In this Tech Barometer podcast, Nick Mahlitz, digital infrastructure manager at Forestry and Land Scotland, takes listeners to his homeland, where he helps the government use data and cloud technologies to manage natural resources and meet sustainability goals.

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Transcript:

Nick Mahlitz: I learn new things every day as I talk to our staff members. Just recently, we’re using drones with lasers to map out the land. So the drone footage stuff is really, really, really good. They can then tailor what they do with the land around what they found with these drones and with the lasers, they can go through forest layers, they can analyze the types of land that is, and oh, there’s a ridge there that we perhaps need to avoid, and just making better decisions.

Jason Lopez: We’re starting this podcast interview by parachuting right into the heart of the work of Forestry and Land Scotland, the federal organization that manages the country’s public land and wilderness. A year ago we talked with the manager of the organization’s data centers, Nick Mahlitz and posed the question:

Ken Kaplan: The forest needs technology?

Nick Mahlitz: Yes. The forests do, yes, to manage your forests well and good, to use technology in a challenging environment like Scotland, where it’s very remote and the weather can be quite extreme sometimes. Technology and exploring all realms of technology will only help us better manage Scotland’s forests and our land.

[Related: Forestry and Land Scotland Trailblazes Private-Public Shift to Cloud]

Jason Lopez: So, we circled back to follow up on that interview. Forestry and Land Scotland is utilizing technologies like drones with laser mapping capabilities. As we’ll learn, it gets very data intensive which is Nick’s job to oversee. He supports the organization’s mission to balance natural resources. One of those balancing acts is to better track wildlife, particularly deer, to protect young trees. 

Nick Mahlitz: Scotland has a lot of deer, so we have to cull a fair amount of them. And the challenges around Scotland being a very remote piece of land and identifying and culling enough deer in a small frame of time can be very challenging. So with technology of tagging deer and using drones to manage where they are, a ranger can go from culling a couple of deer and say half a day or a day to 8, 9, 10 deer within the same timeframe.

Jason Lopez: Scotland’s public land serves many interests. Trees enhance carbon sequestration. Some of its forests are grown for timber, and some of its land is used for renewable energy projects — such as wind and hydroelectric power. Scotland’s goal is to be net zero by 2045. One of the most important uses of the land is for the public’s enjoyment of the outdoors. He takes note: it’s good for people behind the scenes of his own organization to experience the places their work supports.

Nick Mahlitz: You know, I don’t want to be the person in the basement. You know, the data is there, but it’s also good out and enjoy it. And we try and do that. We encourage non-forester staff to go out with a forester for the day. Pick what you want to do. Do you want to go and see a piece of bog peatland be restored? Do you want to go and plant a tree? Do you want to go and uplift trees? You know, we offer these activities to people like myself or back office staff, HR procurement, except anybody who wants an interest in it, because it’s so important. If you understand that you’ll understand your role in the organization and how better you can play a part.

[Related: How a Top University in Scotland Expanded Remote Teaching Tech During a Crisis]

Jason Lopez: This is why the forest needs technology. The earth’s landscape has been so altered by human development for the past 30,000 years, it requires human conservation to prevent further decline or restore land to a balanced state. Intervention is critical.

Nick Mahlitz: Peatland restorations, the soil gets degraded, you know, so we’re trying to restore the balance in the soil so that it can keep more carbon, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s that ongoing. We’ve got big plans for a big nursery that’s coming up where we can plant 19 million trees a year. We’re planting the trees in a special way. The seeds are planted into biodegradable paper that can just be streamlined, planted, and we can plant far more than we could normally. And then as we cultivate them in a nursery, we have to plant them outside in fields. And we’ve re-engineered equipment to then do that planting for us rather than manually. And, you know, just that kind of approach just means far more efficiencies meeting our targets and making our staff more efficient, which is fantastic.

Jason Lopez: What scientists are learning today about the natural world and what technologists are innovating is accelerating.

Nick Mahlitz: And that is unlocked by cloud, by edge, by modern approach. Lots to be done though. Lots to be done still.

Jason Lopez: Nick’s current goal, managing the data centers of Forestry and Land Scotland, is on integrating AI and automation to improve their operations to better understand their data.

Nick Mahlitz: And that’s what we’re actively working on now. And the reality is I can know about AI and automation, me and my team and others in the digital landscape. We know about that for ourselves, but to translate that into somebody with a chainsaw who’s cutting down trees or somebody who’s managing wildlife management as in deer or our nurseries where we’re planting our seedlings to then grow, what does AI and automation do for these ones? And that’s the core of our business.

[Related: Do Forests Really Need Technology?]

Jason Lopez: He reminds us that AI is not the core of the business. AI is a tool. His team’s core business is about data.

Nick Mahlitz:  How much data do we have? How can we better understand it? How can it better help us make more informed decisions on our future for sustainability, for a net zero, for generating revenue, et cetera, that we do? So there is now a big piece to understand how we capture data, how we store that data, how we report on that data, how we integrate that data, how we use AI and automation with that data. So that really is a big focus for our organisation over the next year or two.

Jason Lopez: And this exemplifies how Forestry and Land’s data centers operate, with a passion for sustainability. Migrating to the cloud improved efficiency and prompted a shift towards reducing energy and CPU usage ,as well as modernizing.

Nick Mahlitz: So, you know, we have, we have legacy systems and they have legacy interactions and, but they’re now in the cloud. So we can replace some of those interactions with more modern solutions, which gets rid of, you know, having to spend so much energy or CPU, I get rid of that inefficiency, even in code, even right down to the lower levels. And that really can make a big difference as well. And that’s something that’s, FLS is passionate about sustainability, but even, you know, filtering that down to our digital teams, they appreciate that too. So that’s where we can look at and make those changes that just makes everything run better in a more sustainable way.

Jason Lopez: The transition to a full public cloud makes management easier and has simplified data center operations. And it’s allowed for easy integration of other cloud products and solutions.

Nick Mahlitz: So we have no on-prem environment to administer or manage. So that is quite a unique position that we find ourselves in. And we could not be more delighted with the results. The actual transition to the cloud using Nutanix was an experience that made our journey so much simpler and has bought us the time that we need to modernise and transform our solutions into that next-gen approach. So what we did with Nutanix really was, we saw it as groundbreaking. It’s delivered what we aspire to and it had benefits that perhaps we never really realised at the time that we now enjoy.

Jason Lopez: Nick says the migration has resulted in something else they didn’t originally factor in: time savings. He and his colleagues have the time resources to invest in new technologies, which help in the goal of reaching that net zero target by 2045.

Nick Mahlitz: And comparing our footprint of our on-prem environment compared to what we have now through the metrics that we receive from Microsoft, given that we’re in the Azure platform, it’s really heartening to see that that sustainability piece and net zero is being reached in some way or added to our targets that we have as an organization. And then equally that full cloud integration means that we can now tap into other cloud products, cloud solutions, and very easily integrate them into what we have, which before we didn’t fully appreciate that we could do that. And as Nutanix expand their products and services in the cloud, we’re only going to enjoy that more and more.

[Related: Easy Alternative for Migrating or Extending to Public Cloud]

Jason Lopez: The transition to the cloud, again, enabled the organization to adopt other cloud technologies.

Nick Mahlitz: And now that we’re in there on NC2 in the cloud, what we had to do as part of that journey was unlock other cloud technologies to help us realize that. So for instance, identity management, access management, VPN, et cetera, et cetera. We’re now using all the cloud variants of such so that we have no dependency on really local on-prem infrastructure. So what that entails is a very much a kind of zero trust model that’s highly secure within line with modern approach. So that really can then unlock capabilities that we’re just starting to tap into. But given my team, the ability to now manage that in a completely different way to what we had. But it unlocks really future capabilities at which the IT person’s appetite and desire and helps for recruitment and retain of staff and investment and development on staff when what we’ve done can excite people. It can excite the IT people for sure and other people in the organization. So that’s been really, really a good thing for FLS.

Jason Lopez: Astrophysicists remind us what it is to look back, from space, at planet earth, and viscerally understand how vital earth is to life as we know it, yet how small and fragile. People across political boundaries, economies and cultures are galvanizing efforts to preserve oceans, land and forests… and doing this whether its reducing pollution, conserving farmland topsoil, or establishing more efficient data centers.

Nick Mahlitz: And it really just lines up to understanding where we are in technology and our timelines and our lives, working in that agile manner, having the growth mindset, embracing technology, all the attitudes that really permeate behind a good digital team. We took that novel approach. We did our due diligence, but we did something new and exciting. And really that’s the refreshment I have from working for 20 years in this career, so to speak, that still there’s the ability to do novel, new things. We Scots are a passionate people. And as I meet other digital and IT teams in other government areas, there’s a similar aspiration and enthusiasm for understanding technology in their, in their areas too.

Jason Lopez: Nick Mahlitz is the senior digital infrastructure manager for Forestry and Land, Scotland. This is the check barometer podcast, I’m Jason Lopez. You might want to check out the original video we did with Nick entitled “Do the forests really need technology?” You can find that and more stories and podcasts at the forecastbynutanix dot com.