IT leaders are crippled by digital 'inertia': here’s what they can do about it

Australian organisations' digital modernisation has become bogged down by complexity and cost as it enters a more difficult phase, say leaders of Accenture Cloud First and VMware in Australia.

"We're in one of the biggest changes and the biggest shifts of technology at the enterprise level, which makes it exciting, but at the same time, very challenging," says Accenture Cloud First ANZ Lead Matt Coates.

More than two-thirds of workloads will shift to the cloud over the next three to five years, forecasts Accenture's Cloud Continuum Research. About a third of enterprises aim to move more than 75 percent of workloads into the cloud across most regions.

But Coates argues that the gap between ambition and execution has never been larger. In his view, this “inertia” is largely the result of organisations grappling with core legacy applications and infrastructure.

“The easy stuff has been done. And now a lot of our clients are wading through the business critical applications – the things that were built 15, 20 years ago that are tightly integrated. For example, the on-premise mainframe based legacy monolithic applications that they haven't touched for a long time are now all on the agenda,” Coates says.

"It presents challenges around where to focus, it presents challenges about how much they can do, where to get the skills, the governance, where the value is – [there are] so many different things on the table that they're trying to navigate. And when this set of technology is so pervasive across an organisation everybody's involved and the decision making grinds to a halt."

IT leaders are overwhelmed by the number of solutions and services available. "Not a week goes by when there's not another option, another new application of technology that presents some opportunity but then also makes you question – are we making the right choices?” Coates says.

VMware estimates that 75 percent of its enterprise customers use two or more public clouds. "When the hyperscalers bring out new services, how does that affect what you may have already been thinking about? As new vendors bring out new technologies…does that change your roadmap?"

The Accenture VMware Business Group is helping IT leaders to navigate through this path of uncertainty and roadblocks.

Achieving IT ‘freedom’

A key challenge for IT leaders, according to the Accenture VMware Business Group, is "controlling their own destiny” in a multicloud world.

This requires the ability to move workloads freely between environments. "That's where you need an unbiased, customer-focused situational point of view," points out VMware's Vice President and Managing Director of ANZ, Brad Anderson.

Organisations also need to decide how to deal with diverse application portfolios. “The underlying assumption in the early days of cloud was we're going to migrate everything,” Anderson says. “The reality is that cloud migration should be dependent on such factors as business need and complexity.” 

This requires a more nuanced application strategy. “When's the last time you really took stock of your applications? Do you need to retire half of those? Do you want to take them all up to the cloud?,” Anderson asks.

Security remains another challenge. Having "hundreds of security apps patching holes is not sustainable", Anderson comments. "Building security into the platform is the way of the future."

This requires a technical platform that enables multicloud agility and a zero trust approach to security. It also requires deep expertise and governance.     

In early 2021 the two companies announced the Accenture VMware Business Group, enabling them to offer these technical and strategic capabilities as a single provider.

“Connecting all that together is really important, because without it, you just end up with a whole bunch of disparate activities across an organisation,” Coates comments. “I think that's where some of the power of Accenture and VMware working together comes into it. It's actually connecting the doing with the strategy.”

"Part of the power of our two brands coming together is that we've done this many times with many customers so we know how to work together and how to approach the problem," Coates says.

"We've got patterns and blueprints on problems that we've seen before and so we can pretty quickly get to a point of knowing where we need to focus to drive value out for customers, knowing where we need to focus to actually accelerate, knowing where we need to focus to get velocity."

And acceleration, in Coates’ view, is necessary for constant digital evolution. Which is, he says, “a far cry from where many organisations are today.”

Find out more about how the Accenture VMware Business Group can help you operationalise your transformation journey efficiently by contacting us or visiting us online.