The benefits of efficiency and lower cost have been the primary drivers toward the cloud and SaaS deployments, but this is just the low-hanging fruit of a much greater body of potential. According to a Cisco-sponsored IDC report, a second wave of cloud adoption now targets a much more strategic set of benefits, with 54 percent of businesses surveyed expecting cloud to allow them to allocate IT budgets more strategically, and 53 percent looking to cloud solutions to increase revenues.
According to the Cisco study, cloud and SaaS adoption takes place along a spectrum, with ad hoc deployment on one end and a centrally managed cloud platform on the other. On the ad hoc side, early adopters look to SaaS to solve an immediate need. These early adopters are often “power users” or ad hoc staff outside of IT, often managing a specific line of business, such as marketing, sales, or finance, and operating independently and often keeping the apps and potentially beneficial data to themselves.