V I EWPO I NT 93 Driving operational excellence Distributed cloud environments enable organisations to store data and resources in multiple clouds, allowing them to support edge computing and meet performance and compliance needs, while managing everything centrally How can organisations better manage public clouds, on-premises, remote locations and edge deployments? The answer is through the distributed cloud. This is a business model that extends a public cloud provider's infrastructure and services to geographically distributed satellite locations, each with its own processing capabilities. The key elements include single-pane-of-glass management being delivered by a public cloud provider, and the ability to manage federated resources in any type of cloud deployment. Specific industries have a propensity for distributed cloud environments. The manufacturing industry is seeing the highest demand with the growth of smart factories. Manufacturers are using small clusters to enable augmented reality maintenance and repair for real-time issue resolution with reduced errors. They are also using small clusters to ingest internet of things data for predictive maintenance or to run industryspecific software. Similar use cases are found in the energy sector, which is building connected platforms and exploration sites. The banking, financial services and insurance sector is using larger clusters to address complex and ever-changing data compliance mandates. Many businesses are bringing customer-facing applications and their associated databases back on-premises to mitigate potentially crippling financial penalties. They are using public cloud technologies for application development and testing but are running production environments on-premises. Meanwhile, the healthcare industry is using small clusters as a storage gateway. These hyperconverged nodes ingest medical images or patient results for clinicians to use in real time and then transfer the files to a public cloud for long-term retention. This addresses Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements and provides better patient health management over time. To address market demand for distributed cloud, Kyndryl launched a fully managed offering called Kyndryl Distributed Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with Azure Arc. This new integrated system combines Microsoft-certified hardware and Azure cloud software, which is purpose-built with fullstack lifecycle management and native Azure integration. Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform, enabling the development and management of applications and workloads across distributed IT assets. Kyndryl also offers various services to increase value across customers’ modernisation journeys. They include design, planning, building, migration and management services, as well as capabilities to help organisations manage all types of cloud deployment and implement incremental Azure Stack features or workloads. Users can add incremental Kyndryl managed services. By implementing these services, Kyndryl helps organisations to incorporate the distributed cloud environments and thereby drive operational excellence. Levi Norman is global group manager at Kyndryl L E V I NORMAN : K YNDR Y L
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=