Francine Bey

She saves Christmas, 365 days a year

Francine Bey spends her days making sure that some of the world’s most important networks are up, and stay up, 24/7. Whether those networks belong to hospitals, beverage companies, online gaming services, or financial organizations, her job is to keep things running like clockwork.

As global operations lead for Cloud Managed Services, Francine’s teams keep tabs on the day-to-day cloud environments of more than 150 clients, many of them major global brands and organizations, for whom glitches or downtime could have a major financial, security or customer-experience impact.

Her behind-the-scenes role is a high-pressure one and, as she herself says, not the most glamorous. Yet she talks about it with the enthusiasm and humor of someone for whom going to work is like opening a Christmas present every day of the year.

In fact, when she calls Christmas Day her favorite day, it’s her job she’s talking about. It’s the day where one client’s operations gets put to the ultimate test, when many thousands of people across the globe go online to play the new gaming system they found under the tree; a day when the complex cloud infrastructure that allows to them to play seamlessly needs to be failsafe.

Whenever Francine’s son sits with his game console, it’s a reminder of a job well done. “I know that I'm helping to make sure that the data is intact, and the networks work efficiently, so that he can text or talk to his friends real-time while he's playing that game,” she says. “Being the behind-the-scenes person ensuring he has the ability to play because of my day-to-day operations, that's the fun part.”

The managed cloud services role isn’t just about keeping the petabytes flowing, however. It’s also about ensuring clients’ cloud capabilities are agile and scalable. “We’re looking ahead to what is out there, what's coming … to make sure their environments are healthy, that we can sustain their environments, and that we can build them in the cloud for future projects and the things they want to do.”

Following her university degree in Communications, Francine was originally interested in the broadcasting industry. However, while working in the office of a value-added IT services reseller, she would often answer the customer help-desk line while it was unattended and found that she had a knack for solving caller problems. Delighted at her innate ability, her employer supported her training to become a qualified IT engineer.

In her decade with Deloitte, Francine has seen the technology space expand in potential for women like herself. “There was a time when you couldn't find women in technology—and now we realize, especially at Deloitte, that women in technology is really the future,” she says. ”It’s women that are innovative, women that are doing a lot of diverse and inclusive AI work, women performing data analytics, and women building many applications that solve problems.”

So, what advice would she give young women wondering whether a career in technology, and specifically the cloud, is right for them?“

I would say, run through the fields and figure out what it is you want to do. There's so much out there.”

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