What to Know About Cloud Adoption With Russell Gainford

Tyler Podcast Episode 51, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and Content Marketing Director Jeff Harrell – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary

Cloud gets thrown around as something we are moving toward, but you may be surprised how prevalent it has become in everyday life. Russell Gainford, VP of cloud strategy and operations at Tyler Technologies, joins host Jeff Harrell to discuss cloud adoption and the many ways the cloud benefits people both personally and professionally. Russell also shares how public sector leaders can make the most of the opportunities the cloud brings their jurisdictions.

Transcript

Russell Gainford: The outcomes of this from access to civic services is game changing, and it always ... It should have been that way years before, and now we're seeing that it's able to make that transformation, and COVID was certainly a driver of it.

 

Jeff Harrell: From Tyler Technologies it's the Tyler Tech Podcast where we talk about issues facing communities today, and highlight the people, places in technology making a difference. My name is Jeff Harrell. I'm the director of Content Marketing here at Tyler, and I'm so glad that you joined me. A topic we will be talking a lot about, not only this year, but it well into the future is cloud, or the cloud, or cloud technology. Back with us today is our internal expert, Russell Gainford, Russell is the vice president of cloud strategy and operations for Tyler Technologies, and he's back with us to talk about the cloud, and maybe talk about the cloud in a little different way in that you probably access and use the cloud in your everyday life more than you even realize. It's a great conversation, without further ado here's my conversation with Russell Gainford. Well Russell welcome back to the Tyler Tech Podcast, excited to have you back on again.

Russell Gainford: Yeah, thanks for having me today Jeff, excited to be here.

Jeff Harrell: And I'd love to start because I think a lot of times we talk about the cloud and we think of it as this thing that we're heading towards or someday, but I think we forget that we use the cloud every day in our personal lives, a lot of times without even thinking about it. What are some ways that we probably use the cloud in our everyday life?

Cloud in Everyday Life

Russell Gainford: Yeah, and so many services that we used to consume manually, or you can even think about when was Netflix, you were shipping discs back and forth over the-

Jeff Harrell: Yeah, you know.

Russell Gainford: ... mail, right? And now, now you get everything streamed real time from the cloud, and if you look at books, right? I mean some people, even myself sometimes, still nostalgically ship a book because I want to see the paperback, but so many I just buy digitally now, and go through that process to make sure that I can get what I need quickly, and that the cloud provides it to me without any time and waiting. So there's so much that's out there whether it's games and my kids nowadays, they grab something and play a game directly on the cloud, and there's no more going out to a GameStop and buying something for him. It's just, it's instant content delivery and it's, it surrounds the way that we are and the way that we operate, and it's built into our lives.

Russell Gainford: We yes, we talk about it in where we're going in the future, and the success we're having now at Tyler in the cloud, but the industry itself has shifted that way the last several years, and you can see that in citizen and constituent service, and the way that our families live and operate in the way that we live day-to-day.

Jeff Harrell: I grew up in the 80s and I remember on the weekends you'd say hey, let's go rent a movie-

Russell Gainford: Yeah.

Jeff Harrell: ... you'd head down to Blockbuster or the family movie video store, and you'd hope that maybe they returned the latest news release, and you'd fish through the returns to see if you could find it. You kind of forget about the old ways of doing things.

Russell Gainford: Yeah, and they become Astratec, I think I saw one of the last Blockbuster stores closed down and I mean just the transfer. The cloud has become a transformational shift in the way we operate and the way that we are as human beings, and if you think about enti- you know, how big was Blockbuster? How big were some of these book store chains that were fundamentally transform the industry by the ability to deliver this at scale, it's incredible.

Jeff Harrell: Well, I can tell you the cloud really helps me, and I don't know if it's helpful or not for my budget, but, you know, the guy delivers a little Amazon package about every day.

Russell Gainford: Oh yeah, I come home to a few of those each, each week, but yeah, they're, they come quickly, and you look at these services that are provided. I mean we haven't touched on social media, look at social media, that's all running in the cloud, and the ability for these large companies to scale on demand, and we get instant information, and we get trending information alerts, and it's all managed in these public cloud environments, and so it's pretty impressive.

Benefits of the Cloud

Jeff Harrell: And let's stay on that topic for just a second before we transfer over into the public sector, you know, what are we? You mentioned a few of them, but what are some of the benefits of the cloud that we see maybe in our everyday life? I know I play Wordle every morning, and every morning there's a new word that's automatically showing up on my phone, and I can't imagine having to download that everyday, or looking it up somewhere. So what are some of the benefits of the coud that we're seeing?

Russell Gainford: Yeah, connectivity, the ability to access information real time over the internet, and I can get to services, I can interact with my local city or municipality, and I can interact with corporations and my friends and family. We're a connected world, more than we've ever been historically, and the ability to get information from the cloud and the internet is transformative, right? People can blog, people can create content, you're able to see new stories and stuff we never could before, the ability to learn online in the cloud, right? You can sign up for free MIT courses, and the access to education information is incredible more than has ever existed as a human race, and the cloud and the internet are part of that, they're a big part of that, and so it's really ties people together. We can see what's going on, we can chime in on it, and we can be more educated about who we are as people and where we're going.

Jeff Harrell: It's funny, I was thinking about this, we play Wordle as a family, so we'll do our Wordle of the day, and then we will post our score to a group chat, and I was thinking all that is in the cloud. That's all allowing us to, like you just said, connectivity, connecting a family. We kind of laugh at the ones that maybe didn't get it this (laughs) week or whatever, just it adds a new element of fun to our family.

Russell Gainford: It does, yeah. I have not played Wordle specifically, but I can say that I see a lot of people post the results, so I know that it's out there, and I know that people are sharing it on social media, and so that's a lot of fun. And I mean in the cloud that I can't believe my kids can sit down and be on with 10 of their friends playing the same game at the same time, real time, all seeing the same information, that's unbelievable. The cloud is powering artificial intelligence, and the insights that we're getting. I mean they have these new AI engines that can automatically write code, and answer questions, and interact with people more than we've ever been able to do before, and that takes a lot of compute power, and they're running these things in the cloud, and we're able to see the benefits of them, so it's pretty incredible stuff.

Jeff Harrell: Really it is. Well let's transition now more into the cloud benefits for the public sector. I know you're working with clients all the time, what are you seeing as clients are moving that direction? Any specific things that they're asking about, benefits that they're seeing for their constituents?

Russell Gainford: So I think certainly moving into the cloud is providing a lot more citizen services that didn't exist before, and the ability to interact, it's something that everybody expects now. So being able to move content into the cloud, to be able to provide data analytics, to be able to provide citizen services is huge, and that was harder to maintain a level of service inside of these private data centers. I'd say another one that comes up quite a bit, it's not the flashiest topic, but it is a really important topic is high availability and disaster recovery. So I can say that it has been expensive for customers to have a secondary failover data center, and even if they had it, it was, had to be such a almost catastrophic type of event that they would switch over because the cost and time to recover was high.

Russell Gainford: And now when they're in the cloud they have systems that are running between multiple data centers simultaneously, real time, and they can use either one, and if one goes down immediately it goes to the other. So it's providing their constituents and their staff a level of service they've never seen before, and they're getting it basically built into the cost of managing in a cloud environment.

Effect of Covid

Jeff Harrell: And last time we hedge on the podcast it was coming. Yeah, I think we were still in a lot of the midst of COVID, and while I think COVID there'd be different variants and things that pop up. We feel like we're in a little bit better place now, and I wonder because I think a lot of people will say well, it was COVID that accelerated the cloud. We weren't really headed that quickly towards it before, is that true, and what are you seeing now that we have a little bit of breathing room around COVID itself?

Russell Gainford: Well, I would answer this in two parts, I'd say from our perspective at Tyler we were already moving towards a cloud-first organization, so we had already signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS that it was in our planning and our modernizations with our products, and enhancing them, and changing our operations to provide better updates and services for our customers through the public cloud. So we knew where we wanted to go, but I would say that COVID had certainly changed the mindset of the market, and it did because you had to have folks provide access that typically they were never able to do or never, there was never the drive of change to make it happen so quickly. So all of a sudden people are working at home that work at a local municipality, and all of them need access to every tool that they have, which involves the security and the multifactor authentication.

Russell Gainford: It's changed the way that products are now procured, it's changed the way in the expectations that citizens expect for service whether it's in a court system, and virtual court appearances, and hearings, and interaction with folks in the correction system that typically in-person visits, you'd come down and now you have video conferencing options. And being able to real time donate, and real time provide funds to somebody who's incarcerated, I mean there's just a lot that changed with COVID in the market, and the perception of what needs to be available for government employees as well as citizens 24-7.

Jeff Harrell: I served on a jury a few weeks ago, and usually when you get called you don't necessarily get picked, but they said, "Hey, we're two years behind on our jury cases because of COVID.", and I thought, well first of all you need virtual court, (laughs)-

Russell Gainford: Yeah.

Jeff Harrell: ... and tell me with some of these. But too I mean there's just some things that COVID caused that if you had that virtual environment, or you had that connectivity, could continue, you know, progress could continue versus being stuck for two years.

Russell Gainford: Yeah, yeah, and we had a municipality in Texas, you look at virtual courts and then COVID hit, and they were way behind in their cases, and we were able to deploy that product from the cloud, have it up and running in a couple of days, and burned right through the backlogs. Now people ... And not even COVID was the driver of that change, but that was always a fundamental problem with equal access to justice because you have people that live in other municipalities that need to go through and defend themselves that may live many, many miles away, or maybe they have children, maybe they have parents at home. In all of those cases they deserve the access to speak on their behalf, and sometimes getting there is difficult or impossible for them. So I think that outcomes of this from access to civic services is game changing, and it always ... It should have been that way years before, and now we're seeing that it's able to make that transformation and COVID was certainly a driver of it.

Jeff Harrell: I think you brought up a good point which is COVID changed the market. So while we might have been pushing it for the market to be ready, and to be because they're kind of now used to it. Before what was Zoom, what would ... You know, the people that weren't used to it, now they are because they've had to kind of be forced into it. Now that the market's ready we can actually deploy those services in probably a much quicker way.

Russell Gainford: Oh, without a doubt. I mean we can provide services in a fraction of time, and we're able to keep them in a very predefined state that provides us visibility into them. We can do entire chains of response where I always say our goal as an organization will be that we are seeing something or anomaly before our customers ever have to pick up a phone to call, and the cloud allows us to do that. We can get real time alerts, we can immediately start chat groups that go through a 24-7 escalation, and have one of our most senior experts looking at something within minutes of something showing up as an anomaly. So it doesn't matter if it's two in the morning, it doesn't matter if it's noon, it provides a whole nother level of service that we think services, our customers, and our partnerships, with these agencies better.

Jeff Harrell: Russell, I know in your role you're always looking towards the future. I'd love for you to talk to those leaders listening today, and maybe sharing any kind of advice, or things they need to keep in mind as they look to the future, and in terms of what, what the cloud can bring to them.

Russell Gainford: Yeah, I mean I think a big one that many of our customers I talk to are really struggling with is with their on premise data centers is cybersecurity. Look at the war that's taking place in Ukraine today, and what we hear from our government about what to be careful and diligent about that we expect that there's going to be hacking attempts, and things like that that affect our customers that only have so many staff to spend from a cybersecurity perspective. We look at the cloud and we look at the ability to have world class leaders on cybersecurity, maintaining these public cloud environments. It's a huge benefit to think about there, what is the cost and the risk of not going versus, you know, the benefits that you get when you're in that type of secure and compliance environments. You can read and they're very open about what they do, and how they manage these environments, and all the standards they comply with whether you're using the gov cloud environments, or you're using a commercial environment, there's so much that's done to protect those environments for customers that wish to use them.

Russell Gainford: So think about that, think about the long term implications, because we are seeing so many more alerts, and so many more publications on cybersecurity threats whether it's ransomware, whether it's exploitations or critical vulnerabilities seen in software products that are used, and having the ability to patch those quickly and to keep on top of those things is really important. So these agencies see that as a huge benefit, and I would say it's just as, just as much of a game changer as far as cloud adoption for them as COVID was, and so that's, that's certainly a key piece. I mean I'd say another thing is as you're looking, as in jurisdiction if you're looking more towards adopting and moving your content to the cloud, look at your staff and make sure they're continued to be educated on the benefits that the cloud can provide, and that they feel that they know where they're going, and that they're educated in what those cloud platforms are like because people that are trained and are given the investment from an organization to learn on these new platforms, they'll make better decisions when you get there.

Russell Gainford: So there's definitely a organizational culture in training that needs to take place as part of any jurisdictions, cloud adoption, it can't just be something said, it's got to be something that's, that's coupled with a pragmatic strategy to get there.

Jeff Harrell: That's great, I love it, cybersecurity in training, and if there's clients listening I know one way that they can learn more about both those things is to attend our user conference Connect which is happening in May. If you're listening to this after May, and you're a client that may not be an opportunity, but if someone wanted to get more information about the cloud, about cybersecurity, about the benefits of the cloud, what's a great place for them to go?

Russell Gainford: Well, the cloud in that, in the internet, and there's so much information out there. I mean we, yes, we are spending a lot of time at Connect with our customers, and talking about the benefits, and our decisions and how it's going to improve their everyday lives, and what we're doing to continually improve the service and software to go with that. If you want to understand the cyber security out there, I mean you can see on social media, there's industry thought leaders everyday posting things on Twitter, and online blogs, and there's so much to learn, it can almost be overwhelming. So taking the time to craft what you're looking for, and looking at the right industry information out there is going to be important for you, you can get overwhelmed with it and you don't want to overwhelm your team.

Russell Gainford: So there's also a lot of agencies out there, consulting agencies and organizations that are very adept at helping any of our customers get to the cloud, and we are certainly partners with our customers, and we're willing to sit with them and help them guide them through that transition both for our products and refer them to experts in the field that can help them with their data centers and their products. So there's a lot of options out there, and there's a lot of learning to be done.

Jeff Harrell: What a great answer. If you want to find out more about the cloud go to the cloud, I love that. Well Russell, if someone wanted to reach out to you directly, had a question, what's the best way for them to reach you?

Russell Gainford: Yeah, so I can be reached by email Russell.Gainford@TylerTech.com. My LinkedIn profile, our Gainford publicly accessible, anyway that can be reached there, any team member at Tyler, I'm happy to talk with anyone at any point and be referred through our organization, so always love talking to customers and hearing their stories, and how we can help as an organization.

Jeff Harrell: Well Russell, I know this is a topic we'll be talking a lot about throughout the year, so thanks so much for joining us. I'm sure we'll have you back on soon, so I just want to say a big thanks, thanks for your insight, your wisdom, and for joining the podcast.

Russell Gainford: No, thanks Jeff, I always appreciate the opportunity, and look forward to talking again soon.

Jeff Harrell: But we will definitely have Russell back on the podcast from time to time. I feel like he makes cloud and cloud technology so accessible and easy to understand, so really appreciate Russell and his point of view. Well, thanks again for listening to this podcast, we have new episodes dropping every other Monday on a variety of different topics around the public sector and around thought leadership. So please subscribe, come back and listen to our next episode, we've got a lot of things planned for 2022 we're very excited about. Well, with that my name is Jeff Harrell, I'm the director of Content Marketing for Tyler Technologies, thanks so much for joining us, we'll talk to you soon.