Kyndryl delivers its FinOps offering as a key component of the ModernOps framework, enabled by the applications of the Kyndryl bridge. The Kyndryl bridge is an open integration platform that leverages the company’s 30 years of proven experience, large portfolio of IT solutions, breadth of digital transformation experts, and its own data-driven insights and IP to facilitate and simplify the delivery of IT solutions at scale. The ModernOps framework is a set of modern IT services that encompasses people, processes, technology, infrastructure, and experience to deliver an integrated value stream to customers to solve a problem. The Kyndryl ModernOps portfolio includes services for FinOps and DevSecOps as well as ComplianceSecOps.
Kyndryl has built out its FinOps tools and processes to handle cost management for hybrid IT environments — a significant differentiator from other consulting services and cloud providers. Most cost management platforms, particularly those from public cloud providers, are limited to a singular set of services and lack the ability to comprehensively manage cost and usage data across public and private clouds.
Through use of data ingestion capabilities; standardized schemas; extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities; analytics; and other IP, Kyndryl’s cost management platform ingests data across private and public clouds, normalizing and standardizing the data in a way that results in a single governance view to initiate effective cost management. “We can maintain the discipline of FinOps even in a hybrid world,” says Kathryn Lin, global offering manager of FinOps at Kyndryl. “That’s often not called out in other FinOps solutions and tools, because it’s a whole different beast to tackle.”
Another core advantage of Kyndryl’s FinOps approach: The company practices FinOps as an end-to-end process, not just delivering tools but also ensuring that the processes are sustainable, with an emphasis on business outcomes. The company’s FinOps vision is grounded in respect for operations born from decades of running business-critical systems with a focus on productivity and resilience. “Our heritage makes us operationally aware of the implications of making changes like combining workloads, shutting down VMs, or rightsizing clusters without acute diligence to operational resilience,” explains Catlin. “We don’t break things to save money. We also don’t just tell customers what to do — we show up and help them get it done.”
Kyndryl follows the FinOps maturity model developed closely from the FinOps Foundation’s methodology, mapping each client’s journey from the state it is currently in to where it wants to be.
Awareness and communications Examines team composition, oversight, decision-making processes and performance management as well as workload optimization
Visibility Considers cost visibility, data currency, overage reporting, and cost alerting
Allocation Examines real-time decisioning, fully loaded costing, key performance indicators (KPIs), and peer benchmarking
Utilization Drills down into utilization of resources, containers, orphaned resources, data life cycle management, and prepayment consumption
Rate management Evaluates policy and governance, enterprise agreements, private pricing agreements, Red/Green zone prepay, and prepay oversight
Continuous improvement Focuses on policy enforcement, elasticity, optimization, cost avoidance, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and Red/Green zone optimization
Kyndryl’s engagement framework is three-pronged:
Advise: Kyndryl experts assess where the client is, plan for where it needs to be, and design the best road map for that journey.
Implement: The Kyndryl and client teams work together in an iterative fashion to implement the applicable technology and processes for the specific use case, along with the requisite execution steps that will advance the client on the FinOps maturity map.
Operationalize: After the client’s transformation journey is complete, Kyndryl continuously monitors and optimizes the solution, ensuring positive business outcomes and maximum value from hybrid cloud investments.
Every engagement is designed to meet clients where they are on the FinOps journey and is fine-tuned to a customer’s individual operating model and cloud deployment. In the Inform phase, for example, Kyndryl can help customers establish a baseline, create a tagging strategy, and establish context for cost centers. During the optimization phase, a Kyndryl team identifies optimization opportunities and offers recommendations. At the operationalize stage, customers can opt for assistance with change management, continuous governance, supplier management, and transparency of KPIs through Kyndryl’s fully managed FinOps-as-a-service offering.
To determine the best engagement fit for the client, Kyndryl leverages a proven diagnostic methodology to assess six critical functional areas to assess organizational readiness and/or maturity for FinOps. Each area is reviewed and scored, based on utilization of industry FinOps best practices. (See the chart on the next page.)
The engagement is also designed to execute FinOps in a sustainable way. “You have to have continuous feedback and drive that feedback into the process so when you are making decisions, you are actually making the right decisions,” Maheshwaram says.
