Accenture report finds Irish Organisations outpacing peers in Cloud Adoption

A new report from Accenture highlights that Irish organisations are making strong progress in migrating their businesses to the cloud, with almost one in five (17%) ahead of their global peers. Looking ahead, in order to reap the greatest value from their investment, Irish businesses are leveraging cloud as their new operating model, transforming the way in which they interact with customers, partners, and employees.

The research, Ever Ready for Every Opportunity: How to Unleash Competitiveness on the Cloud Continuum, arrives at a unique time when organisations have been forced by the pandemic to provide new and efficient ways to interact with their customers.

The report explains why looking at cloud as a one-time migration to a static destination — essentially as a cheaper, more-efficient data centre — is limiting. In fact, a narrow focus on cost savings can actually put organisations at a competitive disadvantage compared to those using cloud more strategically.

According to the report, if Irish organisations want to reap the rewards of cloud, they must recognise cloud as a ‘continuum’ of evolving technologies and services and use it to transform their business.

Donal Óg McCarthy, Cloud lead at Accenture in Ireland, commented on the report: “Irish businesses have really embraced the cloud with many seeing it as a core part of their business strategy.  

However, migrating to the cloud is just the beginning. The challenge for business leaders is to ensure that cloud is not considered a fixed destination. The focus must turn to embedding the right cloud skills and capabilities within their organisation, cloud fluency across the enterprise and alignment on a clear set of business value outcomes that cloud will deliver. Continued focus on long-term cloud integration will bolster those organisations who recognise its potential into the future.” 

In Ireland, most companies are migrating workloads to the cloud and enjoying the benefits of cost savings and greater efficiency. According to the country breakdown of data from the report, Irish companies are doing especially well at migrating their workloads to the cloud when compared globally.

Eighty-eight percent of Irish companies are choosing to move to the cloud, with benefits including greater efficiency and cost savings, compared to a lesser 71% globally. In fact, 36% of Irish respondents surveyed said that their business workloads are currently in the cloud today. Over two-thirds of Irish respondents (71%) said that workloads will move to the cloud in the next five years, compared to 66% in Europe and 64% globally.

Accenture defines the organisations leading the way in cloud as “Continuum Competitors.” These organisations — about 12-15% of respondents, depending on region — stand out by extending the experience they gained from public cloud to their private data centres and edge locations to transform daily business operations.

As a result, they achieve substantial gains from their continued cloud engagement and outperform competitors. “Continuum Competitors” are also much better positioned to withstand future shocks, according to the Accenture research.  

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