Berta Izquierdo
Senior Consultant, Consulting - Deloitte Spain
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She’s moving her clients in the right direction
For Berta Izquierdo, cloud is a slam-dunk—and she’s looking forward to spreading the word to as many clients as she can.
“Cloud is the future. What’s exciting is that cloud is a new technology, and if you look at the picture worldwide, only a few organizations have already migrated, so there's a huge demand out there,” Berta says. “It’s a challenge to help customers see the advantages and show them how it can improve their business. That really appeals to me.”
Prospective customers that are yet to be persuaded about cloud’s transformational power only need to witness Berta’s enthusiasm for delivering client satisfaction. “For me,” she says, ”happiness is the success of the customer.”
Berta is a cloud engineer on Deloitte Spain’s Cloud Managed Services team. She helps take clients from A to Z on the cloud migration journey, assessing their needs, proposing solutions, migrating their infrastructure and applications to the cloud, and then operating and maintaining the system. She says: “We really need to understand their business and be in their shoes, to be able to create something for them that helps make their life easier and transforms their business.”
Her team’s innovative work for a life sciences company exemplifies the huge impact cloud can bring. The team set up a powerful cloud-based platform to help the client integrate the complex system of machines and computing devices they use to conduct medical and DNA analysis for a large pipeline of potential products. In another case, a real estate company that was skeptical about giving up its on-premise infrastructure was persuaded to put its faith in Berta’s team, and now does its entire business in the cloud.
Following early encouragement from her teachers and parents to consider a technology career, she studied computer science and embarked on a career as a software engineer. But she became interested in a role with more variety, and found herself applying for a job with a cloud services firm. “I got a job offer, and I decided to move to cloud without really knowing exactly what it involved. But it was there that there I discovered how huge cloud was.” What Berta loved about the emerging field was the wide diversity of industries cloud could serve, and the array of innovative solutions it enabled.
In conversations with clients, she emphasizes cloud’s flexibility and pay-as-you-go benefits, which help organizations optimize their technology spending. She’s also an advocate for its scalability and adaptability to new features. “Many organizations are migrating to cloud, because they want to have their business more secure, more flexible, and as available as possible.”
She believes multicloud is where the future is heading; a gradual evolution from clients using single cloud providers in favor of ecosystems of cloud services delivered by a variety of vendors. But whichever direction cloud goes, Berta is likely to be leading from the front. “There's a huge market here and it's growing every day,” she says. ”We’re receiving new demands on a daily basis, so we have a lot of work to do.”
Berta says that although men are more numerous in the technology field—she is at the moment the sole woman on her team, although actively seeking to increase that—she adds that Deloitte is diverse, welcoming, and full of opportunities for women who want to work in cloud. “I would encourage all women wanting to work in cloud, or anything related to technology, to go for it—because if they are truly interested, they will love it.“
