The biggest priority for COOs is to increase efficiencies and effectiveness for businesses to take advantage of opportunities in the digital economy. This means not only establishing an agile, secure, data-driven supply chain where required, but possibly radically reinventing the way the value chains deliver value and organize. At the same time, some COOs are stepping up to orchestrate the rollout of digital products and services that will significantly impact the performance of the business and make it more resilient by way of innovation. Cloud can deliver in these key areas.

Cloud-based applications are increasing rapidly as enterprises adopt software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-native principles to accelerate digital business. Enterprises are already looking to integrate artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Ihings (IoT) and edge computing to push the second-generation digital business forward and use innovation to drive real competitive advantage.

The issue is that many enterprises still don’t understand how to operate their multicloud estate in a way that fosters both agility for value creation and operational efficiency.

Cloud has the scope to increase business flexibility and, if properly managed, even reduce costs and operational expenses through more granular consumption models. At the same time, the introduction of DevOps best practices can work to optimize software development, deployment and operations – increasing product quality for end users. A multicloud adoption and management plan, however, is critical to optimally address business flexibility and stay competitive.

Sustaining the rapid pace of digital change is proving a significant challenge for COOs. An agile and robust cloud strategy is imperative. COOs with a strong business vision in addition to an analytical view of an organization’s administrative and functional operations are central to developing a successful cloud strategy.

Cloud projects are complex, and cloud migration takes time. A value-centric, well-thought-out strategy highlights the benefits and challenges of the cloud and how technology can be aligned to business outcomes and new security and governance policies. A COO’s outlook is an essential ingredient in any cloud cookbook.