For example, a retail organization can leverage public cloud services to quickly extend services into new mobile-centric geographies while developing its own private cloud to create advanced customer behavior analytics systems for business leaders and supply partners.

The benefits of cloud for future-ready enterprises go beyond simply lowering infrastructure costs. Cloud provides a platform for greater levels of organizational flexibility, availability, and control at the business level by extending business reach. Organizations in our study saw more effective use of their infrastructure (46%), but they also identified better enablement of resource-intensive applications like BDA (42%), improved business agility (42%), and greater developer productivity (39%) as key cloud benefits (see Figure 5).

Cloud gives organizations the ability to scale services up and down more quickly to better align with real business cycles and meet fluctuations in demand. This agility is critical in reducing the barrier that business risk imposes on innovation. When organizations trust their infrastructure to adapt quickly, they are more likely to experiment with new applications since it removes the risk of having to make large infrastructure investments to support initiatives that may or may not pan out.

Future Creators are the most extensive users of all types and combinations of cloud (public and private), supporting 60% of their IT infrastructure with cloud and only 20% with traditional (nonconverged) IT infrastructure. The biggest gap in cloud usage is between Future Creators and Current Focused, as Current Focused organizations still support 41% of their needs with traditional IT infrastructure and use cloud for 40% of their needs.

Future Creators utilize a wide range of public and private cloud catalog services, with 57% using a range of general compute and storage options as well as predefined configurations for key public cloud applications compared with only 20% of Current Focused organizations. 53% of Future Creators use a wide range of key private cloud applications compared with 25% of Current Focused.

For many companies, the use of public and private cloud is thought of as hybrid cloud. For Future Creators, this represents a well-defined effort to use a diversified set of cloud-based resources that they can quickly rebalance to extend services, address new security/compliance requirements, and optimize resources.

Future Creators not only are making more extensive use of cloud but also have more sophisticated cloud strategies using the right cloud option for each requirement. 32% of Future Creators have highly diversified cloud strategies, meaning they can easily choose among three or more cloud options to match specific capacity, costs, and performance requirements while managing them as a single cloud resource, compared with only 4% of Current Focused (see Figure 6).

This approach gives Future Creators a competitive advantage compared with less future-ready organizations, for example:

• Compared with 41% of Current Focused, 58% of Future Creators say cloud provides more effective use of infrastructure and resources, enabling them to achieve more with the same IT budget.
• Compared with 31% of Current Focused, 59% of Future Creators see enablement of Big Data and analytics as a significant cloud benefit, enabling them to monetize both old and new data sources.
• Compared with 36% of Current Focused, 56% of Future Creators say cloud improved business agility, enabling them to respond faster to competitors and be the leader in industry transformation.

Future Creators are also most likely to be their own cloud providers, with 28% having a single instance of cloud that they manage in-house for their own business units. A large number of Future Creators are pursuing a strategy of being cloud providers for their customers and believe they are best aligned in terms of costs, service, and data control to be the cloud for their customers, compared with public cloud providers.

As was the case with their converged infrastructure, Future Creators have sophisticated methods of measuring cloud utilization rates, with 56% monitoring cloud portfolio performance end-to-end (compared with less than 1% of Current Focused). This granular understanding of their cloud environment gives them confidence to be cloud providers for their customers. This confidence is especially important in the area of Big Data and analytics, where a future-ready cloud foundation can play a critical role in the ability of organizations to use data to change business outcomes for themselves and their customers.