Accenture
Siddharth Purohit is a Senior Manager in Accenture’s Technology Strategy & Advisory practice. He focuses on Enterprise Agility, Technology Value Realization and Cloud Acceleration & Innovation for the Resources industries. Debanjan Chakraborty is a Managing Director in Accenture’s Technology Strategy & Advisory practice. He focuses on Enterprise Agility, Technology Value Realization, Cloud Acceleration & Innovation and Data Led Transformation for the Resources industries. Ruari Monahan is a Managing Director in Accenture’s Strategy & Consulting practice for Utilities. As the global CloudFirst lead for Utilities, he focuses on business transformation through large scale implementation and migration via cloud enablement.
Utilities lag significantly behind other industries in adopting cloud computing, primarily because of the disincentives imposed by traditional regulatory accounting. Cloud computing, however, has tremendous value propositions in driving safe, clean, and affordable utility services and infrastructure, which are the very premises the regulatory bodies want to ascertain.
Major industry trends, such as decarbonization, decentralization, and democratization are strongly underpinned by digital technologies and the cloud provides the essential framework on which utilities can build their innovation capabilities.
This article discusses the urgency for utilities and regulators to accelerate their journey to the cloud and the steps to be taken to embark on that journey.
Cloud Value Proposition to Utilities
Cloud computing drives business agility by enabling rapid deployment of technology solutions to dramatically increase speed to value. Most software vendors now offer cloud-native Software-as-a-Service solutions that are managed by the vendors to evolving industry best practices, freeing up valuable time for utility employees. Public cloud also provides access to many prepackaged marketplace applications that can be quickly procured and leveraged to solve business problems and enhance customer experience.