KPMG and SAS today announced a plan to establish Cloud Acceleration Centers with specific focuses in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. The organizations will work together to help accelerate the move to the Cloud for SAS clients.

As a positive response to the current challenges faced by global organizations, the goal of these centers is to help companies navigate their journey to the cloud – from design and architecture to implementation – more cost-effectively and with increased speed. The centers will be highly collaborative, tech-enabled environments that bring together multidisciplinary teams. They will look to support clients who have their own cloud environment as well as those who are employing other cloud-based managed services.

While enabling organizations to prepare for the new post-COVID reality and be future-ready through use of the cloud, the deployment of a cloud-based SAS infrastructure will also enable clients to benefit from a number of readily available cloud solutions and managed services for accounting change, anti-money laundering, continuous monitoring for procurement integrity and SAS Model Manager on SAS Viya.

These solutions can help clients derive better insights from their data to help combat fraud and mitigate risk, while also building, managing, deploying and governing analytics and AI to ensure that models are well understood and can be put into production more quickly.

“An accelerated move to the cloud has become a necessity for many organizations; optimizing and adapting business processes is a great opportunity to maximize the power of the cloud,” said Oliver Schabenberger, SAS Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer. “SAS and KPMG continue to work together to help our mutual clients make the most of this transformation.”

“We’re excited to be expanding our global alliance with SAS,” said Christian Rast, Global Head of Technology and Knowledge for KPMG International. “With these centers, KPMG professionals can continue to help SAS clients to derive increased value from successfully moving to the cloud as well as drive improved collaboration that will enhance the current solution portfolio, which already includes solutions such as Procurement Integrity and Anti-Money laundering compliance that have been particularly helpful for organizations during the current pandemic. Additional advanced compliance solutions that are helping clients to meet regulatory requirements with increased speed and accuracy will also be prioritized.”

Globally, KPMG has a network of more than 400 practitioners across the globe to support SAS clients with cloud transformation, underscoring a commitment to helping customers on their respective cloud journeys.

Today's announcement is in conjunction with Virtual SAS Global Forum 2020, the world's premier analytics conference. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s conference was held virtually.