Competitive Advantage
Compared with the bottom tier, cloud leaders are twice as likely to see a com-
petitive advantage from cloud. In the focus group discussions, it was clear that
the cloud leaders work at enterprises where upper management places a heavy
emphasis on cloud initiatives, including it in corporate objectives and allocat-
ing resources accordingly:
"Cloud is a very strategic objective to the organization.
That right there says it all. We’re in a competitive market — IoT
— so to be able to quickly and nimbly respond to requirements
while scaling up or down is very important."
— IT Operations Manager in the technology industry
"We wouldn’t have a business if we didn’t allocate costs to this.
It’s been a strategic operational objective for the past
couple of years running."
— Project manager, infrastructure and operations in the retail industry
"A lot of our success comes from the fact that we’re moving
towards technology. We used to write up our repairs, and there
would be a lot of errors because you couldn’t read it. We now
automate repairs straight from the yard. That helps us grow."
— Billing Auditor in the transportation industry
Risk Mitigation
Time and again, security concerns top the list of frequently cited cloud chal-
lenges. As shown in the Practices section, our survey data demonstrated that
cloud leaders are better at exerting control and maintaining proper oversight
in order to prevent chaos and sprawl. It appears that a corollary is that they are
better able t o identify and mitigate risk, and are 3.7 times more likely to miti-
gate risk quickly (within days, or even hours).
55% of cloud leaders
feel that their brand is
exposed to risk as a result
of cloud initiatives that do
not adhere to organiza-
tional governance policies.
Surprisingly, the study also
showed that cloud leaders are
slightly more likely to feel that
their brand is exposed to risk
as a result of cloud projects
that do not adhere to organi-
zational governance policies
(either
intentionally
or
inadvertently).
One potential explanation: due
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