There’s no question that there are some complex questions around hybrid and multicloud trends. But for some corporations, the agility and flexibility of these solutions are too appealing to pass up.

So how best to lead a cloud transformation? To get answers to that question, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, talked with experts who’ve been in the room when these transformations occurred.

Adithya Sastry (pictured, left), senior vice president of digital solutions at Hitachi Vantara LLC, pointed to the company’s relationship with RBI International as a sort of template for customers facing challenges with complexity around cloud management and CloudOps.

“It should be a template for a lot of organizations in terms of the preparation, in terms of understanding how other companies have done it, and what are the pitfalls,” Sastry said during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE. “What’s worked, and really what’s the recipe for their journey?”

Along with lessons from RBI International’s journey, there were several intriguing takeaways from theCUBE’s coverage of the “Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence” event. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed:

1) Companies should design, not optimize, for the cloud.

There’s been a sort of “mad dash” to rush to the cloud and realize savings, in Sastry’s view. What has happened is that companies or enterprises that started that journey around five or six years ago are now a few years into it.

What’s now being realized is that cloud costs have increased significantly to what projections were early on, and companies are trying to address the cloud costs by creating a FinOps organization.

“Saying, ‘Hey, if we move from Azure or one provider to another, is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?’” Sastry said. “When, in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams.”

If companies are designing applications and systems the right way to begin with, then they can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns.

“So, you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at: How do we optimize cloud?” Sastry stated.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Adithya Sastry, as well as Werner-Georg Mayer (pictured), head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International:

2) Don’t delink migration modernization and operations.

For IT leaders at organizations planning on redefining CloudOps for their companies, Prem Balasubramanian, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Hitachi Vantara, had two pieces of advice. First, cloud cost is not an afterthought and, in fact, is essential to think about upfront. Second, companies should not delink migration modernization and operations, he added, characterizing them as “one stream.”

“If you migrate a wrong workload onto the cloud, you’re going to be stuck with it for a long time,” Balasubramanian said, adding that a simple example of a wrong workload is if a company’s cost per transaction profile doesn’t change.

“[If] I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that’s going to run in production, it’s better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx and amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay — unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement,” he explained.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Prem Balasubramanian, as well as Manoj Narayanan, managing director of technology at Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR LLC:

3) It’s helpful to remember that cloud architecture is evolving.

In another segment on theCUBE, Balasubramanian spoke about Hitachi Vantara’s efforts to utilize its partner ecosystem to develop solutions, including its partnership with JCI.

“There is a common issue when people go to the cloud, and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses,” he said. “I think [Suresh Mothikuru at JCI] and his team have done some phenomenal steps around how to manage this complexity.”

But other customers who have a less complex cloud may have different challenges.

“Which is, they don’t go to Alibaba; they don’t have a footprint in all three clouds. So their multicloud footprint could be a bit more manageable but still struggle with a lot with the same problems around cost, around security, around talent,” he said.

The reality is that all companies are still learning the landscape as cloud operations evolve over time, according to Balasubramanian.

“If you take architectures, we’ve gone into microservices, we’ve gone into all these server-less architectures, all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent as a business. But that’s not simplified stuff,” he said. “That’s complicated stuff. It’s a lot more distributed.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Prem Balasubramanian, as well as Suresh Mothikuru, senior vice-president of customer success and platform engineering and reliability controls with JCI:

And make sure to watch theCUBE’s complete coverage of the “Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence” 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