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A study from IBM has revealed a major increase in organisations having fully integrated cloud initiatives – but the cloud is not used for everything.
78% of the survey respondents, in the study of 1,000 C-suite executives entitled ‘Tailoring hybrid cloud: Designing the right mix for innovation, efficiency and growth’, say their cloud initiatives are fully integrated or coordinated, up from 34% in 2012. Among high performing organisations, this number rises further to 83%.
In terms of adopting hybrid cloud solutions, the key drivers are lowering the total cost of ownership (54%), facilitating innovation (42%), improving operational efficiencies (42%) and more readily meeting customer expectations (40%). Companies undertaking cloud initiatives said they were most likely to expand into new industries (76%), as well as creating new revenue sources (71%) and supporting new business models (69%).
“Enterprises are moving to the cloud, especially hybrid cloud, faster than anyone expected to support their digital transformation, drive business model innovation and fuel growth,” said Marie Wieck, general manager of middleware at IBM. “As clients continue to reap the benefits of integrating their on-premises infrastructure with the cloud, we see them increasing their investments in new workloads on public clouds.
“Successful clients have integrated plans to place workloads where they fit best, and IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy provides this on-ramp for flexibility and growth,” Wieck added.
In the study, IBM recommended three actions for businesses to drive competitive advantage through cloud adoption. Organisations need to deepen their understanding of the business implications and the financial cases of cloud and then use that knowledge from there, as well as better manage the complexity of multiple cloud ecosystem partners, and establish strict control policies.
IBM’s various partnerships have hit the headlines this week. At the VMworld event in Las Vegas VMware announced an update and the continuation of its deal with IBM, noting that more than 500 new clients, including Marriott International and Monitise, were running VMware’s software on IBM’s cloud. Meanwhile, when cloud storage firm Box announced its latest financial results, the company’s partnership with IBM, launched last year, was cited as a contributing factor in eight ‘six figure’ deals.