Accenture has been granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the analytics-based multi-cloud tagging capabilities of their Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP). Introduced in 2013, ACP is a multi-cloud management platform that enables organizations to manage their enterprise public and private cloud resources centrally from one control plane.
Accenture Cloud Platform would allow enterprises to improve operations, maintain security, control cost and ensure governance of their growing cloud estate. The newly issued patent – U.S. Patent No. 9,853,913, for a ‘multi-cloud network proxy for the control and normalization of tagging data’ – is part of Accenture’s growing portfolio of dozens of patents and patent applications globally related to Accenture Cloud Platform and other core multi-cloud-management concepts.
“If you can’t control your tags, you can’t manage your cloud,” said Catherine Gulsvig Wood, co-inventor of the patent-awarded tagging capability. “Our new tagging technology frees IT departments from concerns over how to manage their cloud assets, regardless of the resource type or platform provider. While the technology is geared to multi-cloud environments, even organizations with a single cloud environment can benefit from its capability.”
What makes the underlying technology behind Accenture’s latest patent award unique is that it enables a company to tag assets across its entire cloud ‘estate’ – regardless of which or how many cloud providers the company uses – and then deploy standard policies and controls across the assets, such as to ensure authorized user access and thresholds.
Cloud Assets and Services
This multi-cloud tagging capability would enable companies to gain the visibility required to keep track of the volume and dynamic nature of cloud assets and services, which include everything from compute capacity to databases to serverless functions. The Accenture Cloud Platform’s multi-tagging capability supports key business functions related to application management, governance, and security, among others.
It would enable companies to better manage and control their cloud costs. For example, ACP tags can group all resources that are used only for development and testing (versus production), enabling customers “to understand their research and development costs and then turn these resources off outside of business hours – thus saving money.”
“The patent award demonstrates Accenture’s commitment to innovation in the cloud. At Accenture, more than 85 percent of our workloads are in the cloud, so we know what it takes to effectively manage and control cloud estates,” said Michael Liebow, managing director of the Accenture Cloud Platform. “The award, with more in the queue, demonstrates our long-term focus on building innovative products, platforms and managed services for our clients’ biggest challenges in their own journey to the cloud, and help them move toward a secure, as a service environment.”
