Accenture Enhances Cloud Migration and Management via AWS Cloud Alliance

Key Security Considerations for Enterprise Cloud Deployments

At the AWS re:Invent 2014 conference today, Accenture announced that it is extending its cloud computing alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include an Accenture Enterprise Application Migration Service for the AWS Cloud. The company will be providing tighter integration between the self-service cloud management framework that Accenture created and AWS management tools.

In addition, Accenture announced that it is building an Accenture Center of Excellence for AWS Cloud in Seattle where customers can work with consultants to move large-scale applications into the cloud.

While most organizations say they want a single pane of glass through which they can manage everything in and out of the cloud, Michael Liebow, global managing director for the Accenture Cloud Platform, says that this isn’t feasible. Instead, Liebow says IT organizations will be better served by a federated set of tools that are tightly integrated with one another. In fact, Liebow says the one thing that Accenture has learned since launching a federated cloud service spanning multiple cloud providers is that trying to create a single pane of management glass is a “fool’s errand.”

Thus far, Accenture claims to have worked on more than 8,000 cloud computing projects for clients, including nearly 75 percent of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 14,000 professionals trained in cloud computing. Liebow says the vast majority of Accenture’s cloud efforts are focused on clients that need to deploy applications in the cloud at scale, versus boutique integrators that can’t match Accenture’s global reach. In fact, Accenture says it will have invested more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015.

Of course, while Accenture is working with AWS to move workloads into the cloud, there is also a surprising amount of movement of application workloads out of the cloud onto systems running on premise and even between different public cloud services. Accenture figures to play a role in all those migrations no matter what the ultimate balance in the age of the hybrid cloud winds up being.