Less than half of all companies are seeing the benefits of cloud, but the top 10% cloud-powered companies are reaping the rewards for more focused efforts.
A majority of organizations have partially or fully moved operations to the cloud, but more than half are not realizing the outcomes that led them to migrate in the first place, such as reduced costs, new revenue channels, and improved resilience.
That’s according to PwC’s 2023 Cloud Business Survey, which surveyed over 1,000 business executives in six major industries on their migration efforts and challenges.
See Also: The Economic Impact of Transitioning to Hybrid Cloud for Analytics and Machine Learning
To prevent organizations from struggling with the migration, PwC has highlighted the top 10 percent of performers and some of the ways these companies are driving value through the use of cloud technologies. Named ‘cloud-powered’ companies, these organizations are fully invested in the cloud, with C-suite collaboration from the offset, formal data and analytics strategies, and a focus on trust, control, and proper governance.
“Cloud-powered organizations are those that are reinventing their business through cloud, experiencing fewer barriers to reach its value, and expect revenue growth of 15 percent or greater despite the current business environment,” said Danielle Phaneuf, partner, Cloud & Digital Strategy at PwC to ITProToday.
Starting with holistic approach to cloud, these cloud-powered companies are two times more likely to have a multi-faceted cloud approach, which combines migration, modernization, and cloud native technologies. Over two thirds of them have implemented enterprise-wide transformations, enabling all organization departments to see the benefits of cloud technology. Cloud-powered companies are also twice as likely to have moved operations to the cloud, while only 35 percent of non-cloud powered companies have done so.
On top of that, cloud powered companies are more likely to utilize managed services and are already beginning to focus on emerging cloud solutions, such as artificial intelligence.
One of the key starting blocks of a good cloud migration or modernization effort is buy-in from the C-suite, either through the creation of cloud executives or collaboration from CISO, CDO, CEOs, and other C-suite executives that have the authority to greenlight budgeting and other requirements. Accordingly, cloud-powered companies have more significant collaboration between engineers and C-suite, with more than 20 percent points difference between cloud-powered and non cloud-powered companies.
Once the groundwork is in place, cloud-powered companies also put more focus on having a clear data strategy, which is adopted enterprise-wide to avoid siloed data and uncooperative teams. These strategies will often contain governance structures and operational changes that enable the business to be data-driven, instead of collecting data for the sake of it. Leveraging cloud service providers to seamlessly integrate data from various sources is another matter which cloud-powered companies tend to take advantage of, more than other businesses.
With a data strategy in place, businesses can more efficiently leverage other cloud tools, such as AI and business intelligence, to gain even more advantages on the competition.
Alongside strategy, cloud-powered companies are also further along in regards to cloud governance. By adopting leading practices and dedicating resources to cloud governance, these companies are protected from cyber-security attacks, and ensure that client or customer data is private and secure. Over 75 percent of cloud-powered companies have dedicated resources for cloud governance, cloud controls, or have evaluated the shared responsibilities with cloud service providers, for non cloud-powered, that figure falls to 40 percent for all three assessments.
