Accenture Adds Migration and Management Tools to Cloud Platform

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As part of a concerted effort to increase the number of workloads managed in the cloud, Accenture this week added a suite of cloud migration and management tools to the Accenture Cloud Platform.

Chris Wegmann, managing director for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) practice at Accenture, says the new release of the cloud platform contains a mix of third-party tools and technologies developed by Accenture. In addition to closing down data centers, many organizations are looking for managed services provided by firms such as Accenture rather than employing their own full-time staffs.

Driving that decision is not just the cost of IT labor, but the ability to scale IT labor resources up and down as needed alongside the applications running on cloud infrastructure, says Wegmann.

In addition to the cloud migration tools, Accenture this week added more tools to provide visibility into the costs associated with consuming cloud resources and tools that give IT organizations more control over the governance of those resources. At the same time, Wegmann says Accenture is now providing integration with a variety of IT service management tools, starting with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications provided by ServiceNow.

Rather than build its own data centers, the Accenture Cloud Platform leverages infrastructure provided by multiple public cloud and hosting services providers to create what amounts to a hybrid cloud that enables applications to be deployed where cost and location make the most sense.

Accenture will continue to provide services for managing application workloads on premise. But Wegmann notes that there has been a surge in the number of legacy application workloads moving to the cloud. Those legacy applications may not ever have the agility of a “cloud-native” application, says Wegmann, but via the cloud, they gain access to the latest generation of processors, which enables them to run faster than on the IT infrastructure upon which they are currently installed. Obviously, organizations could upgrade the legacy IT infrastructure on which those applications currently run, but not without incurring substantial capital expenses.

Beyond being able to treat IT labor as an operating expense, Wegmann also notes that Accenture has wrapped its cloud offering in a set of IT analytics tools that most IT organizations simply can’t afford to replicate. Because of this, organizations that contract with Accenture generally gain access to a more operationally efficient IT environment, says Wegmann.

It’s still unclear just how many application workloads will run on external cloud services in the years ahead. But the one thing that is for certain is that the bar for justifying the running of a workload on premise is getting higher with each passing day.