate in different time zones? It really enables a better employee experience for the end users. Absolutely, very cool.

All right, let's get into. I almost said zero trust right because that has been such a buzzwords. That's a whole other.

Yeah. No, I was telling we were in RSA in early June and man. I I had zero trust coming out of my years already, but let's talk about zero touch.

Charity, and what you guys what exactly is it? And now is it being implemented and stuff like that? Yeah, and so we basically You know the kind of I can kind of go into how you would go like upon a barking until like a zero touch it.

So typically what what we recommend is you find an automation plus platform that can plug into assass management platform that can plug into all your software and you really want to look for something that you is low code that you can have your entire team automating task on and then what we recommend to people say like hey carve out five percent of your it time at time to identify the most common tickets that's running your team's time was carve out five percent and say 5% of our time is gonna be spent automating it tickets to where it does not have to touch those tickets that things happen automatically and then once you do that that five percent creates more capacity And that more capacity that turns into 10% and that turns into 20% and that turns into you know, so essentially you'll go from hey, I'm spending five percent of my time automating tickets to I'm spending 50% of my time. And so if you look at the impact that that has on an organization like ours we get roughly. You know 20 20 23,000 it tickets in the first six months of the year.

Well, 50% of those were completely automated. Well, our team is not actually touching those requests and what that means is that you as an end user. You don't have to wait for it.

So, you know, you're going to do something like oh I need this software. Well, if you can get that immediately, you know in the old days you would kind of open up a ticket you would then have somebody you might have to wait for somebody to respond. You might have to get permission from somebody else and then you provision, you know that software.

But hey, if that's Friday night, you might be getting that software on on Monday, you know, so The employee experience is that you get everything immediately and you don't have to wait. You know at our organization, I count up all the hours of when a ticket was created and when we actually closed the ticket and it's in the thousands and thousands of hours that people are waiting it and that means you have to kind of stop what you're doing. And then you have to do something else and then once they get back to you, then you're like I'm back on this task that goes away right you get everything you need immediately.

You can stay on task. Everyone knows that tests pass switching is is the productivity killer. So that's really the benefit to the organization.

I love it. Very cool. Let me think about that 50% of your tickets automated.

Yeah, and and it's only it's only going higher when when really cool project that we recently embarked on as we have build a chatbot. And so now we're able to solve even higher number of requests because people can talk to this chatbot and this chat bot is talking back the better cloud and launching applications. So what this gives us the ability is hey, not only are we kicking off things via API is when you switch a role we automatically, you know kick off workflows, but you can actually go the chatbot and say like hey, I need access to the Atlanta office.

It'll tell you what app you need to download and it'll provision your keys to your phone. So you can use your phone to get into the Atlanta office. And so that chatbot as quickly becoming the most productive it person on our team.

I love it. I'm always the poor idiot that whenever I ask the chat box something it's like not, you know, some not something the chatbot can handle it says oh we have to get you someone all done, you know, and they transfer me over to a live personally. Yeah, it's just my luck.

But what's been the customer feedback on this Tommy? is transformative because You know, we always talk about. It traditionally has been reactive.

You don't have a seat at the table, right your your, you know, a lot of cios. We see reporting that CFOs. We see cios kind of buried in the organization.

They're not really brought into strategic conversations. And when you go out and you reach out and you start, you know asking people what can we do better people are like, hey get me a new laptop, you know, that's not That's not strategic, you know at all. That's very highly reactive.

And so we really help companies Elevate themselves cios. Elevate themselves get into board meetings get into planning because if you can move from reactive to being proactive the experience is is much greater. And if you're shedding off 50% of those tickets, then I have the time to talk with these Department understand how you're doing business embedding with each department so I can basically enable you with technology things that you would never come and think of to ask me I can embed in and be kind of that trusted partner of every single Department in the organization and hey if you're a salesperson and you're saying hey, I'm trying to get a hundred thousand sales.

I'm like, hey, have you seen this technology? This can get you to 150,000 what that does is the next time you go into planning the next time you start thinking what are our goal? Going to be for the year.

You're going to say Tommy. Can you come in and meet with my team as we're planning? Because you're that type of partner a strategic partner that's going to enable strategic results.

A great excellent Tommy. You know what? com?

What what what's the website? Yeah. com.

And there's a lot of information around how we're helping customers elevate it definitely glad to do assessments on your organization and potentially see the impact that this can have with your organization definitely willing. You know, I'm always willing to talk with people and help them kind of go through this journey of from reactive to strategic and helping, you know, elevate your career within your organization. We have a lot of success stories about a lot of people these really taken their careers to the next level using zero Touch ID I love it.

Hey, Tommy. Thanks for coming on. You're out.

there got a lot of sasses most of us do running a lot of your, you know, it tasks better class. Definitely something to look into we've had some folks from better Cloud on before. zero zero touch it.

You know, it's an appealing. It's an appealing concept. Tommy come back on and keep us posted soon.

Okay. Thank you. All right, man, Thomas Donnelly CIO a better card here on Tech Strunk.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.