Everyone knows the cloud is the place to be. It consistently provides greater flexibility, more agility and new opportunities for innovation which aren’t possible in an on-premise environment. No surprise, then, that more than 90 percent of today’s enterprises are already consuming cloud services in some form. To help its Clients navigate in this challenging journey, Accenture introduces Cloud Ascent, a new and unique solution which seeks to help enterprises maximise their value by leveraging their cloud potential.

Recent disruptions have further made companies aware  that cloud is not some future aspiration—it is an urgent mandate which must be positioned at the heart of every business.

However, a rushed migration to cloud without a clear strategy, can end up costing businesses more and leaving existing legacy applications to rack up consumption— and costs—at an alarming rate.

Numerous efforts to adopt and scale-up to cloud have slowed or stalled. Some enterprises have got stuck in an experimental mind-set without a sense of where their cloud journey is heading. Others have struggled to make a clear business case for scaling their use of the cloud. Most businesses have, on average, only about 20 – 40 percent of their workloads on the cloud, most of them on the easier, less complex versions. For a range of different reasons, technology, security, complexity, legacy, data sovereignty, human psychology workloads remain on-the premises of data centers.

Nearly two-thirds say they have not yet achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives. Enterprises which continue to delay a scalable shift to the cloud are not just incurring an opportunity cost but are risking their very survival.

The time to scale cloud adoption is now. Accenture has identified five essential elements to maximize the full value of cloud for your business:

1. Migrate and scale-up – get your workloads onto the cloud rapidly, securely and with confidence, by selecting the right infrastructure for your business. Harness the cloud’s full potential by aligning your entire enterprise in the process; realising the value of migration throughout and beyond the process; and by prioritizing the “low hanging fruit”. 

1. Get the most from hyperscalers – build partnerships with public cloud hyperscalers. Leverage their global scale and apply their deep expertise and innovations to boost digital transformation and create value for your business. 

1. Modernize and accelerate – ramp up your organizational speed and agility by restructuring architectures, applications and data for cloud. Consider this process carefully, build applications specifically for your cloud environment, based on a solid application discovery assessment which considers the future of your organization. 

1. Run and optimize – adopt new ways of operating that push your cloud estate to ever higher levels of business performance and sustainability. You must continuously manage your consumption, capacity, performance and crucially, your costs. 

1. Innovate and grow – use cloud as a digital transformation lever. Through the strategic use of data, advanced analytics and AI, cloud will facilitate rapid experimentation, where you can spin up new environments instantly and try out several ideas at once.

Cloud has proven its centrality to resilient and sustainable enterprise solutions which secure future competitive advantage. If you are not substantially on the cloud, you cannot hope to realise the full potential of your business.

To learn more about how to maximise your cloud investments, read the Cloud Ascent latest point of view and contact Thibaut Henry or Emmanuel Libeau for more info.