Jaret Chiles, Chief Services Officer, DoiT – Interview Series

Jaret Chiles is the chief services officer (CSO) of DoiT and is responsible for all aspects of their client services organization. With 25+ years of experience across consulting and managed services, cloud adoption, technical sales, security and compliance, he is instrumental in building out a key value driver for DoiT’s business: services, consulting, and support offerings. Since joining the company, Jaret has led development of a scalable services strategy that enables DoiT to grow rapidly – without compromising its unrivaled expertise.

DoiT combines the power of intelligent software products with access to unrivaled multicloud expertise to solve the most complicated and important cloud problems. DoiT’s product portfolio provides the tools to manage cloud cost and infrastructure without compromising the speed or quality of engineering initiatives.

What initially attracted you to computer science and how did you find yourself involved in cloud computing?

My father was an engineer and exposed me to building and modifying computers as a child in the early 80s. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 4 on which I learned how to do some basic programming by the time I was in elementary school. It’s been an interesting journey and I never really considered working in any other field. During high school, I had my first job working evenings and weekends at an internet service provider doing dial-up, broadband, email and website support. While pursuing a computer science degree in college, I helped run the campus data center and networks and led my first team.

I went on to work in many different roles at a managed hosting services provider. When AWS began to disrupt our legacy models, I recognized the undeniable potential and quickly adapted to the cloud computing era as a cloud architect from the very first release of OpenStack to all the major hyperscalers. Ever since I’ve been focused on helping companies large and small understand how to unlock the value that cloud computing creates for their businesses. My passion for computing has never strayed, but now I find it most rewarding as a servant leader supporting the success and growth of others who share my passion.

Can you elaborate on how DoiT's intelligent software products and multicloud expertise specifically address the most pressing cloud challenges faced by organizations today?

Through our products and services, DoiT International helps cloud-driven companies harness the public cloud to drive business growth. We’re a full-service provider of intelligent multicloud technology, so we deliver consulting, support and training to solve essential challenges like migration costs and the sheer complexity of cloud usage.

We also provide full-service FinOps technology along with the procurement advantages that organizations need to solve the challenges of navigating and automating public cloud investments.  Some of the essential capabilities we provide include multicloud budgeting, reporting, optimization and governance.

DoiT’s global team of cloud experts have decades of experience in the analytics, optimization and governance of cloud architecture, as well as specializations in Kubernetes and artificial intelligence (AI). We also stay on top of emerging technologies, so our clients can take full advantage of them, securely and safely. Our experts have technical leadership backgrounds across verticals. Daily, I’m completely humbled by the actual level of expertise in our organization, I’ve never seen anything like it elsewhere.

How does DoiT Cloud Solve enhance the cloud experience for users, and could you share some success stories or examples of challenges it has helped resolve?

Doit Cloud Solve is a services offering that allows customers to unlock real value in cloud computing with unlimited access to the top experts in the industry. We work backward from what customers actually need, with less friction than traditional consulting and support contracting models. Using Generative AI as an example, we leverage a three-part approach:

• Discovery: We delve into specific business objectives, gathering and refining data to lay the groundwork for innovation;
• Innovation: We guide feature selection, model training and validation to meet tailored needs; and
• Deployment and optimization: We implement and refine generative AI strategy, ensuring your team executes on a seamless integration and with maximum impact.

The DoiT Cloud Solve team provides multicloud consulting, unlimited consultancy and technical support as well as cloud-native training. Customers are able to create optimized architectures and configurations while enhancing the skills and capabilities across their teams, which leads to more efficient and sustainable cloud growth. From the core of the cloud stack with compute, storage and networking, through the full cloud-native product portfolio, to the most advanced and disruptive cloud solutions.

In terms of cloud cost optimization, what strategies or technologies does DoiT employ to help clients maximize their cloud investments while maintaining or enhancing service quality?

Cost optimization starts with a well-designed architecture. DoiT consultants and engineers help customers ensure their cloud architectures are future-ready and assist in creating migration strategies.

Additionally, every IT organization wants to get their desired benefits with the lowest possible spend, and to do this, IT needs timely information and tools that make it simple to manage cloud services. DoiT’s intelligent technology does exactly this, helping engineering and FinOps leaders monitor, manage and optimize their cloud usage and spend.

We help IT utilize advanced technologies like GenAI for both internal and customer-facing workflows, without running into unforeseen massive compute and cost overruns.

DoiT offers a suite of proprietary products like Flexsave and Cloud Navigator. How do these products differentiate from other tools available in the market, and what unique advantages do they offer to your clients?

What sets DoiT apart is its unrivaled expertise, full-service FinOps technology and the procurement advantage that we provide to solve the challenges of navigating and automating public cloud investments. These three pillars operating in harmony is a game changer for customers.

DoiT Flexsave uniquely removes the risk, forecasting and tedious work required for managing a complex portfolio of compute commitments and reservations. Compute costs can often represent more than half of an organization’s cloud spend, so accessing optimized pricing on those workloads is an easy way to lower monthly bills. Flexsave automates commitments, providing cost savings without the need to monitor usage, track expiration and renewal dates, while modifying instances to fit an organization’s reservations.

Security is a major concern in cloud computing. Can you discuss DoiT's approach to cloud security and how it helps organizations strengthen their security posture?

Security must be part of every step in a customer’s cloud journey. It’s not one-and-done up front, and you don’t bolt it on at the end either. Security is a consideration baked into everything we do from products to services.

As part of architecture reviews, or as a focused session, DoiT Cloud Solve experts will advise on security strategies as well as perform benchmark security reviews of your environment including vulnerability assessment and security control analysis. A sound architecture and proper configuration are paramount to a secure cloud environment, but also careful consideration of customers' regular operational procedures must be accounted for.

Given the increasing complexity of cloud environments, how does DoiT assist organizations in navigating multicloud strategies and managing infrastructure across multiple providers?

There are many different reasons customers might choose to leverage a multi-cloud strategy. At DoiT we believe in working backwards from the business objectives. Our consultants will help develop a strategy and architecture that meets business objectives without introducing unnecessary complexity.

One of the many challenges in managing a multi-cloud environment on a day-to-day basis is having visibility across all platforms in a consistent and operational manner. DoiT Cloud Navigator extends visibility and anomaly detection capabilities to overcome these challenges and provide the FinOps tools needed manage cloud costs and infrastructure without compromising the speed or quality of engineering initiatives. This allows for a responsible scaling of the business.

Machine learning and AI are becoming critical components of modern IT strategies. How does DoiT support businesses in integrating these technologies into their operations and leveraging them for competitive advantage?

Following the three-part approach mentioned previously, DoiT’s Cloud Solve enables IT to work with our experienced cloud architects, and provides access to knowledge transfer and other resources to enable them to evaluate internal readiness, identify company-specific use cases and collaboratively create customized GenAI solutions.

DoiT also partners with AWS and Google to help their users develop generative AI solutions using those platforms and their supporting applications.

The process of cloud migration can be daunting for many organizations. What key factors should companies consider to ensure a smooth and successful transition to the cloud with DoiT's assistance?

A successful migration starts with establishing clear business objectives and success criteria. There are many factors to keep in mind when planning and executing a migration to the cloud, including data governance, security and privacy, cost management, scalability, skills and expertise, potential service disruptions and legacy system compatibility. Overlooking any of these and others can lead to delays and cost overruns for the migration.

What emerging trends or technologies in cloud computing is DoiT particularly excited about, and how do you plan to incorporate these into your offerings to drive future growth and innovation?

We are a company full of passionate cloud experts and every new technology hype cycle excites us immensely. That said, our many combined years of experience have taught us not to focus on finding ways to forcefully fit a new exciting technology in a business, but rather to understand what use cases make sense for a business and add real value. This is a very common mistake customers make when they see new emerging technologies and ask for help implementing them in their environments.

Generative AI right now has us very excited for a number of reasons, but the main reason is we have uncovered so many high value use cases for businesses across industries to adopt the technology. Starting with basic productivity and insight use cases, nearly everyone can benefit from GenAI. Moving from there on into AI-powered service development and disruptive GenAI product technologies, we believe the skies are the limit for our customers and we’d love to help them find their path to adoption and production.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit DoiT.