How the Cloud Impacts the Whole Business (IT Included)

In a recent Forbes piece, SAP’s Jacqueline Vanacek states a bold claim: Cloud computing will create more jobs than the Internet did because the cloud will alter the entire IT landscape. In the piece, Vanacek touches on the cloud’s impact on business growth, specifically:

• Capital efficiency: It’s easier and more affordable for businesses to build and scale the applications their employees need.
• New companies and emerging markets: New companies can “launch new operations quickly with little to no up-front investment. This reduces their risk and allows them to scale quickly for surging demand.” There’s also a democratization effect as the cloud allows smaller companies to compete against much larger companies.
• Collaboration: With cloud computing, “business partners can define new business models more easily and opportunistically to create customer value.” Furthermore, the cloud streamlines supply chains and “enhances employee collaboration and productivity, leading to business growth.”
• Restructuring IT: “The most important impact of cloud computing is its ability to fundamentally restructure IT costs that free up working capital for the business — and it is how companies re-invest that capital that leads to new revenue streams — and new jobs.”

Vanacek notes that restructured IT costs are the cloud’s most important effect on business growth. That’s no doubt a huge benefit of the cloud, but the benefits cut so much deeper. In addition to restructuring IT benefits, as Vanacek points out, cloud computing makes businesses more efficient by aligning vendor and customer success and by delivering new features faster and with greater scalability than previously possible. Okta CEO Todd McKinnon expanded on this idea in a Forbes piece earlier this year about how the cloud is accelerating business.