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Harvard Business Review Analytic Services 2 Pulse Survey | Improving Business Operations and Executing a Growth Strategy with an Agile Cloud "The cloud allows us to leverage the newest technology, effective immediately, and at a significant discount compared to doing it in our own data centers," says Chris Nims, senior vice president for cloud and productivity engineering with Capital One. Technology infrastructure is seen as essential to business operations: Business leaders support investments necessary to keep our processes running smoothly Technology infrastructure is seen as a growth enabler: Business leaders believe we need to invest in it to execute our business strategy Technology infrastructure is seen as a cost to be managed: Business leaders want to spend as little as possible FIGURE A Foundation for the Future Technology infrastructure is valuable to operations today and to future growth. Rate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements about your organization. ■ Strongly or somewhat disagree ■ Neither agree nor disagree ■ Strongly or somewhat agree Source: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey, September 2021 % % % suggest that they also view the cloud as essential to the future of their businesses. A large majority (84%) strongly or somewhat agree that technology infrastructure is essential to their business operations and that their colleagues support investments necessary to keep these functions running smoothly. FIGURE 1 At the same time, they understand its strategic contribution. More than three-fourths (79%) also agree strongly or somewhat that infrastructure is a growth enabler and that their organization's business leaders believe investing in it is needed to execute their business strategy. Understanding the value of the cloud to run the business now and to grow in the future is step one. Developing the business case and executing a full-scale cloud migration presents multiple challenges that can impact the migration roadmap and its progress. Many survey respondents report being concerned about whether they have the people in place to execute their plans and processes to ensure that their data, once in the cloud, will be safe and secure. Even when a company has a clear business case and a solid strategy, "organizations are going to have their own pace," says Michael Spires, who leads the technology transformation practice for The Hackett Group, a business advisory service. "Some organizations are going to be capable of going faster, whether that is because of their culture, their skill sets, or their risk aversion." This report examines the connection between cloud technology in enterprise operations and business strategy, as well as the obstacles to investment. It also explores what is driving cloud investment today, the challenges facing technology leaders when making the business case for investment, and what business leaders need to understand to move forward with deployment of modern cloud infrastructure and platform services. An Eye to Efficiency—and Agility Companies have always pursued efficiency, and the cloud is a means to that end. The cloud also enables companies to respond quickly to new business demands because they can easily acquire the necessary infrastructure. For example, building an application development environment in-house takes weeks. In the cloud, this work can be automated and completed in less than an hour. "It's because the infrastructure is already there," observes Capital One's Nims. "To a company like us, it might as well be unlimited." For survey respondents, the biggest motivation for investing in the cloud is to improve operations. When asked to select up to three main business drivers of their cloud investments, the majority (53%) cite the need to make business processes more efficient. The need to incorporate more data into business decisions (31%) and improve security (29%), which impact business operations, ranked second and third in a list of nine. Next, more than one-fourth (28%) cite among their top three motivations for investing in the cloud improving their ability to adjust to changes in demand, followed by employee demand for new/better experiences such as remote or hybrid work (25%). Responses tied between the need to make better,

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