Market View 07

William Genovese

CIO Advisory Partner

Market View 07

William

Genovese

CIO Advisory Partner

When we talk to CTOs with a global remit, they’re working with multiple hyperscalers in different parts of the world.

Within regulated industries such as financial services, is cloud adoption predominantly private, public, hybrid, sovereign or industry cloud providers?

There is no one single answer, except to say the delineation between cloud approaches is generally the industry concerned, and the level of regulation. I work with healthcare and financial services - two of the most regulated industries - and at best we are seeing a hybrid deployment selection, where some workloads are on prem, some are private. Organisations are certainly proceeding with caution, it’s not going all-in with the public cloud.

Many major international players are adopting a multi-cloud strategy so that in one part of the world they have AWS, but in Europe they’re using Azure, and in other parts of the world perhaps they’re on prem, or private cloud. When we talk to CTOs with a global remit, they’re working with multiple hyperscalers in different parts of the world.

What are the core challenges that IT leaders face in terms of cloud infrastructure in this immature landscape?

There isn’t enough focus on non-functional requirements from a data security and privacy perspective, or on performance, scalability and interoperability. We see these issues play out and be revisited time and again.

These risks are greater for tier two and start-up companies that don’t have the budget to build their own resources or even go into a co-location arrangement, so how do they launch their business problem solver? They have to settle for the default provider in that location, and 9 times out of 10, that’s AWS. Companies that don’t have the budget or choice are being held hostage in some cases, and if that hosting goes down, it’s crippling.

Companies that don’t have the budget or choice are being held hostage in some cases, and if that hosting goes down, it’s crippling.

There is no rationale for building large data centres, and so we’re seeing business models that rely upon pop-up data centres that support internet services.

Do you see a trend away from centralised data centres for enterprises and a shift towards distributed edge data centres?

We certainly see this, and it’s noteworthy in regions where organisations are looking to re-enter markets or enter markets quickly. A great example in financial services can be seen in places like Africa and former Soviet republics, where banks left those regions and are now seeking to re-enter these markets, with low budgets that are intended to test the waters.

There is no rationale for building large data centres, and so we’re seeing business models that rely upon pop-up data centres that support internet services. Where banks are launching standard banking and credit lending services, and the region has 5G service, they don’t need a full data centre. Instead, we are increasingly seeing the emergence of pop-up edge data centres.

Kyndryl is the largest managed services provider for technology services and management on the planet, with over 90,000 employees. The company provides technology strategy, evaluation and management to 75 of the Fortune 100, and helps clients to create healthy digital ecosystems that support continuous growth.