Women in Cloud — Changing The Face of Technology
This week we are delighted to welcome to the show Devanshi Joshi, a distinguished cloud architect and technology strategist at Microsoft. Devanshi is driving application modernization across organizations. As the cloud technology expert, she works with Microsoft customers and partners across industries including Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector and Manufacturing, and different geo-markets, namely India, Southeast Asia, Australia and the United States.
Devanshi is passionate about cloud and AI, leading focused tech intensity programs and hackathons. Moreover, she has served as a speaker and panellist at conferences and community events and contributed to open source. Devanshi is a strong advocate for Women-in-Technology, serving as an active contributor to the WIT communities within and outside Microsoft. She leads with the motto, “individually strong, collectively powerful,” amplifying WIT initiatives across the Microsoft partner ecosystem.
In this interview episode, we talked about innovations in the cloud industry, Digital Transformation with cloud technologies and AI, leadership across the functional organizations at Microsoft and more.
Watch & Listen to the full interview episode here.
Devanshi, I see you work with tech partners. How does that workflow of cooperation with partners look like?
The Microsoft partner ecosystem is a powerful tool for innovations and digital transformation. It makes the most impact because we deliver cutting edge technology to empower change, build resiliency, and adapt to new market challenges. We work with partners who then serve their customers. These allies relationships are global.
We engage with partners in multiple scenarios and stages. The first and vital stage is envisioning. Here you learn about the variety of available resources and prioritize your goals; you carefully plan for a product or solution in the market for your end customers.
Another stage is an architecture design session where we go deeper to understand what features you want to develop as part of your product. We advise you on using AI solutions, data modernization, data warehousing, containerization, and more. We also define the solution design parameters in this stage, such as cost-effectiveness, the highest performance, the least latency compute capabilities.
Microsoft Azure offers a wide variety of cloud services. Which one do you consider as the most innovative?
I have two favourites. The number one is Azure Arc that offers to manage the entire environment, with a single pane of glass, by projecting existing non-Azure, on-premises, or other-cloud resources into Azure Resource Manager. It manages Kubernetes clusters and databases as if they are running in Azure and use Azure services and management capabilities, regardless of where they live.
My second choice is Microsoft Mesh, a highly futuristic solution that enables presence and shared experiences through mixed reality applications from anywhere and on any device. Imagine us sitting in a virtual room recording this interview and interacting in a holographic way.
Can you share with us a case study of Digital Transformation with clouds and AI tech?
As an example from pre-COVID time, I can talk about face recognition as one of the forms of biometric authentication for bank customers.
A banking customer wanted to develop their authentication system in a biometric fashion, leveraging facial recognition. At Microsoft, we build a solution by leveraging artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition technology, which will become more common from day-to-day tasks such as unlocking smartphones to identity verification in digital banking.
Many companies communicate a commitment to Diversity&Inclusion. How does Microsoft diversify its leadership worldwide across all the functional organizations?
Microsoft truly delivers on its D&I promises across teams, subsidiaries, and functional teams to inculcate cross-gender or cross-individual capabilities. We believe that diversity in itself is not impactful unless you practice inclusion; therefore, we bring various experiences to our work through ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or accessibility needs.
Could you please distil your years of technology experience into a few lessons to advise young women aspiring to build their careers in the tech industry?
There are five stars of wisdom that I’ve put it in mind muscle memory, so it’s no longer a conscious effort. They help me on the days when I feel lost. These are five stars are:
· Be intentionally BOLD
· ADVOCATE your impact
· BUILD your sponsorship
· NURTURE multiple mentor/mentee connections
· Build and ACT upon your career plan
That’s all I would say to the young women out there who are aspiring today for a career in tech. Pursue your dreams, and don’t let anyone or anything stop you.
Devanshi, thanks for your insights, encouragement, and lessons. And I hope we can have you on the show again sometime soon.
Originally published at https://theprimeview.com.
