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Kyndryl’s Senior Partner Walter Huber talks cloud options

Kyndryl’s Walter Huber is the Vice President & Senior Partner for the Lufthansa account, which means, within Kyndryl, he’s Mr Lufthansa 24/7

Walter Huber is the Vice President and Kyndryl’s Senior Partner for the Lufthansa account, which means he is also known as ‘Mr Lufthansa’ within Kyndryl. Founded in 2021, Kyndryl was once a division of the IBM Corporation, called Global Technology Services.

“We design, build, manage and modernise mission critical infrastructures that keeps the world economy going,” Huber explains.

Kyndryl supports Lufthansa as it shifts to the cloud.

As a trusted partner, Kyndryl manages the foundations of Lufthansa Group cloud system. Having successfully transitioned workloads into the cloud for Lufthansa, Kyndryl is doing more than simply migrating workloads and then running it. “Focusing on the customer, we can advise which cloud environment is best for which workload – and then accompany the transformation journey.”

Keeping the customer at the centre

The Kyndryl story is about growth and creating value for their customers.

“We are working closely with Lufthansa and its business units to understand what is driving them and understand what they must change going forward to be the most digital and innovative airline group. Putting the customer in the centre of all of that is extremely critical for us, and it’s one of the core values of Kyndryl.”

Another value is to maintain customer focus. Kyndryl does this by aligning itself to the way the customer is organised and how that customer makes its business decisions.

After an almost 10-year partnership with Lufthansa, Kyndryl sees an ongoing evolution for their continued work together.

“We will continue to drive that relationship with our customer,” he says. “We will continue to work with Lufthansa to take advantage of the capabilities we can offer, using the Kyndryl Vital approach that allows us to find new solutions and the Kyndryl Bridge that allows us to plug in new technologies and new systems into a network managed by us.”

RASTOGI GROUP HEAD – IT APPLICATION MANAGEMENT, TRANSITION & CLOUD MIGRATION; SENIOR DIRECTOR,

“We are migrating thousands of applications residing in multiple data centres,” Rastogi adds. “In a cloud transformation journey, there are multiple stakeholders: application manager, infrastructure team, enterprise architecture team, security team, operations team, licence management and the procurement team.”

“Our central cloud team is bringing all of these stakeholders together towards a common goal, ensuring that they are all working towards the same target objectives and that they're following the same guidelines.”

For managing cloud adoption and transformation at Lufthansa, the central cloud team had to establish a number of guiding principles across aspects related to technical, time and financial considerations.

“The first factor we considered was how we wanted to use the cloud,” Rastogi says. “We would like to use the cloud the way it's designed. It should be possible to use the cloud on a self-service, on-demand and payper-use, or metered, basis.”

“We also want to use the cloud as natively as possible, meaning our implementation preference is Software-as-a-Service, followed by Platform-as-a-Service, and only in the last case, Infrastructureas-a-Service, or lift and shift migration approach. The business continuity and security requirements are directly considered in the design phase.”

As Rastogi explains, there are also guidelines related to time, to fit in with application life cycles and contractual timelines, as well as financial guidelines. “You could spend a lot of effort redesigning or modernising your complete application,” he says, “but at the same time, there has to be a business case behind it. So time versus cost is always a risk-reward that you have to keep in mind.”

Making or breaking the cloud journey

There are many aspects that organisations should keep in mind that could make or break a cloud journey; the first of which is having the right strategy. “There are modern data centres that can meet many of your requirements, but there has to be a good reason why you're migrating to the cloud. Cloud can be a key pillar behind your digital transformation story,” comments Rastogi.

109.5K+

The Lufthansa Group has approximately 109,509 employees (31st Dec 2022)

“The second aspect is setting up the right structure in place,” he adds. “For instance, if there is a need for a central cloud team, generally referred to in the industry as the cloud centre of excellence. Similarly, one needs to decide if the journey is performed on a centralised basis or on a decentralised basis.”

“Third is the governance part, which includes technical, security, and process