Greater cloud maturity leads to £millions in business benefits. But while the cloud has gone mainstream, few British firms are successfully reaping the benefits.
In its latest CloudView study, IDC values the total annual benefit per cloud-based application at £2.3 million in additional revenues and £0.8 million in reduced costs. However, it warns that less than a third of British firms have a mature cloud strategy in place.
One of the main issues is that consuming cloud services is not as simple as it looks when it comes to doing it your way.
It’s a bit like eating a Cadbury’s Crème Egg: everyone has their own preferred method.
Cadbury launched its memorable ad campaign in 1985. According to a Cadbury survey:
- 53% of people bite off the top, lick out the cream, then eat the chocolate
- 20% just bite straight through
- 6% use their finger to scoop out the cream
Fast forward to 2016 and there are now many more contemporary and outlandish ways to consume crème eggs – from deep fried, to cocktails.
Although the choices with cloud are not so outlandish, they are just as numerous – so it becomes a question of ‘How do you eat yours?’.
Cloud goes mainstream
Globally, almost 80% of organisations are using or planning to use some form of cloud service, up from 60% in IDC’s CloudView study last year. Meanwhile, nearly 70% are using or planning to implement private clouds.
The study questioned more than 6,000 executive-level IT and line of business (LOB) decision makers in 31 countries to find out their future plans and current state of cloud adoption.
What it discovered is ‘pretty remarkable’ according to IDC’s Group VP Robert Mahowald.
More than 70% of all organisations surveyed cited hybrid cloud — a strategy for operating in a mix of public and private cloud, provider and customer-based environments — as their dominant operational model.
What’s more, IDC expects a 30% increase in the number of cloud users planning to allocate funds to more than one type of cloud deployment. Here it’s important to note that future budget for provider-based cloud plans grows at the expense of spending for in-house IT.
In other words, organisations are focusing on sorting out what types of workloads are best suited for private clouds versus public clouds.
In general, sustained workloads requiring control and compliance are run in private clouds, while elastic workloads go to public cloud providers for quicker ramp-up and scalable services.
It’s also important to note that private cloud spans a broad range of deployment options – including IT managed on-premises, remotely managed, and hosted (pay per use).
What’s clear is that organisations are dealing with diverse and complex environments as their hybrid deployments grow.
A question of maturity
Of course most organisations want the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for legacy and cloud native applications, which all drive a variety of business benefits.
The latter include improved revenue growth and more strategic allocation of IT budgets. There are also tactical benefits such as lower IT costs, reduced time to provision IT services, and increased ability to meet SLAs.
The most mature cloud users expect to be able to choose from multiple cloud providers based on location, policies and governance principles. But there are plenty of barriers to realising this level of agility, with skill gaps, legacy siloed organisation structures and IT/LOB misalignment identified as common issues.
So what steps should you be taking to ensure your organisation gets the most from its cloud strategy?
Tell us how you eat yours
Ultimately, it’s essential to retain an element of choice between the new, agile ways of doing business and economies of scale the cloud can offer, or gaining those advantages by transforming your own systems. That’s why we see the wisest strategy for providing future IT services as a hybrid of cloud and in-house computing.
There’s never been a better time to re-imagine your cloud consumption. And with so many questions around how best to integrate cloud with IT strategy, we’ve teamed with BT and IDC to give you the answers you need.
Want to know where your organisation is on its cloud journey or how others in Britain are faring? How about scoring your current cloud adoption against your industry peers?
Download our exclusive InfoBrief or use our brief assessment tool to receive a report tailored to your answers with advice on how to optimise your cloud strategy.
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