Cloud – It’s Your Move

A report commissioned by Microsoft, and shared via Forbes, predicts that by 2019, 60% of enterprise apps will be in the Cloud.  Currently just 14% are cloud-based so we can expect the next four years to bring some very rapid change.

This push to get more apps into the Cloud is matched by market appetite. Over a thousand enterprises were interviewed and a third of them expected at least 60% of their exiting apps to be cloud-based within the next two years.  Why is this?

Greater trust

As little as seven years ago it was a challenge to get many businesses to adopt even basic cloud-based productivity but we now have every type of enterprise amongst Microsoft’s O365 customer base.  Equally Google’s success within large enterprises was not something that everybody would have predicted.  What was once viewed as a consumer play has made the leap to earn true enterprise customer trust.

Greater expectations

What’s very interesting in the research is the response to the question: “What is your organisation’s highest expectation for moving to hosted services or cloud computing?”         

The top three are:

  1. Improve technology quality
  2. Help grow our business
  3. Improve availability

Whilst cost efficiency can certainly be a feature of cloud-based services, it’s becoming less of a priority: ‘saving money’ was second from last on the survey.  Years of using online CRM, collaboration and productivity tools have demonstrated the art of what’s possible and now, rather than being seen primarily as a cheaper way to access software, cloud software is recognised as necessary for business improvement and growth.

So now what?

With end users demonstrating a clear preference for consuming apps via mobile devices, our recommendation to organisations aiming for business growth is to move their business processes and back end systems closer to customers, and specifically, closer to mobile devices. 

Moving application business logic and data stores to the cloud delivers a more rapid, high quality experience to the end user.  It also enables businesses to spin up a service in hours, rather than months, slashing time to market and putting you ahead of the competition.

The big question

If you’ve got a legacy system feeding your apps you need to know if it will work outside of the corporate firewall.  It either:

  • Will
  • Won’t
  • Will with some modifications

Getting the answer to this is the first step in making sure you can capitalise on what’s happening within the app space.  If your organisation wasn’t born in the cloud, then it’s a question that you’re going to need to have answered.  It’s your move.

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