Dive Brief:
- A new Verizon report says cloud has become so pervasive that the technology itself no longer provides companies significant competitive advantages.
- 84% of Verizon’s enterprise-level cloud customers said their use of the cloud increased in the past year, the report found.
- However, only 16% of businesses said that being “in the cloud” gives their company a significant advantage over competitors, down from 30% a year ago.
Dive Insight:
The cloud “still has a major role to play in delivering competitive advantage, but using cloud is now just table stakes,” the report said, adding that about a third of companies are using the cloud to “adapt their business models by creating new customer apps, shifting to usage-based pricing or other technology-enabled strategies.”
Among the companies surveyed, only 37% said they had used the cloud in some way to change business models.
“The cloud is about much more than a place to get cheap servers,” Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, said. “It’s a place to turn great ideas into products faster than we have ever been able to before.”
The Verizon survey also found that more companies are embracing the hybrid cloud and worrying less about security. However, a study just published by Bitglass found security is still a significant concern when it comes to cloud. In 2016, 87% of IT leaders said they expect to increase security spending, according to that study.
