The Building Blocks of Cloud Strategy

As organizations accelerate their cloud migrations, they need both a strategy and a strategic partner, according to the Foundry 2022 Cloud Computing Study.

For example, despite their accelerated investments with multiple cloud service providers, 59% of EMEA IT leaders said they do not consider any of them a strategic partner. The partnership capabilities they are most seeking include security expertise, better cloud management capabilities, and strategic guidance on overall cloud strategy or a roadmap.

Working with a strategic cloud partner is more critical now than ever. Companies are adopting both hybrid and multiple clouds, which is creating greater IT complexity. They’re also facing significant challenges controlling costs, while struggling with a lack of cloud security and management skillsets.

These hurdles will become more difficult to overcome as organizations deepen their cloud investments. Meanwhile, enterprises risk employee and customer frustration when IT environments don’t meet their speed and performance expectations. Also, they may not achieve business objectives for increased or sustainable revenues if IT cannot keep up.

Take a building-block approach

It’s important to map your cloud strategy to attain business value. A building-block approach — in which organizations address the most pressing use cases first and build on successes — helps to minimize risks and increase successes.

For example, a global food processing company based in Brazil had deployed multiple clouds, in turn struggling to manage complexity and control costs. Their first step was to map out their pain points and then develop a plan to gain visibility across their clouds, including existing and forecasted costs.

Working with a strategic partner, the company implemented a multicloud management platform that uses automation to pull together costs and cloud assets in a single, consolidated dashboard. This visibility enabled the organization to increase efficiency and reduce costs — which in turn has allowed the company to invest in other cloud solutions.

Identify where expertise is most valuable

Most organizations have cloud skills gaps in their IT teams, and the current labor shortage makes it difficult to attract and retain talent. Once you have a cloud roadmap, identify where you will most need expertise — such as architecture, security, implementation, or management skills.

Even large enterprises with significant resources and IT talent on staff sometimes struggle to get cloud implementations up and running. For example, a multinational food services company in Spain needed to rapidly migrate a 6 TB ERP database and 130 virtual machines (VMs) from their private cloud to the public cloud as a backup and recovery solution. They couldn’t afford much, if any, business disruption.

The food services provider engaged with a strategic partner to plan and prepare for the migration. Although the planning took months, the actual ERP and VM migration was carried out in a single weekend — with zero business disruption.

Engage a strategic partner with deep expertise

Kyndryl has 30+ years of experience designing, building, and managing mission-critical IT environments, and has empowered 4,000 global customers. It offers critical cloud consulting and services, including:

• Cloud strategy and roadmap development to help align platforms and services to your business strategy
• Cloud and landing zone design with a unifying cloud solution architecture that meets your requirements for hybrid or multi-cloud estate
• Platform and infrastructure modernization that aligns to your value chains and transformation goals
• Modern operations management that establishes a solid foundation for cloud platforms via DevSecOps, automation, and AIOps initiatives

In addition, Kyndryl offers implementation and managed services to fill skillset gaps and accelerate your cloud transformation.

Get your cloud strategy underway by starting here.