9 FORCES SHAPING CLOUD MANAGEMENT IN 2019 · cloud computing and where it’s going aren’t alone....
Transcript of 9 FORCES SHAPING CLOUD MANAGEMENT IN 2019 · cloud computing and where it’s going aren’t alone....
9 FORCES SHAPING CLOUD MANAGEMENT IN 2019
CONTENTSINTRODUCTION
FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
FORCE #2: PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY
FORCE #3: CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLY
FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
FORCE #5: CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE
FORCE #6: NATIVE VS. NICHE
FORCE #7: SECURE FROM START
FORCE #8: CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
FORCE #9: GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGIN.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 2
THE RATE AND PACE OF CLOUD ADOPTION IS ACCELERATING ACROSS REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES.
WE SEE SPEED. AND COMPLEXITY. AND GREATER RISK. Making the right decision is a make-or-break proposition for most organizations,
but with expanding choice comes greater risk of failure. Those confused about
cloud computing and where it’s going aren’t alone.
That’s why we’ve gathered our leading cloud experts to compile this eBook. Our
goal was to highlight how recent trends in cloud computing impact the job of the
CIO in guiding a company’s successful journey. The eBook is based on not only
our extensive work helping companies migrate and run their businesses in the
cloud, but also on Accenture’s own transformation into a cloud-first business.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 3
FORCE #1
CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERSTogether, Amazon, Microsoft and Google–the
Hyper 3–have invested more than $30 billion in
capital expense just this past year to build and
scale their global cloud footprint. This substantial
investment is not just for building infrastructure
and facilities. The Hyper 3 are also investing heavily
in innovative new services and capabilities that
pale in comparison to legacy approaches—leaving
companies scrambling to keep up. Alignment of
enterprise IT investment with any or all of the
Hyper 3 means an organization will remain
competitive in the coming years, managing down
technical debt and decoupling from the past.
FORCE #2
PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY There’s much uncertainty in the market about what
defines a true private cloud—and when a company
might need one. Successful private clouds are now
defined around solving a specific use case, such as
conforming to data sovereignty needs or supporting
edge use cases. If the goal is agility, cost reduction
or speed, choices skew public. If, for whatever
reason, an organization feels on-premises better
fits its needs, options exist but require additional
considerations—and all decisions have time, risk, cost
and talent ramifications.
FORCE #3
CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLY Many enterprises are now moving toward a tipping
point, where a substantial amount of their workload
is in the public cloud. Unfortunately, most IT
organizations mistakenly treat the new estate as
just another data center and don’t see the need to
shift their operating model to the realities of cloud
management. In actuality, operating in the cloud
drives a need for a new cloud-based operating
model, and, along with it, people with new skills and
new roles.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 4INTRODUCTION: CLOUD ADOPTION IS ACCELERATING
FORCE #4
MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY The steady adoption of cloud services has created
a complex computing environment for many
companies. Some are in the position to plan for a
multi-cloud environment, while a significant number
of others simply find themselves using multiple
vendors without proper planning, governance or
controls. From a cloud management perspective,
this new reality makes it difficult for organizations
to publish policy, manage costs, maintain security,
ensure compliance or even create a single view
showing all cloud resources.
FORCE #5
CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGEIn the messy real world of hybrid and multi-cloud
environments, cloud management has become
very complicated. Each cloud provider may offer a
dashboard to manage its environment, but achieving
a unified view across a hybrid IT and public cloud
estate is no small feat. No two cloud providers
expose the same billing or management APIs,
and no single tool can handle all of an enterprise’s
management needs.
FORCE #6
NATIVE VS. NICHE Organizations are faced with the tricky decisions
of how, when and where to use niche tools versus
native tools that may sit on top of native providers.
Teams must understand where the capabilities of
native consoles start and stop, and derive a strategy
and plan for how their organization will function
across multiple clouds. Organizations also need to
understand their comfort zone and risk profile—
recognizing that many niche providers likely won’t
be around for the long haul.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 5INTRODUCTION: CLOUD ADOPTION IS ACCELERATING
FORCE #7
SECURE FROM START Most CIOs have come to realize public clouds are
more secure than their own facilities. The critical
difference, though, is that threat vectors in the
cloud have changed. The actions of individuals
can now have a dramatic and immediate impact on
security and place a significant burden on the CIO to
maintain a compliant environment. Building security
into its cloud infrastructure from the start is critical
to a company’s ability to take advantage of the new
services cloud providers roll out each year while
minimizing potential threats and disruptions.
FORCE #8
CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FEAR OF MISSING OUT (FOMO) The rate and pace of innovation in the public
cloud are unprecedented, and skilled people in
the organization don’t want to miss out and will be
eager to try every new feature. But the enterprise
can’t enjoy the level of innovation coming from
each of the Hyper 3 if it needs to vet every new
service. Organizations need an agile policy to make
new services available immediately, while creating
discovery mechanisms and guard rails to
understand where, when and how people are
using which services.
FORCE #9
GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGIN. We’re still early in the maturation cycle of cloud.
Niche vendors are many but are fodder for
acquisition. When that happens, the game changes.
A tool that was once multi-cloud aligned may
become isolated or pivot in some new direction. And
as the Hyper 3 consolidate, competitive intensity
grows. The game is not constant. Organizations
that align with the Hyper 3 will benefit from greater
innovation at continually lower costs. But when
betting on niche vendors to help them manage all
or part of their multi-cloud presence, companies
need to be aware that the long-term viability of their
investment is not guaranteed.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 6INTRODUCTION: CLOUD ADOPTION IS ACCELERATING
THE CLOUD CLEARLY IS FAST BECOMING AN INDISPENSABLE PART OF TODAY’S BUSINESS—BUT IT’S ALSO GETTING MORE COMPLEX AND DIFFICULT TO MANAGE AS COMPANIES’ CLOUD PRESENCE GROWS.
Companies that understand how to use the cloud and get the most from it will
continue to have a big advantage over those that don’t, and that gap will only
widen over time. The fact is, multi-cloud is here to stay, and companies need a
comprehensive approach across operating models, tooling and skills to manage risk
and drive success.
We hope this eBook offers some clarity to organizations and their leaders about
current market trends that are driving change and innovation in the enterprise—both
today and beyond—and, even more important, provides some useful insights to
consider when planning for the future.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 7INTRODUCTION: CLOUD ADOPTION IS ACCELERATING
FORCE #1:
CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERSBy Michael Liebow, Global Managing Director, Accenture Cloud
Over the past five years, there’s been an undeniable surge in cloud usage, with
companies migrating a growing number of their workloads to the cloud. One
study has found that 93 percent of companies have moved at least some of
their processes to the cloud, and 56 percent have moved or expect to move all
of them.1 We expect this momentum to only accelerate. But, there are still many
companies that are reluctant to embrace the cloud at scale and, as a result, are
in danger of being left behind.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 8FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
THE PACE OF CLOUD-RELATED CHANGE AND INNOVATION IS REMARKABLE AND ONLY ACCELERATING. According to one study, operator and vendor revenues for 2018 across seven key cloud services and infrastructure
market segments exceeded $250 billion, representing 32 percent growth over the previous year.2 New cloud
vendors continually arrive on the scene, and new cloud services and solutions are introduced by the thousands
every year. Yet companies that continue to put off a large-scale move to the cloud now have a big problem. The
longer they wait, the further they fall behind competitors that are embracing the cloud and its massive potential.
WHY ARE THEY HESITATING? Myriad factors are at play. There’s the technical debt these companies have been saddled with for years that’s
difficult to write off. There’s the lack of people with strong cloud skills. And then there’s the age-old obstacle of
reluctance to change and fear of risk: Companies are comfortable with what and whom they know.
Think about it. The very skills, processes, tools and vendors that an organization knows, and perhaps loves (or loves to
hate), are the very same legacy elements preventing these companies from moving on to something new: the cloud.
These are all valid issues. But they shouldn’t be an excuse for not moving to the cloud. In fact, despite the
pockets of legacy supporters within these companies, moving an IT estate to the cloud is no longer a choice.
It’s a do-or-die imperative simply to remain competitive, let alone to keep pace with business needs.
Remember in Alice in Wonderland, when the White Rabbit looked at his watch and proclaimed, “I’m late, I’m late,” followed by, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get?” In an odd sort of way, these quotes describe the state of reluctant companies’ move to the cloud.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 9FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
THREE CHOICES TO REDUCE UNCERTAINTY AND RISK
The cloud provider market is dominated by three vendors: Amazon, Microsoft and
Google—or, as the market calls them, the Hyper 3. Each of these behemoths is
investing about $1 billion a month in capital expenditure (CapEx) to build and scale
its global footprint.3 Alibaba is a distant fourth, although one could argue that its low
costs effectively narrow the gap. The others that follow are smaller or more niche
cloud providers that will never be big players simply because they aren’t making the
same level of investment the Hyper 3 are.
The extent of the Hyper 3’s investment enables the group to develop and roll out
new capabilities and services at a pace no other provider—or, for that matter, no
corporate IT organization—could match (Amazon alone launched 1,700 new services
in the past year). This means the Hyper 3 are setting, and continually raising, the
bar for what the cloud can do—and that’s a win for any company that wants as little
uncertainty and risk, and as much potential upside, as possible.
So, which one should a company pick? In reality, which of the Hyper 3 a company
chooses for its cloud transformation isn’t the question—just as long as the company
actually does it; taking the step is what matters most. Each company offers access to
unprecedented innovation and scale, and the stability and certainty that comes with
them. That said, a few factors may swing the decision in favor of one over the others.
For instance, if a company is concerned about vendor risk or pace of innovation,
Amazon—with a commanding 70 percent share and history of innovation—is the
clear choice. However, a company in an industry like retailing may perceive a vote for
AWS as aiding and abetting a competitor, which might narrow the choice. Perhaps
a company already has strong ties to Microsoft in the form of prior investments
in products like Office 365 and SQL Server. Or, maybe a company is looking to
create new, data-rich workloads at a lower cost but with attractive performance. In
this case, Google’s technology leadership and simpler cost model might be most
attractive. Google’s technology extends to its robust network, which might sway a
company looking for near-zero latency in its applications.
Then the question becomes, which cloud provider should a company choose?
It’s not an easy decision.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 10FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
when it comes to stability, security and innovation, all three options hit the mark. Best practices suggest that an organization qualify at least two vendors to further moderate risk and comply with internal policies.
THE POINT IS,
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 11FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
FOCUS ON OUTCOMES AND EXPERIMENTATION To truly benefit from its choice—i.e., capitalize on all of the innovation coming from
the Hyper 3—a company needs to make sure its cloud strategy is aligned with a
specific business outcome. The objective may be to cut technology costs by a third,
accelerate innovation or penetrate new markets—whatever the goal, it and its related
metrics should be explicitly tied to the use of the cloud.
A company also needs to give users the freedom to experiment. After all, what’s
the use of all of the new services and capabilities the Hyper 3 provide if a company
doesn’t take the time to figure out how to use them and where they could
generate significant business benefits? (We discuss this in more detail in Force #8.)
Consuming all of this new functionality means moving away from the traditional
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and six-month approval cycles—
taking months to vet a new capability before allowing users access won’t cut it in the
cloud. Instead, a company needs policies that clearly govern the use of new features
and functions in a way that gives users the latitude to tinker while also enabling them
to monitor what they’re doing.
For instance, a company could allow users to test new functions as they’re available
but restrict how and when the functions move into production. Or, a company could
narrow down the new services to only those relevant to that particular company,
thereby avoiding spending manpower and resources on things that don’t matter to
the business.
Freedom to experiment is critical to finding innovative ways to use the Hyper 3’s services to add business value—and to staying ahead of competitors. There’s little value in using these providers if you aren’t using the new services.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 12FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
Despite all of the promise the cloud offers, some companies still stubbornly stick
with the status quo. That could be a costly mistake in more ways than one. If these
companies insist on staying with legacy technology providers, they’ll only continue
to add to their technical debt—all while the Hyper 3 steadily drive the cost of
compute, storage and network toward zero.
At the end of the day, the choice comes down to disrupting the competition and an
industry, or being disrupted by a clever upstart. It’s entirely a company’s call. Now is
the time for all companies to choose, and we hope, pick the former. Every company
needs to avoid continuing down the legacy rabbit hole by knowing where to go and
helping the rest of the organization to get on board with whichever of the Hyper 3 it
thinks best suits the them. Opportunity awaits, but only for those that move forward
with speed and focus.
IT’S NOW TIME FOR EVERYONE TO MOVE
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 13FORCE #1: CAPEX INVESTMENTS SECURE THE HYPER 3 WINNERS
FORCE #2:
PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY
Michael Rutherford, Cloud Product Management Sr. Manager, Accenture Cloud
By now, companies have a pretty good handle on what public cloud is. And
on-premise data centers certainly need no introduction. But between those two
ends of the computing spectrum lies a grey area where confusion reigns: the
private cloud.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 14FORCE #2: PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY
At a high level, a private cloud is defined as computing services offered over a
network—either a private, internal one or the internet—that often incorporate
some type of on-premises component, and that are dedicated to only select
users (typically, a single client or company). But there’s a lot of room for
ambiguity in this definition, and that’s where companies get hung up.
The fact is, it’s quite easy to misunderstand the term “private cloud.” Private
cloud is not just virtualized hosting, nor is it a collection of static virtual
machines. To qualify as a private cloud, the virtual hosting infrastructure needs
to be dynamic. It provides a standard service catalog through which clients
order and consume capacity on an as-needed basis, leverages a governance
structure to control roles and responsibilities, manages a constrained capacity
pool for dynamic workloads and bills consumers according to their usage.
WHAT IS A PRIVATE CLOUD?
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 15FORCE #2: PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY
WHEN DOES PRIVATE CLOUD MAKE SENSE?Despite the growing popularity of the public cloud, private clouds still have a place
in many organizations. In fact, although public cloud spending is still growing more
rapidly, the $100 billion spent in 2018 on cloud hardware and software was about
evenly split between public and private clouds.4
The public cloud excels at running transient workloads (e.g., scheduled production
runs and ad hoc development and testing), seasonal workloads (e.g., course
registrations at schools or e-commerce surges for retailers during the holidays), and
decoupled workloads leveraging as-a-service functions from cloud providers. The
key is to understand where it’s most effective while acknowledging its limitations.
For instance, if a company’s goals are agility, cost and speed, public is the way to
go. On the other hand, a private cloud is the better option when a high level of
customization is needed to meet an application owner’s requirements. It’s also often
the right choice where there are compliance or data sovereignty concerns. The
public cloud’s “anytime, anywhere” access can conflict with individual countries’
laws and regulations governing how and where data is managed and used. So, for
a large global company operating in dozens of countries, each having its own data
protection rules, compliance may be easier with a private cloud for each location.
Private clouds also can make sense in cases of heightened data security concerns—
for instance, among such companies as financial services, healthcare or government
organizations, which handle extremely sensitive personal and other highly regulated
data. However, such applications are becoming less prevalent, as the growing
strength and sophistication of the public cloud’s security has made these types of
organizations increasingly open to considering the public cloud.
Perhaps the biggest argument in favor of a private cloud is its ability to help meet
significant latency and connectivity requirements. In fact, private cloud is starting
to play a bigger role in edge computing applications, where data processing and
analysis are increasingly being pushed out to where data is collected. For instance:
A cruise ship can connect to the internet when in its home port to download
software updates and passenger manifests from the public cloud, then run
disconnected for its seven-day cruise. With a private cloud aboard the ship, the
crew can run analytics on this data and other data captured while at sea to get more
insights into guests’ preferences and tailor services accordingly during the journey.
A mineral company’s mine in a remote area can’t run public cloud applications
reliably because of high latency, low bandwidth and poor connectivity. With a
private cloud on site, the company could apply analytics and artificial intelligence
to the data being generated by connected devices in the mine to help supervisors
continually improve the performance of assets and anticipate and mitigate potential
safety risks.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 16FORCE #2: PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY
TWO THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN CONSIDERING A PRIVATE CLOUDAs the hosting landscape continues to evolve, a hybrid approach to cloud will still
make sense—meaning a private cloud likely will be part of most companies’ overall
computing landscape. That’s why, when considering a private cloud, companies
should keep two key points in mind.
First, it’s critical for all involved to correctly identify if the workloads in question truly
need private cloud functionality or if they are better suited for the public cloud
or even virtualized hosting. Implementing and running private clouds generates
overhead costs that will just become sunk expenditures if the company doesn’t
end up using the private cloud functionality. While companies continue to toss all
manner of on-premise computing under the private cloud moniker, companies need
to understand that private clouds aren’t free to build, and they require an ownership
structure to create and maintain standards and services. Companies also need to
ensure they will actually require the on-premise agility of a private cloud. If they
don’t, they probably have a virtualized hosting platform. If they do want agility but
don’t want to manage the services and standards, then a public cloud, a third-party
managed private cloud or a community cloud may be a better match.
Second, a company must be aware that a private cloud isn’t a quicker, easier and
lower-cost route to the public cloud. Moving to a private cloud requires application
modernization to use the cloud assets effectively. If a company then takes the
next step to the public cloud, it will need to complete a second optimization of the
application to operate in the public cloud economic paradigm, which is different
from that of a private cloud.
The fact is, the use cases for private and public clouds are very different, so
companies should consider their long-term hosting objectives before pursuing a
two-stage migration strategy. Private clouds are a viable hosting option if they’re
tailored to a specific application suite or owner and address a business requirement
such as data sovereignty or remote hosting. In this case, a company should focus
on optimizing that platform to deliver the application as efficiently as possible to
justify the investment. If a company is really thinking about a private cloud that runs
everything in its data center, it should target public cloud right out of the gate to
take advantage of the cost, scale and performance benefits.
A private cloud undoubtedly can deliver significant business benefits. But it can only do so if a company understands up front what private cloud can and can’t do and the role it’s best equipped to play as part of the company’s larger cloud and computing strategy.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 17FORCE #2: PRIVATE CLOUD FINDS ITS SPECIALTY
FORCE #3:
CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLYBy Tristan Morel L’Horset, Managing Director, North America Intelligent Cloud & Infrastructure Sales Lead
A big part of the significant increase in cloud usage in the past five years
has been the advent of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions and other
components, which have encouraged companies to substantially ramp up their
cloud consumption. PaaS, in particular, has been a real driving force, as it allows
companies to develop, run and manage applications without having to build and
maintain the infrastructure to do so.
In fact, because of these innovations, most companies are now rapidly
approaching a true tipping point in their cloud presence that’s forcing them to
look more closely at their requirements around roles, policy, security, data and
network, as well as more broadly at how they use the cloud and manage the
associated costs.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 18FORCE #3: CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLY
THE NEED TO “RUN DIFFERENTLY”The reality is, with so much of their business now in the cloud, many companies
are beginning to recognize that they need to run their IT operations differently
than when they were primarily an on-premises, legacy data center business. The
cloud is far too dynamic in nature, and the pace of innovations being introduced
much too quick, for a traditional approach to IT to effectively handle. Not
running differently can have a big impact on both the top and bottom lines.
TOP- AND BOTTOM-LINE CHALLENGESFor example, buying capacity and new services from cloud providers is an
ongoing process, which is much different from the periodic purchase of assets
that characterize the on-premises legacy world. Instead of a one-time, closely
controlled activity done every few years, cloud buying happens continually—
and easily. If they’re not careful, companies can see spending spiral out of
control. With the amount that many companies spend on the cloud increasing
steadily—more than $1.3 trillion in IT spending will be affected in some way by
the cloud by 2022, according to Gartner4—failure to properly manage, optimize
and consume cloud services will have a negative effect on the bottom line—to
the tune of millions of dollars for large organizations.
The top line also takes a significant hit if a company doesn’t run differently. A company
that treats the cloud as just another data center—building and deploying applications in
the same methodical and time-consuming way—will never be able to capitalize on the
Hyper 3’s innovations to transform its business and give its customers what they want.
And it’ll end up falling further and further behind competitors that can do it right. In fact,
the economic impact of opportunities lost due to failure to harness the cloud’s innovation
far exceeds the bottom-line impact driven by inferior cost management.
To support—and truly capitalize on—their growing cloud estate, companies need a new IT operating model, with new skills and roles, as well as new processes, that enable the company to run differently.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 19FORCE #3: CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLY
A BIG NEED FOR NEW SKILLSSkills are arguably where the biggest changes are needed and are the stiffest
challenge to overcome. For example, in the old legacy days, companies had
specialists in storage, network, backup and operating systems. As the cloud
emerged, organizations made a few cloud-savvy engineers responsible for
managing cloud services. This arrangement worked fine while companies’ cloud
presence was limited.
But now, with so much of their business in the cloud and the number of platform
services exploding, a small DevOps team supporting the cloud is no longer
sufficient. Companies need a different, and larger, set of specialists in each of the
three cloud PaaS components: container platforms, application platforms, and
function platforms. And they need to organize these new specialists in ways that fuel
collaboration, innovation, speed, and agility—for example, in a center of excellence.
New skills will mean nothing if they’re simply tossed in with a legacy IT organization
that doesn’t truly understand how to take advantage of the cloud.
PROCESSES MUST CHANGEChanges in ITIL processes are also needed. While an official “bible” of cloud
processes has yet to be written, there’s no doubt the importance of each ITIL
process has fundamentally shifted—with the biggest impacts seen in incident
management, problem management, and change management.
Incident management has become dramatically less critical with the cloud. If there’s
an incident with a cloud component, we no longer have to fix it. We just change
over to a new virtual machine (VM), workflow or container because components are
so commoditized and easy to ramp up. In other words, in the world of automation,
incident management becomes almost a non-event. But the importance of problem
management has grown. Even though it’s easy to move on from an issue, a company
still wants to understand why the problem occurred to prevent it from happening
again. That’s crucial to making the company’s cloud presence stable.
Change management arguably isn’t any more or less important, but it’s assumed a
different dimension. Because developers want to be more agile and able to embed a
new feature in real time, the environment must be architected correctly from the start
so developers’ actions don’t have unintended (and unwelcome) consequences. Thus,
change management has morphed from, “I must control the change and its impact”
to “I must architect my application and my ecosystem to enable developers to easily
introduce new capabilities,” which is key to capitalizing on the Hyper 3’s innovations.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 20FORCE #3: CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLY
A cloud-first business—which many companies are on the verge of becoming—
bears little resemblance to one driven by on-premises data centers, so
companies shouldn’t run their cloud estate the same way they’ve always
handled their legacy architecture. As companies reach the tipping point in the
amount of their business that’s in the cloud, they need to think past the short-
term, immediate cost savings the cloud can provide to consider what it really
means to run in the cloud. Crucially, that includes understanding what they
need to do differently, both now and over the long term, to fully benefit from
and keep pace with it.
BE A CLOUD-FIRST BUSINESS
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 21FORCE #3: CLOUD TIPPING POINT FORCES IT TO RUN DIFFERENTLY
FORCE #4:
MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITYBy Andrew Wilson, CIO, Accenture
HOW MANY CLOUD PROVIDERS IS THE RIGHT NUMBER FOR YOUR ENTERPRISE? As companies move more of their business to the cloud, many ask this question
and conclude it’s more than one. Indeed, according to one study, seven in 10
companies expect to be operating a multi-cloud environment by 2019.5
This is not a fixed answer for all, as processing requirements vary hugely across
industries and enterprises. Factors like cost, performance, degree of global
operations, concentration risk, hybrid and scale can all influence this decision.
The advantages of a second provider may be the reality for your company.
At Accenture, we chose to work with a small number of cloud providers for our
own workloads to help prove out multi-cloud operations, to balance risk across
the ecosystem and to help compare and contrast cloud service providers to
inform our work with our clients.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 22FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
It’s hard enough to manage multiple accounts and environments in one cloud
provider—just look at the lines of billing you get every month. Doing it across
two or three cloud providers adds to the challenge.
Consider, for example, a large global company with a significant portion of its
business in the cloud with a single provider. In just one part of the enterprise,
it could have a dozen or more accounts covering different stages of the
development life cycle. And for each of those accounts, the company must
ensure its environments aren’t vulnerable to unauthorized access or use,
manage compliance and keep a handle on costs. That can be daunting. Add a
second or third provider to the mix, and the challenge increases exponentially.
HOW DOES A COMPANY CAPITALIZE ON THE BENEFITS OF MULTI-CLOUD WHILE MINIMIZING THE COMPLEXITY IT INTRODUCES? In Accenture’s experience—both with the 94%+ of our own business in the cloud
and with our clients—the key is to ensure that the company’s ability to manage
cloud usage, control costs, set policy and ensure compliance is universal, not
provider-specific.
Managing usage and cost is extremely important, especially in a multi-cloud
environment. Providers’ flexible-charge models make it difficult to predict
what costs a company will incur and open up vast potential to blow past
established budgets. Furthermore, with millions of line items on a single
invoice, determining who bought what, and why, is far from easy. Security
and compliance, of course, are also critical and become even more important
(and much more difficult) when more than one cloud vendor is involved. And
having the right policy in place that covers multiple providers is vital to tracking
the resources the company has deployed to ensure they’re compliant and
configured correctly.
The decision to select beyond or expand from a single provider brings complexity.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 23FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
A cloud management platform enables
organizations to manage their entire cloud estates
from a consolidated viewpoint (sometimes this is
accomplished with a centralized control plane or a
multifaceted approach to managing cloud services).
Integrating with technology from the leading cloud
providers, it provides total visibility into all cloud
resources to enable companies to maintain security,
control cost and ensure governance across multiple
accounts and providers.
One of the most desired features of a cloud
management platform is cross-cloud tagging.
Tagging capabilities enable a company to tag assets
throughout its entire environment, regardless of
which or how many cloud providers it uses. Tagging,
when paired with analytics, gives a company visibility
into who’s using which cloud assets and shows how
those assets are being used and why. Such visibility
is critical for effectively managing total cloud spend,
as well as deploying standard policies and controls
across these assets.
Another cloud management platform capability that’s
especially important in a multi-cloud environment
is its ability to discover resources. Cloud makes it
easy for essentially anyone with a credit card to go
online and spin up a new resource. That’s a blessing
and a potential curse. Without being able to discover
resources, it’s easy for the cloud equivalent of
“shadow IT” to proliferate. In our case, by provisioning
through the Accenture Cloud Platform from the
start and tagging, we mitigate the proliferation of
shadow IT and can understand our assets from a
scale perspective at all times. A cloud management
platform enables a company to scan its entire cloud
estate to find out what’s being added and assume
control over it—which helps control costs, as well as
ensure compliance and security.
GET THE RIGHT TOOLSHOW DOES A COMPANY ACCOMPLISH ITS GOALS ACROSS PROVIDERS, WHEN EACH PROVIDER’S TOOLS ONLY APPLY TO ITS OWN ENVIRONMENT (AND GENERALLY AREN’T AS ROBUST AS THEY NEED TO BE)? THIS IS PRECISELY THE CHALLENGE A CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM IS DESIGNED TO ADDRESS:
1 2 3
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 24FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
WHEN IT COMES TO TOOLS, IT PRACTITIONERS HAVE SEVERAL OPTIONS. They can address it themselves or can purchase a tool, toolset or
service like the Accenture Cloud Platform. Building one’s own tools will
require ongoing maintenance, support, tracking and innovating, as
well as a dedicated team. Buying vendor tools will most likely involve
effort to piece them together. A service like Accenture Cloud Platform
leapfrogs these options by providing solutions already pieced
together for the enterprise. It brings together lessons learned and
different approaches into one place, and can elevate an organization’s
capabilities and enhance its ability to succeed in the cloud.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 25FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
GET THE RIGHT PEOPLEAs a company expands to multiple providers, some skills will apply across platforms.
But as it starts to consume the specific cloud-native capabilities of each provider, the
company will have to invest in discrete skills in each of the platforms and consider
where to make those investments.
Most companies won’t have the luxury of having discrete teams dedicated to each
provider. Nor is it feasible: Most systems and workloads won’t operate in isolation but,
rather, will be at least partially integrated across providers in some way. Companies
need to consider where to make skill investments to become fluent across providers
and where to be provider-specific—whether it’s security experts, cost analysts, business
people, or the subject matter expert creating and operating the infrastructure. Ultimately,
some skills will be cross-platform and some platform-specific.
The move to multi-cloud will likely involve change management and retooling of
skills. A company, for example, may need to translate its current provider’s approach
to security to create an equivalent set of compliance and security processes across
multiple providers. If this is the case, people will have to learn an entirely new
language and set of products and be comfortable doing so. And that will require
a concerted training and development effort and, potentially, hiring new people
with the requisite skills. At Accenture, we recognized we would need to retool our
people’s skills, and supported an organic, hands-on transformation of skills along
with training programs. For many companies, moving to cloud will be the impetus to
evolving IT skills and moving the organization into the new.
Another option is to fill the talent gap with the help of a cloud managed services
provider (MSP), which can bring expertise in all the Hyper 3 providers. An MSP
can integrate and orchestrate the use of various cloud services, as well as help
companies manage their consumption of cloud services across multiple clouds—
often through the use of its own cloud management platforms. It also can sort
through and assess the thousands of new services the Hyper 3 roll out every year to
find those that provide the most benefit.
PEOPLE ARE ALSO CRITICAL TO OPERATING A MULTI-CLOUD ENVIRONMENT EFFECTIVELY.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 26FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
WITH THE INNOVATIONS FROM THE HYPER 3 CONTINUALLY ROLLING OUT, MOST COMPANIES WILL EVENTUALLY FIND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO OPERATE IN A SINGLE PROVIDER ENVIRONMENT. WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS AND PEOPLE—AND THE RIGHT GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE—COMPANIES CAN MITIGATE THESE CHALLENGES AND REAP THE BENEFITS OF A MULTI-CLOUD APPROACH.
Accenture was fortunate to have had the foresight to establish a governance structure
with a dedicated group that addresses changes and injects them into our organization
in an agile way without disruption. No doubt change is constant, and companies
should remain open to change down the road. Business requirements may exhaust
the capabilities of a provider, or other providers may roll out new services that are
better aligned with the business. A decision made today may not pan out in six
months. The key is to be flexible and ready to move when the time is right.
BE AGILE AND COMFORTABLE WITH CHANGE
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 27FORCE #4: MULTI IS THE NEW CLOUD REALITY
By Sean Peterson, Cloud Management CoE Lead, Accenture Cloud
As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, they’re facing
a reality check: in most cases, companies’ embrace of the cloud has now
outpaced their ability to manage their increasingly large cloud estates. They
don’t have the industrialized governance, security and other capabilities they
need to handle the scale of their cloud presence, especially if they’re using more
than one cloud provider (and most are). This means they’re likely not only failing
to maximize what they can get from the cloud but also setting themselves up for
potential cost overruns, inefficiencies and even security lapses that could make
their business vulnerable to unwelcome surprises.
Accenture understands this situation very well. By helping hundreds of
companies migrate to and use the cloud, and by running so much of our
business in the cloud, we have gained a unique perspective on what it takes to
effectively manage a large-scale cloud estate.
FORCE #5:
CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 28FORCE #5: CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE
WE LEARNED FROM OUR EXPERIENCE THAT FIVE THINGS ARE PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT.
GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT CONTROLSEffective cloud management and governance are basic requirements for any
company. But for large enterprises with equally large cloud estates, there’s nothing
basic about it. The sheer scale and complexity of such companies’ cloud estates
can make it extremely difficult to define who’s allowed to do what in the cloud and
ensure that users comply. As their cloud presence grows, companies need to put in
place enterprise-level, cross-cloud policies that enable the different types of users—
from the business to the IT organization—to have the freedom and agility to take
advantage of the cloud’s innovations while maintaining necessary controls.
COST ANALYTICSOne of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that if you don’t have visibility into how
you’re using the cloud, spending can get out of hand quickly. This is definitely a
big issue we hear about from the companies we speak with today. They have so
many accounts and subscriptions across the Hyper 3 that it’s difficult for them
to understand if what they’re spending is the right amount. They don’t fully know
who’s spending what, so it’s not uncommon for them to find out they’re running
significantly over budget—but not have the oversight to know why. That’s why it’s
critical for companies to have analytics in place that can give them the kind of
intelligence they need to manage use—and, consequently, costs—more effectively.
1 2
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 29FORCE #5: CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE
BILLINGAs companies with large cloud estates have certainly experienced, cloud billing is very
complicated. Tracking and attributing charges, making sure they’re accurate, resolving
discrepancies and figuring out how to apply discounts can be difficult even with a
relatively small cloud estate. With really large estates spanning multiple providers and
involving many different areas of the business, it can become overwhelming: A single
bill from just one provider can have a million line items, each of which needs to be
reconciled before the bill can be paid. Building the knowledge and acumen to handle
billing at this scale isn’t easy. It took Accenture two years to do it, and we continue to
hire more people with the right skill sets as our use of the cloud grows.
SECURITYNo one has to be reminded that security is a central part of cloud management.
Seemingly every week we see in the media what can happen when security falls short.
But it’s not enough to have strong security. In our experience, security also has to be
active, not passive. In other words, as we discuss in more detail in Force #7, it needs
to be baked into a company’s cloud infrastructure from the start so the organization
doesn’t leave itself vulnerable to even simple mistakes—such as configuring a
deployment incorrectly—that can result in unwanted exposure. A key part of active
security is being able to scan and monitor the entire cloud estate—every few minutes,
hourly or daily—to identify and address anomalies to maintain compliance.
A ROBUST CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORMA major challenge a company encounters as its cloud estate grows is simply keeping
up with and integrating new technologies as they emerge. Accenture learned
early on that having a single platform that could serve as the glue among not only
the three major cloud providers but also other related tools would be critical to
operating in the cloud effectively.
By integrating with technology from the leading cloud providers, a cloud
management platform enables a company to manage its entire cloud estate from
a centralized control plane. It provides total visibility into all cloud resources, so a
company can maintain security, control cost and ensure governance across multiple
accounts and providers. While theoretically it’s possible for a company to build its
own cloud management platform, doing so is an extremely long, complex and costly
process. Platforms available as a service are good alternatives to building one from
scratch because they can be up and running quickly, with little effort and no upfront
investment.
3
4
5
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 30FORCE #5: CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE
A company that takes care of these five concerns can go a long way toward
enhancing its ability to manage and optimize the use of its cloud estate. But
beyond these, one other, overarching learning we’ve identified can, perhaps, be
the most impactful of all: enlisting the help of a qualified external provider that
can do a lot of these things for you. The fact is, managing the cloud involves
a lot of work that, in the end, does nothing to differentiate a company in the
marketplace. So why should CIOs devote precious skills and resources to
dealing with these activities?
Frankly, they shouldn’t. There’s no reason to, say, deploy talented engineers
to cloud management when those people could, instead, be developing new
software that dramatically improves how the company interacts with customers.
External partners can do the work associated with cloud management, often
more efficiently and less expensively. This can allow CIOs to focus their talent,
tooling and technology on using the cloud’s innovations to transform how the
company does business.
With cloud adoption—and the accompanying complexity—only growing, CIOs
have to think carefully about their cloud management requirements and how
best to address them. With the right talent, tools, services, platform and partner,
a company can continue to expand its use of the cloud to power the business
while minimizing complexity and risk—much as Accenture has done in its own
operations.
ENLISTING THE HELP OF A QUALIFIED EXTERNAL PROVIDER
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 31FORCE #5: CLOUD MANAGEMENT EMERGES AS THE NEXT BIG CHALLENGE
FORCE #6:
NATIVE VS. NICHEBy Catherine Gulsvig Wood, Cloud Product Management Sr. Manager, Accenture Cloud
Native cloud providers—primarily the Hyper 3—continue their explosive growth,
collectively launching thousands of new features and services every year.
Meanwhile, niche providers of cloud management solutions are constantly on the
lookout for gaps to fill in native providers’ services to make it easier for companies
to control and optimize their cloud estates. So, the question for companies
becomes: What role should each type of provider play in their cloud strategy?
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 32FORCE #6: NATIVE VS. NICHE
INNOVATION BRINGS NEW CHALLENGES AND DECISIONSThe fact is, as cloud use becomes even more pervasive, companies need more
powerful tools to help them manage key elements of their cloud estate, such as
governance, cost management, capacity planning, security and compliance,
configuration management and others. And therein lies the challenge: Which
tools should they use? Should they stick with those the native providers offer
or go with ones offered by niche providers that specialize in specific areas? Or,
should they consider a third option: an abstraction layer that allows them to
use new tools and services without getting locked into a specific vendor? It’s a
critical decision that must be made in light of what these providers offer now.
And it’s not easy differentiating between true capabilities available today versus
those on a roadmap.
Take the native providers. No one denies their innovation engines or the sheer amount of money they plow into their businesses. And when they spot a problem area, they address it quickly.
Security is a great example. In the early days of the public cloud, companies
were rightly concerned about the security of their data, and their feeling that
their own servers were much more secure was dampening cloud acceptance.
Providers recognized this was a huge obstacle to their growth and attacked the
security issue head on.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 33FORCE #6: NATIVE VS. NICHE
INTEROPERABILITY IS KEY FOR MULTI-CLOUD ESTATESOn the other hand, there are two big drawbacks to their innovation. One, they
typically aren’t as robust or comprehensive as they need to be. And two, all of the
tools are exclusive to each cloud provider. That may be fine for a company that’s
dedicated to a single provider, but the arrangement is less than ideal for companies
that use two or even all three of the Hyper 3—which is increasingly the case. Each of
the Hyper 3 is bent on dominating the public cloud market, not interoperability. That
makes it difficult for a company to create a seamless, multi-cloud environment.
Niche vendors offer very specific solutions that cover one or just a handful of the management issues mentioned.
And they can be very effective because of their laser focus. These providers are looking
deeply at the Hyper 3’s services and continually identifying gaps that need to be filled.
They’re spotting potential problems and are upgrading their offerings accordingly.
But niche vendors, too, have downsides. Their solutions aren’t offered as an
integrated service, so companies likely will have to integrate the solutions
themselves and possibly integrate across all of the native providers if they’re running
multiple clouds. And there’s always the chance that the Hyper 3 will come out with
their own version of these solutions, rendering the third-party ones obsolete.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 34FORCE #6: NATIVE VS. NICHE
FORTUNATELY, THERE’S A THIRD OPTION: Cloud management platforms that operate as an abstraction layer and have all
of the benefits of a robust, comprehensive solution without the drawback of
being tied to a specific cloud provider. Such platforms, which use configuration
and rules languages that are Hyper 3 agnostic, enable a company to manage its
entire cloud estate, regardless of how many cloud providers it’s using.
CONSIDER A THIRD OPTION
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 35FORCE #6: NATIVE VS. NICHE
TAKE BILLING, FOR EXAMPLE. Determining how much a company pays for its cloud infrastructure is difficult, even
with just one provider. It’s exponentially more difficult if the company is using all
three, each of which has its own ways of describing its resources and charging for
services. An abstraction-layer billing engine, based on an open-source language,
can apply the company’s specific billing rules across all three providers, giving a
consistent, definitive view of the cloud estate’s total costs.
The same thing applies to security. Because it’s an abstraction layer, a cloud
management platform can establish specific rules for how a company’s data privacy
policy gets interpreted and applied when the mechanisms and even the terms
referring to those policies are different across providers. This enables a company to
consistently apply its security policy in all environments without having to wait for a
vendor’s next release that promises support for an additional Hyper 3 provider.
Another big advantage to cloud management platforms is that they run as a
service—they already include the “plumbing” to accommodate operations across
multiple cloud environments. Thus, they require no time-consuming, expensive
integration or customization to set up and use.
The emergence of abstraction-layer cloud management platforms, and “cloud-
agnostic” solutions such as Terraform, has come at an opportune time for
companies that are increasingly having to manage a presence in more than one
public cloud. That trend is likely to accelerate, as the Hyper 3 continue to roll out
new features and services that are irresistible to companies’ developers. Rather
than try to rein in developers, CIOs need to give them the freedom to explore and
experiment—while maintaining control. Native cloud management consoles can
help in some cases, but they have limitations. The same is true of niche offerings,
which can seem like easy fixes until the costs of customization and their inability to
work in a true multi-cloud environment become clear.
The reality is that, for the foreseeable future, companies shouldn’t expect interoperability to be high on the Hyper 3’s agenda.
Until it is, an abstraction-layer approach to cloud management makes sense for companies looking to optimize their cloud estates while continually taking advantage of the best the Hyper 3 have to offer.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 36FORCE #6: NATIVE VS. NICHE
FORCE #7:
SECURE FROM START
By Jonathan Roz, Global Delivery & Operations Lead, Accenture Cloud
Security is a major concern for the keepers of a company’s data. According
to Accenture research, 79 percent of companies admit their organization is
adopting new and emerging technologies faster than they can address related
cybersecurity issues, and 80 percent said protecting their companies from
weaknesses in third parties is increasingly difficult.6 And that concern remains
as companies move an increasing amount of their business to the cloud.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 37FORCE #7: SECURE FROM START
The thinking that they don’t need to worry as
much about security because cloud providers
have it covered. This is misguided and potentially
dangerous. Yes, cloud providers are laser-
focused on security and have gone to great
lengths to secure their cloud. But tenants of
the cloud are still responsible for securing the
environment they create in the cloud. The
distinction is critical.
Think about it this way: With a traditional on-
premises data center, a company must not only
secure the workings of the servers themselves
but also the physical access to those servers—
for example, performing background checks on
data center workers, stationing security guards
at the data center doors and putting mantraps
at the entrances. In a cloud environment, the
cloud providers are responsible for security of
the cloud, but companies are responsible for
security in the cloud.
BUT WE SEE AN INTERESTING MINDSET AMONG MANY CLOUD-FOCUSED COMPANIES:
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 38FORCE #7: SECURE FROM START
PIVOTING YOUR FOCUS TO BE SECURE FROM STARTThe fact is, as companies embrace multiple cloud environments and cloud providers
create and release new services at an increasingly rapid pace, security is just as
important as it’s always been—except the focus has changed. Now, in addition to
securing their applications (which most companies have always done), companies
need to make sure the infrastructure of their cloud environment can take advantage
of the thousands of new services cloud providers roll out each year. And the best
way to do that is to make that infrastructure “secure from start.”
How does a company do that? First, it needs to take a look at its security policies
and procedures, because they most likely don’t even address cloud infrastructure.
The company also needs to make sure the cloud environment is configured in a
way that’s compliant with the security framework relevant to industry and country
regulations—and that this configuration is automated, not manual (which makes
regulators very happy). From there, a company can drill down into identifying the
controls that it will need to monitor those policies and procedures to make sure the
enterprise is compliant on an ongoing basis.
The company also has to develop a new foundational security reference architecture.
This is critical because securing cloud environments is substantially different from
securing on-premises ones. The potential issues a company faces won’t be the same.
Many of the tools it currently uses won’t work in the cloud. The existing processes for
addressing security issues are far too long for the dynamic cloud environment. And
even the people charged with handling security in the cloud will require different
skills (which means, in most cases, an entirely separate organization dedicated to the
cloud is needed). Likewise, they’ll find it’s time to move to a DevSecOps model, where
infrastructure gets treated like application code and is scanned prior to being deployed
to check for misconfigurations or non-compliance.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 39FORCE #7: SECURE FROM START
IDENTITY ACCESS MANAGEMENT: Spell out the roles that are authorized to operate in the environment and what they’re allowed to do.
LOGGING: Capture and record every API action and network call made in the environment.
ENCRYPTION: Activate each of the cloud provider’s key management services to encrypt all data and transactions.
THIS NEW SECURITY REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE HAS THREE KEY PILLARS THAT LAY OUT, AT A MINIMUM, THE THINGS A COMPANY NEEDS TO SECURELY PLACE WORKLOADS IN THE CLOUD:
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 40FORCE #7: SECURE FROM START
STILL NOT DONE—SCANNING AND MONITORING THE CLOUD ENVIRONMENTBy defining new policies and procedures, configuring to the appropriate framework,
identifying the relevant controls and creating a cloud-specific reference architecture,
a company will be able to securely, and more quickly, take advantage of the cloud
providers’ ongoing stream of new services to build robust new capabilities and
improve business decisions.
But the task is still not done. The company also needs to build or acquire the
ability to scan and monitor all of its cloud environments to identify anomalies and
subsequently remediate them to maintain compliance. The frequency of scans will
depend on the controls involved and the associated risk. For some, such as public
S3 buckets, every 10 minutes is required. For others, such as password policy, a daily
scan is generally appropriate. Typically, scans are mainly concerned with ferreting
out misconfigurations, which are by far the most common issues detected (and, by
and large, are also unintentional). In some cases, a company will enable preventive
controls, such as changing security groups.
SECURITY VERSUS SECURE ENVIRONMENTWe hear all of the time that the cloud is inherently more secure than a typical
company’s own on-premises data centers. That’s true if we’re talking about providers’
protection against access to their servers. But it doesn’t mean the environment a
company creates for its presence is automatically just as secure. As companies
move more of their workloads to the cloud, and to many different clouds across
providers, they need to go beyond the native solutions each cloud provider
offers and take a single, common approach that’s applicable to, effective in and
independent of all environments. That’s the key to being secure from the start in a
multi-cloud environment.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 41FORCE #7: SECURE FROM START
FORCE #8:
CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)By Rodrigo Flores, Platform Innovation Lead, Accenture Cloud
We continually hear that companies are hungry for innovation, for new ideas
and for solutions that can propel their businesses past their competitors. That’s
certainly true with the cloud. Companies are spoiled for choice when it comes to
new services and features they can use to help them transform their businesses.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 42FORCE #8: CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
Well…yes and no. Lots of choice is good for companies. But the speed with which
the Hyper 3 roll out new offerings can create FOMO—Fear of Missing Out—among
consumers of cloud services. It’s like the super-popular couple with hundreds
of friends. They have so many parties, dinners, and other social engagements
to choose from, but they are concerned that by choosing to attend just some
of them, they might be missing other truly great events where something
spectacular might happen.
With the cloud, companies worry that if they don’t keep up with these
innovations, they’ll be outmaneuvered by competitors that do. And that concern
is warranted. According to an Accenture study, 75 percent of cloud-first
organizations and 50 percent of mass migrators said that within six months
their cloud projects have increased speed to market to boost their competitive
positions, compared to just 22 percent of steady migrators and 39 percent
of cautious migrators.7 So, because the cloud makes it easy to do so, various
areas of the company move quickly to embrace new services to solve their own
business problems and help them meet their business objectives.
THAT’S GOOD NEWS, RIGHT?
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 43FORCE #8: CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
WATCH OUT FOR COST AND SECURITY PROBLEMSIn theory, this is a good thing. After all, that’s why the cloud exists. But in practice,
there’s typically a downside. When capitalizing on a cloud innovation, a function or
business unit often does so without the knowledge or involvement of the company’s
IT organization. The result is “business IT” popping up across the enterprise, driven
by the need to become more agile and responsive to customers and markets. And
that, in turn, raises major concerns regarding cost and security.
The cloud makes it easy to dynamically and quickly provision services. So,
a function’s or a business unit’s developer can create the infrastructure
programmatically and provision it within minutes—and then it’s all up and running.
There’s no procurement process guiding the purchase of cloud services like the
one the IT organization has traditionally followed when buying servers for the data
center. But, the quick and painless set-up in the cloud, as well as a lack of oversight
by procurement, makes it equally easy to ring up huge bills without realizing it. And,
by the way, making sense of those bills, each of which can contain millions of line
items, is a huge effort in itself.
Similarly, security can become a big issue when cloud-based business IT proliferates.
When a developer’s setting up the infrastructure directly, is he or she setting up the
right firewall rules? Has encryption been turned on? Are the networks configured
the right way? How does the developer check? Everything’s dynamic, so even if the
developer has everything set up correctly on Monday night, on Tuesday morning
some automatic programs could be running in the background somewhere and
change the settings, compromising security. How does the developer get alerted if
that happens? Once again, lack of structured oversight—in this case, in the form of
established security processes—can result in unintended consequences.
STRIKE THE RIGHT BALANCE BETWEEN CONTROL AND INNOVATIONClearly, a company can’t afford to allow cloud costs to grow unchecked or make
itself vulnerable to security compromises. But it also can’t simply clamp down on the
business’s ability to use new cloud services to stay competitive and meet its growth
objectives. Doing so will only fan the FOMO fire (just as would limiting the number
of parties the couple mentioned earlier could attend). How, then, can a company
maintain the appropriate level of control over the use of the cloud without stifling
innovation? There’s no single “right” answer.
Some basic things can help any organization. For instance, a cloud center of
excellence (CoE) serving the entire enterprise (not siloed in one part of the business)
can act as a clearinghouse for new services, vetting them as they’re released to
determine which have the greatest potential to help the business. Staffed with
specialists in each of the Hyper 3 providers, the CoE can take the onus off of the
business to continually stay on top of what’s coming out. A cloud management
platform can help companies govern and securely manage multiple vendors
and their services—including keeping track of costs and optimizing usage across
all clouds—and seamlessly integrate a variety of platforms. Also helpful is API
integration with native providers, which makes it easier to discover and integrate
pre-existing estates and use constantly emerging new features.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 44FORCE #8: CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
IT’S A CULTURE AND STRATEGY CHALLENGEBut to truly strike the right balance between control and innovation—i.e., avoiding
unbridled spending and security issues as well as FOMO—companies need to think
about their cloud transformations as strategic and cultural issues. And the balance
will be different for each company. What would work for a mining company wouldn’t
work for a global retail bank, for a consumer goods manufacturer or for a retailer.
For instance, an agile, creative company operating in a fast-moving industry with
customers whose demands constantly change is more likely to tip the scale in favor
of innovation—allowing its people to experiment more freely but holding them
responsible for the results (both good and bad). On the other hand, a large company
that deals with highly sensitive or regulated data that must consistently meet explicit
performance milestones for its customers (or face painful penalties) is apt to be
guided by myriad of policies that unambiguously call out what people can do, the
parameters within which they can act and what’s expected of them.
The goal for both companies is to capitalize as much as possible on what the cloud
offers but to do so in a way that fits their strategy and is compatible with their
culture. Strategy and culture will define how each company should use the cloud—
to become nimbler, substantially reduce operating costs, gain economies of scale,
improve the customer experience, disrupt the competition or accomplish some
other core business objectives.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 45FORCE #8: CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE TOO MUCH INNOVATION? Conceptually, no—having a steady stream of compelling new ideas to take
advantage of is a boon for companies. But when it comes to the cloud, it could be a
huge challenge if a company isn’t prepared for it. With Amazon alone offering more
than 480,000 SKUs—with different service levels, limits and pricing—a company
needs to put in place the right policies and controls so it can take advantage of
the massive shift in the cost and quality of IT services the Hyper 3 make possible—
without being blindsided by cost and security issues. Companies that find the sweet
spot will ensure they have the proper guardrails in place so the business can fully
embrace the cloud and do so FOMO-free.
PUT FOMO IN ITS PLACE
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 46FORCE #8: CLOUD’S PACE OF INNOVATION DRIVES FOMO (FEAR OF MISSING OUT)
FORCE #9:
GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGINBy Michael Liebow, Global Managing Director, Accenture Cloud
Most organizations see the cloud as the enabling game changer it is. But as
organizations move in earnest to capitalize on the cloud, whether through the
“lift and shift” of applications or new native development, companies are only
beginning to understand the challenges that come with it: a new managing
style, new operating models, new skills, new security technology, new
governance and policies and new approaches to cost management.
The question quickly shifts to “how?” Myriad providers, native and niche, say
their products can manage these issues—one, some or all of them—yet the pool
of these providers and what they offer remains very much in flux. Companies
need to think hard about their approach—these decisions matter and can have
long-term consequence.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 47FORCE #9: GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGIN
The game is nearly over for hyper-capable providers. Once an organization moves
beyond determining which of the Hyper 3 providers to use as the enabling platform,
a new game begins. Since cloud remains a nascent market, the buying and selling
of niche players is in full swing. Those niche providers are many, but they’re also
tempting acquisition targets. When acquisitions happen, the game changes. A
solution that once seemed multi-cloud aligned may become isolated or vendor-
specific as a result of the acquisition. Or a vendor can go out of business as
providers offer a similar, but single provider capability for free or at a nominal cost. In
all cases, lock-in to any one approach can be a game-ending move.
Consider the following examples of how much can change in a short time:
• Racemi – bought by DXC Technology8
• Apprenda – out of business9
• Evident.IO – bought by Palo Alto10
• CloudHealth – bought by Vmware11
• Cloudyn – bought by Microsoft12
• Orbitera – bought by Google13
• Cloudamize – bought by private equity14
• Rightscale – bought by Flexera15
• HP tools – bought by MicroFocus16
• Cloudcruiser – bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise17
• RedHat – bought by IBM18
Companies that bet on these and other vendors—integrating their tools with other
solutions to help manage all or part of their multi-cloud presence—may have to
question the long-term viability of their investment or be left scrambling for suitable
replacements. In making a change, they’ll face both economic and technology
risks. Integration of tools comes with big upfront costs, and significant downstream
costs to customize. There’s also the possibility a tool won’t do everything a company
needs it to do, making the organization vulnerable to governance, security and
overall performance issues. And, each time a tool needs to be replaced, the business
is impacted by a costly disruption. A lot of time and effort must be spent to identify
and vet prospective new vendors, negotiate new commercials and integrate a new
tool. It all adds up to a situation that’s difficult and expensive to manage over the
long term. We speak from experience.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 48FORCE #9: GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGIN
TO BUILD OR BUY?The fact is, companies that choose to build their own cloud management
capabilities face a serious dilemma. A company that bets big on a capability,
assuming it will be predictable or stable for some period of time, is likely wrong. The
focus for most organizations should be on the level of innovation and new services
coming from the cloud providers. Companies increasingly use more than one cloud
provider and need to effectively capitalize on those steady streams of innovations
these providers roll out to avoid falling behind the competition. The need for robust
cloud management capabilities becomes not just readily apparent, but critical.
Where do you focus your resources?
The answer in our experience is–don’t do it. Resist the temptation to build your own.
Integrating dozens of tools into a seamless platform or control plane is expensive,
time consuming and, ultimately, really difficult.
Obviously with enough time and resources you could do it. A true end-to-end cloud
management platform is a compilation of dozens of different components stitched
together with IP and glue. It took Accenture $150 million, 25 patent applications,
a crew of 500, and nearly six years. You could probably do it in less time for less
money, say four years and $100 million–assuming you find the talent. We were
early and had a critical need to scale our operation–meaning we didn’t really have a
choice. We learned by doing. Why would you take all of that time and make all of that
effort if you had a reasonable alternative?
A PLATFORM CAN BE YOUR BEST FRIEND Many companies are finding a managed service is a better alternative to wrangling
multiple vendors and solutions. With a managed service, companies benefit from
the platform provider’s experience and work to identify, vet and integrate all of the
best tools into a single solution covering the full spectrum of cloud management.
The platform provider is responsible for ensuring the tools work together as a
cohesive whole and is on the hook to replace tools at its own cost when necessary.
The platform provider also is typically able to negotiate better rates from the specific
tool vendors because it’s delivering the capabilities across a large, aggregated
customer base. So, the economics are more attractive than they would be for a
single company. And, because the capabilities are delivered as a service, a company
can gain access to comprehensive cloud management capabilities in a matter of
weeks, not years, without upfront purchase or long-term integration costs.
With a pre-integrated, on demand, pay-as-you-go platform, a company can improve
cloud operations, maintain security, control cost and ensure governance of its
growing multi-cloud estate—without having to worry about vendor instability or the
massive amount of work and expense it takes to build an end-to-end solution.
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 49FORCE #9: GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGIN
The game is changing. As we look ahead, it’s clear that many companies are now
ramping up their public cloud efforts after having selected one or more of
the Hyper 3. That game is over. Organizations are now beginning to understand
there’s a new game at play that comes with the challenges of managing their
new cloud estates. Companies need to avoid making rash decisions on such
tools because they feel overwhelmed by all that effective cloud management
requires. This game is not for the faint hearted. But there is a path to win, avoid
lock-in and deliver the business and technical benefits that cloud offers—and
that’s taking full advantage of what others, such as Accenture, have learned.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 50FORCE #9: GAME OVER. LET THE GAMES BEGIN
Michael Liebow Global Managing Director, Accenture Cloud
Michael Liebow is the Global Managing Director
for Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP), a secure,
scalable, enterprise-ready cloud integration
system that provides management and control over hybrid cloud services. Liebow leads a large portion of Accenture’s cloud investment, myriad of ecosystem partners and a 500-person global team to build and operate Accenture’s cloud platform business. Prior to joining Accenture, Liebow served in a diverse range of leadership roles including: Fellow at the U.S. Department of
State; founder of a ‘big data’ venture launched in
the startup battlefield at TechCrunch DISRUPT;
executive in residence at a top three leading VC,
New Enterprise Associates; Board Member; startup
CEO; and IBM executive.
Michael Rutherford Cloud Product Management Sr. Manager, Accenture Cloud
Michael Rutherford is a Cloud Product Management Sr. Manager on the Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP) team focused on driving the product portfolio for private cloud, cloud management and security services across Accenture’s client ecosystems. Rutherford has been in the infrastructure space for 17 years with expertise in infrastructure strategy, service development, hybrid cloud design, product management and global outsourcing operations for multi-tenant and dedicated client environments. Prior to ACP, Rutherford designed, built and managed private cloud environments in Asia, North America and Europe and developed global service offerings for Accenture’s outsourcing organization.
Tristan Morel L’Horset Managing Director, North America Intelligent Cloud & Infrastructure Sales Lead
Tristan Morel L’horset, Accenture’s North America Cloud and Infrastructure Managed Services Lead, has more than 20 years’ experience helping clients maximize the business value of their Cloud and Infrastructure investments. Morel L’Horset leverages his industry expertise, and technology capabilities and innovation, to help optimize his clients’ digital journey. Morel L’Horset spent three years in France as an expatriate to successfully build and grow Accenture’s Infrastructure Outsourcing practice and deliver large IT Transformation and Outsourcing engagements to Accenture’s French clients. With 15 years in technology services, he has extensive experience with global and large clients, as well as the federal sector, working with top-level government agencies.
AUTHOR BIOS
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 51
Andrew Wilson CIO, Accenture
Andrew Wilson is responsible for IT in the New for global IT operations and driving the digital agenda of the $39.6 billion company. This includes infrastructure, services and applications that enable Accenture people to work anytime, anywhere to serve clients in more than 120 countries. Wilson ensures that Accenture is at the forefront of innovation as a digital business—from mission-critical applications to the network, from e-mail and laptops to enterprise social media and collaboration tools. He also leads CIO Ecosystem Products and Services, and in this capacity, is responsible for Accenture’s buy-side relationships with strategic suppliers as well as supplier management services delivered to clients. Wilson served as Accenture’s Global LGBT Network Sponsor for five years.
Sean Peterson Cloud Management CoE Lead, Accenture Cloud
Sean Peterson currently serves as the Cloud Management CoE Lead for Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP). His primary areas of responsibility include leading a team of architects to assist various practices platform onto cloud architectures (including IaaS, PaaS and applications), improving the Solutions ‘aaS’ model and onboarding theses services into the ACP Catalog for lifecycle automation. Sean has extensive experience with Cloud Native PaaS, IoT, Analytics, eComm/Web and SAP architectures on cloud, and is an Accenture Certified Master Technology Architect.
Catherine Gulsvig Wood Cloud Product Management Sr. Manager, Accenture Cloud
Catherine Gulsvig Wood is the Senior Product Manager for Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP). Gulsvig Wood is a pioneer in the field of IT, joining Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) after graduating from Lawrence University with a bachelor’s degree in piano performance. She has subsequently held leadership positions with Cray Research and served as an IT consultant for such organizations as Channel Four Television (London), ING, and Thrivent Financial. Prior to joining Accenture, Gulsvig Wood built both public and private clouds for several enterprises, in both the U.S. and Europe, including Cisco’s own internal cloud. She holds patents on “provider-agnostic” technologies for managing application stacks and PaaS resources in multiple clouds. A self-taught programmer, Gulsvig Wood seeks to integrate viewpoints and approaches from a multitude of disciplines to create breakthrough IT products and services.
AUTHOR BIOS
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 52
Jonathan Roz Global Client Delivery, Security & Operations Lead, Accenture Cloud
Jonathan Roz is a Managing Director responsible for the delivery of Accenture Cloud Platform for Accenture clients. Roz joined Accenture in 2000 as an experienced hire from EDS. Prior to his current position with ACP, Jonathan held a series of roles at Accenture, primarily focused on managing client relationships for large outsourcing projects. In addition to his position as global delivery lead, Roz is also accountable for the implementation of a global cloud security program within Accenture. His areas of expertise focus on client delivery, contract and financial management, cloud, security and service governance.
Rodrigo Flores Platform Innovation Lead, Accenture Cloud
Rodrigo Flores is Managing Director of Product Innovation, Architecture and Management for Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP). Prior to joining Accenture, Flores was CTO & Enterprise Architect at Cisco’s Intelligent Automation Business Unit working on Cisco’s cloud management product. Flores was the Founder and CTO of newScale, the pioneer in Service Catalog automation, acquired by Cisco. Flores is a frequent writer and speaker on cloud technology trends, co-authored the first book on service catalogs, “Defining IT Success Through Service Catalog,” and led the creation and delivery of the first Service Catalog course. He also drove the creation of the ITIL course and exam for Service Catalogs, now part of Expert ITIL schema, and conducted the initial master class. He holds several patents in workflow technology.
AUTHOR BIOS A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO THE FOLLOWING CONTRIBUTORS
Allison Conrad Associate Director & Global
Lead, Solutions Management,
Accenture Cloud Cori Brodelius Accenture Cloud Platform
Market and Competitive
Analysis Lead
Douglas Chandler Accenture Research Manager
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 53
ENDNOTES1 Commvault and CITO Research, August 14, 2017, “Cloud FOMO Is Real: Study Confirms C-Level and Other IT Leaders Have Fear of Missing out on Cloud Advancements,” https://www.commvault.com/news/2017/august/study-confirms-c-level-and-other-it-leaders-have-fear-of-missing-out-on-cloud-advancements
2 Synergy Research Group, January 7, 2019, “2018 Review Shows $250 billion Cloud Market Ecosystem Growing at 32% Annually,” https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/2018-review-shows-250-billion-cloud-market-ecosystem-growing-32-annually
3 Cleveland Research, 2017 Cloud Vendor Results Recap, February 2, 2018.
4 Gartner, Inc., September 18, 2018, “Gartner says 28 Percent of Spending in Key IT Segments Will Shift to the Cloud by 2022,” https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-09-18-gartner-says-28-percent-of-spending-in-key-IT-segments-will-shift-to-the-cloud-by-2022
5 451 Research, “Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation,” November 27, 2017, https://451research.com/images/Marketing/press_releases/Pre_Re-Invent_2018_press_release_final_11_22.pdf
6 Accenture, January 17, 2019, “Cybercrime Could Cost Companies US$5.2 Trillion Over Next Five Years, According to New Research from Accenture,” https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/cybercrime-could-cost-companies-us-5-2-trillion-over-next-five-years-according-to-new-research-from-accenture.htm
7 IDG Research and sponsored by the Accenture AWS Business Group, “Accelerating the cloud migration dividend - IDG Research,” https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-public-cloud-migration-acceleration
8 “DXC Technology (DXC) to Post Q4 Earnings: A Beat in Store?,” May 21, 2018 https://www.nasdaq.com/article/dxc-technology-dxc-to-post-q4-earnings-a-beat-in-store-cm966257
9 “Apprenda attempting to sell its assets after business shuts down,” August 21, 2019 https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2018/08/21/report-apprenda-attempting-to-sell-its-assets.html
10 “Palo Alto Networks Closes Acquisition of Evident.io,” March 26, 2018 https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/company/press/2018/palo-alto-networks-closes-acquisition-of-evident-io
11 “VMware Closes CloudHealth Acquisition,” October 5, 2018 https://www.lightreading.com/services/cloud-services/vmware-closes-cloudhealth-acquisition/d/d-id/746612
12 “Yes, Microsoft Is Buying This Cloud Monitoring Startup After All,” June 29, 2017 http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/microsoft-buys-cloudyn/
13 “Google buys Orbitera, a platform for cloud marketplaces, for $100M+,” August 8, 2016 Shttps://techcrunch.com/2016/08/08/google-buys-orbitera-a-platform-for-building-marketplaces-cloud-software/
14 “Cloudamize just merged with Blackstone-owned Cloudreach in a push for growth,” August 3, 2017 https://technical.ly/philly/2017/08/03/cloudamize-merger-cloudreach-philadelphia/
15 “Flexera Acquires RightScale - The Multi-Cloud Management Platform Company,” September 26, 2018 https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2018/09/26/flexera-acquires-rightscale-the-multi-cloud-management-platform-company/#5db7f13e5433
16 “HP Enterprise strikes $8.8 billion deal with Micro Focus for software assets,” September 7, 2017 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hpenterprise-software-microfocus-idUSKCN11D2EU
17 “Hewlett Packard Enterprise makes second acquisition in a week,” January 24, 2017 https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/01/24/hewlett-packard-enterprise-makes-second.html
18 “IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion,” October 18, 2018 https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-deal-valued-at-34-billion.html
COPYRIGHT © 2019 ACCENTURE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACCENTURE, AND ITS LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF ACCENTURE. PAGE 54
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range
of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations.
Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40
industries and all business functions – underpinned by the world’s largest delivery
network – Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help
clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders.
With more than 495,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture
drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives.
Visit us at www.accenture.com.
This document is produced by consultants at Accenture as general guidance.
It is not intended to provide specific advice on your circumstances. If you
require advice or further details on any matters referred to, please contact your
Accenture representative.
This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by
others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such
trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an
association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks.