The cloud as a differentiating element, by Manuel Navarro

Difficult times are ahead. Or, at least, surrounded by uncertainties. We have before us a new crisis that seems to have a difficult solution. Even an indispensable sector like technology continues to grapple with problems, especially those stemming from the supply chain crisis. But make no mistake, we are in a sector that, compared to others, is in excellent health.

This is so, because, contrary to what happened in previous crises, technology has become the fundamental pillar for companies to overcome the vicissitudes that life brings. ICT helped a good part of the companies to emerge unscathed from the coronavirus crisis and will do so this time too, allowing energy savings, lower costs and increased productivity.

Technologies have become the fundamental pillar for companies to overcome the different crises and of all of them, the cloud has been the fundamental

And of all the technologies, the cloud has become the main lifeline, as reflected in the traditional study carried out by the consulting firm Quint on the state of the cloud. Some aspects of this report are striking. The first is that the cloud has been permanently installed in the operations of companies. The difference is that if not many years ago the cloud was embraced for cost reduction, today they do so for other reasons such as flexibility or agility. In fact, many companies are finding that migrating to the cloud is not as cheap as they anticipated. And that is why the study points out that one of the priorities of ICT departments is to find a service that allows them to manage costs in the cloud, in an optimal way and that reduces the bill.

The Quint study points out that investment in cloud services has increased by 25% in the last year, with IaaS and PaaS, which make up 55% of the cake, as kings of the classification and with a tendency for this dynamic to continue rising next year. The investment will continue to grow because companies have seen that the cloud provides them with greater flexibility (72.4%) and a complete transformation of their IT (54%). But this latest report adds one more piece of information for which technology departments are going to increase their investment in the cloud: improving time to market is indicated as an objective by 55.2% of those surveyed. According to Quint, this new element appears due to the maturity of the market and the need for organizations to remain competitive.

In other words, the cloud is going to be the support on which the IT strategy of organizations revolves. This will mean that they face this new crisis with a solidity that they did not have at other times and that will allow them to quickly adapt the business to the changing circumstances that surround us all.