Cloud services are meeting or exceeding expectations of the majority of Irish businesses, but greater leadership alignment and expertise is required to increase adoption and maximise their potential, according to Deloitte Ireland.
The Looking at Clouds report, published by the professional services giant on Thursday, shows that 54% of organisations are at the "scaling" stage of cloud implementation, meaning they are deploying cloud services across multiple functions and business areas.
Of the 101 C-level executives in Ireland surveyed, 81% said cloud services met or exceeded expectations in terms of quality of services, costs and improved business resilience, 78% said they improved scalability, 73% said they enabled them to enter new markets or disrupt the competition, and 75% said they helped their company to access new capabilities.
Conversely, 78% of respondents said that executive support and lack of skills/resources to implement are the biggest barriers to cloud adoption in their organisations, closely followed by no clear vision or ambition for cloud (71%).
Chief financial officers, chief information officers, IT directors, chief technology officers, chief transformation officers and chief digital officers from across a wide range of industries in the private and public sectors were questioned for the survey.
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The report also shows that 34% of technology budgets will be put towards cloud-related infrastructure or applications in the next 12 months.
"Cloud adoption isn’t just a technology change for business, it’s an organisational and cultural shift that requires governance and leadership buy-in to deliver its true value," Deloitte Ireland partner Ruairi Allen said.
"Although cloud adoption is on the rise, the true value it can deliver remains elusive for many, but the opportunities are widespread. For organisations already using cloud, now is the time to double down on those investments and build on the progress made to date by unlocking cloud’s ability to transform how value is delivered."
The survey found that only 11% of respondents understand that migrating workloads to cloud could improve sustainability, with 62% citing a lack of expertise as the main obstacle to employing digital technologies to become more sustainable.
Other reasons cited for digital reticence were no clear vision/ambition for sustainability (42%); cost/resources to implement (29%); executive support/alignment (29%); lack of sustainability subject-matter expertise (25%); and insufficient data on possible sustainability impacts across the business (22%).
When asked how they are using cloud transformation to operate more sustainably, 60% of respondents say for smarter energy; 42% for resource savings; 38% cloud data centres; 23% moving existing IT architecture to the cloud; 20% cleaner energy use, and 11% have moved servers to the cloud to avoid maintaining physical hardware.
"For businesses that have not yet adopted cloud, energy efficiency can be a compelling factor to make necessary changes to its cloud adoption plans. In reality, due to their scale, cloud providers can deliver IT more sustainably than most enterprises that operate their own data centres," Aoife Connaughton, Deloitte Ireland's director of climate sustainability, said.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) said AI and cybersecurity are critical and strategic priorities for business, but most (78%) agreed that security expectations were met by cloud services while 83% cited security and sovereignty concerns as the most significant barrier to implementing cloud services.
Other technologies and applications that businesses are focused on as strategic priorities include data analytics (72%), Internet of Things (69%) and robotic and intelligent automation (49%).
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