Everyone knows the cloud is the place to be: It has offered greater flexibility, more agility and new opportunities for innovation. No surprise, then, that more than 90 percent of today’s enterprises have adopted cloud in some form.1
So what’s the challenge? Many enterprise efforts to adopt and scale to cloud have slowed or stalled. Some organizations got stuck in an experimental mindset without a sense of where their cloud journey was headed. Others struggled to make a clear business case for scaling up their use of cloud.
The result? Most enterprises have, on average, only about 20-40 percent2 of their workloads in the cloud, most of which are the easier, less complex ones. And nearly two-thirds have said they haven’t achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives to date.3
On top of these concerns, COVID-19 has created an unprecedented wake-up call. Organizations in every industry have had a very powerful and direct reminder of the importance of systems resilience, agility, adaptability and scalability. As companies look to outmaneuver the uncertainty heightened by the pandemic, the enterprise focus has shifted to sustaining operations under severe disruption, flexing to address highly volatile customer demand and managing vastly changing workforce dynamics and increased needs for remote network access.
For many companies, the pandemic not only introduced new disruptions to their enterprise systems and business models, it also exposed pre-existing weaknesses in those models and systems. According to research we conducted before the pandemic, only a small minority of companies—the top 10 percent — had mastered systems resilience.4 It’s imperative that the companies that went into the crisis with significant gaps embrace the promise of cloud now to enable short- and long-term change. If they do, they can mitigate business risk, maximize human potential, enable business transformation and emerge stronger, able to change and thrive despite ongoing uncertainty.