The New Business as Usual

Host: Stuart Robinson

Guest: Robin Gardner

 

 

00:00:03 Stuart Robinson

Hello and welcome to Cloud Insiders, the podcast that brings cloud down to Earth, brought to you by Xtravirt. Today we’re talking about the new business as usual, how the world moves on when we’ve been all been allowed back to work and how companies have had to undergo unprecedented change in the past few months as well as their employees.

00:00:21 Stuart Robinson

Today we’re joined, virtually of course, by Robin Gardner Strategic Services Director for Xtravirt. Hi there, Robin and thanks for joining us.

00:00:28 Robin Gardner

Hi there Stuart, glad to be here.

00:00:30 Stuart Robinson

Can we just kick off with you telling us a little bit about yourself, your background and your roll at Xtravirt?

00:00:36 Robin Gardner

Yeah, sure, as she mentioned that I’ve joined Xtravirt at the beginning of April as strategic Services Director. My background’s been all in IT almost 30 years. I’ve always been in infrastructure roles, either senior infrastructure management or CTO positions. Main career highlights: I was CTO for Avis Europe, running both infrastructure programs, data centre consolidation, large scale server and desktop virtualization programs. I moved from there to IFDS, s financial services business where we were providing managed services to the UK financial organisations mainly based in the city. Again, while there, big Data Center refresh programs, consolidation, virtualization and a 6000-user desktop virtualization rollout. And my most recent role prior to joining Xtravirt was actually as CTO for a start-up life insurance business, taking a greenfield site and developing and delivering end to end business solutions. All cloud based. Great opportunity to have and deliver a cloud first strategy, all the way from initial ideas through to business launch and the first 2 years of operations.

00:01:57 Stuart Robinson

So, all in all, you’re no stranger to big roles and big projects, really.

00:02:01 Robin Gardner

Not really, certainly from a customer perspective, and it’s great to be joining the supplier side to bring that insight to Xtravirt’s customer community.

00:02:09 Stuart Robinson

That’s wonderful, so I should probably highlight this is now the second Cloud Insiders recorded out of lockdown, and although we’ve always been very used to recording remotely, this has come with a unique set of challenges which is actually caused rapid change for our entire tool set. It’s completely different in terms of the fact that I’m having to sit in my front room instead of at my desk to shield me from angry baby noises. I can play piano with one hand, should one need to, and I can pour whiskey with another. It’s a completely different set of circumstances to if I were at the office, but of course, the changes are universal.

The past few months have been a time of change for many organisations and their IT teams. From the view of a CIO or CTO, what do you see as being the main challenges and what have you had to overcome in enabling remote working and keeping businesses running?

00:02:59 Robin Gardner

So I think the biggest challenge that has been seen across the UK and worldwide, from an IT perspective, has been the speed of changes, the new demands that will have come out of the boardroom and out of management teams and CIOs with very short notice to change working practices and to support a business as it looks to sustain its employees, to sustain its ability to generate revenue and to move rapidly into a new working paradigm.

That will have translated into the scaling of existing remote working solutions, remote access platforms that were just, you know, predominantly out of hours with ad hoc utilization and low concurrency ratios, suddenly become a business-as-usual requirement. In many organizations that capability just won’t have existed. Working from home won’t have been a supported activity, and management teams will have been of the view that employees can only be productive if they’re in the office, working visibly and collaborating together in meeting rooms and over the water cooler. So, we’ll have seen rapid change, rapid demand into IT teams. Alongside that, employees who come to the office everyday won’t necessarily have the computing capability, laptops, home PC’s, mobile phones to be able to interact from the office, so if they’re not going into furlough schemes or being asked not to work, then those tools will need to have been acquired, provisioned, and distributed to the employees, or approaches will be needed to be put in place that allow them to use their own technology, Bring-Your-Own-Device if you like, but likely with much more restricted requirements and controls put around that. So, that navigation of information security requirements, compliance requirements and policy standards that have been sitting as a consideration for IT over many years, I suspect in a number of organisations will have been put to one side with the demand, ‘if we don’t do this now, if we don’t enable our employees to work tomorrow/by the end of this week, we won’t survive as a business’ and I think that has probably left a set of activities outstanding that need to be addressed in the near term.

The other thing that we’ve got is those decisions within IT as to what normal business-as-usual activities can be downplayed while we respond to the new set of requirements. So that all translates into a Herculean effort for infrastructure management for infrastructure engineers to respond to the crisis and come up with solutions that can be implemented and delivered quickly.

00:05:55 Stuart Robinson

OK, so you’re saying a lot of this has been implemented very fast and they’ve had to put compliance to one side and a lot of these situations. So, are these quick sticking plaster fixes? Or can they be sustained longer term?

00:06:07 Robin Gardner

I think the answer to that is clearly going to be ‘yes to both’, but to varying extents, depending on the organization. The thing that’s got to be sustained long term is the changing awareness within organizations and within managers and leadership teams that remote working, home working is something that does work.

Employees who were given the opportunity in the tools to work from home actually largely continued to contribute in their role as an employee and add value to the organization. From an employee perspective, there are clearly a lot of benefits to that as well, but in terms of technology, some of those things quickly installed, we’ve got to look at do they give the full functionality that the business needs to operate longer term or were they just delivered with the minimum necessary to get us through on a week to week, month to month basis?

Do organisations have the skills incapability to actually manage them over the longer term? Do they have the capacity in the organization to support two very different profiles of workforce? And is the licensing, is the implementation of those solutions fit for purpose or has it been delivered quickly to meet a short term need and now needs to come back to be addressed in a different way.

From an organizational perspective, we’ve also got to recognize that these services and these IT capabilities have only been delivered to keep those people who are required to work, working. So, employees who were furloughed are not currently supported in in this new operating model. And as those they come back into the office or into the ability to work from home, then we need to look at what’s the right solution to support their needs in parallel with a workforce that’s continuing to work within the new operating model.

00:08:07 Stuart Robinson

And you say there’s this second hurdle essentially coming for when furloughed users return. And of course, you mentioned licensing. Do you think the companies have had time to take into account all the costs and all the price comparisons that usually accompany would take on before they embark on one of these projects?

00:08:24 Robin Gardner

Absolutely not. I think the response to the lockdown requirements and the push to work from home will very much have been delivered based on: what do we have? What do we know? What are we already aware of and where can we get it most quickly?

We know that lots of supplier organisations have delivered short-term either 0 cost or low-cost licensing. Recognizing the need of the market to have something that can be adopted quickly without long drawn-out negotiations. Those deals are going to start running out and equally. There is a potential need for IT architects and IT leadership to take a step back, reconsider what their likely long-term requirements are, and reassess whether the quick fix that’s been installed to date is the right solution and when would be the right time to update that, change it or re-license it for future large-scale adoption.

00:09:27 Stuart Robinson

And we’ve said here that companies won’t be able to return to working how they did back in 2019. Could you just give us a little outline of how companies were working, how they’re now working, and how we believe they should be working and how they get there and what needs to be fixed first, if they’ve gone down this quick win scenario?

00:09:47 Robin Gardner

So that’s a really broad question and I think we could spend hours exploring that, and I suspect there will be lots of books and theses written very much in that transition out of 2019 into the new reality of 2020. But if we sort of take a high-level review of that, 2019 and the many years before, organizations were driven by market activity that followed historic economic models, standardized trends, supply and demand, responding to competitive activity. And all of these had a slow burn. Yes, with the new Cloud solutions and the rapid adoption of technology. Some of those lead times are speeding up. But certainly, a new working paradigm would never been forecast to kick in across a whole country within 24 hours. So, the requirement for businesses to show their capability to adapt to new requirements, to new working practices, to new market models that may become available or drop away at very short notice, is a level of change that’s never been anticipated before and never been catered for, either in IT solutions or in business management models. So, I think from businesses. They need to look at how do they become more responsive and more immediately reactive to the new needs or changing market requirements that are associated with the move out of the current lockdown scenarios, the risks associated with second waves coming through, or with changing government guidelines and the changing dynamics across different countries. That needs to be a capability that we’re certainly going to need for the next 12/18 months. Depending on industry, we may see it stabilize sooner or take much, much longer. You know we’ve seen the airlines talk about 2022-2023 before some level of new stability starts to come to their markets. Certainly, business continuity, disaster recovery, and operating models becomes a core discussion at the board and at the senior management team in organisations. That risk profile of what happens if we lose the office or lose access to the office for a 24 hour/72 hour period in the event of an oil spill or a fire – what’s our business continuity actions – that was something that was considered, there were some very standardized responses, around working from home or use of workplace recovery suites, but I suspect that many board members and many management teams never expected the level of impact that we’ve seen in the last few months never occurring. So, that subject is going to become something that will be discussed more frequently, will need to be evidenced, and will need to be challenged or expected to be challenged by management teams and by CEOs and chief risk officers on a much more frequent basis.

What else do we anticipate changing? Well, the ongoing use of offices is a primary location for work. Real estate charges have continued to increase, particularly in central business districts and key cities, and so the opportunity to move back into and take advantage of work life balance for the employees and lower occupancy charges potentially for employers as well, is certainly something that we could see coming forward. In counter to that we should expect increased requirements or different requirements for how we monitor and manage employee well-being and we need to bring this changed profile of workforce back together. While all of our workforce is working from home, then video conferences, the dramatic rise of zoom and the effectiveness of that, not just because the tool is available and is being commonly adopted, but also employees within themselves, are becoming more comfortable with video, they’re using it more frequently with family with friends and colleagues outside of the workspace, so adapting to it within your office environment becomes and feels more natural. However, how that then changes when half the meeting is sitting in a meeting room and the other half is sitting individually at home with a video screen one to one, introduces a changing dynamic and educating a meeting room to include remote participants an acknowledge the visual signals of remote participants becomes much more important and that becomes a training requirement and a need to look at how we fit out those rooms and how they become enabled for use.

As mentioned before, making sure that all of the solutions that are put in place to support this new operating model(s) are scalable and fit for purpose. We’ve talked at length about cloud platforms being able to scale to meet Christmas sales periods or launch of new products. Actually, we’re talking much more across a wider scope of our end-to-end business operating environment than just the front-end sales channel now. We’re talking about how a short notice a remote access platform or a virtual desktop environment can scale dramatically at short notice, service a population taking a period to work increasingly from home, and then potentially scaled down again as we move back to a more traditional operating model, with more people returning to the office.

00:15:43 Stuart Robinson

It’s interesting how you brought up like the physical location and also the culture of companies being on a near permanent shift. I’ve already heard of companies that are shutting down rented offices, been told that ‘actually our productivity has gone up since we’ve started working remotely’, and from the point of view of culture, I’ve actually heard so many more people say they’ve spoken to their colleagues and bosses about, you know non-work-related things so much more since I’ve been working from home, just because they’re constantly on video calls. Yeah, so for a lot of people, from a cultural point of view, this actually been quite a positive outcome for them.

00:16:22 Robin Gardner

I think that those are really good observations. You know, we’ve seen announcements just in the past week by Dell and Twitter, among many others, saying that they they’re going to extend work from home opportunities forever. You know, they don’t see a return to the mandated attendance into offices five days a week at any point in the future assuming that your role supports that capability. But for a lot of employees, we’ve got to remember, that it does depend on their out of office circumstances. A number of those will have been furloughed because they’re unable to work and be productive in their roles. Their living arrangements; do you have access to a garden? Do you have access to local community services? Or are you living in a flat and actually your sole engagement in in the wider environment is done through your travels to the office and then your collaboration with colleagues within that office environment. I think those dynamics are going to play out and in the short term, while we’ve just seen these changes kick in, and a large proportion of the population are enjoying it. The longer-term burn and the impact of that all families, home life, home-schooling and other dynamics are probably going to be things that will see change over the next 12/24 months.

How organizations monitor their employee well-being as well this is going to be critical. You mentioned that those water cooler conversations are being replicated over teams or other video solutions as well. For an organization that’s mature where there’s been high levels of employee stability, I think that dynamic that’s built in the office quickly is able to be sustained outside the organization in that new working environment.

But when we look at new joiners, when we look at employee turnover role changes, then how a new employee within an organization builds those relationships and integrates them into that camaraderie and that culture is probably something that we haven’t seen challenged yet and we haven’t seen the impact on overall long-term productivity yet either.

00:18:33 Stuart Robinson

Yeah, because I mean, I guess that’s a perspective I hadn’t taken into account before and it’s really handy having your point of view on it because the people I’d heard with their positive outcomes and their playing quizzes and doing Friday night drinks with their work colleagues were, of course, all previously established employees. So, unless your company is setting up these quizzes and Friday night drinks and being inclusive of the new starters and everyone, then yeah, you might not be getting this positive spin on this set of events.

00:19:03 Robin Gardner

That’s again a really interesting observation, because managers and HR departments are putting an awful lot of effort into managing the well-being of their employees and arranging these activities. For this type of engagement to continue, then those activities need to continue as well, and they need to become part of normal working practices and we need to sustain them and there will be a key risk in the future if the value add that’s holding this community together, or these business communities together drops away then productivity, engagement and value will drop away as a result of that as well.

So, it’s not just around giving somebody a laptop an ability to remote access, it’s putting the additional management effort and engagement in to make that a holistic and wholesome work environment.

00:19:59 Stuart Robinson

Yeah, so empowering employees is one thing, but keeping them engaged is an absolute must. Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. There’s got to be a huge burn on the HR Department to try and keep this rolling. We’ve spoken at length about the culture of how this is all changing and how this is affecting everyone. If we bring this back to an IT perspective, what shape should IT planning and strategy be taking right now? Is now the time to be thinking about long-term transitions and huge migrations?

00:20:28 Robin Gardner

Great question, Stuart.

I think that the number one response to that is do they support the business objectives that are in place for the next 6 to 12 months? And secondly do the outcomes sustain and justify themselves in the light of uncertain market conditions? Is the assumed outcome reliant on a market being in place, a revenue opportunity being in place or demand being in place that cannot be guaranteed until there is more clarity within government guidelines or transition conditions as we move out of this current scenario that we have today.

I think there will be increased focus on cost control, cost predictability. I think there will be much more time spent on price negotiations, looking for reduced costs to reflect the challenging financial situations that many organisations find themselves within. And I do think that there will be significant focus on IT rapidly making the interim working solutions, robust, secure, and compliant to meet the standard policy requirements that an organization may have relaxed in order to get some short-term solutions in place.

00:21:53 Stuart Robinson

You said in there about price control and predictability. Are there any particular tools or products that you see helping people on these journeys?

And from the point of view of compliance, do you see that hybrid cloud technologies might come more into view for companies that might have been shying away from cloud solutions up until this point?

00:22:14 Robin Gardner

Actually Stuart, I think, you know, there are good cases where both of those questions come together with a single scenario. So, one of the best ways to control price within the current scenario and within the current challenges that we have is to look to where scalable cloud platforms with variable cost models can be used to support the demand that we have within our business environments. So, delivering working from home environments, digital workspaces that can flex up and down. Either flex up, turn on during business hours, and turn off overnight, releasing the cost of processing and compute technology or solutions that support the whole workforce at times that it’s required, and should the guidelines mandate it, but actually turn themselves down, recognizing that proportions of the workforce are returned to the office and are able to work in a traditional manner as well. So that takes us into cloud and particularly public or flexible cloud capabilities supporting price and cost management.

You know, you rightly ask, what does that mean for compliance? Well, there’s been a huge amount of investment from the cloud providers Amazon, Google and Microsoft to give clarity to their cloud capabilities and to give clarity to the compliance standards that they meet in the delivery of those capabilities. And it’s important to remember that if they are correctly configured and well managed and maintained, then in many situations, a cloud environment and a cloud solution, it can be at least as secure and at least as compliant as an internal organizations’ data centre or private environment.

One of the big challenges is if you don’t achieve that correct configuration, then you are starting to expose your business to unnecessary risk that would not traditionally have been in your operating model.

00:24:19 Stuart Robinson

Brilliant, do you see products or solutions are particularly well placed to meet these requirements?

00:24:26 Robin Gardner

Yes, so, we’ve seen the growth of VMware’s portfolio, so with Horizon and Workspace One now being much easier to deliver out of the box capability to initially enable a workforce to be productive, Citrix virtual apps and desktops, the same thing, getting that workforce back up and running from remote locations. These are incredibly powerful and the old perception of them being clunky, unreliable, and unperformant, in today’s environment with increased access to Fiber DSL, solid home connectivity, performant mobile phone connectivity, etc means that the services that can be delivered now across these virtual desktops including streaming video, video collaboration and other high powered modelling tools mean that they can be used and adopted in far more organizations that then we might have seen you know 3/5 years ago.

From a security perspective, yeah, there are lots of cloud and on-premise security products available on the market. VMware have just launched carbon black, their new proposition that goes multi-cloud and on premise in terms of delivering those capabilities and of course the whole NSX portfolio as well is well positioned to deliver scalable computing and flexible use of a corporate assets in order to deliver to changing business needs at very short notice.

00:26:02 Stuart Robinson

Beautiful and I’m guessing from a higher level, for smaller companies we’ll see a much wider adoption of things like Office 365, Google’s G Suite and a lot of tools along those lines, more of a SaaS based offering?

00:26:15 Robin Gardner

Well, absolutely. And the other thing that the current circumstances will have brought sharply into focus are risks that organizations might have around key man dependencies and knowledge domains within their IT organizations. So, moving some of those core productivity capabilities off their on-premise platforms are pinned to standardized cloud-based services allows those risks to be much better managed and that trading, between moving off premise into a public tenanted consumption environment versus having a very small or targeted IT team where the loss or non-availability of small number of key members of staff could impact the integrity of their ability to do business, is really key and those are decisions that IT leaders and CIO/CTO’s are going to have to start to grapple with over the coming months.

00:27:16 Stuart Robinson

That’s brilliant. I think we’ve covered off a lot if employee expectations have shifted and if employees are kind of happy with how things have moved. Do you see this, not just from like the huge monoliths that you spoke about earlier in The Dells and Googles and Amazons, do you see that this might be a sustainable option for smaller to medium companies going forwards if there will be a dramatic upshift in remote working?

00:27:45 Robin Gardner

So I would like to think that the attitude of the nation has changed as a result of the lockdown and the experiences that we’ve all been through together over the recent months. I think there is a general perception that we needed to make changes from an environmental perspective, from a carbon generation perspective, that perhaps we were using transport too much, global Travel was higher than it should be, and there had always been a pushback that our business cannot operate if we change and stop doing this. Actually, what we’ve proved over recent months is that in many cases a global meeting can be carried out effectively over video conference and we can trust that when we start that video, we won’t see attendees dropping off and coming back in all the time because actually technology, cloud capabilities, home connectivity, as I mentioned before, have all matured to a state where this is a realistic expectation, and it doesn’t matter where you are in the globe, actually, these type of capabilities are now available.

So, I think that has a great opportunity to change our working practices. The trust and engagement with our employees when they work from home and the appreciation that they will continue to contribute to the success of our organization, they will do their job, they won’t get distracted, and they will maintain that commitment. I think is something that again, managers have built up as trust over recent weeks and there should be no reason for that trust to suddenly dissolve because government guidelines change.

So, I personally hope that there will be a sustained change towards greater adoption of these working conditions. Do I think that 90% of us will continue to work from home five days a week? No, absolutely not. But I do expect more people to spend more time working from home and regaining that work-life balance and equally I do anticipate that more organisations will work globally locally, rather than working globally through travel and long business trips and conferences.

00:30:02 Stuart Robinson

Brilliant so, it’s funny that we started this year on cloud insiders talking with Andy Gomersall and Joe Bagley about the environmental impact of how we work and how the IT industry works, and everything seems to have come into a much sharper focus much more quickly than anyone could have predicted.

00:30:21 Robin Gardner

I think that really key it’s less now “the art of the possible”, it’s more “the art of what we’ve just seen and done in the last two months”. We know it’s possible. We know we’re capable of doing it. The question now is, how do we sustain and maintain that that those working practices.

00:30:40 Stuart Robinson

OK, so we’ve mentioned business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Do you think IT teams can cope with, well, this monumental shift to needing this, what was previously fringe, to being day-to-day front and centre?

00:30:56 Robin Gardner

Well, IT and IT professionals we know we always respond well in a crisis, we always have done, and we will continue to do so. That transition now really depends on what the steady state requirements are going to be of the businesses that they support. We know that from a workplace perspective the reliance on workplace recovery suites, where there were 2040 desks available at short notice to move into in the event of a disaster, well those don’t meet the requirements of what’s turned out to be the scenario that we may see happen multiple times as we progress into the future, so business continuity takes on a different dynamic and has different expectations. If we’ve all identified now that whatever happens to our office work environment, we will all switch to working from home. Actually, that becomes one tool that is able to address any number of scenarios that previously might have required lots of individual solutions or changing to working practices. So, I think that’s a huge positive and actually simplifies business continuity rather than making it more complex. As I said before, I think Chief risk officers/CEOs will spend more time expecting these continuity capabilities to be validated on ongoing basis, what better way to do that than to embed it into normal working practice and expect every employee wherever possible to spend one or two days working from home every week, which means that we know that the solution works, and we know that people are able to be productive on an ongoing basis.

The last thing is we’ve done something, and so far, we’ve operated it for 55 days. The question is what are the changing working practices, changing roles and responsibilities, and as we mentioned before, the re-validation of the right technological solutions that need to be confirmed in order to make this a long-term sustainable IT service to meet those business needs. I think the key for IT is making sure that we have tools, capabilities, skills and partnerships in place that mean whatever happens within our business environment, our economic environment or the external factors that can influence our business, we know what we’ve got, we know the steps that we can take and how we can remodel ourselves to be able to respond.

That starts with good people, and it starts with strong mutual partnerships, and with those actually, you’ve got the core to make anything possible. It sounds a little twee, but actually it does come down to the power of the individual alongside what opportunities that are provided to them?

00:33:57 Stuart Robinson

Cool, I’ll start taking steps wrapping this up because I know I’ve started stealing a lot of your time now. What would be your top tips that businesses need to consider now?

00:34:06 Robin Garnder

So, if you’re walking out listening to this and thinking right, ok, what are the top three or four things that I need to make sure I’ve got in place to support my business over the next few months from an IT perspective?

Well, you’re going to need to support that ongoing employee productivity, making sure that the collaboration tools, the work from home environments, are robust, are sustainable and are not going to let the organization down when it needs it the most.

Making sure that scalability is in place, any contracts or licensing that was only available for a short-term initial trial period, making sure that you’re going back and either extending those trials or putting in place the right agreement at least see you through the rest of this year if not on a longer basis if things are more uncertain.

Making sure that you’ve got the right partners in place and that the solutions are fit for purpose. Take a step back and ask your customers, ask your business leaders are the capabilities that we have delivered to you to get you through the last 50 days/60 days the ones that you need for the next two months, the next three months, as the workforce starts to reengage, and normal business operations start to recover.

And the last thing, this is a great opportunity to reflect on the single points of failure in your organization. Are those people? Are they processes? Are they technology? What are the right things to do to sure up the business such that if that individual, if that capability was unavailable, actually you could continue to operate as a business?

00:35:52 Stuart Robinson

And as the strategic Services Director for Xtravirt, how do you see Xtravirt supporting organisations through this stage?

00:36:00 Robin Gardner

We see our role across the UK as a trusted guide and partner to those cloud virtualization and collaboration platforms and technologies.

Today we can offer health checks and secure configuration validations where we take a full ride review of the solutions that you’ve put in place and ensure that you are not exposing your organization to any unnecessary risk and we can make recommendations as to how those could be addressed to be more fit for purpose.

We can clearly deliver Horizon Workspace, one solutions Citrix solutions to expand X or extend your remote working capabilities, or to bring them more up to date to deliver access to new capabilities and newer functionality.

We can assist in the management or delivery of cloud solutions to bring in that scalability of these working platforms and the technical solutions. And we can also offer managed services capabilities where you have now taken a work around and you’re transitioning it into a business-as-usual requirement, but you don’t have the organizational skills or the organizational capacity to manage and maintain it in recognition of the key function it delivers to your business.

Well, here at Xtravirt we can manage that for you, and we can ensure that we deliver that back to you and your users to ensure that it can be relied upon when it’s needed the most.

00:37:34 Stuart Robinson

Wonderful, now I won’t keep you for too much longer as it’s a beautiful Friday afternoon. I’ve already stolen far too much of your time. Have you got any final thoughts for us?

00:37:43 Speaker 1

Yes, I think for me this has been a hugely challenging time for the UK and for people around the world, I think we’ve all gone through a rollercoaster of emotion, some more than others, depending on how you were personally affected by the events of COVID and the infections etc. However, as we come out of it, the lessons that we’ve learned the changes to our both working cultures and our home life culture, I think there’s a lot of positives to see in that, and from from an IT solutions and services perspective, actually some of those opportunities that we’ve identified over the years to increase the flexibility in our businesses and increase the flexibility for our working practices, I think, those are going to see increased focus and increased investment, and I think will be healthier and gain a much better work life balance as a result of that.

So, I feel very positive as we look ahead into how this will change the nature of our working activities and our careers in the future.

00:38:59 Stuart Robinson

Thank you that’s a very positive note to end on. If anyone would like to reach out to you and speak to you about this or any other subject, how would be better than to get hold of you?

00:39:08 Robin Gardner

The best way to find me is on LinkedIn. You can search for Robin Gardner and if you add Xtravirt to that search, then you’ll land on me straight away, happy to respond to questions queries, or other requests.

00:39:22 Stuart Robinson

That’s absolutely brilliant. And if you’d like to reach out to Cloud Insiders, you can get us on Twitter @CloudInsiders. For any ideas or questions related to the podcast, you can get us on team@cloudinsiders.fm. You can get episodes of the podcast where you usually find your podcasts on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, SoundCloud, the list goes on and on and on.

Well, even put our episode on YouTube, so just search CloudInsides or visit our website CloudInsiders.fm. For any information on Xtravirt and their services you can visit Xtravirt.com that’s X-T-R-A-V-I-R-T.com or send an email to info@xtravirt.com.

Robin, thank you so much for your time. It’s been brilliant.

00:40:02 Robin Gardner

Thank you Stuart, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Speak to you again soon.