Although cloud computing has numerous business benefits, such as flexibility and agility, it does not mean that its implementation is worry-free. Companies that migrate applications to the cloud are often concerned with maintaining security and compliance and having management capabilities and optimizing costs.

Helping enterprises address these pain points when moving to the cloud is the goal of the partnership between the information technology company Unisys Corp. and Amazon Web Services Inc., according to Anupriya Ramraj (pictured, right), vice president of cloud services at Unisys.

“Two-thirds of our clients that have started this cloud journey believe they didn’t fully realize the benefits out of that, and up to 53% of the respondents said they needed some help with cloud security,” she said. “And this is where I do believe that Unisys cloud services has a strong viewpoint and can combine with AWS.”

Ramraj and Anupam Sahai (pictured, left), vice president and cloud chief technology officer at Unisys, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the main challenges that businesses face when moving to the cloud, how the global pandemic impacted this process, and how Unisys works with AWS to help companies navigate this landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

Approaching hybrid cloud security holistically

The most common infrastructure model chosen by enterprises to run and store their applications is the hybrid cloud, which means that they have workloads in more than one public cloud, as well as on-premises and at the edge. To ensure security and compliance in this landscape, Unisys adopts a holistic approach, using its own and partners solutions.

“We put together a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud security and compliance solution that includes securing their cloud infrastructure, their cloud workloads … and also to look at securing their applications which may or may not be running on the cloud,” Sahai said. “That allows our customers to have complete peace of mind as they take care of assessment, remediation, monitoring, and then continuous posture management.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rush of companies to the cloud, as they needed to set up an infrastructure capable of allowing remote work and more digital sales. This brought even more challenges to the cloud journey, with CEOs struggling to optimize costs and maximize their spending results, according to Ramraj.

Cost optimization includes having a platform able to make the right predictions about where business spending is going. “Combining cloud knowledge with financial knowledge and organizational and business knowledge, that’s the service that we bring to our clients,” Ramraj stated.

AI and automation make spending predictions

To help customers predict and manage their costs, taking full advantage of the cloud, Unisys also relies on the use of artificial intelligence and automation.

“[It] essentially looks at historical usage and predicts future usage based on a number of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that is able to give you predictions that are otherwise very hard to get,” Sahai said.

Because of the volume and variety of data in the cloud environment, doing this manually would be very difficult, if not impossible. “So, an automated machine learning-driven approach is very productive and very effective,” he added.

The results are impressive. “We’ve been able to save up to 25% of infrastructure costs through AI-led operations. [And] about 40% of infrastructure incidents have been reduced due to root cause analysis,” Sahai concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Unisys Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Unisys nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE