What can you learn from the investment game plans of top IT leaders? Quest recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey business leaders who are highly satisfied with the return on investment (ROI) in hybrid cloud investments.

Here are three winning moves:

• Invest in new technologies
• Empower business units to take more responsibility for their core business technologies
• Develop new and greater skills

Invest in New Technologies

Seventy percent of surveyed firms currently seek to increase the budget available for new technology, including hybrid cloud deployments.

As detailed previously in this Quest Business Technology blog, the payoffs from increasing the adoption of new technologies include:

• Greater business flexibility and agility that helps the organization act more responsively to changing business opportunities and challenges
• Stronger information security despite increasing security challenges
• More scalability to respond better to seasonal and organizational changes

Empower Business Units

Seventy-seven percent of firms realizing top ROI from hybrid cloud deployments currently seek to empower the business to take on more responsibility for their core applications.

Thinking about it, what do you see as upsides from this move? In my opinion:

• Moving more responsibility to the business units enables the business to adapt sooner to business challenges and opportunities
• The IT function becomes even more of a valuable business partner while remaining a valued services provider
• The IT function can focus more on the highest value and most strategic activities

Develop New Skills

Firms realizing top ROI from hybrid cloud investments plan to invest most in staff skills in the areas of security, business process, and business analyst skills. Furthermore, nearly as many plan to increase investments in application and integration development and vendor management – for hybrid cloud deployments.

Their top tactics are through either training, additional hiring, or a combination of both. They may also turn to outside consultancies to augment the skills of their staff.

• Fifty-three percent plan to increase staff skills in security
• Forty-seven percent plan to increase staff skills in business analysis

Learn More, Do More

What do you think are the best ways to maximize ROI from hybrid cloud deployments? I will share a few takeaways in my next blog post. Email your comments and ideas to charles.knapp at questdirect.org.

Learn more in “Gain Agility While Mitigating Risk Through Hybrid Cloud,” a custom Technology Adoption Profile commissioned by Quest International Users Group with Forrester Consulting. Paid Quest members can access this new Forrester research within Quest’s new “Strategize and Act” Business Technology Content Center on Questdirect.org.

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