Cloud is an urgent mandate and no longer a future aspiration. The global disruption wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has re-emphasised the fundamental value of systems resilience, agility, adaptability and scalability.

Luxembourgish companies have understood that cloud is the place to be. Flexibility, agility, and new opportunities for innovation are the main drivers. No surprise, then, that more than 90 percent of the country’s companies have adopted cloud in one form or another.

So, what’s the challenge? Efforts to adopt and scale to cloud have slowed or stalled at many companies. Skills deficit, technology debt, regulations, and security remain common challenges for all. Some organisations are stuck in an experimental mindset without a sense of where their cloud journey is headed. Others are struggling to make a clear business case for scaling up their use of cloud.

Luxembourgish companies have understood that cloud is the place to be.
Thibaut Henry

Thibaut Henryassociate director – cloud practice lead Accenture

The result? Most Luxembourgish companies have, on average, only about one third of their workloads in the cloud, most of which are the easier, less complex ones. And nearly two thirds say they haven’t achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives to date.

What’s the secret of a successful cloud journey?

The key to accelerating the value you get from cloud, and lowering the risk while getting there, is to know where you’re headed – and why… A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.

Although public cloud continues to grow, the predictable realistic future is hybrid cloud: a composition of two or more clouds (with at least one public and one private) that remain unique entities but are bound together enabling application and data portability.

can be complex and requires a well-designed overarching Cloud Control Plane.

A Continuum Control Plane can be seen as an extended view in comparison to traditional Cloud Management Platforms, which are very tool driven. A is primarily an operating model change to support both worlds, providing holistic management across all infrastructure estates (a.k.a. hybrid cloud), which is essential for a future-ready IT organisation.

How long does it take to move to cloud?

Getting to cloud is only the first part of the journey. Once you’re there, you need to learn how to thrive in your new cloud environment – and capitalise on the huge efficiency and innovation potential it offers. This means, ultimately, becoming a more cloud native enterprise – one that modernises infrastructure, applications, and data specifically to maximise the value of a cloud environment. Furthermore, in a world of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and increasingly edge computing, cloud environments need to be viewed as a continuum.

To benefit from new waves of technologies, companies need to plan now for continuous innovation.
Thibaut Henry

Thibaut Henryassociate director – cloud practice leadAccenture

Simply rehosting your applications in the cloud will likely cut some costs and solve some technical debt issues… but that’s just the starting point. Only when you modernize your applications for the cloud will the business really start to extract value from this new environment.

To benefit from new waves of technologies, companies need to plan now for continuous innovation. This means being able to re-engineer applications data & infrastructures as new technologies become available.

By leveraging more flexible cloud native architectures and advanced Platform-as-a-Service capabilities, you’ll create systems that can talk to each other better, that allow new business rules to be encoded more easily, and that support continuous improvement, faster releases, and greater innovation.