Maximizing your cloud advantage

A key question for CIOs: How can we bring technology and data together to create value?

Migrating data to the cloud is only the first step. Cloud supports the larger opportunity of creating a trusted data platform across disparate parts of the business—helping reinvent workflows, initiate engaging experiences, and fuel innovation and growth.

But taking the next step isn’t easy. Only a small number of enterprises are using cloud strategically today, implementing the advanced practices needed to drive profitable growth and innovation.  

Organizations need to take responsibility for how they use, store and share data. How long should it be stored? Do individuals have a right to delete personal data about them? Are AI systems being trained ethically? It requires an industry lens to manage trade-offs between consumer expectations and corporate responsibility.

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Adopting cloud often requires more—not fewer—people, as well as a higher level of skills. So, what is the role of people in the cloud equation: cost reduction or strategic enablement?

Our research shows that people are the key to unlocking faster migrations and greater cost savings. In fact, organizations that prioritize people and culture as a part of their cloud transformation achieve 60% greater value by increasing their speed and agility.

Yet cloud technology and people can easily get out of sync, especially as organizations focus too much on technical enablement and minimize or ignore how people will interact with the new technology.  

Many organizations focus on how to enable their workforce but not on the broader and underlying question of whom to enable. To get maximum value from cloud, organizations need to accelerate demand management, portfolio control, change management and other slow-moving governance processes.

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Cloud is fast becoming a dominant expense line item. Because it can adjust to meet business demand, it’s shifting the technology cost base from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model. Managing the dynamic, variable costs requires new forecasting mechanisms and processes.

The explosion of choice resulting from offerings that cater to different customer needs—e.g., multiple architectures, and varying service and performance levels—can cause costs to skyrocket when not managed with shared accountability across the business. Therefore, maximizing business value requires alignment between the CIO and their C-suite counterparts.

Fortunately, the past few years have given rise to FinOps, a new organizational discipline to control cloud spend. Bringing greater financial accountability to managing cloud’s variable spend model, FinOps helps distributed teams make business trade-offs between speed, cost and quality.

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