Microsoft Cloud computing proves its value in a new survey of 150 global decision makers

In advance of a major new Cloud Power advertising campaign throughout May, a new Microsoft survey of 152 IT and business decision makers, published last month, revealed that the cloud can solve many of the big challenges still facing businesses. The challenge of globalisation is that it has fragmented industry value chains, making them far more complex and therefore unable to respond rapidly to shorter product and service life cycles and increased competition. Almost 50% of respondents indicated an immediate need to better integrate collaboration tools with business systems, and 36% saw a requirement to improve direct access to unstructured data and processes.

Cloud computing has the greatest capability to transform manufacturing and service provider value chains according to the Microsoft survey. The biggest benefit of cloud computing was viewed to be the lowered cost of optimising technology infrastructure (49%), closely followed by more efficient collaboration across geographies (48%) and then the ability to respond more rapidly to business demands (38%).

Where cloud computing is increasingly likely to help is in integrating critical business processes within and across organisations, extending the reach of networks and services in the cloud to integrate client and partner systems and data and connect smart web-enabled business devices to cloud applications.

Cloud computing is able to empower organisations to re-evaluate how they innovate and collaborate right across the value chain. However, the survey also revealed of that most organisations saw this as too big a challenge to tackle on their own, with 60% of respondents viewing an industry-wide collaboration of manufacturers, IT providers, systems integrators, service providers and business analysts as most capable of bringing about these improvements.

With the complexity of cloud solutions on offer, organisations are understandably seeking expert guidance on how best to plan and deploy powerful cloud technologies to meet their business goals and achieve greater competitive differentiation.

To find out more about how Ballard Chalmers and Microsoft Cloud solutions can help your organisation, please email us or call Andrew Chalmers on 01342 410223.

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