With all the marketing messages broadcast by cloud services vendors, many people accept the premise that cloud technology can increase business flexibility and lower costs. Nevertheless, CIOs I have spoken with have varying experiences in the degree of benefits they experience.

Quest recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey business leaders who are highly satisfied with the return on investment (ROI) in hybrid cloud investments. One question we explored is, What are the actual business benefits of your hybrid cloud investments?

Though many survey respondents experienced IT cost savings, the larger win is the impact to the business — especially the greater flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs and market conditions.

Cost is Not the Top Benefit of Hybrid Cloud

Cost savings did not make the top-4 tier of the business benefits experienced by business leaders who are highly satisfied with the returns on their hybrid cloud investments.

• 44% reported that their organizations are experiencing cost savings over their pre-cloud on-premises expenditures.

Greater Flexibility and Security with Hybrid Cloud

Increased flexibility, greater business agility, increased security, and better scalability are the top four benefits realized with hybrid cloud versus traditional on-premises deployments. Here is a more detailed breakdown of the actual benefits experienced by hybrid cloud ROI leaders:

• 52% – Increased flexibility
• 48% – Greater business agility
• 47% – Stronger security
• 47% – More robust scalability

Faster and More Available with Hybrid Cloud

For ROI leaders, hybrid cloud investments are delivering technical benefits. Keeping in mind that cost savings was fifth in our survey at 44%, here are the remaining benefits experienced by our surveyed hybrid cloud ROI leaders:

• 43% – Faster performance
• 42% – Increased availability

Learn More, Do More

Among leaders achieving the best ROI, cost is not the top benefit of the hybrid cloud approach. Rather, business benefits are.

In my next blog post I will share with you research data showing the winning hybrid cloud investment game plans for the next two years among the most successful leaders in hybrid cloud environment ROI.