Early cloud adopters to be more profitable than peers, reveals survey

Cloud is having a significant and fast-growing strategic impact on U.S. companies, claimed a new study conducted by Oxford Economics and released by Windstream. The study, based on survey of 350 senior technology and business executives, revealed some interesting insights on cloud technology and adoption.

According to the study, more than half of respondents identified that cloud will be critical to their business’ innovation strategy in two years while 57 percent said it will enable their company to move into new geographic markets.

Roughly two-thirds of respondents expect the cloud to support innovation and customer service delivery within two years. Moreover, 88 percent of large companies surveyed said that cloud would enable more collaboration among business units.

When asked about cloud security, 76 percent noted cloud security as their primary concern with migration, while platform compatibility and privacy ranked highly with just over half of respondents. Healthcare organisations ranked significantly higher than the overall survey set with data security concerns.

Trailblazers, or those organisations that adopted cloud technology early on, have higher profit margins and are more likely to be profitable than other respondents, claimed the survey. More than half of trailblazer organisations stated that cloud was critical for innovation, compared with 33 percent of non-trailblazers.

“The survey findings illustrate a compelling snapshot of the cloud environment today,” said Edward Cone, managing editor and senior analyst for thought leadership at Oxford Economics. “The conclusions drawn in this report provide vital information to anyone interested in cloud computing.”