COVID-19: Cloud interoperability is more critical now, says Accenture Technology’s Kishore P Durg

Kishore P Durg, senior managing director, lead – Intelligent Cloud & Infrastructure, Accenture Technology

Even though many organisations have seen cloud as a catalyst for innovation, there was no sense of urgency to accelerate cloud adoption through the enterprise —until now. For many of them, Covid-19 has shifted their cloud agenda from an aspiration to an immediate priority as they look to build a resilient business. “In the past few months, we have seen a significant spike in cloud demand as businesses look to expand their cloud-based platforms to drive cost-efficiency, increase agility and deliver faster innovation needed to remain resilient,” says Kishore P Durg, senior managing director, lead – Intelligent Cloud & Infrastructure, Accenture Technology, in an interview with Sudhir Chowdhary. Excerpts:

How is Accenture helping companies navigate the complex landscape given the shift to hybrid cloud environments?
Covid-19 has stretched and exposed a lot of businesses to resiliency issues, making them accelerate their decision to migrate to cloud rather rapidly. However, the challenge for most organisations right now is understanding how to support business-critical applications that are complex, industry-specific and absolutely secure. While businesses look to adopt the right cloud solution to meet their business need immediately, identifying the right solution from beginning to end is complicated and time-consuming.

To manage this complexity for our clients, we leverage Accenture myNav, a cloud platform that provides an end-to-end ability to navigate the complexity of the cloud landscape and determine optimal cloud solutions that best fit our clients’ specific business requirements. This enables us to identify the right solution before “putting feet on the ground,” lowering risk and cost, while maximising value.

Why should enterprises focus on cloud interoperability? What are the benefits?
Cloud interoperability has a clear and an important role to play in enterprise cloud strategy, now more than ever, as companies seek to mitigate vendor lock-ins, ensure business continuity and navigate through fluctuating workloads. To seamlessly migrate between clouds, organisations need to:

• Determine the right level of “stickiness” with existing cloud platform and port rest to a new cloud service provider;
• Use published adapters to port applications across platforms and open environments to bridge different cloud platforms to port and interoperate systems;
• Evaluate the usage of common APIs and platform-agnostic containers during development phase to avoid lock-ins.

What are the new areas that companies are looking at adopting cloud?
The current situation has forced organisations to dramatically change the way they operate. Digital payments, for instance, has become a preferred method for consumers and businesses to keep things moving in the lockdown. With enterprises being bombarded with customer and stakeholder demands, they are realising the transformational effect of cloud and are investing to help them build agility and outmanoeuvre the uncertainty.

There are three specific reasons why organisations are moving to cloud:

• Many industries are facing pressure to deliver value by creating optimised operating models. Many companies in travel, oil & gas, electronics manufacturing sectors are moving away from the traditional fixed cost to a variable cost based operating model to improve agility and deliver superior customer experiences.
• Banks are adopting a cloud-first approach to enable higher system availability and security posture to build increased resiliency.Organisations are looking to accelerate efficiency of the IT network with a cloud-based strategy to drive business.

How is Accenture working on expanding its capabilities to provide cloud services?
We are expanding our capabilities by developing market-ready industry solutions on the cloud to address unique business needs and help clients accelerate their cloud journey. Enabling learning programmes for our people to be cloud conversant and develop deeper proficiencies continuously is part of this.

We are also maintaining global alliance relationships with all the top cloud providers as well as major SaaS ecosystems players to enable our clients to be successful.