Businesses once hailed the cloud as a way to save money, but recently they’ve changed their tune. Today, the cloud can give businesses a tangible advantage over competitors, and they’re hearing about the benefits directly from their customers.
Advantages that improve the customer experience are more important than ever. With digital products and distribution, people can switch business partners overnight. Driving loyalty means offering real improved customer experiences, supported by cloud computing. A 2013 IBM study (PDF) found that organizations embracing the cloud report doubled revenue growth and nearly 2.5 times higher gross profits than that of companies that are more cautious about the cloud.
Hyper-connected business
The power of off-premise computing is being harnessed by line-of-business managers, not just IT. Content to sign up for “freemium” cloud services, managers at all levels are leveraging cloud technology, using software as a service wherever they deem appropriate. By 2020, 90 percent of all enterprise tech spending will take place outside of IT departments, according to Gartner.
The big win for business units is ready access to advanced mobile, social, and analytic resources that help them use Big Data to their advantage. Nearly 80 percent of those ages 18 to 44 years old reach for their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up, and enterprise workers are no exception. They are taking advantage of pervasive connectedness to interact with each other via social networks that bring together communities of common interest, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But their constant digital activity also generates a wealth of useful information, making them intense hubs of activity that impact critical business activities from marketing to recruiting.
Smarter, faster decision-making
These new technologies also bring unprecedented speed and agility to teams that deploy them. With the freedom to start small and scale as needed, organizations can process much larger volumes of more diverse data more quickly, and in more advanced ways, than they ever could with legacy IT infrastructure.
Faster data processing allows decision makers to pinpoint actionable “needles” in massive “haystacks” of data available to the enterprise. From predicting trends based on historical inputs to real-time alerts, on-premise equipment often can’t handle the enormous compute power required to make rapid insights. But cloud computing can scale up when big jobs arise, avoiding big data bottlenecks and keeping management agile.
When decision makers are equipped to be agile, that makes collaboration easier and more secure for resources across the rest of the organization. Importantly, customer feedback is free to move quickly through the system and spur improvements. The faster a line of business can incorporate feedback, the better their products and services become.
Learn more about the cloud as a catalyst for business transformation.
This article was produced on behalf of CDW by the Quartz marketing team and not by the Quartz editorial staff.