A new report examines how regional CIOs and business leaders are using the cloud to provide organisations with the needed digital capabilities
- 56 per cent of surveyed regional organisations followed a “cloud-first” strategy in 2021
- Nearly 50 per cent of the organisations favour a hybrid cloud approach for investing in cloud services
- 82 per cent of the organisations to focus any IT investments in the coming year on cloud services only
- 87 per cent of the surveyed organisations are looking to drive innovation with the use of cloud services over the next 12-18 months
Gulf Business Machines (GBM) revealed insights from its cloud services report, where it explored how organisations are leveraging cloud services to become digitally resilient and, subsequently, business resilient.
With disruption being the keyword in today’s global and regional economy, we are witnessing the daily rise of new business models and trends driven by multiple forces. From external events such as the recent pandemic to the emergence of new digitally based economies such as NFTs, blockchain, and 5G enabling agile, entrepreneurial industry disruptors, the report examines how regional CIOs and business leaders are using the cloud to provide organisations with the needed digital capabilities and enabling them to become digitally resilient to address disruption in the new normal.
The survey was conducted among CIOs of over a hundred organisations across banking, insurance and financial services, government, oil & gas, energy, and retail sectors in UAE, Oman, and Kuwait.
The study highlighted how organisations invest in digital technologies to be prepared to capitalise and grow in the event of mass disruption.
This has led to an increase in organisations achieving digital resiliency, which IDC defines as an organisation’s ability to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to restore business operations and capitalise on the changed conditions.
Cloud services provide organisations with scalable, fast to deploy, integrated digital platforms for business continuity while also enabling them to launch products faster and drive insights-led decisions from their data. However, only 10 per cent of the surveyed organisations have massively matured and are using cloud services for broad implementation of business applications.
Another 24 per cent of the organisations have already started using cloud services for implementing business applications. The survey supported this trend, where organisations cited that all their technology investment projects will include cloud services in the next 12 months.
Moreover, nearly 50 per cent of the surveyed organisations favour a hybrid cloud approach as it offers more reliability, operational agility, and scalability as they look to grow their operations.
According to the survey, more than half of the surveyed organisations utilise cloud services to offer their businesses agile and scalable infrastructure, improving their ability to expand and optimise operations based on market requirements.
Forty-four per cent of the surveyed organisations are also making investments in cloud services to ensure better data integration and data access across all cloud environments. An equal amount of organisations want to invest in cloud services to improve data insights and data-driven decision making, allowing them to accelerate their market initiatives, including launching new products and services for their customers based on their evolving needs.
However, 58 per cent of the surveyed CIOs want to manage the usage, performance, and delivery of cloud services to ensure cost-effective cloud services utilisation. This is the leading cloud initiative that organisations embarked on in 2021.
Cherif Morcos, Vice President of Digital Business Solutions at GBM, said, “Over the last two years, business disruptions have significantly impacted organisations and challenged their existing operating models. This has brought the importance of digital resiliency to the forefront as CIOs look to build digitally-driven businesses which enable operational agility, scalability, and reliability.
“Implementing a cloud architecture and cloud services within an organisation has consistently proven to support operational continuity and overall growth. And hence, it is extremely encouraging to see that 56 per cent of regional organisations followed a ‘cloud first’ strategy in 2021. We are also seeing the rise of hybrid cloud as the preferred cloud led platform as it ensures the business meets regulatory, compliance, and security requirements while also enabling increased digital resiliency.”
In markets where GBM operates, we are working with organisations from different verticals and industries that are rapidly adopting cloud technologies as a key underlying enabler to raise their competitive advantage through speed to market and faster execution of their growth strategies such as geo-expansion and scaling their offerings.”
Looking ahead, 87 per cent of the organisations believe that they will be able to drive innovation better using cloud services over the next 12-18 months to address their immediate and future business requirements.
Seventy-five per cent of the surveyed organisations are looking to use cloud services to their competitive advantage by launching new solutions in the market faster and scaling up the requirements of the service when needed. Organisations are also using cloud services to accelerate business process transformation more quickly, as cited by 34 per cent of the surveyed organisations, which further supports the drive for digital resiliency.
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