Cloud Computing in Hybrid IT Environments – Harish Grama, Kyndryl

This is texturong TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throne.

We're here with Harish Grama who is global Cloud practice leader for Kindle and we're gonna be talking about not only their Partnerships with multiple cloud service providers with the rise of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing and where we're going from here Harish. Welcome to the shop. Thanks.

Mike good to be here. Do you guys spun out of IBM? I think you've created Partnerships now with all the major cloud service providers.

And the question I would have is are you seeing from customers? Are they kind of deploying individual classes or workloads in each cloud, or are they trying to unify the management of these things and they're looking to you guys to help with that? I mean, where are we on the proverbial Journey?

So Mike, I think that's a great question to start with, you know, as you know, when we first started in this industry, everyone was saying look, we're just gonna take applications that are run our Enterprise for decades and we're going to rewrite everything Cloud native and put them up on a public Cloud, right and as the the days went by, you know, we saw the Motions of lift and shift which really didn't work that well for the most part because of Economics or lack thereof and then you know, we saw people trying to as I mentioned rewrite the whole thing and I think where people are and have been for a while is writing their applications in a hybrid motion. All right, you know, sometimes you can't move your data up into the cloud sometimes, you know, The Regulators won't allow you if you're on a regulator industry and you know, sometimes it's just very hard to move some of these Enterprise AppSec to the cloud. If you don't have an inordinate Runway and a lot of money to do it, so I think you see people following more of the hybrid motion, you know keeping data where it makes the most sense rewriting stuff extending out into the cloud and and leveraging the innovation of cloud.

So that's what we really see from a hybrid perspective. From a multi-cloud perspective. Well, you know clearly there's private Cloud on Prem one of the public clouds.

I used to work in a bank and I'll tell you in the bank. We had a very strong mandate to say we're not going to be tied down to one public Cloud number one because you know, we didn't want to be that that's a business risk for us or for them. I should say because I'm no longer there but equally the banks Regulators demanded that we be on multiple public clouds, right just to mitigate risk concentration risk as they would call it.

And so what we end up doing was really, you know, following application design patterns, if you will or Cloud application design patterns, and we would you know, Define a pattern that is representative of an application type. So, you know, think about Out your Java web transaction server or job Java web transaction application, which is 60% of the applications out there. So we created a pattern for that and we ensure that you know applications written to that parent could go to you know, AWS and Azure and so on and so forth.

So there was you know, we're mitigating concentration risk if you will. So again a long answer to an opening question, but hopefully that gave you, you know some flavor for what we're seeing. A lot of what you just described is what some folks might refer to as data gravity.

Do you think that they underestimate the challenges of data gravity when they start talking about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and people forget that data is difficult to move copy replicate and a lot of times bad things happen. Yeah, so, you know data is hard to copy replicate and secure for that matter. Right?

I mean public clouds have some of the best Securities built in but if you're not and Adept user of that cloud then you know, it's like the analogy of you can have the best lock on your front door. But if you don't lock it, it's not going, you know, people are gonna just walk in right and that's certainly true here as well. And so that's where people like us, you know, trusted partly like Kindle we're able to help you to ensure that things like that don't happen with respect data gravity for sure, right?

Because if you're gonna avoid concentration risk and you're saying look I'm gonna move a same pattern of application some of them to Cloud one some of them to Cloud too. Then what do you do with your data? Do you move that to Cloud one or Cloud too?

Because very often they're sharing it. So the selection of You move where and who is using it what the scope of that is is equally important, you know as is securing it right. So sometimes it just makes sense to leave all of it on Prem or if there really is a class of applications that can move to a particular Cloud along with its data you can move it there and then you have to think about other things like hey, you know, if I put too much data up there all of these clouds charge data egress charges and you could be staring at a really big Bill if you're not careful.

And I think you alluded to this earlier, but I wonder if people are becoming more sensitive to the cost of the cloud because if I do have a long running application it may turn out to be more expensive in the cloud than in a non-premises environment depending on what accounting rules that I used. But are you hearing from people that they're kind of want to review their whole Cloud costs as the economy kind of changes? Yeah, you know that's a great Point recently Mike.

I did this interview with another publication, you know where I I kind of mention that it was one of the analyst Farms that set 67% of the Ci or is we're not really happy about the way they were getting, you know, an effective return on their spend on cloud. Everything just takes much longer than you can think right. So that's certainly is true for a lot of people but if you plan right, you know from the outset and this, you know think about it.

This is the gardeners six hours right? Are you gonna repatform? Are you gonna retire?

I'm gonna rehearse architect Etc and you take on the right initiatives again, you know with somebody like us that understands this landscape. And has done it for many Fortune 1000 companies and Beyond it starts to become much more of a viable proposition. Speaking of those ours.

One of them is rewrite or sometimes you're just writing from scratch. But are you starting to see people right more cloud-native applications using microservices containers and we kind of maybe pass some sort of proverbial crossing of the chasm here. Yeah, so, you know, you see you see the gamut of it right there certainly are Bond on the cloud companies where they have no Legacy to deal with and you know, they tend to do everything on the cloud 12 factor microservices and so on and so forth Cloud native, right?

Just perfect but for most of our customers, especially the ones that we deal with, you know, they all have Legacy they've been running their Banks their telcos. They're retail Enterprises for decades on end and they don't have the luxury to go and reinvent all of that and sometimes it's just simply not possible for some of the reasons that we mentioned earlier on in this conversation. So over there you see, you know, the industry mostly modernizing and containerization is a great way to modernize, you know, when you don't have all of the source code sometimes or you know, you want to refactor to some extent but And get some of the cloud native capabilities in the cloud native advantages you start to you know, you can you can containerize them and modernize them and run them on cloud.

So you really do see the gamut of things out there. As we can go down that path. Is it getting more complex?

Because I think we promise people something the felt like an easy button about a decade ago. But every time I turn around there's yet another new architecture. There's Edge Computing is now coming down the pike.

So we're getting the point where this is. Just getting too complex for me or Mortals to handle. Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Right? I mean and that's where we shine. You know think about most companies again, we talked about the fact that you know, they all have Legacy and Legacies anything that you've deployed.

You're deploy something today. It's Legacy that you have to deal with forever going forward. So when you start to use new models, like cloud computing and then you know now Edge Etc.

I mean essentially you're doing the same things but you're doing it more innovative ways more flexible ways in ways that bring more value to the company and that's why people, you know switch to Modern Technologies as they're available for the most part, but with that comes this sprawl of all the existing things that you've already deployed plus the new things that you're doing, right and you know, you take public Cloud for instance. Yes, everything is managed by the cloud but only to the extent It's things running in the cloud by the cloud right even in my containerization example, the cloud understands what containers are running can manage it can provision it and so on and so forth, but it has no idea what's running within it. And then when you get into a hybrid example, that's probably becomes much worse.

So the ability to help people run in that sprawl with a little bit of everything, you know, the cloud spitting a zillion messages at you, but being able to make sense of it automating it getting some artificial intelligence to predict issues and operational issues, even before they happen and correct it, you know, that's the kind of help that people need that we do so well here in Canada. There are many Global sis and smaller Boutique terms these days and they all say they specialize in the cloud what from your perspective ultimately differentiates one from the other what should folks be looking for? So look, I think you need to find somebody that number one has the scale of operations, right?

You know, are they a present all over the world where you you're you're working and sometimes some of these small nature Boutique phones. Yes, they have some very smart people. They even have some IP but there are not really They Don't Really scale next is you know, you'll look for you you look at us Kindle maybe new and we're gonna be a year old by on the fourth of November.

So in the next four days, we'll actually be a year old, but we've been an existence in some way shape or form for the last 33 years since the late 80s, right and in those 33 34 years now, I should say we have collected a lot of you know, digital exhaust or metadata from managing infrastructure applications and so on and so forth and we're able to build IP and build You know capabilities are infused with artificial intelligence and machine learning that allows us to do the things that I was describing which is you know predict when something is going to go wrong or you know, take a look at all the costs that you're incurring using the different elements of on-prem public clouds Etc predict where you know, you spend might go Way Beyond predict how you're development is happening in the deaf SEC op cycle so it can be applied to almost the entire life cycle of how software gets ridden deployed and managed on the cloud and that's really what you should be looking at because otherwise, you know, it becomes really complicated and really hard to get your arms around. Do you think the relationship between internal it teams and services providers is changing because you know historically they're always kind of looked at each other somewhat warily. But you know, is that whole conversation getting a little more collegial?

Well, I mean, you know collegial or not. I think there is a real need for them to work much more closely with you know Services firms like us and you know, when you go to when you embark on a cloud Jenny to a public cloud or hybrid or what have you you suddenly realize that at some level the company that's trying to do this ends up being the integrator across all these pieces and that's not their core competence. So they look for again a trusted partner like us with scale of operations and size Etc to help them through that Journey.

Right? So, I think the interdependence is a lot more so For the most part, you know, you want it to be collegial, but of course, sometimes it goes the other way as well. So that interdependence though, some of that is just simply a factor.

We don't have enough people to handle all these different classes at work clothes and we need to find a more efficient way because even the largest company cannot fully staff their entire it organization full of full-time employees just cost prohibitive that costs. The labor is still the biggest cost of it. So as we go along here, do you think that we're going to have a greater appreciation for the math that goes into that relationship?

Oh, yeah, and I'm already seeing it right I mean which is why we have IP and capabilities offerings. If you will that give people a handle on what they're spending what the trends are and you know what the best practices around deploying the various pieces of technology that host ultimately their applications, right because it's all about their business applications and their ability to be competitive in the market leveraging that and cost is a very very important aspect of it. Right so it's cost.

It's you know, the complexity of managing it it is a security and compliance around it all of those go hand in hand. And and yes, you know increasingly it's harder for Enterprises to do themselves, which is why they need trusted Partners like us so what's that one thing you see customers doing in the club? That just makes you shake your head and go I cannot believe we're still having this.

An engagement or what? Some folks might call an anti-pattern but you know, what's your best advice to folks about how to think about the cloud these days? So, you know even as the cloud Journey has progressed and evolved and people are really seeing Cloud for what it is and not what they thought.

I still see very often people fall into the Trap of saying hey, look I'm gonna go to Cloud to save money, right and and I want to do it quickly and I want to save money quickly. So if you start to lift and shift AppSec and move them to Cloud quickly to save money, it's actually going to go the other way. You're gonna increase your costs, right?

If done right, you know, the you you can save costs if done right and takes a while but very often you really want to go there because even if it doesn't save you outright costs, you're leveraging the Innovation and you're able to do better in your business. So, you know think of it as even if you're bottom line, you know, if your costs don't go down if you're Topline goes up then you're doing well, right so That's really the advice. I'd give people.

Right here. He's thanks for being on the show. Thanks, Mike.

Thanks for spending the time. I appreciate it. All right, guys, you heard here.

The cloud is more nuanced than we all appreciate. Hey guys back to you in the studio.