Kyndryl

About Kyndryl

Kyndryl is a global information technology infrastructure service provider that builds and manages technology systems for businesses. It was spun-off from IBM IT infrastructure services in 2021 and has a global base of customers that includes 75 of the Fortune 100 companies. Much of Kyndryl’s current focus is to assist customers with tailored cloud environments that promote and accelerate successful digital transformation.

The Kyndryl Customer Cloud Conundrum

As a global IT services provider, Kyndryl itself owns numerous data centers, and its customers maintain their data in countless on-prem environments. With the customers’ increasing need for advanced cloud services, Kyndryl searched for a unified cloud platform that could take advantage of this existing infrastructure and also offer high performance for modern cloud-native applications.

Kyndryl realized that the centralized cloud model, in which a few mega-platforms host the majority of cloud-based deployments, is sub-optimized for many customers’ business needs. Specifically, these include a growing number of applications — in use cases such as IoT, image processing, and automated manufacturing — that depend upon low latency, maximum security and data control.

They discovered Ridge Cloud: Ridge solves the problem with a distributed cloud based on a dynamic hybrid architecture. Ridge integrates private clouds, public clouds, and on-prem facilities with its modern cloud-native technologies, such as managed Kubernetes, Object Storage, and more.

The Next Generation of Cloud Computing: A Fully Integrated Hybrid Cloud

With Ridge, infrastructure is never a bottleneck in meeting customer needs. Its platform transforms heterogeneous infrastructure into a homogeneous cloud platform, which is then leveraged to support delivery of cloud services near to end-users. The main ingredient in Ridge’s cloud is its CNCF-certified Kubernetes service. As the de-facto standard for microservice orchestration, Kubernetes plays an essential role as an enabler of cloud-native application deployments, offering flexibility in moving workloads between environments.

Beginning in France, where they own a network of private data centers, Kyndryl partnered with Ridge to create a flexible hybrid cloud platform to integrate application deployments across multiple locations. This platform, powered by Ridge’s cloud building blocks, empowers businesses to deploy cloud-native workloads in any environment. By leveraging existing as well as private infrastructures, and by taking advantage of points of presence with specific capabilities, Ridge enabled Kyndryl to tailor a cloud for edge use cases such as:

• IoT image processing
• Artificial Intelligence at the Edge
• Automated manufacturing plant fault finding and quality control
• Health and safety inspection and control

Where Cloud and Edge Become One

Ridge Cloud workloads run in the edge location that provides optimal performance. Most importantly, Ridge runs on any physical server technology, and on any underlying IaaS, virtualization system or bare metal machines. As a result, it can be quickly integrated to PoPs in virtually any location and has the latitude to handle most emerging location-dependent applications.

“The thing we needed to have was something which is really lightweight and really easy to maintain. It takes care of our latency issues and it’s very easy to deploy” said Franck Besnard, Kyndryl’s Director of Advisory Services.  “We have seen various companies or startups and frankly Ridge was the most advanced in this domain.”

“It was very gratifying for us to provide Kyndryl with the best of two worlds: the public cloud agility with the high performance of private edge infrastructure” added Nir Sheffi, Ridge co-CEO and CTO. “Ridge’s platform is simple to integrate and use. There’s no need for dedicated staff, there’s no installation & there’s no CapEx.”

About Ridge

Ridge’s distributed cloud converts any underlying infrastructure — public or private — into a cloud-native platform. Because it leverages existing infrastructure, Ridge requires zero installation or CAPEX. Businesses get a cloud that matches their specific throughput, locality, and commercial requirements.