Increased adoption of cloud platforms and services is underway with upwards of 45% year-over-year growth.1 Organizations are increasingly using cloud investments to boost business performance, drive strategic outcomes, and enable breakthrough innovation—not just to deliver IT services in a more flexible and efficient way. Many organizations have come to realize that while moving to the cloud can double their speed and efficiency, leveraging and building on the cloud can also give them enhanced capabilities that can reach 10x multiples.

Although most organizations have come to recognize cloud adds value beyond agility and efficiency goals,3 many don’t know where and to what extent cloud platforms and services can contribute to broader enterprise goals such as product and service development, market expansion, cybersecurity, revenue generation, competitive differentiation, customer experience enhancement, and business/regulatory risk mitigation—just to name a few. And the contribution cloud plays to enabling business strategy can be significant. Cloud, in fact, can drive value in ways organizations may not know or realize.

Cloud is now the default platform for many business and technology innovations—enabling everything from artificial intelligence and machine learning to advanced cybersecurity, IoT, and edge computing (as well as new products and services, new operating processes, and new business models). Yet many organizations are not getting nearly as much value from their cloud investments as they could be and are lagging behind in terms of managing cloud capabilities in a way that drives business performance— strategic outcomes and innovation success.

As business and cloud decision-makers map out their future cloud strategies, what should they be doing to ensure their organizations are harnessing the technology’s full potential?