Business opportunity

Automobile manufacturers are on a collective transformation journey driven by the principles of CASE: Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric. For Mazda, this movement is another chapter in its long history of innovation and an opportunity to spread its corporate philosophy of the “joy of driving” and “joy of living”.

To support CASE initiatives, Mazda wanted to modernize legacy systems to make them more efficient, flexible and responsive, while helping to ensure a safer, reliable and stable operation. The company also aimed to improve integration between different customer-facing and internal business systems and enhance its business continuity capabilities. Constructing highly resilient systems capable of swiftly recovering data would secure Mazda in the event of natural disasters or unforeseen outages.

Technical challenge

With the advancement of CASE, vehicles are becoming increasingly software-driven, and there are growing expectations for companies to lead proactive digital transformation efforts that deliver new value. To accommodate these new requirements, Mazda must ensure the resiliency and reliability of numerous applications and systems evolving at different speeds within an increasingly complex infrastructure.

Mazda needed to make its infrastructure easier to maintain and upgrade, which included virtualizing storage to eliminate the existing dependency on specific storage products.

Equally, Mazda aimed to reduce the operational burden of its IT operations, which had traditionally relied on manual tasks and individual expertise.

"From a disaster recovery standpoint, it was essential to have an infrastructure environment that wouldn’t place a heavy burden on operations. Ensuring and strengthening capabilities for data protection and recovery has become one of our most urgent management priorities," explained Yuichi Sukegawa, Senior Specialist, Infrastructure Systems Department, MDI & IT Division, Mazda Motor Corporation.

Our solution

Together, Mazda and Kyndryl launched a major modernization project to enhance business resilience, improve integration and collaboration and overhaul the existing virtualization infrastructure.

Kyndryl led the project management office (PMO) for the virtualization project, which enabled Mazda to handle two to three times the volume of projects achievable with internal resources alone.

Expert consultancy from Kyndryl was vital in the design and implementation of a new cloud backup system based on Veeam technology, in which Mazda had no previous experience.

Kyndryl helped with server sizing, network bandwidth control, backup methods, and immutable storage, as well as assisting with upgrades to Mazda’s DR site.

"The construction of a virtualization infrastructure necessitates a multi-vendor approach. Our role is to coordinate multiple vendors to advance the project and we required a partner who could assist us. In this context, we requested support from Kyndryl, trusted for its quarter-century track record with Mazda, rich experience in multi-vendor projects and a truly open vendor approach that isn't fixated on selling specific products,” said Toru Mitsumune, Senior Specialist of the Infrastructure Systems Department at MDI & IT Headquarters.