Do you remember when cloud services first emerged? Driving operational efficiency was the name of the game -specifically reducing IT costs. Now, as organizations continue to innovate themselves, many are expecting their cloud services to be instrumental in digitization efforts that can improve business growth and drive innovation.

A Cisco-sponsored IDC survey revealed that a second wave of cloud adoption is emerging. Companies now have higher expectations and view cloud as a way to drive innovation and revenue growth. The first wave of cloud was primarily tied to operational efficiency and that is no longer the case. This next wave of Cloud adoption is driving more EFFICIENCY, it is increasing IT SPEED and it is enabling new and DISRUPTIVE applications.

For those companies which have been able to optimize their cloud strategies the results are extremely positive across a number of key performance indicators (or KPIs.) But there is room for improvement since only 1% of organizations are getting the most out of their cloud strategies (or have in place optimized cloud strategies).

As private and public cloud adoption continue to increase, the opportunities for Cisco to help our customers get the most out of their cloud deployments also will continue to grow. How can companies proceed in developing a cloud strategy that will help them take advantage of this second wave of cloud innovation? And what are the business benefits of doing so?

We worked with IDC to make all this research actionable for our customers and help organizations define their own cloud strategy. The Cisco Business Cloud Advisor (BCA) framework in addition (first and foremost) to our Cloud portfolio will allow us to help you derive more value from your cloud deployments. Cisco offers innovative private/hybrid cloud solutions (build your own or as a service) and with our partner ecosystem we can help organizations embrace the cloud with confidence while accelerating deployment times and business impact.

In the quest for efficiency, IT organizations have already invested in consolidation and virtualization. They next area of focus to drive efficiencies now is automation, meaning the ability to simplify and bring consistency to provisioning, improve workflows, and accelerate IT services lifecycles.  And while automation's sweet spot may start with efficiency, its function and impact needs to continually extend and evolve beyond the data center as we expand our playing field into cloud and to the edge of the network and IoT.

When it comes to speed, it's a matter of delivering on the needs of stakeholders (such as LOB leaders and developers) in a timely fashion to help them stay ahead of market disruptions and capitalize on new opportunities faster. This requires support for flexible consumption models to deliver new IT and business services, whether sourced internally or externally via the cloud.

And when it comes to digital disruption, the next wave of market disruption is coming from IoT applications and goes well beyond big data and enabling M2M communication. It requires a radically different shift in what we consider the traditional boundaries of IT organizations. With the right IT capabilities, information from the IoT can be turned into actions quickly, creating new and disruptive capabilities, richer and innovative experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunities.

And finally, with the considerable complexity of today's IT environment, especially when that environment includes public cloud resources, it's critical to ensure security is pervasive across the extended network.

So at a minimum, you need automation, support for flexible consumption models, edge/IoT applications, and security to make this combination of efficiency, speed, and disruption a reality while extracting the most value out of your cloud services.

So the question now is ... where are you in the journey? Take a quick assessment to preview the possibilities and engage with our Cisco Team and our Partners to begin a much deeper conversation during a BCA workshop.

Additional Resources:

• Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Web Site
• Cisco Business Cloud Advisor Overview