Amazing innovations are happening all around us, but they’re not occurring consistently. Businesses want to innovate and get ahead of the pack, but many of them struggle to convert ideas into tangible, impactful products and services – at speed. We call this the ‘innovation-execution gap’, and it’s something that continues to test the majority of organisations. Our research found that 70% of businesses are struggling to unlock the value of their data – directly impacting their ability to innovate.
Organisations looking to make better use of their data to close the gap between originating ideas and delivering them to market should turn their attention to the cloud. In fact, in an age of most large businesses running multiple clouds, a multi-cloud strategy must become the de facto model for digital businesses. A way in which organisations can manage and use their data more effectively when workloads are more distributed than ever.
Here are seven ways multi-cloud can help close the innovation-execution gap – by helping businesses move, store, utilise and thus monetise their data, irrespective of where it resides.
- Time to value: The nature of business today means workloads must be up and running on any cloud quickly and easily. Being locked into a multi-year contract with a cloud provider and not consuming resources in the way they anticipated, hampers the ability of the business to move quickly. Instead, organisations should be able to consume cloud at the right pace to meet their spend commitment, avoiding unnecessary expenditure and allowing them to tap into required data sets when needed.
- Agility: As part of that freedom to choose any cloud, organisations should be able to move both new and existing apps quickly and easily, with zero or minimal refactoring. Requirements and services are continuously evolving, and a company’s multi-cloud infrastructure must be able to evolve as well. This also reduces friction linked to the migration of data, enabling businesses to be more agile and access and use their data flexibly, at speed.
- Ease of management: As customers embrace the multi-cloud model, they also come to learn that greater choice can lead to a big spike in complexity. Businesses on this journey need to move from being ‘cloud first’ to ‘cloud smart’ – where they can choose the right type of cloud for the right data, including highly sensitive information that needs to remain within national borders.
- Security: Being able to proactively monitor, detect and remediate security across clouds is critical. It should be baked into the platforms that organisations are using in a way that ensures upgrades happen on time, with support to minimise disruption in the event of an attack. This directly ties into the uptime and resilience required to manage data effectively, across workloads and at all times.
- Sovereignty: Organisations who are fully exploiting the competitive advantages of using multiple clouds to manage their data are seeing benefits across the business. To achieve success, however, they must be able to take control of where their data resides - without compromising sovereignty or compliance, and the choice of providers to manage it. Having access to a sovereign cloud can also provide the guarantees and assurances around these legal requirements, opening up the possibilities of innovation to entire industries that previously had no access to cloud services.
- Freedom of choice: Organisations don’t want to have to plan their entire cloud journey upfront; they want the freedom to adapt as their business needs evolve. That means having the freedom to adjust data utilisation as required rather having to compromise on decision making by being locked into one cloud. A truemulti-cloud strategy enables companies toincorporate the right mix of on-premises, private, public and edge cloud environments to meet their needs.
- Future-proofing: No-one knows what new innovation the future will bring, not even two or three years ahead. Businesses need to be agile to respond to evolving opportunities and new challenges. With a multi-cloud platform, they will be equipped to adapt every part of their organisation as needed, including tech infrastructure and data management capacities, to have those same capabilities.
By deploying a multi-cloud approach, organisations can give themselves the foundations they need to make better use of their data and ultimately close the innovation-execution gap.
LinkedIn Live Event on 20 October
To find out how a multi-cloud strategy can help you get your ideas out the door faster, register here to attend our LinkedIn Live on 20 October!
Joined by Dr. Sally Eaves (Global Strategy Advisor, Professor of Emergent Technologies and Founder of Aspirational Futures) and Professor Feng Li (Chair of Information Management at Bayes Business School at City, University of London) , we will explore the role of multi-cloud in helping organisations to bridge the Innovation-Execution Gap.