New data reveals that 67 percent of all companies plan to adopt at least one new cloud technology by 2023. However, decision makers are not united as they progress through the buyer’s journey. It is important to resolve this, since companies need to develop business strategies for constructing and operating cloud computing environments.
This metric comes from a new study conducted by Spiceworks Ziff Davis. For the research, SWZD surveyed 300 Information Technology decision makers and 200 business decision makers from organizations across North America, Europe and Asia. This was in order to provide insights on the technology buying process as cloud adoption rises.
The study identified different groups of stakeholders that influence or make decisions about cloud technologies within each organization, known as the “buying collective”. Within this group are both IT decision makers and business decision makers.
Central to the decisions are the costs and technological challenges of implementation, addressing security issues, and building governance structures. Security risks include on-premise environments, and they need to consider others risks like hijacked of accounts, exposed public services, and so on. Each of these presents a different feature pertinent to cloud computing technology.
Looking across these two groups is important, given that, typically, six to eight key stakeholders collectively make the decision whether or not to purchase a given cloud technology.
Key findings on how these groups differ include the fact that most IT decision makers (64 percent) prefer to do the majority of their technology purchase research online without speaking to a salesperson.
Whereas with business decision makers, this group were found to be more willing to speak to a human. Here, 59 percent would provide their name, email, and phone number to view interesting, gated content.
In terms of the interrelationship between these two sets of decision makers, the survey established that 41 percent of IT decision makers stated that they trust that business decision makers understand technology well enough as so to make informed technology purchase decisions.
Going forwards, focusing in the business culture is important. Development, operations, security, and finance will take on new configurations in a successful cloud-first business. This cultural shift needs to be supported by a robust training program. This is necessary for expanding cloud competency across the entire organization.
