A Cloud(y) Forecast

Business disruption caused by the pandemic, rapid changes in human behavior and the acceleration of new technologies - including 5G, artificial intelligence/machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, edge computing and more - are all driving business change at a pace none of us have experienced before. 

In this era now more than ever, cloud is strategically important. Before the pandemic, Accenture estimated that it would take companies about a decade to become mature cloud businesses; we now believe this will happen in the next three years. Cloud powers the elasticity that gives businesses the capability to quickly scale services up or down and operate efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, it fuels an accelerated rate of business innovation. The top three cloud service providers are spending more than $200 million per day on R&D, and companies are capitalizing on this investment by imagining and delivering new experiences that are changing their market posture.

On the journey to cloud adoption, some businesses are moving quite aggressively, but the majority are currently only about 20-30% in the cloud. Accenture believes companies need to move to 80%+ to remain competitive. 

As part of a recent Accenture Research study, we asked business and technology leaders to identify and rank barriers to cloud success. We found that responses varied depending on the company’s level of cloud maturity:

• Low cloud adopters were most concerned about a lack of skills, security, and data sovereignty.
• Moderate adopters’ top concerns included security, legacy infrastructure and application footprints, and IT and Business stakeholder alignment.
• High adopters ranked security, complexity of business and organizational change, and stakeholder alignment as their top concerns.

I recently had the pleasure of recording a podcast for the New York Business Journal with Verizon’s Senior Vice President and Global CIO Shankar Arumugavelu. Shankar discusses Verizon’s cloud journey, which began in 2017 with the goals of driving efficiency, speed and innovation. The company has had great success building cloud confidence and new cloud-native business models. Shankar shares some powerful lessons learned along the way, including the recognition that a strong governance model coupled with culture and talent transformation are critical to success. He also provides insights on how they got started on their cloud journey, the challenges they faced, the benefits they’ve realized, and how 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) in conjunction with cloud is a game-changer for future innovation. 

When it comes to the cloud, we’re all on a race to master speed, flexibility and innovation, and can certainly learn from others’ journeys. Take a listen to Verizon’s cloud transformation story here.