A Purpose-Built Approach Optimizes the Value of Cloud Investments

Not every journey to cloud takes the same path.

Each deployment model has its own set of challenges and demands different solutions to deliver the desired business outcomes. Too many IT organizations take an ad hoc approach to moving applications and workloads to the cloud to solve a singular business need or as a stopgap measure to address a particular pain point. Without having purpose-built framework that supports a holistic cloud migration strategy, organizations spend too much time on the basics of cloud management and infrastructure modernization and do not devote enough time to innovation and optimization.To mitigate challenges and ensure a successful journey to whatever cloud model works best, organizations need to first define the right strategy, based on business needs. From there, it’s all about advancing a rollout strategy and a set of solutions taking aim at the highest-priority workloads. The strategy must also uphold budgetary thresholds and deliver the flexibility to scale, modify, and pivot cloud investments to meet the changing needs of business.Depending on the path, a trusted partner can streamline the transition and provide a solid foundation for scaling and evolving cloud infrastructure and IT modernization, no matter where the starting point is. By drawing on a partner’s expertise and a set of end-to-end services, organizations can wade into a hybrid multicloud future armed with a purpose-built strategy. That strategy will work for both what’s important today and anticipation of future migration needs.

We’re helping customers with their strategy across myriad workloads, and often each solution is in its own stage of cloud readiness. We want to help our customers wherever they are in their cloud journey.

Kevin Powell - Cloud Offering Executive at Kyndryl

The path can take several forms:
1. Optimizing on-premises environments. Organizations focused on modernizing legacy on-premises environments typically struggle with an array of challenges, including:

Increased demand for as-a-service models that span infrastructure, applications, platforms, and operations to free IT up from day-to-day operations so it can focus on innovation as well as on delivering value for the business

Increased demand for new security expertise and proven methods for managing critical workloads, given an expanding and more diverse IT footprint and in light of heightened cybersecurity risks

A lack of automation to achieve operational efficiency, leaving IT grappling with cumbersome and unproductive operations

A desire for 24 x 7 uptime, which demands access to highly skilled teams well versed in resilience and IT operations

A lack of talent to fill critical skills gaps in areas such as security, devops, and AI and advanced analytics

What customers need:

To meet these challenges, organizations need a trusted partner that can deliver private cloud infrastructure in an as-a-service model. These solutions include management services that support a hybrid cloud environment, including the tools, processes, and skilled talent that can manage workloads regardless of whether they’re hosted in an on-premises data center or in that of a third party.

There’s also a need for modern competencies and services that cover key areas such as building and managing container platforms, orchestrating DevOps and DevSecOps processes, automating security configuration and remediation, and providing management oversight to identify and resolve anomalies and other issues.

“Companies need attributes of the public cloud even if their data never goes into the public cloud,” says Kyndryl’s Duvvur. “With private cloud as a service, there are typically fewer concerns about data exfiltration and exposed security vectors.”

2. Optimizing public cloud/hyperscaler environments. Although it’s relatively easy to spin up a public cloud instance, the environment can get messy pretty quickly as more and more workloads migrate. Among the issues:

Limited familiarity with cloud operational models. Managing cloud like a traditional data center only serves to increase costs and lower operational efficiency, negating any perceived benefits of migration.

Inability to apply the appropriate security controls and governance policies to ensure a secure, compliant, and optimal cloud environment across an end-to-end chain. Shifting left on security is a requirement for public cloud deployments.

Missing talent well versed in the nuances and capabilities of any one cloud platform, let alone multiple clouds, all with their own policies and controls. Given the IT skills gap, it’s simply not practical to field teams with knowledge of every cloud. There’s also a glaring lack of on-staff expertise in what’s required to integrate and manage across multiple cloud environments.

What customers need:

To ensure success in public cloud, organizations need experts on the strengths and weaknesses of the different hyperscaler providers as well as in the particulars of each operating model and configuration requirements. Access to enterprise-grade reference architectures can help optimize deployment in individual clouds, and integrated tooling and automation capabilities will ensure that organizations maintain an enterprise-grade environment and can scale appropriately in response to changing consumption patterns. Flexible pricing mechanisms are also essential for scaling up or down with shifting business needs.

3. Optimizing hybrid multicloud environments. With a variety of mission-critical applications within their portfolio — each with different needs — companies gravitate to the cloud provider that meets their requirements in capabilities, price, and quality. Although greater choice promotes flexibility and optimization, it also creates complexity, whether that’s glaring gaps in the requisite skill set or myriad security, management, and integration challenges. Among the most significant challenges:

A lack of core cloud expertise in many of
the newer, albeit critical, areas such as microservices, containerization, Kubernetes, DevSecOps, and automation. Not only are IT organizations deficient in many of these newer skill sets but there are also differences across hyperscaler platforms, requiring additional upskilling and training.

Fragmented solutions and decreasing threat visibility after expansion into a multicloud hybrid environment, despite
the individual security capabilities the public clouds tout. Moreover, with the shared-responsibility model championed by cloud providers, it is difficult to establish the proper visibility, control,and compliance across a diverse landscape.

Difficulty achieving seamless visibility across the entire hybrid and multicloud environment. This leads to complications
on numerous fronts, including predicting container performance, managing and securing data across containers, and monitoring and measuring SLAs across platforms.

Difficulty predicting and tuning applications performance across a mix of environments, not to mention dealing with data silos and cloud sprawl.

What customers need:

Organizations ready to make this leap need help aligning with cloud-native operating models and also require access to experts familiar with the specific capabilities and controls of the individual hyperscalers. Organizations need to be able to define a cloud security posture based on the unique privacy and regulatory requirements of the business, be able to manage identity and access across multicloud environments, and have knowledge of DevSecOps for building security into the application development process. Rather than enlist an assortment of service providers for individual clouds or workloads, which leads to silos and sprawl, organizations must strive to engage with a partner that addresses integration challenges with common application integration techniques as well as standard management and operational processes and tools.

“We implemented and managed numerous complex integrations with our ecosystem partners to deliver end-to-end solutions” says Anthony Dasari, director, Hyperscalers & GTM Offering Management at Kyndryl. “That’s from designing the integration points to securing the integration points with continuous observability and proactive AI-driven protection. That’s the huge difference we bring to the table.”