What CEOs Need to Know About the Cloud in 2021
While companies’ shift to the cloud has been gradual over the last decade, Accenture’s research shows that the pandemic has accelerated that move. In 2020, companies of all kinds quickly learned that they had to depend on cloud technologies to enable entire staffs to work from home, to ramp up digital commerce, and to provide telehealth, entertainment streaming, and more. CEOs must now evaluate a changed and changing business for the longer term. And despite the enthusiasm for what cloud can do, executives across the C-suite have concerns. The authors answer five key questions about cloud adoption on the minds of business leaders.
Medical researchers and innovators may be the heroes who will make our world livable again, but they can’t do it without the power of technology — especially cloud computing. This critical technology has enabled the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines that, as of this writing, we hope will be as effective as clinical trials have indicated.
One of the companies leading the way is Moderna, a relatively small organization compared to the pharmaceutical giants working on other vaccine candidates. But by building and scaling its operations on the cloud, Moderna was able to deliver its first clinical batch to the National Institutes of Health for phase one trial only 42 days after initial sequencing of the virus. To accomplish this, the company invented proprietary cloud-based technologies and methods to create mRNA constructs that cells recognize as if they were produced in the body. This allows Moderna to experiment rapidly and easily shift between vaccines for different viruses without investing in new technology or infrastructure.
Moderna also uses the cloud to achieve higher efficiency and visibility across manufacturing, inventory management, and even accounting — and to “copy and paste” its digital manufacturing model onto partner facilities, which is critical for the rapid scaling of vaccine production.
The Moderna example reveals the cloud’s connection to five key areas all CEOs must lead: speed to market, reduced costs, flexibility of operations, business resilience, and innovation capabilities. Cloud technology allows startups and midsize companies to access big tech capabilities — compute power, algorithms, programming tools, and architectures — and partner in an ecosystem with larger firms.
But prior to 2020, progress toward the cloud had actually been quite gradual. As we found in designing the research for our recent survey of 750 C-level leaders, today, about 20% to 30% of work is being done through the cloud, and companies initially planned to accelerate that to more like 80% over an eight- to 10-year process. The year of the virus, however, is speeding things up. Companies of all kinds quickly learned that they had to depend on cloud technologies to enable their entire staffs to work from home, to ramp up digital commerce, and to provide telehealth, entertainment streaming, and more. We now see this shift to 80% taking place in the next three years.
Despite the enthusiasm for what cloud can do, executives across the C-suite still have concerns. In our survey, only 37% said they had fully achieved the outcomes they expected from their cloud initiatives — an increase of just two percentage points from our 2018 survey. Only about three in 10 reported complete confidence in their organization’s cloud migration initiatives to deliver expected value at the expected time. (The 2020 survey covered 17 countries in 11 industries, with a split of roughly two-thirds IT executives and one-third business executives and a minimum $1 billion in sales.)
Through our work with companies across the world, which includes dozens of in-depth discussions with C-level leadership, we identified the five key questions business leaders have as they strategize for the long-term and move closer to that 80% target. Two are longstanding concerns about security and legacy IT.
