April 1, 2013
The latest research is clear: the cloud has matured from its early experimental phase into a bona fide global business phenomenon. According to analyst firm IDC, organizations will spend $100 billion on public IT cloud services in 2016. Over the next four years, the cloud sector will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of more than five times that of the entire IT industry.
Those figures don’t come from organizations moving individual applications or single departments to the cloud. They come from enterprises accelerating their platform-as-a-service deployments and rolling out cloud strategies on a global basis. While the majority of cloud spending is spread across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, the fastest growth is happening in emerging markets.
The availability, scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud makes it a natural choice for international implementations. But getting the technology running is just the start. In a global context, you need to think more than ever about people and processes.
