Companies are increasingly embracing hybrid cloud and multicloud, but that journey doesn’t come without its challenges. IT services provider Hitachi Vantara LLC often cites studies suggesting roughly half of major modernizations fail.

For that reason, along with critical areas such as managing uptime, performance and security, Hitachi Vantara has built more robust solutions for digital transformations through partner ecosystems.

“Our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud — they’re truly the trusted advisor,” said Kimberly King, senior vice president of strategic partners and alliances at Hitachi Vantara, in a recent interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.

During today’s “Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence” event, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE spoke with experts who discuss their strategies for managing and optimizing cloud operations, as well as with Hitachi Vantara executives about the company’s investment into Application Reliability Centers for redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers and how partners are helping with speeding up this process. (* Disclosure below.)

Managing problems with cloud operations

It’s no great secret that hybrid cloud and multicloud provide some important benefits for consumers. But they also come with complexity. So how best to approach those challenges?

To explore those questions, theCUBE spoke to Adithya Sastry, senior vice president and general manager of global digital services at Hitachi Vantara, and Werner-Georg Mayer, head of group core IT and data at Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI), to discuss what strategies their organizations adopted to lead cloud transformations.

RBI decided to renew its IT strategy in 2020, aiming to change the organization so that it could react and adapt fast to future challenges. The organization found that cloud, and the public cloud environment, fit into that venture, built up competence centers and established a group cloud platform.

“We had a lot to do, hardening the platform in terms of security to put in,” Mayer said, adding that the organization had to train hundreds of engineers while convincing top management to implement the program. “One of the highlights was, of course, the safeguarding of the Ukraine banking environment. We had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that … our platform works.”

Of course, challenges tied to such processes are not unique to RBI. Hitachi Vantara worked with RBI for a little more than a year and views the company’s cloud transformation journey as a sort of template for other organizations in terms of preparation and understanding.

“When we look at the complexities of this transformation that most modern enterprises are going through, it’s not very unique, right?” Sastry said. “What is unique for Raiffeisen Bank has been the preparation.”

Organizations often overlook whether an organization’s applications and data workloads are resilient on the cloud, according to Sastry. This poses some critical questions: How is the performance? Are they just running, or are they performing with high availability to meet customers’ goals? Are they scalable? Are costs in line with what was projected?

“That’s one of the areas we are seeing: what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they’re realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta,” Sastry said. “A lot of it is dependent on are the applications and the workloads designed for the cloud, or are they designed for on-prem, which you just move to the cloud?”

Effectively, what has been created is a hybrid between what teams have to do and the central functions supporting them, all of which need to work together and go hand-in-hand, according to Mayer.

The key element to keep in mind is not looking at cloud operations in the way the enterprise has traditionally looked at managed services, Sastry pointed out.

“In traditionally managed services, you had L1, L2, L3, and then it goes into some sort of vacuum, and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point,” he stated. “It really has flipped. And Werner hit the nail on the head … to bring an engineering-led approach to make sure that [when] you see an issue, you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. The problem is routed to the right individual, for example, the application engineering team or the data engineering team, for resolution in a rapid manner.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Adithya Sastry and Werner-Georg Mayer:

An eye on enabling technology and business to work together

The complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved significantly over the past few years, and Prem Balasubramanian (pictured, left), SVP and chief technology officer of digital solutions at Hitachi Vantara, has watched that evolution closely. Over the years, he has completed well over a thousand cloud engagements. And over the past few years, there has been a significant shift in thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than just as an infrastructure.

“What I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code, so you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code, and your data is codified as data services,” he said. “With that context applied, the way you think about the cloud has to significantly change, and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else.”

Multicloud environments exacerbates the situation, and data costs are another issue, according to Balasubramanian. Managing these issues together has become very complex for enterprises over the past few years.

Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR LLC was facing challenges with its cloud ops and looked to Hitachi Vantara for a solution, according to Manoj Narayanan, managing director of technology at GTCR.

“At the end of the day, we need to focus on our core competencies. So, we’ve got a very strong technology leadership team,” he said. “We’ve got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HARC comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Prem Balasubramanian and Manoj Narayanan:

Seeking to utilize partner ecosystems

Hitachi Vantara has long sought to utilize its partner ecosystem to enable collaboration in a quickly evolving landscape. Though the cloud can deliver a lot of simplicity, it can also bring a lot of complexity and problems with it. But through key partnerships, its able to help companies attack challenges head on. It recently worked with Johnson Controls International PLC to improve efficiencies, as well as user experience.

“We have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers,” said Suresh Mothikuru (pictured, right), SVP and CTO of platform engineering and reliability engineering at JCI. “If you look at my jacket, it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building. And within that, my team, along with Prem’s or Hitachi’s, we have built what we call Polaris. It’s a technical platform where our apps can run.”

Hitachi always thinks about its end users and how things could be made easier for them, according to Balasubramanian.

“Our intention is to not to build a product to compete with our partner,” he said. “Our intention is just to fill the white space until they build it into their product suite so that we can then leverage it for our customers.”

“Tools sprawl,” especially on the cloud, is very real — and for every problem in the cloud, there are a billion tools being thrown back, he added.

“So that’s what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification, not just making money,” Balasubramanian said.

So, if a company was a partner, what would be the things to consider when planning to redefine CloudOps at that company? In Mothikuru’s view, the answer is relatively simple.

“First and foremost, reliability,” he said. “You know, in today’s day and age, my products have to be reliable, available and make sure that the customer’s happy with what they’re really dealing with. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important. And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value, so I keep my cost low. These three are what I would focus on and what I expect from my partners.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Prem Balasubramanian and Suresh Mothikuru:

You can watch the full event video here:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence” event. Neither Hitachi Vantara LLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE