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Define and effectively communicate your strategy
For CEOs, board members and other senior business leaders to take multicloud seriously as a business accelerator, the cloud strategy needs to be backed by a business strategy and move beyond point solutions.
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Sell multicloud’s benefits
The benefits of multicloud to enterprises are significant and wide reaching, but they haven’t been well articulated to senior business leaders.
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Build a multicloud culture and mindset
While 95 percent of cloud-smart organizations worldwide say they institute a mindset and culture that makes managing multiple clouds easier, just over half (54 percent) of cloud-beginner organizations say the same.
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Become a cloud-smart business
For the majority of organizations worldwide, being cloud smart is still a goal yet to be achieved. And as they undertake the journey to get there, it’s important that every part of the business be on board.
How to Help Move Multicloud Strategy to the Top of Your CEO’s To Do List
CIOs, CTOs and other business technology leaders are keenly aware of multicloud’s untapped potential. Yet to make gains faster, multicloud needs to be more than an IT project.
The enterprise digitalization boom isn’t stopping but it is changing gears.
Companies across the world are facing a new global reality; a realization that is pressuring them to pivot – again. Steady growth is becoming harder to achieve and organizations are refocusing on productivity. The next phase of digitalization, according to the Gartner Research Board, is “putting the new digital technology to work.”
Despite several years of large investment – much of it in cloud-based systems – many organizations have yet to reap all the promised rewards of their existing technologies. Complexity and high costs remain key challenges. What these companies now need are strategies that not only simplify cloud infrastructure management and application development but deliver better business outcomes.
In short, they need to become cloud smart, passing the tipping point where multicloud benefits overtake implementation challenges.
CIOs, CTOs and other business technology leaders are keenly aware of multicloud’s untapped potential. Yet to make gains faster, multicloud needs to be more than an IT project. New research, commissioned by VMware and conducted by Vanson Bourne, shows that CEOs and other senior leaders have an outsized role to play in getting the right strategies in place.
Globally, nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of organizations that have taken a more mature, sophisticated cloud smart approach, say their CEOs are “extremely” engaged in cloud, compared to fewer than half (45 percent) of CEOs in “cloud beginner” organizations, the research shows.
What steps can CIOs, CTOs and other technical team members take to get the buy-in they need from their CEOs to turn multicloud into a winning strategy? The following three are good places to start.
1. Define and effectively communicate your strategy
For CEOs, board members and other senior business leaders to take multicloud seriously as a business accelerator, the cloud strategy needs to be backed by a business strategy and move beyond point solutions.
Organizations have embraced multicloud in big numbers. According to the Multi-Cloud Maturity Index Research Report, multicloud adoption worldwide is running at 64 percent, a giant leap from 38 percent just two years ago. But in many cases, cloud strategies have not kept up with business visions. Data remains siloed and visibility into data limited, preventing teams from realizing data’s full value. Management and security challenges, including ransomware attacks, also have increased as the number of clouds has multiplied.
Despite the high rate of multicloud adoption, only 31 percent of the 5,790 organizations worldwide surveyed say they have a “fully defined” multicloud strategy in place with only 19 percent of all organizations categorized as cloud smart. At 21 percent, companies in the Asia-Pacific region – followed closely by EMEA – are leading the cloud-smart charge compared to those in North America but there’s plenty of room for improvement across the regions.
There’s a big disconnect everywhere between adoption and strategy, leading to cloud chaos – widely dispersed, hard-to-manage cloud environments that bring unnecessarily increased complexity and higher costs.
For technical leaders, defining a cohesive strategy that addresses the entire multicloud data estate in a way that senior executives, particularly CEOs, can understand and support is key to getting the backing and budget to become cloud smart and unlock all the economic and operational benefits of multicloud.
2. Sell multicloud’s benefits
The benefits of multicloud to enterprises are significant and wide reaching, but they haven’t been well articulated to senior business leaders. According to the Multi-Cloud Maturity Index Research Report, organizations worldwide most often cited enhanced employee flexibility – a non-negotiable in the era of hybrid work – as a key business advantage of multicloud.
Survey respondents also say multicloud is helping their organizations:
- Develop higher value applications.
- Get applications into production and market faster.
- Enhance their ability to innovate.
- Reduce operational expenses.
What CEOs who are less involved and uninvolved in multicloud may not realize that technical leaders can bring forward is that being cloud smart multiplies the benefits.
One example of this accumulating benefit is 92 percent of cloud-smart organizations saying they find it easier to manage data, wherever it resides. This can give a boost to an organization’s data protection and compliance efforts. Cloud-smart organizations also agree they are far more likely to see a positive financial impact from multicloud.
A full 97 percent of private cloud-smart organizations say their multicloud approach has had a positive impact on revenue growth in the last 12 months, compared to just 51 percent of organizations at the beginning of their cloud journeys, according to the Multi-Cloud Maturity Index Research Report. Positive impact on profitability over the same period is even more pronounced. A full 96 percent of private cloud-smart organizations say their profitability has been enhanced by multicloud, compared to just 34 percent of cloud-beginner organizations.
Cloud-smart organizations are more likely than cloud beginners to say that monetizing data is currently a “significant” source of revenue.
As CEOs pivot their thinking to productivity, having them understand the full potential of multicloud as a growth driver is important. Being cloud smart creates the path for multicloud to deliver positive outcomes against a wider variety of business objectives. The vast majority of cloud-smart organizations worldwide surveyed say that multicloud architecture has become critical to success, and that organizations that don’t adopt this approach risk failure.
In addition to discovering the significant benefits of adopting multicloud and becoming cloud smart, CEOs and other senior leaders should be made aware of the risks of taking on multicloud without the right platform and partner.
3. Build a multicloud culture and mindset
CDW and VMware are here to help organizations become cloud smart. Our partners at VMware are innovating with platform solutions such as VMware Tanzu, VMware Cloud and VMware Aria that remove complexity for organizations’ app development and delivery, application migration and hosting as well as cloud management teams.
Yet technology always works best when it is backed by culture and processes that support it. Cloud chaos is a business problem as much as a technology challenge. While 95 percent of cloud-smart organizations worldwide say they institute a mindset and culture that makes managing multiple clouds easier, just over half (54 percent) of cloud-beginner organizations say the same.
The support of the CEO and senior business leadership is vital to growing and embedding a culture of improvement, but technology leadership plays a vital role in creating the conditions for improvement powered by multicloud to thrive. That includes leaders getting out from behind their desks and talking to the business about multicloud: How it can help align goals; how it can improve time to market; and its role in not only scaling growth but increasing efficiency.
Through discussions like these, technology leaders can help end the isolated decision-making that allows cloud chaos to flourish. They can work more closely with business leaders to make the multicloud culture part of the business strategy.
Become a cloud-smart business
CEO engagement is critical to the success of multicloud strategies, according to organizations surveyed for VMware’s Multi-Cloud Maturity Index Research Report. Organizations whose CEOs are leaning into multicloud are reaping the benefits – both in the maturity of their infrastructure and on the bottom line. They’re also better positioned to adapt to changing markets and economies.
But CEOs need the rest of the organization – technical plus business leaders and teams alike – to step up as well to most effectively drive multicloud forward, faster.
For the majority of organizations worldwide, being cloud smart is still a goal yet to be achieved. And as they undertake the journey to get there, it’s important that every part of the business be on board.