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The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar.

It was a montage of close-up shots—looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple. She compressed days of work into a tight 30-second clip. It was mesmerizing.

Of course, that wasn’t the only video I saw that day. In barely another five minutes of swiping around, I saw a historian discussing the songs Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings; a sailor puzzling over a capsized boat he’d found deep at sea; a tearful mother talking about parenting a child with ADHD; a Latino man laconically describing a dustup with his racist neighbor; and a linguist discussing how Gen Z uses video-game

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Whether pursuing digital transformation, exploring the potential of AI, or simply looking to simplify and optimize existing IT infrastructure, today’s organizations must do this in the context of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. These complicated architectures are here to stay—2023 research by Enterprise Strategy Group, for example, found that 87% of organizations expect their applications to be distributed across still more locations in the next two years.

Scott Sinclair, practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group, outlines the problem: “Data is becoming more distributed. Apps are becoming more distributed. The typical organization has multiple data centers, multiple cloud providers, and umpteen edge locations. Data is all over the place and continues to be created at a very rapid rate.”

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Finding a way to unify this disparate data is essential. In doing so, organizations must balance the explosive growth of

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Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to “paranormal dark cabaret afternoon” and “synth space,” and streaming has become the default. Radio DJs have been replaced by artificial intelligence, and the ritual of discovering something new is neatly packaged in a 30-song playlist, refreshed weekly. The only rule in music streaming, as in any other industry these days, is personalization.

But what we’ve gained in convenience, we’ve lost in curiosity. Sure, our unlimited access lets us listen to Swedish tropical house or New Jersey hardcore, but this abundance of choice actually makes our listening experience less expansive or eclectic.

Most of us access music through streaming services: over 600 million of us worldwide, to be exact. And claiming over 30.5% of this population, nearly double the share

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For many years now, cloud solutions have helped organizations streamline their operations, increase their scalability, and reduce costs. Yet, enterprise cloud investment has been fragmented, often lacking a coherent organization-wide approach. In fact, it’s not uncommon for various teams across an organization to have spun up their own cloud projects, adopting a wide variety of cloud strategies and providers, from public and hybrid to multi-cloud and edge computing.

The problem with this approach is that it often leads to “a sprawling set of systems and disparate teams working on these cloud systems, making it difficult to keep up with the pace of innovation,” says Bernardo Caldas, corporate vice president of Azure Edge product management at Microsoft. In addition to being an IT headache, a fragmented cloud environment leads to technological and organizational repercussions.

A complex multi-cloud deployment can make it difficult for IT

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