INTERVIEW - Cyber resilience to top companies' security agenda, cloud to drive innovation

"To reduce risk and improve ability to hire and maintain security skills, organisations will focus on “cleaning the house”, Izbeki said in the e-mailed interview, adding that companies will seek to hire cyber resilience officers.

According to a recent survey by U.S.-based global information technology research and advisory company Gartner, 88% of boards now see cybersecurity more as a business risk than a technology risk. "This means that cyber resilience is no longer just a chief information security officer's problem in 2023 – it’s an issue and focal point for the entire C-suite and company boards," Izbeki commented.

In telecommunications, 5G private wireless will move beyond industry 4.0, he went on to say.

"5G not only changes the conversation, but it changes the way we do things. We see a lot of customer demand for network edge and 5G support. To date manufacturing, petrochemical, telecommunications, gas and energy sectors have been successfully deploying private wireless and edge to drive business efficiencies and cost savings. Other industries will soon take note, and 2023 will be the year (5G) private wireless use cases and testing take hold across other industries, with retail leading the pack. From enabling cashier less payment, real-time analytics, personalized promotions, asset tracking and supply chain optimization, private wireless and edge will be key to unlocking the next generation of the shopping and customer experience," Izbeki explained.

In his view, cloud networking will continue to grow exponentially and more enterprises will be using different means of connectivity to the cloud compared to what was traditionally built in the past.

"We have seen a flux of companies that are virtualizing network infrastructure and providing it as a service to enterprises. However, a lot of these companies do not have a good direct-to-enterprise channel. There’ll be an increasing demand to integrate the connectivity with managed services, and help enterprises manage the multi-networks," Izbeki said.

Cloud adoption provides the quickest path to innovation and gives companies much more flexibility to run their businesses in hard times, Izbeki stressed, adding that industry clouds will proliferate and companies will fully embrace distributed cloud.

Industry cloud, which has already taken off in some sectors like retail, will expand into other sectors. While telco and healthcare are slow adopters, industry cloud adoption is heating up in the manufacturing sector, according to Izbeki.

"Companies will increasingly take a distributed cloud path as they embrace a federated model between cloud and edge," he explained. "In a distributed cloud environment, workloads are aligned with specific resource locations in order to meet compliance needs and performance requirements or support edge computing while being centrally managed from a public cloud provider."

Cloud native applications and delivery will accelerate, Izbeki also said. "Companies will increasingly invest more in cloud native applications."

According to Gartner, cloud native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025 — up from less than 40% in 2021. "The opportunities for companies: faster innovation, ability to enable other technologies like AI, more resilient applications – and also, help companies meet their ESG goals […] because by using server-less cloud native technology, companies aren’t running their applications 24/7," Izbeki said.

Kyndryl spun off from global tech giant IBM in late 2021 and over the past year it officially launched operations across Southeast Europe (SEE).

Currently, more than 4,000 companies in over 60 countries, including 75 of the Fortune 100 entrants, rely on Kyndryl services. Across SEE, Kyndryl has closed services agreements with lenders First Investment Bank and Raiffeisenbank in Bulgaria, Slovenia's NLB, Bank of Cyprus and Hungarian CIB, among others.

"Today we design, optimise, modernise, implement and often also manage the most complex IT infrastructures in the world, those that have been defined as 'mission critical' and that companies need to function so that they can provide services to their customers," Izbeki said.

"I feel very proud that the services we deliver to our customers literally touch the lives of almost everyone across South East Europe - whether you withdraw money from an ATM, open a bank account, shop online, get a medical prescription online, or apply for a passport, for example, the chances that your service is delivered by Kyndryl powered technologies are very high."

To achieve this market positioning, Kyndryl was quick to establish strategic partnerships as a way to diversify its technology agnostic capabilities. To date, Kyndryl has formed agreements with over 20 partners, including cloud-focused partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle, enterprise-oriented alliances with Red Hat, Cloudera, NetApp and Nokia and expanded partnerships with Dell and SAP.

Responding to organisations' demand for fast and advanced delivery of transformational projects, Kyndryl has launched Kyndryl Bridge - an open integration platform, Kyndryl Vital - a co-creation experience where Kyndryl professional designers and technical experts work side-by-side with customers and partners, and Kyndryl Consult - a new brand for its amplified advisory and implementation services.

"Relying on our multi-vendor approach, strategic alliances, state of the art technical capabilities, intelligent automation, new ways of working and continuous investments in people’s skills, we are able to align technologies, processes and people with business objectives, thus ensuring best business outcomes for our customers," Izbeki concluded.