Cloud’s the urgent imperative: Maximize its value

Everyone knows the cloud is the place to be: It has offered greater flexibility, more agility and new opportunities for innovation. No surprise, then, that more than 90 percent of today’s enterprises have adopted cloud in some form.¹

So what’s the challenge? Many enterprise efforts to adopt and scale to cloud have slowed or stalled. Some organizations got stuck in an experimental mindset without a sense of where their cloud journey was headed. Others struggled to make a clear business case for scaling up their use of cloud.

The result? Most enterprises have, on average, only about 20-40 percent² of their workloads in the cloud, most of which are the easier, less complex ones. And nearly two-thirds have said they haven’t achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives to date.³

On top of these concerns, COVID-19 has created an unprecedented wake-up call. Organizations in every industry have had a very powerful and direct reminder of the importance of systems resilience, agility, adaptability and scalability. As companies look to outmaneuver the uncertainty heightened by the pandemic, the enterprise focus has shifted to sustaining operations under severe disruption, flexing to address highly volatile customer demand and managing vastly changing workforce dynamics and increased needs for remote network access.

For many companies, the pandemic not only introduced new disruptions to their enterprise systems and business models, it also exposed pre-existing weaknesses in those models and systems. According to research we conducted before the pandemic, only a small minority of companies—the top 10 percent — had mastered systems resilience.⁴ It’s imperative that the companies that went into the crisis with significant gaps embrace the promise of cloud now to enable short- and long-term change. If they do, they can mitigate business risk, maximize human potential, enable business transformation and emerge stronger, able to change and thrive despite ongoing uncertainty.

Cloud isn’t some future aspiration—it’s an urgent mandate at the heart of the business. Cloud offers the promise of greater efficiency, accelerated innovation and is a critical enabler of advanced digital technologies that open the door to new business models and revenue streams. But a rushed migration without a clear strategy can end up costing the business more, leaving existing legacy applications racking up consumption—and costs—at an alarming rate.

An intelligent cloud journey must balance business drivers, technology needs and industry dynamics in achieve the right blend of scale, shape and speed for your organization’s unique needs. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead each will be driven by industry-specific competitive environments and individual company aspirations for cloud.

Consequently, your cloud initiative should start with defining the business value that this technology transformation can enable: identify where impact will be derived fastest across the business through new capabilities, cost efficiencies, or risk mitigation.

Success in the cloud goes beyond technology. You want to consider key factors including how ways of working will change, your organizational structure and business model, human performance and organizational behaviors and mindsets. With the value identified, you can then map out the journey and determine how cloud will enable the overall business strategy and ambition.

There are five essential elements to capturing the full value of cloud: