GBM survey reveals one in two regional organizations prefer hybrid cloud approach

Gulf Business Machines (GBM) announced key findings from its cloud services report, which examined how enterprises are embracing cloud services to become digitally resilient and subsequently business resilient.

The study explores how regional CIOs and business leaders are leveraging the cloud to give enterprises the digital capabilities they require, allowing them to become digitally resilient in the face of upheaval in the new normal.

The survey was conducted among CIOs from over a hundred firms in the UAE, Oman, and Kuwait, including those in banking, insurance and financial services, government, oil and gas, energy, and retail.

The report emphasised how firms are investing in digital technology in order to capitalise and develop in the case of massive disruption. This has resulted in an increase in enterprises gaining digital resilience, which IDC defines as an organization’s capacity to swiftly respond to business disruptions by employing digital capabilities to not only recover but also capitalise on the changing conditions.

Cloud services provide enterprises with scalable, quick-to-deploy, integrated digital platforms for business continuity, as well as the ability to launch products faster and make data-driven choices. However, just 10% of the studied firms have substantially matured and are employing cloud services for wide business application implementation, while another 24% have already begun using cloud services for business application implementation. 

According to the survey, more than half of the questioned enterprises use cloud services to provide their businesses with agile and scalable infrastructure, boosting their capacity to expand and optimise operations based on market demand. 44% of the firms surveyed are also investing in cloud services to improve data integration and access across all cloud platforms.

An equal amount of organizations want to invest in cloud services to improve data insights and data-driven decision making, allowing them to accelerate their market initiatives, including launching new products and services for their customers based on their evolving needs. However, 58% of the surveyed CIOs want to manage the usage, performance, and delivery of cloud services to ensure cost effective cloud services utilization, and this is the leading cloud initiative which organizations embarked on in 2021.

Cherif Morcos, Vice President of Digital Business Solutions at GBM, said, “Over the last two years, business disruptions have significantly impacted organizations and challenged their existing operating models. This has brought the importance of digital resiliency to the forefront as CIOs look to build digitally driven businesses which enable operational agility, scalability, and reliability.

“Implementing a cloud architecture and cloud services within an organization has consistently proven to support operational continuity and overall growth. And hence, it is extremely encouraging to see that 56% of regional organizations followed a ‘cloud first’ strategy in 2021. We are also seeing the rise of hybrid cloud as the preferred cloud led platform as it ensures the business meets regulatory, compliance, and security requirements while also enables increased digital resiliency,” Cherif added.

Looking ahead, 87% of firms feel that using cloud services to solve present and future business requirements will help them drive innovation more effectively over the next 12-18 months. 75 percent of the firms surveyed want to employ cloud services to gain a competitive edge by introducing innovative solutions faster and scaling up service requirements as needed. Organizations are also embracing cloud services to speed business process change at a quicker rate, as reported by 34% of those polled, supporting the push for digital resiliency.

GBM has crystallized years of customer experience to create the Journey to Cloud (J2C) framework, which takes into account customers’ individual business models and capabilities/services to align the transformation and cloud adoption strategies, helping organizations in their digital transformation. GBM has created an essential guidance to support organizations develop an effective hybrid cloud approach to becoming digitally resilient. 

For more information on the findings in the GBM Cloud Services Whitepaper, visit this link.