Elly Yates-Roberts |
When the pandemic hit, it changed cloud adoption from a long-term transformation goal to an immediate business need.
The Hybrid & Multicloud Perceptions Survey from Microsoft in October 2021 found that more than 50 per cent of enterprises increased cloud usage because of the pandemic, while 92 per cent said their journey to cloud was accelerating faster than they had previously anticipated.
In the rush to cloud adoption, businesses have encountered unintended outcomes, such as increased complexity, growing costs and lack of technology integration. Without making sure that they have the right mix of planning, strategy and skills, many businesses moved to the cloud without realising the benefits of innovation, better time to market or improved IT resilience along the way. We encourage businesses to take a step back and closely investigate the following four cloud transformation entry points and determine which one is the best fit for their organisation and their journey towards adoption.
Infrastructure-led transformation
The crucial first step toward IT transformation, this pathway helps enterprises lift and shift workloads before embarking on a full-fledged application-led modernisation journey. The benefits of this entry point often include the ability to optimise cost, streamline operations and achieve significant reductions of technical debt.
Business-led transformation
Cloud has become the premier foundation to address current business priorities for digital transformation. The agility, flexibility and strategic value cloud brings to the business will multiply when the cloud transformation strategy is aligned with business and digital transformation strategy. This is where a consultant-led approach helps clients to select the right destination hyperscaler, hybrid strategies, network integration architecture, security architecture, application placement and aligned return on investment models with well-articulated business benefits.
Application-led migration and modernisation
Applications are the backbone of many digital transformation initiatives. In the shift towards cloud native technologies, hyperscaler platform-as-a-service adoption, site reliability engineering-based operating models and integrations will drive application modernisation. Clients expect faster time to market, improved innovation, improved customer experience, agility, cost reduction, IT simplification and ease of operations benefits when following this transformation path.
Analytics-led transformation
With the sudden explosion of digitisation, data has become a strategic asset for today’s businesses. But despite the volume of data they possess, many enterprises still struggle to derive actionable insights from their data, often due to operational inefficiencies, exponential data growth, poor data integrity, and a lack of data management and engineering skills. Data modernisation, data democratisation and artificial intelligence-assisted data governance leads to monetisation of data and creates differentiations for business.
By 2025, market researcher IDC estimates that 75 per cent of organisations looking to drive revenue growth will only select vendors with a portfolio of strategy, design and technology services. Kyndryl can help businesses realise the transformation that is right for them by designing and building secured landing zones for enterprise workloads, modernisation and migration of workloads to Microsoft Azure, efficient management of the workloads on Azure leveraging cloud native and DevSecOps, data modernisation and management using artificial intelligence on Azure, design, build and management of hybrid cloud services leveraging Azure Stack Ecosystem.
Kyndryl can help customers move forward with the transformation entry point that makes most sense for them. When combined with Microsoft’s Azure services and Cloud Adoption Framework, our methods can help your enterprise overcome some of the most common transformation challenges, such as business continuity, cost optimisation, and evaluating gaps in your current technology platforms.
To learn more about Kyndryl’s partnership with Microsoft, visit: https://bit.ly/3qSa4OK
Prakash Somani is executive director of cloud advisory, migration and transformation services for Kyndryl
This article was originally published in the Spring 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.