The pandemic has been a test for many businesses, especially when it comes to their agility, adaptability, and resilience. The ongoing crisis has shown that organizations must be equipped to rapidly respond to unexpected crises – be they cyberattacks, natural disasters, or even a global pandemic.

To add to these, businesses constantly face a myriad of usual business challenges – from competition to an ever-evolving marketplace. Gone are the days of clunky internal enterprise infrastructure, which was expensive to update and couldn’t keep up with the needs of organizations as things evolved. For businesses to proactively adapt during unforeseen situations, they need to use technology that can evolve just as quickly as organizational needs.  

That’s where the cloud comes in. Global cloud revenue will grow from $408 billion in 2021 to $474 billion in 2022, with 85% of organizations set to embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025, according to Gartner. And over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms in 2025, illustrating how anything non-cloud will quickly be considered legacy.

It can seem daunting to make such a change and become a cloud-native enterprise, but doing so can be instrumental for business success.

What Is a Cloud-Native Enterprise?

Prior to the pandemic, cloud adoption was already becoming the norm. Once COVID-19 hit, businesses that had not yet adopted the cloud joined the ranks out of necessity. However, the last two years have really accelerated this adoption since cloud technology has provided significant opportunities for organizations ready to take advantage of the possibilities this technology offers.

But being cloud-native goes beyond simply adopting the technology and rolling out cloud platforms for the sake of seeming like an adaptable organization. It’s also about cultivating a culture that is inherently interconnected and works expertly with cloud. Most importantly, it’s about recognizing the possibilities cloud enables to drive fundamental business change. For businesses to drive the most value from cloud, they need to understand it in the context of how it brings true value – this means thinking less about cost-optimization or speed-to-market and more about implementing new processes.

Practically speaking, businesses must connect the dots between traditional, IT-centric cloud adoption, which works towards their specific end goal, and business experimentation. By aligning these two core adoptions and strategically combining them with a leadership ambition to drive meaningful change, businesses will empower themselves to break through to new levels of performance.

Looking Ahead

For enterprises to progress on their journey to becoming cloud-native, they should focus on embracing failure. Failure is how the most effective organizations learn and develop – but it can be costly. Luckily, cloud is adept at minimizing this cost. By rethinking failure and using cloud technologies to lower the cost of failure, businesses can start putting cloud experimentation at the core and focus on doing, rather than analyzing.

Emphasizing cloud-native will empower software development teams to deploy and scale apps at a pace that wasn’t possible prior to cloud solutions. Being able to develop these apps can address business requirements, rapidly test new features, and experiment without the risk of disrupting customer operations.

This approach can deliver tangible business benefits, such as reducing operating costs to launching new products and services faster, which can break down organizational silos and enable large-scale automation. 

Finally, as the one position that can bridge the gap between technology and business, leaders must be prepared to be the champions of cloud-first initiatives. Through driving cloud education and awareness outside of IT they can determine the relative success of their organization and become one of the most important members of the executive team.

From pandemics to natural disasters, change is coming to businesses at an accelerated rate. The organizations that embrace a cloud-first mindset will be the ones that thrive during this era of cloud-native enterprises.