Cloud adoption is accelerating, but most organizations don’t have a coherent strategy for rationalizing multiple clouds. Cisco Systems Inc. sees that as an opportunity.

The networking giant today is rolling out the results of a global study it commissioned from International Data Corp. along with details on its plans to introduce new services to help organizations migrate cleanly to hybrid clouds.

The bottom line of the IDC study is the finding that only three percent of organizations are at a cloud maturity level that the research organization defines as “optimized.” Less than one third of organizations have repeatable, managed or optimize cloud strategies and 22 percent have no cloud strategy at all, IDC said. An optimized strategy is defined as delivering IT-enabled products and services and driving business innovation through transparent access to IT capabilities.

Those organizations that have their cloud act together are reaping the benefits; 92 percent of optimized companies and 74 percent of “managed” companies – the next-most-mature category – expect to increase revenue as a result. That compares to only 30 percent of firms at the low end of the maturity scale.

In general, the higher you go on the maturity scale, the better the performance you see. Mature companies report higher incremental revenue, lower IT costs, faster provisioning times and higher service-level agreement performance. IDC estimates that the average annual benefit per cloud application is $3 million in incremental revenues and $1 million in reduced costs.

Optimized organizations also show a greater inclination to adopt other productivity-enhancing practices such as DevOps, microservices and Internet of Things (IoT). They are also more likely to turn to the cloud for security services.

Nearly three-quarters of cloud adopters are using some form of hybrid cloud, with a majority subscribing to multiple external cloud services, and this is where Cisco spies opportunity. “You can’t just put everything into the cloud,” said Fabio Gori, director of worldwide cloud marketing. “When you update and upgrade your infrastructure and look at other clouds, you need to make smarter choices. Simplifying architectures and data centers is what we do.”

In conjunction with the survey, Cisco launched a new set of Cloud Professional Services aimed at helping businesses navigate and optimize multi-cloud cloud environments. Services will be provided by Cisco and its partner network. New features include:

• New multi-cloud management and orchestration services that enable customers to model once, deploy and manage anywhere;
• New services to accelerate the design and deployment of both traditional private clouds and cloud-native solutions such as OpenStack and platform-as-a-service (PaaS);
• Enhanced application and cloud migration services to reduce the risk and complexity of migrating applications and workloads to the cloud; and
• New IT transformation services based on a DevOps-related change management initiative that Cisco said helps align business processes and capabilities across both traditional and DevOps environments and teams.

Image courtesy Cisco and IDC