Accelerate Cloud Value

As I wrote in my blog, “ The importance of aligning IT and the business for cloud success,” we’re hearing a lot more urgency in the voices of clients wanting to move their critical apps to a cloud provider like AWS. COVID-19 has certainly been a driving factor. Many companies that were primarily on-premises found themselves brittle and slow to respond to customer and business demands during the worst of the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, companies on average had just 20% of their workloads in the cloud. Now there’s a rush on. But how can you move to the cloud safely and confidently when speed is also a critical issue?

In this blog, I want to break a migration to AWS down into some of its component parts and look at several accelerators from Accenture and AWS that can help you achieve benefits faster. The accompanying video also discusses these important tools.

Assessing your cloud readiness

A cloud migration effort begins with a cloud readiness assessment of your enterprise’s current state. Such an evaluation produces insights into how far along your organization is in its cloud journey, identifies your current cloud-readiness strengths and weaknesses, and helps create a plan to close identified gaps.

An important tool that helps our clients at the assessment phase is Accenture myNav ®, which evaluates, architects and simulates cloud solutions to determine which will best fit your business requirements. myNav evaluates multiple parts of the existing environment including infrastructure, operating model and business outcomes to recommend a solution optimized for your needs, ultimately accelerating your migration.

Creating your migration business case

Migrations can only proceed based on a rigorous case for the value to be gained:

• What is the future expected IT cost on AWS versus the existing (base) cost?
• What are the estimated migration investment costs?
• What is the expected ROI, and when will the project be positive from a cash flow perspective?
• What are the business benefits beyond cost savings?

The insights from myNav are important inputs to the business case, and another important asset is AWS Migration Evaluator -a migration assessment service that helps you create a directional business case for AWS cloud planning and migration. To project future-state cloud costs, Migration Evaluator provides a clear baseline of what your organization is running today and projects AWS costs based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization. The software models compute patterns for all instances, showing the projected costs to re-host on AWS and the breakdown of costs by infrastructure and software licenses.

Executing the migration securely

According to Accenture research, security and compliance risk is the most frequently cited barrier to achieving full cloud value, with 65% of survey respondents placing it in their top-three list of concerns. With this in mind, security teams need to be intimately involved in a migration right from the beginning. An important Accenture accelerator in this area is the Secure Cloud Foundation (SCF), which leverages Accenture’s industry experience in implementing enterprise cloud environments on AWS using well-architected practices.

SCF defines 90% of cloud foundational resources in templates. It integrates fully with client operations processes and speeds up delivery of infrastructure-as-code by 40%. Security is integrated at multiple layers in the AWS Cloud Foundation, including: organizational policies, multi-account/multi-region AWS-native security, multi-region central networking, automated security guardrails and more.

About the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG)

As Andy Jassy of AWS has put it, “There is no compression algorithm for experience” when it comes to cloud migration and operations. As a migration partner, Accenture AWS Business Group’s 15+ years of experience partnering with AWS gives us a solid foundation to help our clients migrate more workloads, solve more new problems in the cloud, and build more unique industry solutions than any other cloud systems integrator. Our unmatched understanding of what it takes for a successful migration to AWS is knowledge we bring to every client engagement.

Following a migration to AWS, we then offer ongoing optimization and refinement of our clients’ public cloud estate to ensure our clients are benefitting as much as possible from their AWS cloud migration.

In addition to our experience and accelerators, our people are our most important competitive advantage. We have more than 20,000 AWS-trained technologists and over 10,000 AWS-certified professionals. We have invested close to $1 billion in training and certifications (plus another $3 billion in the Accenture Cloud First program for FY21) so that our people can deliver the most value for our clients.

Accenture experience, innovation and expertise with AWS cloud are why I’m confident we can help even more organizations get there faster-and see the results they were hoping for sooner.

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Originally published at https://www.accenture.com.