SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 20, 2016 – Cisco today released the findings of a global study indicating that while cloud adoption continues to accelerate, few organizations are maximizing the value that cloud can offer. According to the study, nearly 68 percent of organizations are using cloud to help drive business outcomes, a 61 percent increase from last year's study. The increased cloud adoption is being fueled by cloud-native applications, including security and the Internet of Things (IoT) cloud-based solutions.

However, most organizations (69 percent) do not have mature* cloud strategies and only 3 percent have optimized cloud strategies generating superior business outcomes.

On average, the most “cloud advanced” organizations see an annual benefit per cloud-based application of $3 million in additional revenues and $1 million in cost savings. These revenue increases have been largely the result of sales of new products and services, gaining new customers faster, or accelerated ability to sell into new markets.

The study also reveals that 95 percent of those leading organizations with optimized cloud strategies have built a hybrid IT environment that uses multiple private and public clouds based on economics, location and governance policies.

The Cisco-sponsored InfoBrief “Cloud Going Mainstream: All Are Trying, Some Are Benefiting; Few Are Maximing Value” was developed by International Data Corporation (IDC). The study is based on primary market research conducted with executives responsible for IT decisions in over 6,100 organizations across 31 countries that are successfully implementing private, public and hybrid clouds in their IT environments. This marks the second year of the study, nearly doubling last year’s sample size.

In the study, IDC identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed and optimized.

Hybrid Cloud Adoption by Country

Hybrid cloud adoption (public cloud and private cloud services) varies by country, with Korea and Japan among the countries with the greatest percentage of organizations using a mix of public cloud services and dedicated assets. The study notes the percentage of organizations with hybrid cloud adoption in the following countries:

45 percent United States 47 percent Latin America Region 46 percent UK 42 percent France 51 percent Germany 41 percent Australia 47 percent Canada 55 percent Korea 42 percent The Netherlands 54 percent Japan 52 percent China

According to the study, organizations face a number of obstacles to achieving greater cloud maturity, including capabilities and skills gaps, lack of a well-defined strategy and roadmap, legacy siloed organizational structures, and Information Technology/Line of Business (IT/LOB) misalignment.

Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Adoption Report

Cisco is helping customers translate the findings of this study into personalized analysis and guidance. The Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Adoption Report allows organizations to complete a brief survey to determine their own cloud adoption level and associated business benefits relative to their industry peers—by industry, company size, and geography. Customers can access the tool and additional information at www.cisco.com/go/bca. The tool will continue to be offered to Cisco partners to use with their customers.

New Cloud Professional Services

In addition, Cisco is launching a new set of Cloud Professional Services to help businesses navigate the multicloud maze and optimize their cloud environments. These services will help customers bridge the skill-set gaps they may be facing as they accelerate their digital transformation strategies and cloud native initiatives.

Available now, these Cisco® Professional Services will include:

• New multicloud management and orchestration services for Cisco Cloud Center empowering customers to model once, deploy and manage anywhere.
• New Cloud Acceleration services that accelerate the design and deployment of both traditional private clouds and cloud-native solutions such as OpenStack and PaaS.
• Enhanced application and cloud migration services to automate and de-risk the complexity involved in onboarding and migrating applications and workloads to the cloud.
• New IT transformation services focused on DevOps-related change management initiatives that help align business processes and capabilities enabling customers to integrate and optimize across both traditional and DevOps environments and teams.

Scott Clark, Vice President, Advanced Services , Cisco

“Our customers are dealing with increasingly diverse and complex environments as their hybrid and multicloud deployments grow. These customers want the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for their traditional and cloud native applications, which all drive a variety of business benefits. Yet, as this research bears out, while many customers are embracing cloud, most are still in the early stages of their journey to an optimized cloud model. That is where our new and enhanced Cisco Professional Services can help. Working with our partners, our joint services offerings are designed to help customers achieve a highly secure and optimized cloud environment specific to their unique business needs.”

In the future, Cisco plans to offer an integrated strategy workshop combining the Cisco DomainTen Service with Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Workshop. The Cisco and channel partner-delivered workshop will help organizations identify cloud adoption gaps and benchmarks, continuously improve their multicloud environments, and facilitate alignment between IT and line of business (LOB) stakeholders. The workshop will also help organizations better measure the potential impact of cloud adoption in their IT organizations across a broad range of key performance indicators.

Cisco’s Domain Ten framework provides customers with an end-to-end view of the key elements, or domains, in their data center and IT infrastructure. It helps customers plan their IT transformation by providing a strategic roadmap and steps to take to achieve their goals.

These new services and integrated workshops will also provide channel partners with opportunities to either resell Cisco services or combine their own complementary services and work with Cisco to deliver a holistic solution to customers, bringing the right combination of skills, capabilities and offers together to help organizations achieve their business outcomes.

Holger Jung, Project Manager, T-Systems

“T-Systems is working with Cisco on a cloud onboarding solution called ‘Migration as a Service (MaaS)’ that is an easy to use and highly sophisticated server migration solution that streamlines time-to-value for our customers. With minimal configuration and time involved it is possible to make a source system available on the T-Systems vCloud and provide T-Systems-managed workloads as well as customer-managed workloads based on customers’ needs. We are currently starting to use this service for mass migrations with various customers.”

Michael Thomaschewski, CTO, Hybrid Infrastructure, Long View Systems

“As our customers evolve toward adopting cloud to help drive business outcomes, we are working closely with them to help determine the best path forward as their trusted advisors. By combining our own specialized consultative services with Cisco’s cloud professional services and applying Cisco’s Business Cloud Advisor framework, we are building a robust methodology to help our customers on their cloud journeys. Long View intends on conducting more than 100 BCA assessments this fiscal year, and integrating BCA as a critical element of our client consultation for cloud.”

Richard Scannell, President & CEO, RiverMeadow Software

“In a complex multi-cloud world, customers require choices on the environments and consumption models for their cloud workloads. We are working with Cisco to help customers optimize their cloud strategies and simplify their journey to cloud. In our joint collaboration with Cisco on application and cloud migration services, we are able to streamline the process by automating and removing complexity involved in onboarding and migrating applications and workloads to the cloud. This helps customers easily move entire server workloads to public, private and hybrid cloud environments.”

Robert Mahowald, Group VP, SaaS & Cloud SW, IDC

“As this global cloud adoption study reveals, most organizations are still attempting to optimize their cloud strategies, but the 3 percent of organizations that have reached the highest level of adoption are reaping the most benefits. It also underscores that multicloud environments are the default scenario among a majority of companies worldwide, and successfully managing multicloud is a key attribute of mature cloud strategies. As the market evolves, customers will move across the cloud maturity continuum with the help of engagements like the Cisco Business Cloud Advisor framework, which can help customers accelerate their cloud journeys and drive measureable business benefits.”

*Mature refers to companies that are in the repeatable, managed, and optimized stage of cloud adoption.