Kyndryl’s focus on improving Bord Gáis Energy’s IT infrastructure will enhance end-customer experiences by ensuring less downtime, platform stability and faster resolutions.
In an economy recently challenged by higher energy costs, Kyndryl is committed to helping Bord Gáis Energy optimise existing customer experiences as much as possible, while supporting its overarching strategic objective of energising a greener, fairer future in which new digital services will be key to business growth.
Kyndryl, one of the world’s largest IT infrastructure services providers, recently announced the renewal of a three-year agreement with Bord Gáis Energy for extended Managed Services support for its hybrid cloud.
It will also work to migrate Bord Gáis Energy’s entire environment to the cloud and SaaS (Storage-as-a-Service), following the co-created ‘Kyndryl | Bord Gáis Energy Strategic Technology Roadmap’.
As part of the new agreement, Kyndryl will manage Bord Gáis Energy’s Microsoft Azure and private cloud environment, up to the operating system, along with providing Backup-as-a-Service (through Microsoft Azure and on-premise), Storage-as-a-Service and Compute-as-a-Service.
The new services will help Bord Gáis Energy reduce its data centre space and lower CO2 emissions, which aligns with Bord Gáis Energy’s journey to net zero by 2045, while providing an IT infrastructure environment that will enhance Bord Gáis Energy’s end customer experiences.
This new deal builds on the work Kyndryl has already undertaken over the past three years with Bord Gáis Energy. The partnership has so far seen the successful migration of almost half of the company’s workloads to Microsoft Azure without any issues, reducing the number of overall IT incident tickets by using Kyndryl Bridge automation, while Kyndryl delivery teams have kept current systems running without any outages for the prior three years.
One of the solutions Bord Gáis Energy and Kyndryl have implemented together is the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, to progressively automate event and alert management, and all security code controls. The Ansible Automation Platform integrates into Bord Gáis Energy’s IT Service Management tool and the result has been enhanced stability across the Bord Gáis Energy IT estate.
In the two years since implementation, the solution automatically diagnosed 72% of all incidents and automatically resolved 40% using Ansible playbooks. End-to-end automated resolution closes trouble tickets in seconds.
“We value our relationship with Bord Gáis Energy, and I’m delighted we’re renewing our partnership for another three years,” said Chris Davis, Managing Director, Kyndryl Ireland. “We are already exploring new domains in the data and AI field for the future, we’ve showcased our global alliance with Microsoft and the efforts we put into developing skills and expertise in a key focus area for the company.
“The forthcoming migrations to Azure and SaaS give Kyndryl the opportunity to offer application-managed and rationalisation services for Bord Gáis Energy’s critical production workloads,” Davis added.
We asked Steve Martin, Technology Director at Bord Gáis Energy, about the motivations behind the continued collaboration and the trajectory of its improved data centre operations.
What factors determined the outcome of a partnership renewal with Kyndryl?
Kyndryl has been a trusted partner of Bord Gáis Energy since 2011. Thanks to our longstanding relationship, Kyndryl has a clear understanding of our strategic objectives, enabling us to work as a unified team. So, when it was time to renew our partnership for extended Managed Services support for our hybrid cloud, continuing our collaboration with Kyndryl made perfect sense.
What improvements is Bord Gáis Energy hoping to see from enhanced management of hyperscaler and private cloud environments?
We’re hoping to see more scalability on demand. We’ve shifted as a tech team towards agile delivery, where demand isn’t necessarily known up-front, or easily forecasted. One significant benefit of this agile approach is no longer being constrained by purchase and upkeep of hardware. Our older model was based around ‘technology on-premise’, where we’d have purchased infrastructure, software and maintenance.
Moving to a cloud-based environment with Kyndryl has helped alleviate these concerns. We now have the capability to scale up as needed and adopt a consumption-based pricing model. This allows us to pay for what we use and power down when demand decreases.
Kyndryl Bridge, an open integration platform leveraging Kyndryl’s core strengths in data-driven insights and extensive expertise, provides us with a unified view across our technology landscape. This includes both on-premise and cloud environments, empowering us with actionable insights to enhance business outcomes.
How do Kyndryl’s values align with Bord Gáis Energy’s goal of reaching net zero by 2045 and achieving a greener, fairer future?
Bord Gáis Energy is committed to achieving net zero status by 2045. Partnering with suppliers like Kyndryl, who share our vision for transformation, is essential to achieving this ambition.
As a business, when you adopt newer, faster technologies, you are going to see a natural reduction in energy consumption. We’ve seen the effects of this as part of our partnership with Kyndryl and adopting a cloud-based model and consumption-on-demand approach. We’ve been able to reduce the number of racks in our data centres and reduce reliance on our data centres more generally – thus reducing our carbon footprint.
How has Kyndryl’s Backup-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service and Computer-as-a-Service impacted data centre operations and overall IT infrastructure?
Kyndryl’s Storage-as-Service offering was something we first implemented three years ago. The uplift was significant – we saw a 35% performance increase, with zero P1 (‘Critical’) or P2 (‘High’) incidents since implementation.
We’re at the early stages of utilising Computer-as-a Service, but it’s enabled us to take a progressive approach to overheads and management whilst retaining flexibility. This setup enables us to quickly scale up computing power as needed.
What obstacles arose during the migration process, and how did Kyndryl help overcome these?
The biggest obstacle was the data migration, which takes a very long time. We naturally wanted to minimise any disruption to the business so had the data copies running as a background service. We tested the process by running the copies in a few non-production environments first, to confirm they could run seamlessly, before migrating into production.
Part of any successful migration is about being able to communicate the anticipated benefits while managing any obstacles during the process. Access to Kyndryl’s skilled support team, combined with our shared group chat for communication, ensures any disruptions to service are promptly identified and addressed.
How does Bord Gáis Energy handle Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning for its data centres to minimise downtime and data loss?
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are integrated into our IT architecture by design. On-premise, we utilise two Kyndryl data centres, replicating critical production workloads to a secondary location. In the event of a ransomware attack, all of our production backups are secured via an isolated copy using Commvault’s immutable storage vault.
Could you elaborate on how Kyndryl’s solutions have enhanced the end-user experience for Bord Gáis Energy?
One of the solutions Bord Gáis Energy and Kyndryl have implemented together is the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to progressively automate event and alert management, and all security code controls. The Ansible Automation Platform integrates into Bord Gáis Energy’s IT Service Management tool, and the result has been enhanced stability across the Bord Gáis Energy IT estate. In the two years since implementation, the solution automatically diagnosed 72% of all incidents and automatically resolved 40% using Ansible playbooks. End-to-end automated resolution closes trouble tickets in seconds.
Can you elaborate on the tools, technologies and strategies Bord Gáis Energy uses to monitor and manage the energy consumption of its data centres?
Last year, Kyndryl conducted a Technical Debt Assessment of our estate that provided insights into the actual energy consumption of our environment which included legacy servers and storage. The specifics outlined in this assessment enabled Bord Gáis Energy to build a business case to not only improve performance by migrating to a Kyndryl Private cloud and Azure Cloud, but to also show the impact the project would have on the environment by reducing our carbon footprint.
What plans do you have with Kyndryl in the data and AI fields, and how do you anticipate these to affect Bord Gáis Energy’s data centre operations?
When we’re thinking about the future, we’ll be working on the consolidation of the data lakes and data platforms, to move as much as we can to cloud. This will simplify the amount of access Bord Gáis Energy has to data at a customer level and help simplify the internal and external reporting at the customer level too.
Where do you see the partnership with Kyndryl and its solutions taking Bord Gáis Energy – as an organisation – into the future?
Our monthly strategy conversations with Kyndryl have been valuable in giving us a broader view of the market. They help us understand what other customers in the industry are doing, especially those with transformation projects similar to ours, and how different organisations approach their IT programmes.
We anticipate Kyndryl will move towards additional value-add digital services in the next 12-18 months. And as a company focused on innovation, we’ll be eager to explore these opportunities. Looking further ahead, as Bord Gáis Energy continues to transform our energy supply, services and solutions toward achieving net zero status, we’re confident Kyndryl can support us in optimising customer experiences and facilitating business growth.
