Accenture has launched myNav, a cloud platform to help organizations to design and simulate different cloud solutions to identify the ones that best fit their specific business requirements. According to Kishore Durg, senior managing director—Accenture cloud lead, technology growth and strategy lead, Global Leadership Council, identifying the right cloud solution can be complicated, as there are multiple cloud providers and cloud models, including public, private, multi, and hybrid. In addition, many companies are spending large amounts of time and budgets migrating applications and data centers to the cloud and then finding that their applications don't work the way that they expected.
Durg cited Accenture research that found that nearly two-thirds of companies are not seeing the expected benefits from their cloud migration initiatives.
Likening a cloud migration to a move to a new house, said Durg, said myNav is all about visualization of the various aspects of the move. "Today, a lot of clients are doing it without visualization and simulation capabilities. This is like giving them a walk-through of their new house and making sure the bedroom furniture goes into the bedroom and the kitchen is properly modeled. The simulation of the new architecture and the new layout is the power of myNav."
myNav evaluates multiple variables, such as an organization’s technology infrastructure, applications, data, operational model and business outcomes, and identifies the right solution for enterprises, then simulates it at scale to confirm its viability and refine the business case. By providing a customized roadmap, the goal is to maximize the return on their current and future cloud technology investments.
myNav has been built on Accenture's knowledge repository of more than 30,000 cloud projects and over 80 industry solutions deployed worldwide and uses this repository to simulate optimal and scalable cloud architectures and solutions. By providing a more informed view and a calibrated cloud strategy for business transformation, the company says, myNav will help clients compete more effectively in today’s data-driven, cloud-enabled economy.
The new platform provides a recommended cloud target through a three-step process:
- Scanning and assessing the client’s existing infrastructure, application and data landscape and recommending the most appropriate cloud architecture and solution;
- Using an automated artificial intelligence (AI) engine to interact with Accenture’s library of collective cloud expertise and recommend an enterprise architecture and solution; and
- Simulating and testing the scaled-up model of the client’s recommended cloud solution to identify the value and help build the business case for an optimal solution for their business requirements.
Organizations are trying to decide which data to keep on-premise, which data to expose, and there are a host of complexities about what the data architecture will look like, Durg said. "Hybrid cloud scenarios can get very complex." Among the considerations are which data should be moved, where the data will sit, how it will be cleansed and curated, and how it will move to the cloud.
Today, said Durg, clients are making business-changing decisions and they need reassurance about what it will look like, the savings that will be attained, which public cloud provider they should go with , and whether a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy will best, and how long the process will take.
"What we are trying to avoid is having hundreds of people trying to migrate data from a data center to the cloud, realizing that they didn't think of a scenario, and then repeatedly trying to do it correctly. We want to help our clients visualize and simulate a lot of issues, without actually putting a person on the ground. This will give them a lot of confidence and credibility in terms of the solutions."
Additional information is available from Accenture at www.accenture.com.