Cloud technologies enable you to access, consume, deliver and pay for services on your terms. You can use them to create more efficient application and development environments and to outsource your entire data center if you choose. That’s why so many companies have been turning to cloud solutions to improve the way they do business.
Organizations are choosing among public, private and hybrid clouds to keep pace with modern business requirements. Public cloud services help companies achieve business goals without buying, operating and maintaining on-premises infrastructure. But some companies feel that private clouds offer more security. Companies that use a combination of both — and integrate them with hybrid clouds — get the best results, according to a recent IDC study.
IDC’s study, “The Future-Ready Enterprise: Driving Business Results Today While Preparing for the Challenges of Tomorrow,” surveyed various organizations and grouped them into four categories of future-readiness — Future Creators, Future Focused, Future Aware and Current Focused — based on their technology portfolios. The Future Creators (18 percent of the total number of organizations) had more of the advanced technologies, such as cloud, in their portfolios. At the other end of the scale, Current Focused companies had adopted fewer or no future-ready technologies.
More diversified cloud usage leads to better IT performance
The study shows that Future Creators support 60 percent of their infrastructure and applications with cloud technologies as opposed to 41 percent for Current Focused organizations. Most of them manage multiple clouds as a single resource. As a result, Future Creators are better equipped to integrate application services, extend data center capacity based on demand and maintain business continuity. Future Creators match the right applications to the right cloud platform based on service levels, resources and cost. They can act quickly to rebalance to their workloads, address new security or compliance requirements and optimize resource usage.
Future Creators get better results
The more diversified the cloud environment, the better prepared businesses are for future challenges — and the more likely they are to see better business results today — according to the IDC study. Future Creators:
- Almost doubled their increase in revenue to 37 percent growth within three years compared with Current Focused revenue, which increase by 8 percent.
- Boosted employee productivity by 39 percent, while Current Focused companies saw only a 20 percent increase.
Future Creators report better use of infrastructure and resources, faster response to industry changes than competitors and improved service to their customers.
Don’t play catch-up in one, two or five years. Now is the time to move up the future-readiness ladder. There is a cost to doing nothing. Assess your current state and move forward. Become your own Chief Cloud Officer and see how Dell can help you take control of the cloud in your organization today.
Ready to take action?
See how future-ready IT drives business results today. Download the IDC study, review additional future-readiness information and plan your next steps.