Pidilite Industries, the Indian consumer and industrial products giant, has completed a sweeping IT modernization that moves its non-ERP workloads out of traditional data centers and into a managed Google Cloud environment. The company reports a 30 percent reduction in infrastructure provisioning time and a 20 percent improvement in service response, marking an exit from on-premises operations that Kyndryl will now run as a fully managed service.
The Migration: What Pidilite Moved and Who’s Running It
Kyndryl, Pidilite’s long-time IT partner, migrated the company’s non-ERP workloads from existing on-premises systems and previous cloud environments to Google Cloud. The migration is complete, and the environment is live in production. Kyndryl will continue to provide cloud-managed services, meaning Pidilite has outsourced day-to-day operations of its cloud infrastructure while retaining strategic oversight.
The “non-ERP” qualifier is significant. Pidilite deliberately separated its enterprise resource planning systems—often deeply customized and transaction-critical—from the workloads shifted in this phase. That decision allowed the company to modernize a large chunk of its application estate with lower risk while keeping core ERP on its own transformation timeline. The approach mirrors a best practice for complex manufacturers: modernize in layers, not all at once.
From Server Rooms to Automation: The Real Operational Shift
For Pidilite, the data-center exit isn’t just about where servers live. It’s about replacing hardware refresh cycles, physical facilities management, and manual provisioning with an automated, governance-driven operating model. Kyndryl’s managed-service wrapper adds continuous monitoring, incident management, and policy enforcement.
The 30 percent cut in provisioning turnaround time didn’t come from magic. It came from standard templates, policy-controlled automation, and the removal of multiple manual hand-offs that used to exist between procurement, infrastructure setup, and business requests. When a business unit asks for a new analytics environment or a supplier portal, the underlying capacity can now be spun up through well-defined automated processes rather than waiting for weeks of manual configuration.
Service response—the other headline metric—improved by 20 percent. This likely reflects faster incident resolution, quicker support ticket handling, and more consistent operations across the application landscape. In a distributed enterprise with manufacturing plants, sales offices, and supply-chain partners, that consistency reduces friction for employees who depend on these systems daily.
Why Faster Provisioning Is a Win for IT and Business
For IT teams, provisioning speed is a direct measure of agility. But for the business, it’s about time-to-value. A delayed environment for a field-sales application, a marketing campaign, or a manufacturing support tool can directly affect revenue, customer engagement, or production uptime. Pidilite’s business mix—81.6 percent consumer and bazaar sales, 18 percent B2B, with adhesives and sealants as its largest category—means technology responsiveness has a direct line to market performance.
Faster provisioning also changes the relationship between IT and business stakeholders. Instead of being seen as a bottleneck, infrastructure becomes an enabler. Development teams get environments sooner, test cycles shorten, and business initiatives face fewer dependencies on hardware procurement. Over time, that acceleration compounds across the organization.
What This Means for Your Windows Environment
Most enterprises aren’t starting from a blank slate. If you manage a Windows-centric infrastructure—Active Directory, Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, .NET applications—a migration like Pidilite’s raises practical questions. Here’s how the lessons map to common roles.
For IT Managers and Decision Makers
Pidilite’s results validate that cloud migration isn’t just a cost play. The real payoff comes from operational improvements: predictable performance, faster service delivery, and the ability to refocus internal staff away from hardware maintenance. When evaluating a similar move, define outcomes like provisioning speed, incident response time, or developer lead time as key performance indicators—not just infrastructure savings.
For System Administrators and Engineers
A managed-service arrangement like Kyndryl’s doesn’t eliminate your job—it changes it. Your focus shifts from rack-and-stack to cloud governance, identity management, automation scripts, and policy enforcement. Skills in Terraform, Azure Policy, or related tools become more valuable. And if your organization retains a hybrid footprint, expertise in Azure Arc or Windows Server hybrid management will matter even more.
For Security and Compliance Leads
The shared-responsibility model becomes sharper. Google Cloud secures the underlying platform, but Pidilite remains responsible for its data, identity controls, access policies, and configuration management. After migration, expect heavier emphasis on Azure Active Directory/Entra ID governance, privileged access management, encryption, and audit logging. Pidilite’s annual report explicitly ties cloud migration to cybersecurity and business continuity, signaling that a cloud move must be part of a control framework, not a bypass of it.
For Developers and DevOps Teams
Pidilite’s stated vision is “data- and AI-led transformation.” A well-governed cloud platform can give developers on-demand access to compute, analytics services, and modern tooling. But governance must keep pace. Self-service without budget guardrails and policy controls leads to sprawl. The lesson: pair provisioning speed with automated compliance checks and cost quotas from day one.
How Pidilite Got Here: A Timeline of IT Modernization
Pidilite’s journey didn’t start with a viral tweet about cloud migration. The company has been working with Kyndryl for over a decade, building institutional knowledge of its legacy systems. That continuity matters: a migration partner that already understands your server names, network topologies, and application dependencies can move faster and with fewer surprises.
In its 2025–26 annual report, Pidilite flagged cyber risk and digital infrastructure disruption as material business risks. The report noted that critical systems had been moved to secure cloud environments with real-time redundancy. This migration, then, is the culmination of a deliberate risk-mitigation strategy, not a sudden pivot. The company chose Google Cloud, but the operating model—managed services, automation, governance—is vendor-agnostic in principle, and similar outcomes can be achieved on Azure or AWS with the right planning.
Action Plan: Adopting a Cloud Operating Model
If Pidilite’s results sound like the kind of transformation your organization wants, here’s a practical checklist distilled from their approach and established cloud best practices.
1. Define Your Migration Scope and Boundaries
Just as Pidilite separated ERP from non-ERP workloads, map your application estate into migration waves. Consider factors like data sensitivity, latency requirements, licensing complexity, and dependency chains. Not everything needs to move, and not everything should move at the same time.
2. Invest in the Landing Zone First
Before migrating the first VM, design your cloud foundation: identity integration (Azure AD/Entra ID, or Google Cloud Identity), network topology, logging, monitoring, cost controls, and security baselines. A poorly designed landing zone creates technical debt that multiplies with every workload you add.
3. Measure What Matters
Choose operational metrics that tie directly to business outcomes. Pidilite tracked provisioning time and service response. Other useful indicators: mean time to recovery, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and user-reported incident trends. Share these metrics with stakeholders to demonstrate progress.
4. Treat Managed Services as a Partnership
If you engage a provider like Kyndryl, negotiate clear service-level agreements, escalation paths, and reporting cadences. Retain internal expertise in architecture, data governance, and strategic decision-making. An external partner can operate the environment, but only you can align technology with business goals.
5. Govern at the Speed of Cloud
Automation can provision resources faster than any human—including misconfigured ones. Implement policy-as-code, cost alerts, and access reviews that match the velocity of your new environment. Lean on tools like Azure Policy, Google Cloud Organization Policies, or third-party platforms.
6. Plan for Resilience, Not Just Redundancy
Cloud platforms offer high availability, but resilience comes from workload design. Define recovery time and recovery point objectives per application, map dependencies, and test failover scenarios regularly. Pidilite’s annual report mentions real-time redundancy, but thorough testing turns that from a claim into a capability.
What’s Next: AI, Data, and the Long Game
Pidilite’s chief information and digital officer, Vivek Sharma, positioned the new cloud foundation as core infrastructure for “data- and AI-led transformation.” That’s a strategic framing, not a feature list. Cloud infrastructure provides the scalable compute, storage, and analytics services that AI workloads demand. But the real work—data quality, model governance, change management, and responsible-use policies—remains firmly in the hands of the enterprise.
For Windows-focused organizations, the AI opportunity often starts with familiar services: Azure AI, Power Platform integration, SQL Server-based machine learning, or .NET applications enhanced with cognitive services. Whatever stack you choose, a modernized, governed cloud environment makes it easier to experiment without compromising security or budget controls.
Pidilite’s completed migration is a notable milestone, but it’s not the end of the story. The lasting value will come from how well the company manages its new operating model—governance, resilience, cost discipline, and the ability to turn a flexible platform into better business outcomes. For IT leaders watching from the sidelines, the message is clear: a successful cloud exit isn’t about moving servers; it’s about redesigning how IT delivers value.