Cloud saves time and money, now it can also fuel growth

Cloud is now an indispensable lever that allows enterprises to accelerate innovation, fuel digital transformation, and achieve faster time to market.

When used effectively, cloud gives enterprises complete visibility of their data and helps streamline business processes to gather, integrate, analyse, and present insights to key decision-makers. (Pixabay)

Although the modern cloud is nearly two decades old, businesses continue to discover more uses and applications of the technology. In 2020, organizations that had invested in cloud technologies found an innate advantage as many companies shifted to work-from-home arrangements. Enabling remote access via the cloud became important during this period of disruption, but it obscures more important structural changes that may have developed. Cloud has become so pervasive and computing so powerful that companies can now use cloud technology to expand their businesses.

The recent Cloud Radar 2021 study delineated how cloud can augment growth by rapidly bringing new solutions and services to market. The research findings further validated what organizations have been experiencing. For instance: cloud adoption continued to accelerate, doubling every two years, and has grown to touch all aspects of a business. More interestingly, the research revealed that cloud could deliver new capabilities that increase profits.

An effective cloud strategy can unlock new growth avenues

Cloud is now an indispensable lever that allows enterprises to accelerate innovation, fuel digital transformation, and achieve faster time to market. In addition to remote working, cloud enables richer collaboration and quicker innovation.

When used effectively, cloud gives enterprises complete visibility of their data and helps streamline business processes to gather, integrate, analyse, and present insights to key decision-makers. Cloud provides businesses the capabilities to launch new products and services and ensure that the customer experience is at its best. Overall, a well-defined cloud strategy can help enterprises achieve economies of scale and unlock new avenues for growth.

Cloud has become a function of profit growth

Cloud has advanced from an IT concern to a core business strategy, directly linked to revenue, growth, and new business opportunities. The Cloud Radar 2021 analysis found that effective cloud usage could add up to $414 billion (US) to annual profits in the markets surveyed.

These benefits derive from businesses' ability to accelerate time to market, enhance business capabilities and build a competitive edge. The study found that the highest performing businesses had annual profit growth that correlated with using cloud to accelerate the development and launch of new solutions, add new functions to software, and expand their current processing capacity. Cloud can additionally provide improved capabilities to unlock value from data through artificial intelligence, foster collaboration, and enable businesses to discover new revenue sources.

But these profit boosts and new powers only manifest with higher levels of cloud opportunities. The research shows that profit benefits only kick in when businesses have at least 60 percent of their IT systems in the cloud. To benefit from AI on cloud, businesses must have at least 80 percent of their business functions, such as cross-domain business applications, in the cloud for AI to boost profit growth.

Once a company begins making use of AI in the cloud, it can receive a further cloud boost in the form of a virtuous cycle: First, cloud can help build data platforms that consolidate and surface enterprise data. AI models can then unleash the value of data in a new way by making it more usable by business functions. Second, AI models often require large amounts of processing power. Cloud allows enterprises to access such power on-demand when the need for AI analysis occurs. Enterprises can also use cloud to access rich AI tools on a per-use basis, instead of investing in owning them outright. The results of that data refining and AI usage create better data, and quite possibly, additional business. Business growth generates more data for AI to refine and of course, greater profits for the company.

This article has been written by Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, Executive Vice President, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions, and Infosys Validation Solutions