A new survey by cloud service management firm CloudHealth Technologies Inc. finds that companies that plan their journey to the cloud and appoint a steward to oversee it enjoy more than twice the revenue growth of those that don’t.

That translates into an average 35 percent year-over-year increase in the top line. These companies, which CloudHealth calls “cloud leaders,” are also 2.3 times more likely to see the cloud as a driver of competitive advantage.

In addition, these cloud leaders roll out new applications and services faster and consider themselves to be “somewhat or extremely efficient” at delivering applications and services by a better than two-to-one margin over their more haphazard counterparts, the survey found.

“Trailblazers look at faster time-to-market, easier ways to test new strategies and delivery mechanisms and increased agility on how to deliver services,” said Melodye Mueller, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances at CloudHealth.

Although the revenue growth figures look impressive, CloudHealth acknowledged that it didn’t ask respondents how they calculated top-line growth attributable to cloud computing specifically. “Given the seniority of participants, we are confident that their responses accurately reflect the state of their business and the degree to which they are experiencing success based on those initiatives,” Mueller said.

The study covered 388 senior decision-makers is U.S. enterprises who were asked how they’re doing against a range of operational metrics. Among the findings:

• Cloud leaders are three times more likely to act quickly to identify and quell cloud computing risks compared to laggards.
• They’re also three times more inclined to take advantage of pricing strategies that save their firms money and 2.5 times more likely to have a cost-management strategy.
• Leaders are 4.6 times as likely to see cloud deployment optimization as a continual process, rather than a one-time exercise.
• They’re 10 times more likely to say they have a “crystal clear vision” for their cloud transition.
• Three-quarters of them have a role in the organization dedicated to ongoing cloud management. They’re also nine times more likely to hold business groups accountable for spending.
• Cloud leaders are also significantly more likely to have service level agreements in place, monitor for abnormal cloud behavior and define instance utilization thresholds by workload to optimize performance.

Small companies are more likely to be classified as leaders than large ones. Leaders averaged 2,500 employees, compared to 4,500 employees in companies that were classified as laggards, Mueller said.

Cloud stewards are people who are charged with establishing and enforcing policies, measuring progress against metrics and envisioning success, Mueller said. “They have enough tech knowledge to get down in the weeds and help resolve issues, but they can also work at an executive business level,” she said. The study includes a more detailed profile of this role.

Leaders tend to have a centralized governance strategy but decentralized implementation approach, Mueller noted. “The lines of business are responsible for launching new cloud infrastructure. The centralized role is about ensuring governance,” she said. Leaders are twice as likely to have a centralized approach to migrating workloads to the cloud, however.

Image courtesy of CloudHealth