Business Agility

Moving to the cloud will make your organization more agile - allowing your organization to adapt and respond rapidly to changes in your business environment in a cost-efficient manner. According to McKinsey & Company, the leading global management consulting firm, the benefits of business agility include faster revenue growth, greater and more lasting cost reduction, and more effective management of risks and reputational threats.

A 2011 survey by market-research firm AbsolutData identified attributes of "extremely agile" companies and linked the companies' agility to their adoption of cloud-based technology solutions. According to the survey, extremely agile companies outperform their peers across several business-agility dimensions including recognizing shifts in customer trends/demands, launching new products or functionalities, and scaling resources in order to meet demand.

The AbsolutData survey further linked business agility to the adoption of cloud technology with 72 percent of respondents indicating that the cloud played a key role in their IT agility and that, in turn, the cloud made the entire organization more "business agile" and "responsive." Extremely agile companies report IT as one of their top two agile business functions. Companies that aren't identified as agile report that IT is among their two least agile business functions.

How the cloud supports business agility:

• Scalability - the cloud allows you to scale IT resources and infrastructure to meet demand - in many cases allowing you to provision additional resources (computational power, bandwidth, storage, functionality, etc.) in a matter of minutes or even dynamically.
• Reduced risk of innovation - the low startup cost of implementing cloud solutions allows organizations to test new ideas with minimal financial risk.
• Project lifecycles are accelerated - cloud resources are available on-demand - making it possible to implement new ideas much more quickly versus on-premise solutions which require waiting for hardware and software to be ordered, delivered, installed and configured before implementation of a new idea can even begin.
• IT can focus on strategic initiatives - moving to the cloud frees IT resources from the routine maintenance and support of on-premise software and hardware making it possible to focus these resources on implementing strategic initiatives to support business objectives.