SRE and FinOps Manager at Globo

In an interview with CIOReview Latin America, Rodrigo Araujo Andrade, Programs and Products of Cloud, SRE and FinOps Manager at Globo, highlights the learnings on their cloud adoption journey and the crucial strategies for developing a successful cloud implementation program safeguarding infrastructure, apps, and stored data.

As the cloud program and product manager at Globo, what, according to you, are the significant factors that play a key role in driving cloud adoption for businesses?

One of the primary forces guiding the adoption of the cloud is the need to adapt to market demands continuously. The ability of a company to consistently innovate and remain attractive in its products and services, especially in the increasingly digital environment, is driven by customer needs, which are increasingly resistant to loyalty. Subsequently, the availability of a company’s service and the ability to deliver with quality regardless of the volume of requests to their products or platforms plays a fundamental role in ensuring a good user experience.

The scalability and elasticity of the cloud, which helps support large volumes of access to digital products, also play a significant role in the ability to cease services/offers and reduce losses when a product strategy needs to be changed, or infrastructure needs to be scaled efficiently.

Recently, demand for personalization and intelligence leveraged by AI in products has been an essential criterion for success in attracting, retaining, and entertaining customers, whether in a B2B or B2C business. This requires managing, maintaining, and processing a massive amount of data. With the cloud, companies can use various accelerators prepared for the scale and deal with such challenges. The ability to launch products without having to depend on waiting times for hardware purchase and set up in their infrastructure is increasingly becoming a complex challenge in terms of post-pandemic delivery times.

What is your opinion on the long-term impact of cloud implementation in promoting operational efficiency across industries?

The cloud enables and accelerates the innovation by continuously and globally being attentive to customer needs, developing their technology offerings as functional blocks and with suggested architectural models that can be combined in infinite ways for solution development. With this, companies that adopt their solutions need to spend less time creating, developing, and maintaining complex technology architectures and can spend more time developing attractive features and business rules for their customers.

As cutting-edge cloud technology development takes excellent strides, what crucial strategies can help businesses create effective cloud implementation programs and protect their cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and stored data?

While the cloud brings numerous technologies that can be quickly combined to deliver value to users, it also brings governance, operation, and security challenges. These challenges can be overcome by developing technical and management skills, providing more security to this new environment. 

 Whenever possible, balance the ability to innovate with the abundance of cloud services with your companies’ ability to sustain these technologies 

Businesses can form a body of technical knowledge or count on a partner who can help them make decisions during the journey to internalize competencies that assist them in making architectural decisions considering aspects of security, performance, resilience, and financial efficiency of what will be built.

They can also build a foundation based on best practices (each provider has a relevant guide for this) and, beyond this, integrate the company’s governance intelligence and processes to ensure adequate usage limits that protect their infrastructure and operation.

Besides, they can develop a cloud cost management shared throughout the organization supported by tools that provide adequate visibility and transparency, facilitating decision-making and awareness of the current efficiency level. With this, every developer, cloud architect, executive, or business area that makes volume-related decisions is aware that any change, creation and solution, innovation, or architectural technology decision directly affects cloud cost.

As more and more decisions about how to implement solutions are made at the edge by the cloud providers or your own developers/ cloud architects, businesses need to establish a straightforward process of responsibility for sustaining services and solutions, integrated with the cloud provider so that in case of failure of any component, they can have a fast enough reaction time not to impact the business. Depending on the criticality of the service and understanding that cloud components also fail, they need to build resilience strategies compatible with the need.

Before your stint at Globo, what experiences empowered you to gain deep expertise in managing cloud platforms, products, and programs?

I have been at Globo for just over ten years. In this company, I had the opportunity to develop myself in program, portfolio, and product management, starting from simple challenges of implementing new infrastructure solutions to meet applications, replacing obsolete equipment and technologies, and evolving to the point of beginning to manage optimization programs and integration of the company’s IT infrastructures in previous unification processes. This allowed me to build generalist knowledge and strong relationships with specialist teams and peers that developed me professionally.

In the last five years, all the knowledge acquired and relationships built have provided the challenge of managing cloud adoption programs at Globo and, more recently, structuring and managing the maturity evolution of FinOps and SRE topics. In parallel, throughout this trajectory, I had the opportunity to continuously develop myself in project management, agility, product management, cloud, Finops, and SRE through face-to-face, online, and hybrid training that gave me inputs to continuously seek improvement in the management process and evolution of these initiatives.

What is your advice for other senior leaders and CXOs in the cloud domain?

Typically, cloud adoption processes are built together with providers in a medium/long-term strategy, and with that, there is a good level of discount, but it is crucial to observe the market movement so as not to be surprised by relevant changes in the price of cloud services.

Whenever possible, balance the ability to innovate with the abundance of cloud services with your companies’ ability to sustain these technologies. The more technologies your companies use, the more complex it is to sustain them. Eventually, strengthening the core in a set of specific technologies can help leaders govern environments and future decisions on movement between clouds if the long-term offer is not technically or financially attractive.

Finally, develop awareness at all levels of the organization of the impacts of technical, strategic, resilience, and scale decisions on cloud costs, bringing them to the discussion table and sharing responsibility for efficient cloud management by adopting FinOps practices and processes.