About DonovanDonovan Brady is the Director of Solutions Architecture at Logicworks. He began his career at Logicworks six years ago as a Solutions Architect, fast forward to today, Donovan now manages a team of highly skilled and certified AWS and Azure Solutions Architects. During his time at Logicworks, Donovan has had the opportunity to work with companies in a variety of verticals to solve their most complex IT and business challenges. Donovan is originally from New York and has been a professional musician since the age of six. He is also a self-proclaimed 90’s video game nerd.Links Referenced:
LogicWorks: https://www.logicworks.com/

Donovan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donovan-brady-9403a583/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. My guest on this promoted episode of Screaming in the Cloud is Donovan Brady, director of solutions architecture at Logicworks and something of a kindred spirit in that he tends to also focus on something that I more or less spend my time being obnoxious about on Twitter, which is in many cases going towards cloud for the right reasons with an outcome in mind, which is rarely having the most interesting and clever technical stack imaginable. Donovan, thank you for joining me today.Donovan: Yeah, thanks for having me. Corey, really excited for the conversation and looking forward to getting into it.Corey: Let’s start by establishing the bona fides, for lack of a better term here. What does Logicworks do that they require a director of solutions architecture?Donovan: Logicworks is a managed services and professional services cloud provider specializing in hyper-compliant workloads migrating, optimizing, and operating in the cloud, right? That means that we work with primarily Software-as-a-Service companies or HealthTech or FinTech companies with compliances, like PCI, HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC, ISO, GDPR, pretty much you name it and we help customers in their cloud journey operate and optimize in the cloud.Corey: It’s weird, when you talk about optimizing in cloud, people always hear that as, “Oh, we’re going to fix the bill, we’re going to—” because again, that is the context in which I operate where, “Oh, great. We’re going to optimize your cloud bill.” Which makes sense, but I think that people have lost sight of the forest for the trees in many respects, where when they hear, “I’m going to optimize your bill,” that often comes across, “Oh, we’re going to make it smaller,” because generally, it’s not very well optimized, and one of those optimal things you can do is turn something that’s unneeded or unnecessary off, and surprise, there’s a side effect of saving money. But it often means that in some cases, it’s time to start spending more money on things like, oh I don’t know, backups, and resiliency, and figure out what it is that the business is aligned around. Because you can always cut the bill to zero by turning everything off. It seems like that’s not really the alignment that—or the reason that companies go to cloud in the first place. So, what’s your take on that? Why do most companies say, “Ah. We have a problem and we’re going to go with cloud,” in the hopes that it fixes that problem?Donovan: Yeah, it’s an interesting point. So, a lot of times we hear customers say exactly what you just mentioned: “We want to move to cloud so that we can save costs,” or, “Oh, we’re in the cloud and we’re primarily concerned about costs.” Unfortunately, that’s the wrong motivation. Saving cost is definitely a byproduct of moving to the cloud if you do it the right way, but the primary busines