For the past few years, pundits have touted the benefits of moving away from traditional data centers in favor of “the cloud .” These advantages promised in articles, blogs, and social media posts by analysts and evangelists include:
- Saving companies time and money and moving from CAPEX to OPEX.
- Scaling of the cloud platforms to support demand as usage increases.
- Offering more options for fault tolerance and failover in the event of server issues.
- Providing a broad menu of service offerings, including on demand CPU cores and data storage options.
According to Trends in Cloud Adoption, a report published by business process management consultants Navint , the cloud
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has indeed lived up to the hype. US-based CIOs with firsthand experience with navigating the challenges and pitfalls of making the move to the cloud were surveyed and the findings overwhelmingly reinforce the stated advantages of moving to the cloud.
First, one of the biggest concerns that CIOs shared was whether the move would indeed save the company money. According the CIOs surveyed, 90 percent of the respondents said that they received 100% of the forecasted savings when their companies adopted cloud technology.
Second, 64% of respondents also confirmed that implementing cloud technologies had a significant impact on process efficiency and effectiveness. The idea being that moving at least some applications to the cloud frees up time to work on more strategic, business‐facing tasks.
Finally, a full 80% of respondents reported that the cloud migration gave their companies a competitive advantage. The cloud’s modern approach to data and infrastructure, combined with its on-demand scalable nature, pushes organizations into a more competitive position.
While CIOs have generally been very satisfied with the move to the cloud, a better understanding of the general consensus around cloud solutions will hopefully inspire IT and business leaders to make more informed strategic decisions when deciding if and when to move an important business process to the cloud.
As an industry, we need to continue to do these kinds of assessments to make sure that the hype surrounding the cloud is not outpacing the ability to deliver real benefits to businesses. This type of survey is just the first step toward more systematic evaluations of the cloud.
Do you agree with the results of the Navint Survey?
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