Darren Mowry
EMEA director, Amazon Web Services
We’re going through a shift in technology that is unlike any other in our lifetime, and it’s happening at a startling pace – much faster than anybody anticipated. Cloud Computing allows organisations of any size to focus on what really differentiates their organisations – such as accelerating drug discovery, producing blockbuster movies, building great mobile apps, and even exploring Mars – and removes the heavy lifting of managing the underlying technology infrastructure.
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) report, The Transformative Effect of Cloud on Firm Productivity and Performance, found that cloud is having a significant impact on organisational efficiency, with 90% of organisations using it to make productivity gains in 2018.
Furthermore, research conducted by Forrester Consulting established that 56% of European government leaders saw cloud, first and foremost, as a means of increasing speed-to-mission and business agility.
Every imaginable organisation from startups to enterprises to government organisations are now using the cloud to aid security, innovation, cost reduction and improved customer service.
Cloud is helping organisations deliver productivity enhancement
Cloud enhances organisational productivity as infrastructure, processes, and operations are moving to the cloud. The LSE report found that when integrated effectively into a technology stack, and combined with best management practices, using cloud services improves productivity by as much as 20%.
Leading global provider of digital asset management, creative logistics and analytics solutions, Adstream, is an excellent example of this. By going all-in on AWS, Adstream has been able to optimise its IT usage and modernise its workforce with more automation, auto-scaling, and faster deployment methods. Adstream can scale easily to meet the requirements of new and large customers, enabling it to increase revenues and drive year-on-year growth.
The most productive and successful organisations are positioning cloud at the core of their strategy.
In the public sector, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is using cloud computing services to modernise its technology and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the services it provides to citizens and staff. The MoJ significantly reduced the time taken to deliver services from more than six months per release in some cases, to multiple times a day. As well as saving money, the move enabled MoJ to manage, change, improve and secure its systems.
More widely, the Forrester Consulting research suggests government cloud adoption is still accelerating. 49% of organisations studied had already implemented cloud, with a further 35% planning to do so within 12 months.
Cloud strategy is fueling digital transformation
The LSE report found that the most productive and successful organisations today are positioning cloud at the core of their transformation or market-entry strategy, and are deriving clear benefits from this approach.
These include, for example, a reduction in turnaround times for some decisions by 50 to 70% due to the removal of many complex larger capex decisions for infrastructure and technology; a reduction of enterprise technology costs by 20 to 80%; and ‘freedom’ to assess emerging areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
These results highlight the shift to cloud services and how all organisations, irrespective of type, size, and location, are gaining benefits. This trend will continue as cloud evolves and becomes further embedded in organisational strategy, culture, and execution.
Take Tandem Bank, a digital bank shaking up the status quo that went all-in with AWS. The Tandem app, powered by AWS, allows users to securely manage all their bank accounts in one place and provides a range of services, including spending forecasts and personalised highlights using machine learning algorithms. Using AWS, Tandem Bank has delivered a 47% increase in overall application performance of the app.
Innovation and efficiency go hand-in-hand
The LSE report found that 95% of start-ups would have been prohibited from entering the market at all if it weren’t for cloud computing. Many of the consumer apps that have become household names in the last few years may not have become so pervasive. A range of startups were able to very quickly launch their new ideas, without having to secure a ton of capital first, and then have been able to scale globally based on consumer demand at a speed that simply wouldn’t be possible if they had to build their own data centres.
The shift to cloud computing has seen also seen enterprises reinvent themselves and bring new services to market, so that they can move quickly, reduce costs and compete effectively against some of these more agile newcomers.
Find your future in the cloud
Cloud services offer the path to a more productive, efficient, and innovative future for organisations of all shapes and sizes. It’s time to invest in the right approach to adopt cloud services to drive transformation throughout your organisation.
