Guest: David Williams (LinkedIn)
Company: Quali (Twitter)

While many are uncertain what 2023 holds economically, it is having an effect on how organizations are operating and is driving changes. With so many in different stages of adopting cloud, infrastructure is playing a crucial role but without the right approach, organizations are facing numerous challenges. 

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with David Williams, Senior Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Quali, to discuss the current trends in the development market and the effect the uncertain economic situation is having on organizations. He goes into detail about the mistakes organizations are making with their infrastructure and how a platform engineering approach can be beneficial. 

Key highlights of the video interview are:

• Companies and its consumers feel that 2023 looks uncertain in terms of investments. However, this is driving change organizationally as well as in the technology and how it is applied. Williams explains how people are lacking the visibility in their infrastructure to deal with these changes, and the challenge of planning in uncertain times. 
• Many organizations build their security around infrastructure to a cloud user, provider, or application; however, this can lead to a fragmented approach. Williams discusses how this makes it difficult to gauge how vulnerable you are with the infrastructure being used and why consistency is key. 
• Williams talks about the role of platform engineering and how it helps ensure you can interact with the infrastructure in a consistent way, in terms of the polices, the security, and the ability to interoperate with different resources and technologies that support it. He discusses how this creates more consolidated points of control for specific practices. 
• Many customers do not see infrastructure as a business value item. Williams explains how most people doing cost management or risk analysis look at it from a production view and do not take into account the continuous delivery process. He discusses the problems with this approach and how platforms need to capture that information, putting purpose to the infrastructure activity, where it can be grouped into costing and risk. 
• Many companies on their cloud journey turn to the solutions before asking if it is right for them. Williams feels that organizations need to try to make sure their virtualization, containerization, and cloud enablement are subsumed in a consistent way, which is where the platform engineering approach can be beneficial. He explains the dangers if they do not take this approach. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.