Companies struggling under the stress of COVID-19 may be tempted to blame bad luck for their problems. But, bad luck could be a rationalization for lack of business foresight.

Proving that preparation is the best policy, Australian food and beverage company Lion Pty. Ltd. is prospering despite a run of events that would challenge even the strongest organization.

“We had to live through bushfires, and then we had COVID,” said Stuart Driver (pictured, center), director of infrastructure and operations at Lion. “Then we had to deliver a very large, transformational project completely remote. And then we also had some cyber challenges as well.”

Driver, Douglas Regan (pictured, left), managing director at Accenture LLP, and Sadiq Islam (pictured, right), associate director of technology delivery at Accenture, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit. They discussed how cloud preparedness has helped Lion thrive in a challenging year. (* Disclosure below.)

Lion was ahead of the game in cloud migration

Things would have been very different if Lion hadn’t already modernized its infrastructure and enabled cloud-based operations before 2020 hit, according to Driver.

“When you get some of the challenges like we’ve had this year, it makes all of the hard work worthwhile, because you can actually change pretty quickly, provide capacity and increase your environment, and do the things that you need to do in a much more dynamic way than we would have been able to previously,” he said.

Accenture and Amazon Web Services Inc. supported Lion as the company undertook its infrastructure review and modernization. That collaboration was key to the success of the project, according to Driver, but cloud transformation is not just an information technology task.

“You need good partners to work with, and you need good engagement from the business as well,” Driver said. ”You’ve got to make sure that your investment streams are appropriate and that you’re able to understand the benefits and the value that you’re going to drive back.”

Accenture lays out the ‘seven Rs’ of cloud

The seven Rs methodology guided Lion’s transformation journey. The three key stages are “assessing the current environment, setting up the new cloud environment, and modernizing and migrating applications through the cloud,” Islam explained.

Accenture’s journey to cloud strategy provided a clear roadmap, but as with any transformation, there were bumps along the way.

“You can have the best plans, but in the environment that we were dealing with we often had to make changes, work with a lot of agility, and also work with a lot of collaboration with the Lion team, as well as AWS,” Islam stated.

He also stressed the importance of collaboration for success. “It’s all of us working together to make this happen,” he said.

The cyber-incident that occurred in June 2020 was another example of the three companies working together to mitigate damages from the attack and set in place measures to prevent future security breaches.

“We dove in with Amazon,” Regan said. “Their security experts and our experts were able to work through that with Lion quite successfully.”

As 2020 draws to a close, Driver reflected on the reason for Lion’s strength, despite disruptions due to fires, the pandemic and cyber attack.

“The momentum is we didn’t just do it in isolation,” he said. “Technology was linked to broader business changes, creating a digital platform for the entire business. [We’re] moving the business where they’re going to be able to come back stronger after COVID [and] where they’re actually set up for growth.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit. Neither Accenture LLP, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE