Why I think cloudy skies have never looked so good

It’s certainly been a year of collective experiences on a global scale. And there’s one thing I think we can all agree on—it’s not a matter of if we should use the cloud but how we use it that’s up for debate.

I’ve explained before how our cloud journey—which today places 95% of Accenture applications in the cloud—was a result of a shift to becoming cloud native. And now a new case study explains more about how you can get the most from your own cloud journey.

Just like the clouds we see in the sky, cloud computing has been changing and moving before our eyes at quite a pace. As a result, we’ve not taken anything for granted about how we structure Accenture’s cloud services and recognize that we need to adapt in line with those changing patterns.

To get the most out of cloud, we began by being secure from the start and getting our culture aligned to working in the cloud. Now, we’re looking to be faster, more cost effective and, ultimately, sustainable in our cloud efforts so our business is primed and ready to be responsive and resilient.

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Six areas for change

Taking advantage of cloud analytics and reporting, we’ve identified six key levers that enable us to optimize our cloud operations. The levers are: application modernization, right sizing and true sizing, instance payment strategy, instance upgrades, environment rationalization and smart scheduling.

Tackling these areas has enabled us to make some incredible progress in our operations. We have improved our speed significantly, upgrading 1,300 cloud instances in just six weeks. We are now able to provide cloud-native services in minutes and have reduced the provisioning of infrastructure-as-a-service from weeks to hours.

We also saved on spend; our optimization program has helped realize more than US$10M in savings in nine months. Through our reserved instance strategy alone we have been able to save US$13M over four years. We are shifting 13% of fixed IT spend to variable IT spend and maintaining a healthy pipeline forecast of more than 25% savings in the cloud over the next three years.

And in terms of sustainability we’ve estimated a reduction of more than 220 metric tons of carbon emissions in nine months, reduced more than 900,000 kWh of power consumption over nine months and our cloud partners have committed to providing carbon neutrality across all of their data centers by 2030.

Tips for your cloud journey

I hope you’ll agree, these are impressive outcomes—and you can achieve them, too. Here’s how:

• Be data driven—Analytics and reporting unlock insights into ways you can increase savings while eliminating waste. Develop this capability in-house or consider third parties that specialize in cloud analytics.
• Understand your consumption—Know how much compute power you need, when you need it, and, more important, when you don’t need it.
• Use vendor offerings—Cloud vendors are operating in a competitive landscape. Vendors have modern architecture and services that your company can take advantage of. Additionally, there are flexible payment structures available that align to your workload criticality.

I know by optimizing our cloud journey we are faster, more efficient and have significantly reduced our carbon footprint. Take a look at our latest case study to find out if you’re ready to do the same.