The cloud is on the rise. Just shy of 80% of organizations are seriously considering adoption in one form or another, and almost 40% have already implemented cloud products and services in their operations. But according to research carried out by International Data Corporation (IDC) on 19,080 worldwide IT and LOB (line of business) respondents, mature Cloud-centric organizations are hard to come by.

Perhaps more important is that organizations who have learned to master the cloud are seeing considerable business benefits, as opposed to those still struggling to get past cloud adolescence.

Simple recipe

IDC’s CloudView study stresses that, although cloud adoption is skyrocketing, many businesses hop on the bandwagon but never get past the first steps. Moving operations to the cloud doesn’t mean that you can let go your entire IT department. In order for the transition to work, you need educated staff to begin with. Yet IT in many firms struggle to keep up with data analytics and the demands of their higher-ups.

After analyzing the responses from the survey, IDC concluded that the recipe to achieve cloud maturity is actually very simple: use a mix of external sourcing and internal transformation. For the companies that have let this process transpire across the board, business is flourishing.

Hard to bake-in

According to the IDC whitepaper, maturity in cloud generates tremendous benefits. Organizations become able to focus entirely on strategy versus day-to-day operations, faster and with more provisioning options regarding new services. IT costs are considerably reduced and revenue gets charged with new streams.

The organizations that achieve a well-balanced use of cloud will also have marketing & sales units capable of sourcing the IT solutions that best fit their business needs. The research firm identifies 5 major categories of cloud maturity, each with their own set of IT tasks and milestones to overcome, complete with the end results. Those are:

• Ad Hoc/Learn: develop a high level of knowledge of the business value by focusing on pilot projects driven by the needs of individual decision makers.
• Opportunistic/Change: scale up access to standardized IT resources while focusing on app virtualization, with the end goals of promoting buy-in to cloud resources, achieving a company-wide experience, and eliminating redundancy.
• Repeatable/Refine: enabling agile access to resources through aggressive standardization with the goal to understand cost versus value, self-service mechanisms, and outsourcing.
• Managed/Mainstream: in a nutshell, the company finds ways to expand a consistent enterprise-wide best practices approach to cloud
• Optimized/Attack: LOB and IT are harmonized and are able to drive success and innovation, all thanks to feedback loops for continuous improvement, and a sourcing structure entirely focused on adding value to the business.

This, and much more can be found in the 19-page PDF which compiles data both from IDC’s CloudView Survey, as well as IDC’s Business Value Practice report.