Lower costs, variable cost models and freedom from expensive upgrades continue to draw attention to cloud-based computing. By the end of fiscal year 2012, Accenture had moved more than 250,000 Accenture mailboxes and nearly 11,300 shared-services sites to the cloud. This initiative will earn back its required investment in just one year, and is slated to continue saving Accenture millions of dollars per year going forward.
Why would a global corporation take the risk of handing over critical communications and collaboration capabilities to a third party? Where some might see only risks, Accenture saw opportunities. Accenture’s migration experience indicates that even when starting with an optimized platform, the business case is more than validated by the benefits. Cloud-based capabilities offered by third parties provide superior performance and functionality at a much lower price, because costs are spread across a larger customer base. Accenture’s internal IT organization was impressed by the enhanced capabilities available in cloud-based offerings: mailbox sizes up to 15 times larger than pre-migration limits, not to mention robust archival services and built-in disaster recovery protocols.
Security, often a concern when companies first explore the cloud, turned out to be a non-event; Accenture found security safeguards and procedures equal to its own security procedures. Best of all, cloud-based service provides for a stable and predictable financial model.
Seizing new cloud-based opportunities continues to be an Accenture priority. By the end of fiscal year 2012, over 200 development and test environments were taking advantage of public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. Accenture continues to add more Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings to the company’s application portfolio, especially in situations where lower integration costs are attractive. In August 2012, Accenture’s internal video sharing platform was replaced with an advanced cloud-based offering that delivers more powerful functionality with an improved user interface.
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