‘Work from home’ has boosted the enterprise journey to the cloud

• Amdocs has been surveying enterprise users and has discovered a distinct up-tick in enterprise plans to accelerate their ‘cloud journeys'
• 75% of  UK businesses intend to  increase investment in remote working technology
• 86% of UK enterprises are using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions (such as Google Workspace, Salesforce, etc.)

More evidence that, in the UK at least, enterprises have latched properly onto the idea that cloud technology is the way forward for the usual dozen or so tactical and strategic reasons...  plus the lockdown. Recent corporate near-death experiences have put a rocket under many companies’ plans to use their cloud migration to support more flexible working requirements. 

Before Covid the drivers for home working included the fact that people were simply asking for it (especially highly-valued employees wanting to put child rearing in their diaries); that it might be beneficial from a productivity point of view; that it made it easier to engineer flexible hours; and more. 

But Covid has clearly boosted home working to a necessity for many enterprises anxious to avoid being wrong-footed by the next lockdown, They see that a lack of robust home working arrangements could be fatal the second time around since it might not only badly impact them, but fatally hole their customers below the waterline. 

They’ve noted that where businesses were able to demonstrate cloud-based agility through the summer, they have been heaped with praise. That’s in telecoms, but sure-footed responses to protect customers have no doubt occurred across the piece. 

Amdocs decided to get a measure of how collective corporate attitudes have changed with a survey of UK enterprises. It found that there was distinct interest in, and move towards, remote and home working. 

As lockdown continues here in the UK:

• 75% of  UK businesses intend to  increase investment in remote working technology to make it easier, and potentially, permanent.
• Crucially, ‘cloud’ is seen as a prerequisite to this move. UK enterprises say they’re putting cloud technology at the heart of their IT strategies and say that upskilling and reskilling are going to be crucial to support shifting work patterns.  
• 47% of UK enterprises are aiming to upskill staff in cloud security practices
• 52% of UK enterprises say they will be hiring new cloud architects and software engineers, whilst 44% say they will bring in more cloud systems/network administrators
• 86% of UK enterprises are using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions (such as Google Workspace, Salesforce, etc.), highlighting that some UK enterprises have already taken major steps to adopt the cloud
• 78% of UK enterprises using cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions (such as Apprenda, Red Hat OpenShift etc.)
• 70% of UK enterprises using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions

I spoke with Avi Kulshrestha, General Manager and Division President at Amdocs, and pointed out that our own TelecomTV interviews or panel sessions often conclude with agreement that the barriers to ‘technology x’ adoption are not technological so much as cultural. But there the diagnosis usually ends. 

Fiddling with corporate culture would appear  to be out of our collective lane.  So user companies have to get on and find ways around the  barriers themselves,   

I put it to Avi that when it comes to the sweeping organisational change that may accompany a  work-from-home journey, might the cultural aspects be partially in our lane - if not now, then in the future? Might this be an opportunity for Amdocs and others to extend the support they can offer to end-user organisations? 

He agreed up to a point, but maintained that senior executives have ways of finding out from each other what the best course of action might be and how to go about it.

“Every meeting I’ve been to recently with senior execs from other companies always involves that sort of discussion,” he told me.

But for Amdocs the decision to do a survey (made pre-Covid) has helped expose a lot of the dynamic around Cloud, Covid and ‘work from home’ and Amdocs is keen to share it. 

“Mid last year our CEO said “guys we’re taking the industry to the cloud’.”  What that meant was that the ‘time had come’ to  move our heavy payloads to the cloud. Avi said. “And we thought the time had come for executives to drive the cloud option, but we were unsure about what the barriers would be.  So we decided our portfolio would become a cloud native portfolio and to do that we had to transform our own technical environment.

“So we said let’s go out and find out how enterprises are tackling cloud adoption -  not just in telecoms but right across the piece.

“Life is not going to be the same again,” he says. “But in reality the work from home situation will end up somewhere in the middle. Companies will take the full spectrum of approaches - from ‘work from anywhere, right down to work 5 days in the office.”