In addition to the business benefits, cloud innovators are also realizing technical benefits from their cloud implementations, as shown in Figure 6. Cloud is the key enabler for digital innovation, but also provides better security and compliance than on-premises IT.
Cloud users were assessed across three main dimensions to determine their progress in leveraging the cloud for digital business innovation. IDC developed 3 pillars for the Cloud Benchmarking Framework and assessed the respondents across each of the pillars.
The 3 pillars of the cloud benchmarking framework are:
Plan and Architect
Build, Secure, and Optimize
Innovate and Differentiate
The research revealed that organizations with a successful cloudbased digital innovation strategy excel in mastering all the three pillars of the cloud framework. However, only a small percentage of European organizations (15%) have truly excelled across each of the three pillars to achieve cloud innovator status.
To be a cloud innovator, organizations need to excel holistically and demonstrate maturity in each of these pillars.
Figure 7 shows the benchmark results by pillar. In the Plan & Architect pillar, 52% of EMEA organizations are at the second level — cloud optimizer. In the Build, Secure & Optimize pillar, 45% of EMEA organizations are Experimenters at the beginning of their cloud journey and in the Innovate & Differentiate pillar, 46% of EMEA organizations are in the experimenter category.
Cloud skills are further developed at the beginning of the cloud journey, as more organizations have started to put their cloud strategies into actionable plans, while building, securing, and optimizing cloud environments at scale. Using cloud as a platform for innovation remains a challenging task for EMEA organizations, mainly due to a lack of skills and practical experience.
