Emerging group of 'Cloud Masters' to outperform peers: Oracle

Oracle, the US-headquartered IT giant which provides enterprise software and computer hardware products and services, on Tuesday said a new group of 'cloud masters' is emerging in various business verticals.

According to a global survey of 730 IT professionals conducted by Oracle and Longitude, the  small group of forward-thinking businesses have reached cloud maturity (with on average 70%  or more of their applications operating in the cloud) and are outperforming their competitors.

"Comprising 12% of respondents, the research shows that these 'cloud masters' are more data driven being better able to access, experiment and get insight from their business information, innovative and better able to respond to customer needs with greater relevance, speed and agility,"states the report.

Oracle report states that Cloud Masters have also seen the largest increases in productivity and competitiveness. "Together, these organisations are disrupting the industries in which they operate, leaving their peers behind. The remainder are playing catch up despite most having a cloud strategy in place and implementation underway,"states the report.  

Commenting on the Indian scenario, the report states that  just under a half (43%) of Indian IT executives surveyed stated that their cloud strategies are fully-developed and largely implemented.

"Only a very small percentage, even globally, can be classified as 'cloud masters', revealing a gap between what companies are talking about and what they are doing,"states the report.  

In terms of cloud strategy implementation in India, a similar proportion (40%) reported that strategy implementation is progressing.

"Nearly a fifth (18%), however, say their strategy development for cloud is in its infancy. Cloud is not the only technology investment that Indian businesses are looking to make in 2018,"states the report.

Oracle's research found that businesses in India are looking to capitalise on new, innovative technologies, such as open source, multiplatform capabilities and visual tools in the next year.  Additionally, nearly a quarter (23%) of IT executives from India felt that automation capabilities were important to the business, and a fifth put an importance on AI and machine learning within the organisation.  

Commenting on the report, Oracle  Senior Vice President of Systems & Technology for Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) & Asia Pacific (APAC)  Andrew Sutherland said  in  2018, the gap between 'cloud masters' and those lagging behind has the potential to widen significantly.

"What we are seeing is that those with the most experience are the quickest to exploit the new enterprise technologies and development methodologies and to use them to wow customers or develop competitive advantages before they become mainstream," said  Sutherland.  

He also said  this  speed to market comes from having the experience to apply the emerging technologies to business and from having invested in the right cloud platform, infrastructure and tools. "This means they can accelerate their way to competitive success – and if other businesses don't catch up now, they could be permanently left behind,"said  Sutherland.  

Although 81% of Indian respondents agree that cloud adoption offers the ability to better meet customer demands, enable greater collaboration, improve scalability and agility, concerns over security remain a barrier, 45% feel there are major security issues in moving IT operations and data to the cloud.  

Contradicting this, however, 78% say they believe application security in the cloud is better than previously.    At the same time, globally, respondents with a higher level of cloud maturity and exposure revealed themselves to be more confident in their cyber security capabilities than companies less ingrained in cloud – 65% rated their cyber threat detection as good to very good compared to 38%.  

The survey also shows a stark difference in analytics capabilities between those with a significant cloud exposure and those of lesser maturity.   Globally, more than 60% of cloud-mature companies say they have an increased ability to analyse most types of data and are taking advantage of improvements in machine learning-based automation and visualization, compared to nearer a third of companies at a lower stage.  

Eight in 10 cloud-mature companies say they're realising important gains from migrating data management to the cloud and able to experiment with different data models, and nearly as many say they generate better insights from their data. This is in comparison to around a half of organisations with lesser cloud maturity.

Critically, it is firms that integrate their data analysis capability into a single cloud platform that provides secure access to data in both on-premises and cloud data sources that are experiencing the greatest gains.

Organisations including Skanksa, Pragmatyxs, Australian Finance Group, Benchmark, Pernod Ricard Asia, Telesoft and Total, are amongst those who have chosen Oracle Cloud platform to speed innovation and deliver elite customer experiences.