9 Ways Cloud Makes Companies More Competitive

CIOs, CTOs and the C-suite often say they want to move to cloud (or deeper into the cloud) to gain a competitive advantage. Yet, the outcomes are not uniform. Learning from organizations that have achieved a higher level of maturity helps, because they’re not making rookie mistakes like assuming the cloud is necessarily cheaper or that services on their own are more secure than they are. 

“The competitive advantage that cloud offers, really, is that customers that use it can make decisions faster, move faster, do projects quicker, and complete their projects quicker because of the cloud service acquisition time,” says David Boland, VP of cloud strategies at hot cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies. “[T]he time it takes to spin up a compute service or storage service, or any other type of cloud service is 80% faster than if you were to do it yourself on site, in your own data center or co-location center. It can be a month-long process to kick off a project that requires compute or storage or networking. It can be minutes or hours if you’re doing it in the cloud.” 

So, the total cost of ownership tends to be lower because no one needs to set up and manage the equipment. However, they do need to monitor it. 

How do companies achieve more than speed? Following are some traits of companies that are using cloud for competitive advantage.