Companies are accelerating cloud migration, but the complexity of architecting, deploying, and managing a multicloud, hybrid IT landscape is proving to be more than some companies can — or want to — handle. We spoke to Harish Grama, global practice lead for cloud at Kyndryl, about what makes the transition so challenging and how a managed services partner can help.

Q: Companies are modernizing IT infrastructure in the cloud, but many run into unanticipated obstacles. What are the most common miscues during cloud deployment?

A: Initially, a lot of companies thought the best path for cloud adoption was infrastructure, and they didn’t go further up the stack — i.e., to platform as a service (PaaS). When you take that approach, all you are doing is lifting and shifting the existing technology stack to the cloud, and a lot of traditional apps do not behave well in the cloud. If a primary reason you’re moving to cloud is to manage costs, this approach can move the needle the other way and total cost of ownership (TCO) actually goes up.

Some companies go to the other extreme and rewrite an application to be cloud-native to use all the innovative services the cloud offers. But even at large enterprises, there isn’t enough time, talent, and money to redo all your enterprise applications and migrate them to the cloud. Companies can get the most bang for the buck with app modernization. Here, you’re not rewriting everything or blindly lifting and shifting. You’re being smart about what you’re refactoring, rewriting, and carrying forward.

Q: What kind of challenges do companies face as they shift to cloud as part of a broader IT modernization journey?

A: Companies don’t want to concentrate risk on one particular cloud, so they adopt multiple clouds and then try to build guardrails between on-premises systems and public clouds. Companies must get smarter about how they consume cloud and what they put on cloud. In this way, they’re not spending all their time building guardrails, as opposed to what they want to be doing: innovating apps and positioning the business to be more agile than in the past. At the same time, organizations need to pay attention to the security implications of moving to cloud and introduce security as a fundamental attribute of cloud migration right from the design phase.

Q: Where can a partner such as Kyndryl add value to cloud modernization?

A: A good partner should understand your enterprise applications and platforms as well as cloud. They can help you co-create a solution that helps determine what should move to cloud and what the right investments are to help improve time to value. With Kyndryl, we start with advising and helping organizations on these factors — taking care to build security into the strategy as part of the end-to-end journey. We then help them migrate and deploy on the platforms that make sense for that workload. After that, when the environment is deployed, we can manage it on an ongoing basis so it’s always up and running, consuming just the right amount of resources. With management best practices, automation, and our own IP, we can start to do things like predictive analytics on operations so problems are flagged and disaster is averted before it happens. It’s all about a holistic end-to-end approach.

Click here to learn more about Kyndryl’s unique approach to cloud services.