Companies of all sizes have migrated to the cloud — and with good reason. Cloud migration can help businesses scale faster, reduce IT operating costs and speed up their transformation story.

But they’re often complex endeavors. Some organizations, in fact, have mission critical systems and applications that weren’t built for the cloud or lack the skills to move or modernize them. 

“This is the primary challenge customers are asking us to help them solve,” said Tony Savoy, Vice President of Global Alliances at Kyndryl. “Our heritage of managing some of the world’s most complex systems and our deep cloud expertise with over 24,000 Microsoft Certified employees — coupled with Microsoft’s enterprise grade cloud — offers customers a new set of solutions they didn’t have access to before.”

Since 2021, Kyndryl and Microsoft have worked together to deliver solutions that help businesses accelerate their digital transformation projects, thanks to the strength of the Microsoft Cloud and Kyndryl’s operational experience. That collaboration is paying off, as Kyndryl won Microsoft’s 2023 Partner of the Year award in Peru and was named a finalist in three categories, including Global Systems Integrator (GSI) Growth Champion (Global + U.S. categories), Security (Kyndryl Singapore) and Media & Communications (Kyndryl Thailand).

After winning these awards, Savoy spoke about the business relationship’s evolution and what customers can look forward to next.

How has the Kyndryl and Microsoft relationship evolved since forming an alliance in 2021?
The greatest development is the pace with which we’re moving to accelerate our Microsoft Cloud capabilities and help our customers accelerate their cloud journey. Since forming the partnership, we’ve activated our go-to-market engine in over 60 countries, released over 30 new service capabilities wrapped around Microsoft technology, and grown our Microsoft Cloud skills three-fold.

What areas have driven the partnership’s growth?
From a regional perspective, we’re seeing 700% growth in the UK-Ireland region, 182% in Latin America and 91% in the U.S., with notable success stories from British Telecom, RIMAC and Dow. From an industry view, financial services (Laurentian Bank of Canada and Belfius) and consumer goods (Cristalerias Toro) are where we’re seeing the most momentum, and there’s growing customer interest in other industries, including governments and healthcare.

Speaking of governments and healthcare, both industries have experienced recent cyber attacks. What are some of the biggest threats in today’s cyber risk landscape?
The average company has adopted five or more different cloud platforms to run their business. In a hybrid, multi-cloud environment, that means the threat vectors are increasing because there are more areas for attackers to compromise. Further, each cloud platform has its own set of security capabilities with varying levels of sophistication — leaving a very complex and diverse environment for enterprises to maintain a high security posture.

So, how is Kyndryl working with Microsoft to develop solutions to confront threats?
Microsoft has substantially invested in its security portfolio over the last several years — not only to protect customers on the Microsoft Cloud but to protect customers wherever their workloads run in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. 

Kyndryl is leveraging Microsoft’s security capabilities, such as Sentinel and Defender, to help customers provide expanded threat protection between Microsoft Cloud and their private infrastructure. We’re also integrating these technologies into our Cyber Resiliency Services and new joint solutions, such as the Cyber Resilience with SAP on Azure offering, to help our customers with mission critical applications.