Into the Cloud - Umbrellar powered by Pax8

Into the Cloud is a podcast about the cloud computing business in New Zealand, and it speaks from the inside. The show carries the Umbrellar and Pax8 names, and the people at the microphone often talk about their own company, its partners and its relationship with Microsoft. That makes for an unusual mix. One conversation is practical advice on running infrastructure well, and another marks a milestone in the company's own history. The practical material is concrete. In a conversation on managed services, a speaker argues that moving workloads into Azure is the easy part. The harder question is whether it was deployed right, with compliance, security and costs under control. Managed services are compared to car and house insurance, then taken a step further: a policy that works every day through monitoring, alerting, escalation and security response. Near its close the same talk wanders to cloud gaming, with a confident prediction that it will be the next wave. Rob Farnell and Adrian Venter, introduced as colleagues of the interviewer, weigh paying for a service against owning servers in a data center. The point that lands is scale. Cloud is designed for bursts and contractions such as month-end and year-end, where the old answer was to buy another box. Their conversation starts with some good-humoured fumbling over how to pronounce Venter. The new Microsoft datacenter in New Zealand gets its own episode, recorded with video at Minaki Studios. It includes a proud claim to be 'the most sustainable hyperscaler cloud on the planet', with sustainability said to shape chip selection, piping and cooling. The guest is credited with following the project from the business case onward. The company's own story is told with open excitement. 'Umbrellar have joined the Pax8 family!' is introduced as a very special edition, and it talks about teams gaining the chance to work in Asia, the US and Europe. It also includes the claim that Umbrellar is the first organisation of significant scale in Asia Pacific to join Pax8. It signs off with thanks to the team and a plain call to action: 'Time to do the mahi.' Outside voices widen the view. A conversation with Vanessa Sorenson recalls an earlier session that included John Key, then turns to the Inspire partner conference and the face-to-face networking that partners say they have been missing. David Downs and Scott Arrol, recorded remotely, bring the gravest moments, as the talk turns to the danger of New Zealand setting aside its carbon targets in a rush to recover. Across all of it the pacing stays measured. Questions tend to recap the commercial picture before handing over, and answers are allowed to run.