 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Sean Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and cloud migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show, Sean. Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers. Tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. Sure. Sean Snyder, I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector, local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud. And I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? Yeah, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually show our clients a typical journey to the cloud and we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are. But if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this? Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What does the end state look like? Do they wanna build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also run what platforms they wanna use. And then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information. So it really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. So take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state and local agency looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because the technology was getting a little dated, it was getting inflexible to maintain. And when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to take up to 90% of the budget. And so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID which I know we haven't gotten into but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility. And so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers? And then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable which allowed them to save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure cost to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure. And then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring. And so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem on a complex system. So thinking about now we are in this pandemic which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work. Moving to the cloud was a business goal, something that a lot of organizations sort of had in their two and three year, two and five year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? There's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatically always got in the way of that. And also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud-suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. So we know what now our clients wanna move fast as they have a virtual workforce. They need more scale, they need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space. That ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming mission critical with combating COVID and being able to protect our citizens. Speed is the name of the game as you're saying. So how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS both on a professional services perspective as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration programs. So that's the map. Because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program which allows us to team with AWS, go on site and quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications. And if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect how quickly we could get it cloud suitable, what would need to be done? Is it application code or is it database or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones and all of the sizing of the infrastructure is able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. I wanna ask you about innovation in a lot of these cube virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most and our ability to be able to stand up application whether it's a Salesforce service on the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud. And they can be stood up very quickly and very cost effectively. And I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations. And really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking, we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future? Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around, what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, delivering something in several months or years. So it really is shifting. It's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management. These disciplines as part of these, what we call DevSecOps type teams and being able to deliver an undone product on a particular platform in a very agile way. In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect. We know from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. Yes. So let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, first of all, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting and I've led recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years and I've always been a technologist. So now just seeing how technology is embedded and in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical. I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the amount of careers that are available are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific. It's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus in addition to that. So I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees as well as for women, it's been a challenge because some schools aren't closed or are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit. We're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Do you have to be off right now from dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations because it's not just women, it's men too. I mean, these are difficult situations that we're all co-living with our spouses and our significant others and our children and potentially extended family members and trying to work in the same environment is very challenging. And so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. Don't I know it, Sean? I love it too. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, you just talked about how you are a technologist at heart and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation? Yeah, I mean, I think Deloitte, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem. And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and to the business use cases. We've invested a lot in our lab capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's HR and talent thinking about the workforce of the future, the technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together, now albeit in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really a strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice and our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. Excellent. Well, Sean, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you very much, Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE Virtual's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020.