For those that are willing and able to capitalize on it, the Cloud Continuum revolution is delivering huge leaps forward in organizational agility, speed and innovation. Today, most enterprises are adopting a hybrid and multi-cloud mindset — but not all are reaping the benefits equally. According to Accenture’s research:

These Continuum Competitors are using the cloud in a fundamentally different way to transform everything their business does—from customer interactions to product development to data insight generation and beyond. As a result, these leaders are seeing significant advantages in IT cost reduction, innovation, sustainability and more.

Cloud transformation isn’t about how many workloads you’ve migrated to the cloud. It’s about using the full spectrum of Cloud Continuum capabilities to radically enhance the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of IT and the business without compromising security and compliance.

Nothing in life comes for free. And the extraordinary flexibility and power of the Cloud Continuum comes with a cost: it can be much more complex to manage. That level of complexity requires a fundamentally different approach to architecting, engineering and operating infrastructure, applications and services.

A Continuum Control Plane is a unified command, control and decision support center providing visibility into critical aspects of the entire business.

But don’t think of it as a single tool or a specific platform. Rather, think of it as a way of bringing together a modular collection of best-in-class tools, services and platforms. These are integrated and abstracted, and amalgamated with new processes, new kinds of automation and new analytics enabling enterprise IT to run more efficiently, with more agility, security and predictability.

It’s differentiating feature? The extensive use of automation and self-service. This radically simplifies how organizations build, manage and consume services across the full range of Cloud Continuum infrastructure.

A fully fledged and mature Continuum Control Plane consists of six distinct lenses into the performance of enterprise IT and the broader business.

A degree of stability and predictability are the keys to honing the IT estate for ever more efficient, effective and secure performance. But there’s a tension between this need for stability and the need for greater agility. Because IT also needs to help the business innovate quickly with new concepts, business models, products and services. It needs to adapt quickly, innovate, automate more functions and offer real time insights into performance

That’s where the Continuum Control Plane really comes in to play: Organizations can embrace automation and self-service to secure, operate and govern a complex cloud estate. Meanwhile, they can continuously optimize and mobilize innovation across private and public cloud provides as well as on-prem data centers. The organization is better equipped to adapt to change. In this way, a Continuum Control Plane helps the business realize its future-focused cloud ambitions with greater speed and certainty while simultaneously mitigating risk.

A Continuum Control creates harmony out of the complexity. It’s a way to create the IT foundation that lets the business rapidly innovate with a culture of continuous reinvention, and to sync everything together to make beautiful music.

A Control Plane-enabled enterprise gains greater visibility, insight and control of the business.

It provides additional tools and processes to inform, enable and optimize business performance and simplifies decision-making by filtering the noise of an increasingly complex environment.

The simple fact is, if you’re operating in a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and edge computing environment, you need to be thinking how to orchestrate your infrastructure, your applications, your data, your network, your people and your processes to deliver both stability and agility.

For that, you need a Continuum Control Plane. Now’s the time to start the journey.