Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

It’s no mystery that enterprises today are racing to give themselves a competitive edge by moving operations from on-premise to cloud. This ‘maturity’ is apparently at its highest in 2015, with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reporting that 44 percent of respondents in a study reported increased revenue, while 36 percent posted a spike in profits.

Perhaps more interestingly (to us, at least), the same survey found that cloud adoption enabled unprecedented levels of scalability and increased collaboration across the surveyed companies – 452 business and IT professionals.

Business agility & collaboration

At those organizations that have already hopped on the cloud bandwagon, usage has continued to rise this year. 84 percent said their organization’s use has increased in the past 12 months, with no signs of stopping.

An immediate ‘side effect’ of integrating cloud services and apps has been “increased business agility,” according to HBR, with 71 percent of the surveyed companies reporting this instant benefit. This, in turn, has enabled a major increase in collaboration – 72 percent said the use of cloud-centric apps has made it easier to collaborate with colleagues.

So why is collaboration so much smoother when you’re using the cloud? Well, one major perk is that you and your colleagues can get access to resources in real time even if you’re not sharing the same office. With a tool like Hubgets, the data fed into the cloud is processed and made searchable, so the chance for error is diminished even when the person who generated the data is physically absent.

Perception problems

One area that still needs improvement, however, is perception. According to the report, “Cloud still suffers from a perception problem when it comes to security. Cloud providers have to do more to show decision makers that their services are at least as secure as the more traditional alternatives and help their customers manage risk appropriately for the business.”

And the reality is they are. Cloud-experienced respondents in the study noted that data security has seen virtually no impact (34 percent), or that security has actually been strengthened (39 percent) as a result of cloud integration. Only 10 percent said their use of cloud has lowered the bar in security, but failed to mention a culprit.

Finally, IT is beginning to see much more involvement in cloud matters. 43 percent of cloud purchases are now made by central IT, according to the research. Only 16 percent of the 452 business highlighted in the report said the purchased cloud services without involving IT.