Latest release includes new capacity for clients to optimize multi-cloud costs and new capabilities to drive smoother transition of IaaS and PaaS workloads to Microsoft Azure
Accenture has released an enhanced version of the Accenture Cloud Platform, designed to help organizations reduce costs associated with cloud implementations, such as migrating to cloud, modernization of cloud applications, and ongoing management of cloud infrastructure. New cloud economics capabilities enable enterprises of all sizes take greater advantage of the flexibility offered by an as-a-Service operating model, where IT and business services are delivered on-demand via the cloud.
With the power and flexibility to manage complex enterprise workloads simply and securely across any cloud environment on demand and at speed, the Accenture Cloud Platform is an open, scalable and technical solution for enterprises. The multi-cloud management platform allows services to be ramped up or down as needed, centrally managing all enterprise cloud resources—public, private or hybrid—by automating and accelerating the delivery of cloud solutions.
“In order to adopt an as-a-Service operating model and truly become digital businesses, companies must focus on greater operational agility, increased flexibility and speed-to-value that requires the right cloud management tools,” said Michael Liebow, Global Managing Director, Accenture Cloud Platform. “This release of the Accenture Cloud Platform addresses and improves the organizational capabilities designed to manage their cloud ambitions, significantly cutting the time to deploy resources while providing greater control and boosting the ability to innovate and integrate new solutions quicker than ever before on the journey to cloud every company must embark on.”
Helping clients optimize cloud costs, agility, governance and control of cloud applications in the as-a-Service economy
The Accenture Cloud Platform’s latest release includes capabilities designed to help organizations improve their cost efficiency by enhancing resource usage and reducing operational costs that improve ROI with better consumption and cost-management. The resulting reduction in overall cloud costs can be as much as 40 percent. Additionally, by centralizing cloud governance with analytics, cost controls and policy management, the Accenture Cloud Platform enhances control of cloud capabilities and provides better visibility, accountability and compliance while reducing IT operational costs.
A key new offering with this release includes the piloting of a new Cloud Optimization Service to help clients control cloud sprawl and reduce cloud spend through expertise, actionable analytics and continued process improvement. A combination of platform capabilities and consulting knowledge, this service provides:
- Collaborative Assessment – A deep collaboration with clients to gather business requirements, understand expenditures and organize their cloud portfolio.
- Proactive Monitoring – Establish visibility and control through analytics, targeted alerts, and automated reporting that enables continued flexibility and oversight.
- Actionable Recommendations – Leveraging insights and deep industry expertise to produce custom optimization roadmaps tailored to client’s business needs and industry requirements.
- Continuous Improvement – An ongoing refinement and simplified implementation that leverages automation to optimize migration processes and addresses changes in cloud usage.
Among the clients already using the Accenture Cloud Platform for cloud management and cost efficacy of their cloud investments is GRTgaz, France’s leading natural gas transmission system operator, who has deployed a cloud-based infrastructure on Amazon Web Services to drastically shorten release cycles from 8–12 weeks to just 10 days, improving the performance and increasing the agility of business-critical applications. By using AWS with the Accenture Cloud Platform, GRTgaz achieved a 30 percent reduction in IT infrastructure costs, and was able to resolve incidents 20 percent faster and increase environment availability from 54 percent to 90 percent.
With an increasing interest and demand from the enterprise for simplifying and accelerating application modernization, Accenture Cloud Platform’s recently released capabilities have been enhanced to help shepherd clients on their transformations to cloud, whether focusing on infrastructure or platform needs. Over the past year alone, Accenture has seen a spike in consumption of resources. Accenture’s virtual machine count has grown by 50 percent, and public cloud spend increase by well over 100 percent, with over 3x growth in non-VM types or PaaS resource usage, and storage up nearly 3x in the same timeframe. Regardless of client need for IaaS or PaaS resources, Accenture Cloud Platform is designed to not only provide a smoother transition to the cloud but the required management and governance of the resulting new IT estate.
New capabilities to drive smoother transition of IaaS and PaaS workloads for clients
Accenture invests in high-fidelity features across 7 different cloud providers with continued emphasis on the hyper-3 leaders, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. For example, ACP now includes support for 19 Azure PaaS solution types and high-fidelity feature support for VMs based on Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. These features helped a global natural resource client with their cloud-application modernization to streamline their operations. The features helped another global client migrate their legacy datacenter workloads to Azure – all from a single portal. This approach not only made provisioning and managing cloud applications faster and easier, it created a centralized governance that met regulatory requirements, while also fostering better ongoing operational visibility and management of the client’s overall cloud strategies.
The Accenture Cloud Platform has a global footprint on six continents as well as strategic relationships with all three leading hyper-scale cloud providers and more than 150 alliance partners. Accenture has managed thousands of projects of major enterprise clients using ACP, including its own internal transformation where 60% of applications now reside in the public cloud.
