Sky High Hopes: Navigating the Barriers to Maximize Cloud Value

After years of helping companies move their business to the cloud, we’ve learned a thing or two about what makes for a smooth versus a bumpy cloud journey. Our 70,000 cloud professionals have seen it all. So, we weren’t surprised by the latest results of our biennial Cloud Outcomes Research. But you might be. 

You won’t be surprised by the overall dominant intention to be in the cloud. Everyone wants to be in the cloud, particularly after the pandemic wakeup call. Cloud migration is clearly an overwhelming goal for the vast majority of businesses. After all, it’s the first stop on the digital transformation train, an accelerating bullet train since the pandemic. What may be startling is the rate of unfulfilled cloud expectations.

Our Cloud Outcomes survey from late 2018 found that just 35% of companies had fully achieved their expected outcomes from cloud. Nearly two years later:

• Full achievement of outcomes has not significantly increased, basically holding steady at 37%.
• The percentage who say they are very satisfied with the cloud outcomes achieved to date showed little change: 45% in 2020 (vs. 44% in 2018).
• Further, only 29% are completely confident that their organization’s cloud migration initiatives will deliver the expected value at the expected time.
• It's not uncommon for CEOs to have markedly different impressions of cloud results and concerns than fellow C-suite leaders and high-ranking company officials.
• One in four organizations always or usually run into unexpected complications during cloud migration initiatives.

Yet, here I am advocating for a cloud first strategy. Why? In part based on our vast experience helping thousands of companies transform their businesses through the cloud. And because the research bears it out. Success in cloud goes to those that bet big—the high adopters. High adopters (with more than 75% of their workloads in the cloud) achieved their expected cloud benefits at nearly double the rate of low adopters. In fact, the companies that jumped into the cloud had greater cloud satisfaction across the board. The high adopter is more likely to work with partners, using cloud managed services, and to be larger business ($10B or more) and geographically located in the Americas. But any company can become a high adopter. Case in point, over half of high adopters (54%) report they haven’t fully achieved their desired cloud outcomes. It’s like learning a new language – total emersion helps you pick it up faster but it doesn’t make you fluent overnight.

So, adoption rate is only part of the picture. The road to the cloud’s transformational benefits is complex with multiple dimensions. In the survey, we also asked business and IT leaders to identify the obstacles to their efforts to drive a cloud agenda and achieve their goals. The top hurdles were “security and compliance risk” followed by “legacy infrastructure & application sprawl” and “misalignment between IT and the business.” But when we looked at job title, we saw differing perspectives. The CTO is concerned with security, the CIO with infrastructure and application sprawl, the COO with business complexity and the CEO with having cloud-skilled talent. A critical takeaway from the Cloud Outcomes Research 2020  is that success in the cloud requires leadership aligned around a clear cloud directive and strategy.

Start with a strategy, communicate it clearly amongst leadership, then execute with intention. Because we also know that practice makes perfect. The more workloads that migrate to the cloud, the greater the achieved value.

Transforming your business is not easy but it is vital to survival. And cloud is the foundation to that transformation. It will require more than technology. You will need to adopt new ways of working, new operating models and develop new roles and skills.

Specifically:

1. Develop a cloud strategy that is tried to your business strategy. Align goals and ensure company leadership is all on the same page.
2. Get your talent ready with the right people, skills and adaptive culture.
3. Go big or go home. Be a high adopter.
4. Unleash your data in the cloud to quickly inform the entirety of your business.
5. Don't go it alone. Leverage the skills and experience of your cloud partners and of managed services partners.

We’ve seen and overcome every obstacle on the journey to the cloud. We’ve seen companies with a 100-years of heritage and traditional business practices transform into digital powerhouses. We know success. We know the power of cloud. Learn more about our Cloud Outcomes research here.