infoTECH Feature

October 13, 2015

Beyond Hybrid: Four Steps to an Intelligent Business Cloud

By Special Guest
Marshall Wells, Managing Director of Hybrid Cloud, Accenture

The cloud has had a dramatic impact on business, providing companies with agile, highly responsive infrastructures and seamlessly connecting business processes, information and devices. Companies are increasingly using cloud to get more value from every customer experience and business interaction.  But with public and private clouds running alongside legacy mainframes, distributed computing and virtual computing environments, companies have recently begun to recognize the importance of having a hybrid cloud approach. 

A recent survey by Avanade, the Accenture (News - Alert)-Microsoft joint venture that focuses on the implementation of Microsoft solutions, confirms that companies view hybrid cloud as a competitive advantage. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed believe that adopting a hybrid cloud solution will give their organizations a competitive edge.  And 76 percent agree that in the next three years, more of their critical applications will be hosted on a hybrid cloud than on public cloud services.

However, the fact is that for most companies in most industries, cloud has created nearly as many challenges as it has provided solutions. Today, organizations have to contend with multiple, separate cloud accounts. Few IT leadership teams can say with certainty what their organizations spend on cloud, or even why – largely because more and more of that spending is outside their control, authorized by business teams. 

To generate maximum value from their cloud investments, companies should think about hybrid cloud in a different way. Hybrid cloud is more than just bolting together something convenient for an immediate functional need, and it is more than just a wrapper for various instances of public and private cloud. Above all, hybrid cloud involves more than just consuming multiple clouds.

In our view, the next evolutionary phase of hybrid cloud is the “Intelligent Business Cloud.”  It is an open, scalable and integrated approach to managing the hybrid cloud landscape from a single point, smartly connecting intelligent infrastructure, data, applications and business processes. It will enable trailblazers to deliver “everything as a service”, consume their core business services on demand and respond and innovate faster, at unprecedented scale.

A key feature of the intelligent business cloud is that it uses an analytics-based, policy-driven approach to provide unprecedented levels of agility. This puts the right workloads in the right places and enables enterprises to optimize their IT estates for performance, price and business continuity. This not only eases the formidable cost burdens of moving workloads—much of which is manual today—but it frees enterprises from the vendor lock-in inherent in many of their instances of cloud today.

Marshall Wells, Accenture

Leading companies are already piloting cloud implementations with the potential to produce superior business outcomes by pushing speed, interoperability and new models of consumption. One global chemicals company taking this approach is prototyping solutions that can deliver IT as a consumable service. The new solutions will allow them to migrate, operate and govern applications across public and private cloud environments so they can be accessed anytime, anywhere with the right credentials—in secure and predictable ways.

The vision is compelling, but most companies have a long list of to-dos before they get to the intelligent business cloud.  We see four key initial steps in the process:

  • Get cloud religion.  This means not thinking of cloud computing as a “new trend” or another technology to be layered on top of everything legacy, but seeing it as the basis for the company’s intelligent digital business foundation from this day forward. Those companies which already think in terms of “everything as a service” operate at far higher rates of change and are better placed to make good business decisions about the cloud services in which their organizations should invest.
  • Re-architect applications with a “cloud first” mindset.  A “cloud first” mindset calls for new applications to be designed for the cloud, leveraging the elastic and resilient nature of the cloud to provide auto-scaling and fault tolerance while also delivering cloud’s “pay-as-you-go” economics.
  • Invest with business outcomes in mind.  The first emphasis of all cloud investments must be on the value generated for and the competitive advantage delivered to customers. All spending on cloud must tie directly and measurably to business results. This spending discipline will help channel investments into the areas with the highest returns. 
  • “Skill up” for the intelligent business cloud.  The most valuable talent in the intelligent business cloud world will be the architect who understands the functions and roles of all the pieces and who knows how they all work together. The more disparate the instances of cloud, the more the organization needs to design and operate a mosaic of best-in-class capabilities.  Currently, the skills required to address these fundamentals are immature at best. 

These four steps are essential, but business leaders need to take an even bigger step.  It is one thing to talk about swapping capital expenditures for operating costs, but quite another to envision new competitive possibilities or how cloud can connect all of the capabilities required to outperform in a digital world. Companies engaging in these conversations now will make the fastest strides toward a new and powerful intelligent business cloud and all the competitive advantages that come with it.  




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
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