According to a recent study from IBM, mid-sized businesses that embrace cloud technology see nearly double the revenue and increased profit growth compared to their more hesitant peers.

The study, which included 800 leading global IT professionals, found that the 20% of organizations that had committed more resources to the cloud were reaping significant cost-cutting advantages and improved levels of efficiency.

There are a number of ways that cloud technology, and the public cloud in particular, can benefit medium-sized companies.

More Efficient Infrastructure Provisioning

Under- and over-provisioning is always a risk for IT-dependent businesses. The significant CAPEX associated with deploying IT infrastructure causes businesses to be cautious about over-investment, which can leave them unprepared and overstretched. On the other hand, over-provisioning can tie up much needed resources in infrastructure that provides a negative ROI.

Cloud-based IT provisioning helps cut the Gordian knot by allowing businesses to deploy infrastructure on demand. They can scale up or down depending on their requirement, with no significant capital expenditure.

Expedited Adoption of New Tools

In a company with hundreds or even thousands of PCs in use, spread across multiple sites, the roll-out of new tools or the updating of existing tools can takes weeks or months.

In a sense, cloud computing allows businesses to go back to the old days of the thin client. Deploying software on a centralized cloud-based set of servers allows businesses to constantly iterate on the tool set they make available to their employees. For example, customer relationship management software that lives in the cloud and is accessed by employees from their offices or from mobile devices can be maintained and updated constantly, without the hassle of extensive testing for compatibility with legacy hardware and protracted roll-out schedules.

Organizational Efficiencies Due to Improved Collaboration

We live in a distributed and globalized world. Workloads that were once dependent on the geographical location of teams can now leverage cloud technologies to efficiently distribute tasks to those with the necessary expertise.

Actionable Insights From Analytics

In order to be agile and responsive to market conditions, businesses must ensure that they can gather, process, and analyze large amounts of data. Better analytics leads to superior decision-making. The cloud empowers businesses to gather extraordinary quantities of data from customer relationship management tools, logistics, market research, and elsewhere. They can efficiently deploy infrastructure and tools to sift data for actionable insights, often leading to revelations that shape business strategy and and help to open up new markets.

The cloud presents many opportunities for businesses who have the vision to invest in transformative technologies.