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Adaptive cloud: Why companies with widely distributed IT will benefit first
By Edgar Haren
Organizations continue to experience challenges migrating complex, highly integrated workloads like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to the public cloud.
Complexity in migrations can lead to performance setbacks, control gaps and increased costs.
In particular, the complexity of edge computing and custom applications has prompted some businesses to repatriate workloads back to on-premises environments. Indeed, complexity was discussed in the Kyndryl Readiness Report as the number one challenge to technology modernization.
We recently worked with a large financial services provider in the U.K. that needed better visibility into its IT estate, compliance with data privacy regulations and lower operational costs. The company wanted to move most workloads to Microsoft Azure, while keeping some in another public cloud and on premises.
It was a complex scenario, for which we deployed an adaptive cloud. The company now has better visibility through a single control plane, more accurate chargebacks to internal business units and stakeholders, better regulatory transparency, reduced costs, and enhanced control over on-premises environments.
The adaptive cloud approach — which Kyndryl and Microsoft are partnering in — may not suit every company staring down decisions about what and how to migrate. Organizations rightfully will hesitate to significantly overhaul their operating models. But it’s now a viable option to cut through the prioritization paralysis that often lives just downstream from IT complexity.
An adaptive cloud strategy can help address limitations of public cloud.
The benefits of an adaptive cloud strategy
Whether the concern is vendor lock-in, data security or the complexity of multicloud environments, what’s clear is that forcing all workloads into the public cloud comes with limitations.
An adaptive cloud strategy is built on an understanding that not every cloud use case is the same, and companies will need purpose-built cloud solutions that provide specific capabilities, tools and a consistent user experience to simplify and optimize business outcomes.
We worked with a large telecommunications company in Asia that wanted to expand into financial services, content delivery and shopping by creating a “super app” with multiple services. The application needed on-premises support for strict data laws but also required Azure connectivity for analytics.
To ensure high availability and business continuity, we deployed an adaptive cloud environment across two locations for redundancy and failover. This setup included a data fabric spanning both the on-premises environment and Azure Cloud. The company now has centralized management for all its federated environments, cost reductions through as-a-service infrastructure and database resources and a performant data pipeline for real-time insights.
An adaptive cloud strategy has notable benefits for companies with many locations.
Industry use cases for an adaptive cloud strategy
In sectors where IT is widely distributed, companies can use an adaptive cloud approach to deploy cloud-enabled solutions for digital technologies at the edge with a data pipeline to the main data management hub — whether it’s on premises or in a public cloud.
Many geographically dispersed businesses keep certain workloads on premises to mitigate data privacy penalties. As a result, they often use multiple public clouds, on-premises workloads and edge locations. An adaptive cloud strategy helps them extract value from the various environments without increasing costs, complexity, time to value and human error, or creating data silos. The advantages can be particularly evident in retail, manufacturing and healthcare:
Considerations for an adaptive cloud strategy
Over the last several decades, we have seen ebbs and flows of centralization and decentralization of IT environments. Promises of a unifying agent have mostly come up short. So, it’s not surprising that some will hesitate to make the operating model changes that an adaptive cloud approach requires.
By now, however, cloud providers have introduced solutions that extend their cloud services on premises to any customer location. Advances in application programming interface (API) and container technologies have also increased the ability of management engines to integrate more broadly, including into other public clouds, while accelerating the deployment of workloads.
The emergence of data fabric technologies also demands attention due to the manual effort, error-proneness and lack of scalability involved in managing data pipelines across a federated IT estate. An adaptive cloud approach can help minimize this complexity by centralizing the tasks of integrating and managing all the systems.
How to get started with an adaptive cloud strategy
For organizations looking to test if an adaptive cloud strategy will suit their business, here are three considerations to help drive a successful adaptive cloud strategy:
Edgar Haren is the Associate Director for Kyndryl Public Cloud Services.
1. Cloud revenues poised to reach $2 trillion by 2030 amid AI rollout, Goldman Sachs, September 2024
