Accelerate Your Journey to the Cloud with KPMG

Successful data modernization—the innovative use, accessibility, governance, operations and value delivery of data in a modern cloud architecture—requires a strategic approach. We can help you define your business case, your data and technology architecture, standards for data usability, consistency and integrity, metadata standards, ETL/ELT data processing standards, data security standards, data modeling plans, and more.

Data strategy and architecture

Lack of an enterprise data strategy or clear business case can leave organizations struggling to find value in their data. Many suffer from a lack of data quality, a lack of trust in data and low data literacy. There may be large, operationally complex and slow data pipelines causing timing collisions. Technology sprawl with many manual operational touchpoints and workarounds put in place over the years can add to the complexity. Tightly coupled technology stacks can inhibit modernization efforts and planning flexibility. Data security and privacy risks abound. The list goes on.

We help organizations overcome these challenges by helping to define a clear, compelling and achievable data modernization strategy. We can help introduce a data-product mindset, a contemporary approach to data that can provide your functional teams with advanced and scalable data capabilities that address business needs across the enterprise. The goal is to create a culture where deploying data products for functional and enterprise-wide use-cases drives sustainable value over time.

Our extensive experience implementing modern data capabilities gives us essential insights into the technical and operational challenges that a solid strategy and business-case-driven plan can help to avoid or mitigate, and help put you on solid ground for your journey to true data value.

We can help you accelerate the migration of your application portfolio to the cloud and modernize each application to improve the user experience and be more resilient, responsive and scalable to meet your future business needs. We can help modernize your storage platforms, update middleware and application integrations, and take advantage of cloud-native services to improve efficiency and agility.

Cloud modernization and migration

Migrating and modernizing your existing application portfolio and platforms to the cloud requires the right knowledge, skills and tools to leverage the advanced features that the cloud offers—and to realize the full return on your investment. But the complexity involved can mean many companies leave value on the table.

Our highly skilled and experienced technology professionals, armed with our advanced cloud migration accelerators, and automation and generative AI solutions, can help you make the transition to the cloud far faster than you might imagine.

But it’s not just applications that move to cloud, it’s your business. And so our technology and business professionals work side-by-side to help align your business and IT leadership on how to use cloud for business outcomes, tune your organization’s operating model for cloud, and address risk, security and compliance challenges throughout the process.

From edge computing to augmented reality, emerging technologies have the potential to significantly impact your organization by helping to enable transformational change. We work closely with you to help you understand these technologies and guide you through the process of evaluating the implications across the organization and determining the potential business value that they provide.

Cloud emerging technology

Emerging technologies are new and innovative solutions that are ready for the market but may not yet have reached full scale of adoption, and may still be in the experimental stage with many enterprises. These technologies include internet of things (IoT), edge computing, digital twins, augmented and virtual reality, quantum computing, private 5G, robotics and automation, and autonomous vehicles. These technologies are powered by cloud solutions, which can help to create a seamless, integrated experience.

As with any new technology, it’s likely you’re approached by vendor after vendor trying to sell you a hardware and software solution without any clear insights on how to capitalize on them or the value they can have for your business. KPMG can help to cut through the complexity. We offer a pragmatic approach to developing a business value-led strategic vision, integrated architectural designs, return-on-investment models and roadmaps for execution, and we can support you through all aspects of the deployment process.

Finding the right mix of on-premise data centers, private clouds and public clouds can be a significant challenge. We can help you develop a successful cloud placement strategy tailored to your unique operational requirements and aligned with your business needs. We can help select the right technologies, optimize your operations teams, mitigate persistent infrastructure challenges such as end-of-life refresh, modernize technical debt and enable efficient cloud management processes.

Hybrid and multi-cloud management

Designing and implementing the right cloud architecture for your organization can be a significant challenge, especially as you work around technical debt or legacy systems while implementing new cloud technologies. The result can be a complicated setup that can impact performance and scalability. It can be difficult and costly to manage, and lead to inconsistencies in automation, controls and observability that can create vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. Managing data and workflows across such environments can be challenging, too.

We will work closely with you to develop a strong understanding of these challenges and a comprehensive strategy to manage them effectively. We can help you design a placement strategy that balances costs and performance, and help optimize the financial and operational aspects of your cloud infrastructure. We can help you design and implement your cloud architecture, including a multi-cloud and hybrid operating model. And we can help merge your cloud and on-premises teams using site reliability engineering (SRE) practices, enabling one team to manage all clouds, which can help to streamline processes and improve efficiency.

We can help you design and implement your cloud-based data architecture and integration strategy, improve data uniformity, accuracy and integrity, map the flow of data between applications and data stores, and securely and transparently prepare and migrate data to the cloud. We can help you implement advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to help unlock the full potential of your data assets and make data-driven decisions.

Modern data fabric and artificial intelligence

There’s a long list of challenges related to data in the cloud, including ensuring data quality and consistency, data integration, data storage and scalability, data security and compliance, data access and governance, data analytics and insights, skillset and expertise, cost management, change management and real-time data processing.

With our deep sector-specific experience, and our advanced skills, processes, technologies and accelerators, we can help you tackle these challenges efficiently and effectively. We can help you with cutting-edge technologies such as data storage solutions, data integration tools, big data frameworks, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and data security tools. Our Modern Data Platform and alliance partners include pre-built data models, data pipeline templates, analytics use cases, data quality frameworks, pre-built connectors and integrations, and industry-specific knowledge. Together, they make KPMG a highly qualified strategic partner to help you design, build and operate your cloud-based data platform.

Our cyber security services can help maintain effective and efficient security and compliance for your valuable assets in the cloud. We can help you create robust security strategies and governance structures, and modernize your security processes to increase stakeholder trust. We can also help implement and configure new tools for cloud security to enable a single control-pane  for your myriad of cloud service providers.

Cloud security and compliance

The basic functions that cloud service providers handle such as vulnerability patching can create a false sense of security. But as evidenced by the numerous headline-grabbing examples of security breaches of cloud environments, the responsibility for cyber security is far broader—and it falls on your shoulders. The scale and complexity of cloud security, underpinned by a fundamentally new technology stack and new skills required to operate it, make it an extraordinarily challenging task.

KPMG is a leading provider of security for Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud platforms. We’ve made significant investments in control libraries, migration tooling and security automation accelerators across all three platforms. Our highly skilled security professionals hold numerous advanced cloud security certifications and, as a practice, we have obtained multiple organizational certifications.

We can help you holistically manage risk associated with cloud security, beginning with establishing the appropriate governance of the cloud security function and building the underlying control and compliance structure. Our industry-tested security automation accelerators and security and compliance “as code” solutions can help you keep pace with the ever-changing nature of cloud investments, and increase the velocity of your product deliveries.

It's essential to maintain control and governance over your cloud investments. We can help you implement operational controls, define and automate governance policy and processes, and establish transparency and visibility into both security vulnerabilities and cloud costs. We can help you build a solid data foundation, optimize code quality and developer productivity, and improve resiliency and your ability to mitigate threats and defend against attacks.

Cloud governance and optimization

Without clear visibility and proper governance controls, it’s easy overspend on cloud. Security teams may operate in reactive mode, and recurring defects and productivity losses can hamper your efficiency and effectiveness. Insufficient controls and lack of standardization in data platforms can also make it difficult to leverage advanced analytics and extract essential insights.

We can help with compliance tools and controls designed to protect your enterprise and its systems with proactive vulnerability detection, and help verify control consistency across modern delivery practices. We can also help you optimize cloud operations, with visibility into risk controls and vulnerabilities, and help your teams be more proactive in addressing risks and defects, with a focus on value instead of capabilities.

The KPMG FinOps team can help you move to a well-governed and monitored cloud estate, employing automated controls to reduce and govern cloud spend. Our cloud operations capabilities enable automation of policy to monitor controls and help ensure that security policies and configuration remain consistent and current. Our data management professionals can help enable data foundational capabilities, including data quality, data cataloging, master data management and data observability. And our modern delivery practice can help optimize your developer productivity, leveraging automation and generative AI capabilities to enable code quality improvement and proactive discovery of software deficiencies.

Moving to the cloud doesn’t automatically mean continuous availability and increased resilience, but we can help you get there. We can help identify critical business functions, determine maximum allowable downtime based on the regulatory, operational, financial and reputational impact of an outage, and evaluate resiliency architectures and disaster recovery plans. And we can implement solutions for application, product and process-centric recovery measures, along with the development of recovery plans and testing procedures, customized to meet your distinct requirements.

Cloud resiliency

Preparing for, operating through and recovering from significant and prolonged disruptions in your hybrid or multi-cloud environments requires detailed capabilities effectively applied. This can be a challenge when you’re supporting rapid business change, dealing with complex legacy technology systems, managing dependencies between applications and IT infrastructure, and navigating evolving regulatory frameworks. To overcome these challenges and realize the full benefits of cloud migration, you need effective strategies that prioritize resilience for successful cloud adoption and management.

Our approach begins by identifying and focusing on operations of critical business functions and product delivery to key stakeholders and the impact of a cloud service provider (CSP) outage. We can help you put resilient infrastructure and application designs in place to minimize these disruptions, and to recover quickly if they should occur. Our innovative dependency analysis toolkit can help you find and address dependencies within your cloud infrastructure. And our technology professionals, with their cloud and resilience certifications, can provide specialized and up-to-date support for managing complex cloud environments, help you adopt leading recovery methods and solutions, and develop custom solutions tailored to your needs.

Our cloud-native architectures, solutions and automation tools can help accelerate your journey to a software environment that’s designed to reduce business risk and increase consistency and quality. We can help you develop flexible, resilient and scalable cloud-native applications built on a modern architecture, backed by modern software development and delivery practices, including DevSecOps and continuous delivery.

Cloud-native development

Modernizing to a cloud-native architecture and building cloud-native applications can be a radical shift for many organizations. Maintaining quality and consistency across cloud-native environments can be a challenge, especially given their inherent dispersed and decoupled natures. Even knowing where to begin can be intimidating. KPMG can help.

With their extensive experience in cloud-native architectures, our technology professionals can help guide your strategy from start to finish. We can help you define target architectures and an actionable transformation roadmap to implement cloud-native solutions, including API-driven microservices, containerization, infrastructure as code (IaC), and low-code and AI-generated automation. We can help you implement modern software development and IT service delivery practices, including agile development, DevSecOps and continuous delivery.

Our cloud-native center of excellence provides patterns and practices to help enable and expedite your journey with greater confidence. And our cloud operations capabilities offer policy automation to monitor controls and help ensure that your cloud-native architectures, processes and configurations are consistent and secure.

Data siloes are the enemy of a data-driven enterprise. We can help connect your applications and their data across hybrid cloud, multicloud and on-premise environments with an application programming interface (API) architecture, including an API management (APIM) platform for securing, documenting, publishing and monitoring your APIs. We can also help you integrate data from disparate sources with a data warehouse, data lake or data mesh architecture, and implement modern DataOps processes and technologies.

Advanced data integration

Data integration can be one of the biggest challenges to digital transformation. Data sources are often widely dispersed, in on-premise systems, and public and private clouds, which can make it challenging to ingest, align and standardize your data.

With over 20 years of experience in data integration, KPMG can help. We take an API-driven approach. We can provide a functional and technical assessment of your current state, and help you design and develop your data integration strategy and architecture based on your key business drivers.

We work with leading data integration companies and technologies, and can help you select and rationalize your integration tools and vendors. We can help you execute your vision, starting with detailed requirements documentation and designs.

We can help you implement a low-code integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solution combined with an application programming interface (API) management platform (APIM). Our data and technology professionals are armed with an array of tools and accelerators. Our connected integration framework includes an extensive library of design patterns and common use cases, pre-built integrations, industry-tested APIs, webhook connectors and other reusable assets to speed the process.

We can help you maintain the ongoing quality and security of your data integrations. We can help you implement modern DataOps processes and technologies, define standards and procedures to guide developers, and help you establish a data integration center of excellence (CoE) for leading practices.

Our managed services enable you to leverage our extensive technology, operational and sector expertise and experience to help you realize your operational vision, accelerate your enterprise transformation, minimize disruptions and risks, and reduce operational costs. We can monitor, maintain, repair and run your cloud applications and supporting infrastructure, helping you to meet your service level requirements, deliver on business outcomes and achieve operational excellence.

Cloud managed services

Operating a new cloud platform, virtualized infrastructures, and complex cloud-native services and applications can be a sea change for IT organization, requiring a new operating model, different skills and resources, and new technologies. Managing cloud consumption costs while delivering high-quality and resilient business-critical cloud services at scale can be an equally large organizational transformation. Putting your business at risk while upskilling your operations to meet these new challenges isn’t an option.

We can help you hit the ground running with a high level of confidence. Our global centers for managed services delivery are staffed by cloud-certified professionals highly experienced in enterprise IT cloud operations. Our managed services are built on and for hybrid- and multi-cloud environments. They include a workbench of integrated observability, reporting and maintenance tools designed to automate management of your cloud infrastructure and applications. Together, they can enable us to meet your expectations for performance, availability and resiliency.