Making Cloud Services Less Nebulous _ Accenture Pega

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Digital Evolution

Adapting Business for a Digital World
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THEME: Cloud

Making cloud services less nebulous
More companies are gaining clarity on the advantages of
cloud computing
5 MIN READ   From Accenture Pega

From Accenture Pega
6th April 2015

Making cloud services less nebulous
If you’re an established business, the cloud can seem like a mixed bag.
On the one hand, migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud could be a budgetfriendly move. On the other hand, the cloud has dramatically lowered the barrier to
entry in some industries, thus, it’s all the more likely that some upstart could come
along and disrupt your business—if it hasn’t already.
Moving a traditional business into the cloud is more challenging than to start one

there from scratch. However, once the move is made, a company has effectively
leveled the playing field—those companies are better positioned to stave off
competition from any startups stepping into their space.
Still, despite cost savings, quantum leaps in computing power and the competitive
advantage afforded by cloud computing, many firms are still holding out. Last year,
industry researcher, IDC, estimated that businesses spent around $100-billion on
cloud computing. That may sound like a hefty sum—until you consider it’s only 5
percent of the $2-trillion that’s spent on IT annually. Why are companies so hesitant?
One reason is there’s a cultural resistance to giving up control, says Mark Grindle,
cloud strategy leader North America for Accenture. “People are used to running their
own infrastructure,” he says. “Giving up control to another organization is a bit
disconcerting to a lot of people.”
Grindle says the dynamics are similar to when IT departments began virtualizing their
systems a few years ago. “There were a lot of business groups and end users that
wanted their own hardware and wanted to know that it was their server and their
storage and all of it was dedicated to them. Now with the advent of the cloud, they’re
giving up the entire environment. So that’s a big change to the culture and how people
think.”
Perceived security weaknesses are another reason businesses are holding off, Grindle
says. “Most of that is unfounded now,” he says. “It’s been a concern, but cloud
computing is very secure. In fact, in most cases, cloud computing is more secure than
traditional data centers and infrastructure.”
People are also concerned about downtime. We’ve all heard horror stories of outages
at a cloud provider that take down websites for hours at a time. However, this is
another case in which the cloud is actually superior to standard data centers, Grindle
says. “The big cloud providers are selling their environments to a multitude of
customers,” Grindle says. “So downtime equals a lot of lost revenue for them. They do
a lot to make sure their environments are always up and running.” That’s not to say
outages don’t happen, but data centers, which are subject to power interruptions and
network interruptions, suffer more downtime generally, Grindle says.
The potential cost savings and competitive advantages of cloud computing will allay
fears and overcome many objections soon enough, says Grindle. That’s when the
industry will really start to see savings accelerate because companies will start to
employ flex computing. “Once you start putting in the right automation and
orchestration tools to have your workloads flexed to dynamically adjust capacity, you
achieve an even a greater cost savings. Then you’re just paying for what you’ve used,
not what you’ve allocated or guessed you would need.”
In fact, companies that have moved their operations to the cloud have found the cost

savings is actually a secondary benefit compared with the new speed and agility they
enjoy. For example, say a company has a huge surge in usage because it releases an
app that becomes a hit or there’s a natural disaster that overwhelms an insurance
company with customer claims. With cloud technology, a company can simply scale up
rather
than
physically accommodate more activity in a data center and then scale back
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down when things return to normal. “You can provide a new service for your business
much more quickly than you can in a traditional infrastructure,” Grindle explains. “And
that’s the real benefit; you can respond to changing market speeds.”
Of course, not everyone can move everything into the cloud. Industries that must
adhere to compliance standards related to sensitive data—such as the financial
services and insurance sectors—find that a partial solution makes more sense. Thus,
hybrid cloud solutions are quickly gaining traction.
“Hybrid cloud has been one of those things that has been talked about for years,” says
Grindle. “Now we’re making it much more of a reality.” For instance, companies can do
their development, testing and quality assurance in a public cloud and then port that
into a private cloud or even onto traditional infrastructure. “That agility has been
something that has been a real challenge for years,” Grindle notes.
The new-found agility allowed by cloud computing is quickly translating into new
opportunities. So what’s the biggest trend on the horizon for 2015? ”People are
getting very creative in their cloud use,” says Grindle. “They’re using it for things that
we wouldn’t have necessarily thought of a few years ago. I think that evolution is going
to continue.”
One example comes from, of all places, the U.S. government. NASA’s Nebula cloud
computing platform lets scientists and engineers share their computer systems rather
than build new data centers, thus saving money and allowing them to use large,
complex data sets. It seems that when it comes to the cloud, the sky’s the limit.   

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