The Cloud mission in the post Covid-19 Spanish economy

“To accept duality is to earn identity.”
~ Joss Whedon

Quint’s fourth annual report “State of Cloud Computing in Spain” (2020) is already underway. One more year, we have polled more than 100 IT executives about the benefits and barriers of cloud adoption, the current and estimated budgets plus the assessment on their current cloud providers. This year, in addition, we have added a couple of questions about the impact of Covid19, one of which:

In the post Covid-19 economy, do you think the cloud will be a recovery lever for your business?

Although the analysis process is still open (the results will be published in the next weeks), we can say in advance that the preliminary results are quite revealing:

• 34% confirm that the cloud is going to be a differential recovery lever
• 45% consider that the cloud could help the business
• only 12% consider that in no case will the cloud be a business recovery lever

Among the firm believers (34%), technology managers and CTOs prevail, while the skeptics (12%) are mainly formed by CIOs and IT operation managers of large enterprises (annual sales turnover of more than 5 billion €).

What accounts for this cloud mission divide?

Probably one of the key factors is that Covid19, like any global pandemic, has a delayed impact on the economic sphere which is not yet fully visible. It is reasonable to deduce that large corporations are used to analyzing macroeconomic scenarios for the long term and are surely already projecting numbers, while smaller companies tend to work out estimations in a more localized context projecting a limited timeline.

In any case, from the data of the survey, the Spanish market does not consider the cloud as a strategic recovery lever for the business by the most part, but rather an operational and tactical solution in a business context closer to the industry and the local market.

Cloud dimensions in the post-Covid-19 era

Although it is still early to draw conclusions, the pandemic is undoubtedly acting as an accelerator of cloud adoption in Spain along three main levels:

• operational with cloud services focused on business continuity and resilience
• tactical with the remotization of the workplace and the strengthening of digital culture across the teams
• strategic by reorienting innovation to rethink customer experience and reverse the impact of the pandemic by automating and leveraging digital channels

The latter dimension is probably the differential lever that 34% of the respondents refer to. This means that decoupling the system architecture to gain more agility and “customer-centricity” has never been more relevant.

For all these reasons, we believe that the verticalization of Cloud solutions will gain much relevance in the coming months. These solutions are already accelerated for “quick consumption” by organizations. It should be remembered, however, that cloud verticalization requires a high degree of governance maturity (to be precise for the sake of data governance and enterprise architecture). Organizations that have not been able to develop these lines of work will be limited to capitalize on these “accelerating packs” and will be forced to constrain the benefits of the cloud to an exclusively operational level without being able to innovate and drive the necessary changes to create new business models that are capable of adapting to the unprecedented uncertainty of the post Covid-19 economy.

Finally, a fun fact, the origin of the English word “cloud” comes from medieval English “clud” which meant “rock mass”. The term was used for the first time in the Middle Ages to describe the evaporated water that could be seen in the sky which looked like certain rock formations. It does not seem risky, therefore, to speak from an etymological point of view, of the “rock-air” duality of the cloud…

The cloud has been undoubtedly an operational protection “rock” for many Spanish companies facing Covid19, but will it be also the fresh air to open their innovation wings?

Alvaro Martin
Cloud Enterprise Strategist at Quint
a.martin@quintgroup.com