Accenture is going to become the first few companies to have most of its internal operations in the cloud.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, this company plans to move more than 90 percent of its IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Out of all the divisions, Accenture Australia is leading the way in this adoption of cloud.

This strategy is significant in many ways. Firstly, Accenture is one of the leading companies in terms of cloud usage. Already, it’s the biggest user of Office 365 in the world with an employee strength of more than 260,000. It also uses cloud extensively for documentation management. In fact, for internal document maintenance, it uses software-as-a-solution (SaaS) products like Salesforce to increase its productivity and efficiency. Given this usage, it’s only natural for the company to envision a future where all its applications are in the cloud.

The second aspect that makes this strategy interesting is that Accenture will be in a better position to advise its clients on the right cloud path. When this company has most of its applications in the cloud, it gets more credibility for it to talk about cloud adoption to its clients. In this sense, this strategy can even boost its business in a big way.

That said, this transition process is not going to be easy for Accenture. Already, there have been concerns about moving mission-critical data to the cloud and this is one area that the company will take a deep look into before making its move. It may even choose to keep the remaining 10 percent of data and application in an on-premise storage, if its management feel so strongly about the security.

Another major challenge that Accenture will face is the presence of a large number of legacy systems. Some of its divisions have either near-new applications or very old legacy applications, both of which may be difficult to move. In the case of near-new applications, the investments that were made by the company in its infrastructure can go down the drain if it moves to the cloud without realizing the returns.

One possible way to overcome this problem is to wait till the end of the life of that software and replace it with a cloud-first or cloud-only investment. But, that could take time, depending on the expected life of the application.

In the case of legacy systems though, migrating them to the cloud can be a real hassle. It’ll be interesting to see how Accenture is going to handle both these classes of its assets and system while migrating to the cloud. If it comes with a good strategy, it can set a good precedent for others to move to the cloud as well.

Overall though, it’s a great strategy as it is sure to offer a ton of benefits for Accenture in the long run. It can not only increase its productivity and efficiency, but can also save a ton of money in the process. Not to mention, the example that it would set for other companies to follow suit.

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