Digital innovation is at the heart of business transformation. To respond to the issues and challenges linked to innovation, Markess has identified 6 reasons to use cloud computing.
Whatever the business line - marketing, HR, finance - digital technology is revolutionising practices and imposing new ways of doing business, both externally with customers who have become more demanding, and internally, where operational methods are being revolutionised by multiple constraints: accelerated time-to-market, new consumer demands and the need to develop new service models (e-CRM, marketplaces, etc.).
To keep pace with this new situation, more and more businesses are turning to cloud computing to support their innovation projects. The proof is in the pudding: in 2015, 91% of the business decision-makers surveyed by Markess had already implemented innovative digital projects using cloud computing solutions.
The cost of the cloud: the first factor in the decision
The decision to use these on-demand IT or application resources is based on a number of factors:
- The cost for 66 % decision-makers: the cloud avoids the need to invest in costly infrastructures which, moreover, can prove complex to administer and quickly become technologically obsolete.
- The elasticity (42 %) of the cloud, which means you can adapt to the real needs of the moment
- Speed of access to new application environments (41 %) or supply of new resources (40 %)
- These factors are also closely linked to new ways of using and accessing applications in mobile situations (40 %), working in collaborative mode and sharing data within ecosystems as part of co-innovation or co-production (39 %).
- Innovate (54 %) in the fields of collaboration and real-time exchanges
In addition to these reasons, nearly a third of the decision-makers questioned cited other advantages associated with the cloud: speeding up development (web, mobile or applications), storing data without volume constraints, creating new 'disruptive' services, integrating web and Internet components, etc.
In addition, the Markess study identifies the reasons put forward by business decision-makers for using Cloud computing and adapting to changes in the business environment:
- Web-related uses
- Analysis of structured and unstructured data
- Mobile-related uses
- Responding to new uses linked to changes in workstations (BYOD)
In short, cloud computing is proving to be an invaluable accelerator for decision-makers in negotiating the innovation curve in a turbulent and complex environment. Above all, it gives the reins back to the business units, who can now dialogue with the IT Department to assess the best responses to the challenges of innovation.