Cloud adoption on crest of second wave

CLOUD has moved on to a second wave of adoption and emphasis is now on its use as a platform to fuel innovation, growth and disruption, a study by Cisco has found.

Based on market research with executives responsible for IT decisions in 3,400 organisations across 17 countries, the study found 53% of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years.

According to Cisco, this will be challenging for many companies as only 1% of organisations have optimised cloud strategies in place while 32% have no cloud strategy at all.

Nick Earle, senior vice president, global cloud and managed services sales at Cisco, said: “As we talk with customers interested in moving to the second wave of cloud, they are far more focused on private and hybrid cloud, primarily because they realise that private and hybrid offer the security, performance, price, control and data protection for which organisations are looking during their expanded efforts.

In the study, IDC identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed and optimised. The study found that organisations elevating cloud maturity from the ad hoc, the lowest level, to optimised, the highest level, were able to improve revenue growth by 10.4 percent and cut IT costs by 77%.

The study also quantified the economic benefits the most mature cloud organisations are realising. Organisations studied are gaining an average of $1.6m (£1m) in additional revenue per application deployed on private or public cloud. They are also achieving $1.2m in cost reduction per cloud-based application.

Cloud Adoption Rates By Country 

The revenue increases were largely the result of selling new products and services, gaining new customers, or selling into new markets. Organisations were able to attribute revenue gains to increased innovation resulting from the shifting of IT resources from traditional maintenance activities to new, more strategic and more innovative initiatives.

Operational cost reductions associated with cloud stem from the advantages to the business of running on a more scalable, reliable and higher-performing environment. These include improved agility, increased employee productivity, risk mitigation, infrastructure cost savings and open-source benefits.