Recently, I asked some of my colleagues and clients “What does cloud mean — and more importantly, how do you know when you’ve adopted it?”

‘Adopted’ and ‘cloud’. Two simple enough words, you would think, and two relatively simple questions. But surprisingly, with no simple answers.

Some colleagues and clients just didn’t know, while for some their answers focused on where workloads are performed. But the reality is that cloud adoption is about far more than just migration and workloads. It’s about new business and service models; new ways of operating and harnessing the insight and capabilities cloud technologies can provide.

At Deloitte, we’ve been helping our clients with their migration and workload adoption for almost ten years – and there’s still so much more to do. Today, we’re doubling down on helping clients to fuse the capabilities of Deloitte and Google, pivoting their business and becoming truly digital and cloud first.

That means using Google technologies to help clients solve their biggest challenges like:

Developing new business models and accelerating growth;

Simplifying business operations and reducing costs;

Enhancing the services their customers receive;

Developing and launching new products and services more rapidly;

Enabling carbon-zero operations.

As one of the largest technology and professional services firms in the world, Deloitte is excited to be building a dedicated Google practice in the UK. Our aim is scaling up to over 300 practitioners by 2024, all with the deep technical capabilities that our clients need to harness the power of cloud.

But more than this — we’re going to marry these skills to the challenges we’re presented with. We want to combine our expertise in operating model transformation, risk and controls, finance and tax, to enhance our clients’ businesses. We want to bring to bear all of Deloitte’s knowledge across Consulting and Risk Advisory, in ways that make a real impact.

We’re already seeing successes, across Financial Services and both the Private and Public Sector, as our clients experience the benefits cloud transformation can bring. Between us, we share a common purpose: to build more resilient, sustainable businesses through the diverse skills our practitioners bring to the table.

So what trends are we currently seeing in cloud? And what impact are barriers to adoption and scaling having on UK businesses? In our recent research we interviewed 2,000 UK Execs and found that:

96% said COVID-19 had accelerated their cloud adoption by 3-12 months, and failure to do so in the next year could undermine their organisational success;

9 in 10 UK businesses cited cloud as a key enabler of business performance — yet only 14% had scaled adoption;

70-80% said their expected benefits from cloud investment had been met, with agility and scalability being the highest-ranked benefits;

The three biggest impact areas of cloud post-COVID-19 were demand spike reliability, cost reduction flexibility and business process automation;

1 in 3 cloud adopters were very concerned about their organisation’s internal lack of ability to execute digital strategies.

As these stats show, cloud is now in huge demand. And while it’s meeting business expectations, there is still a lack of knowledge, particularly around the transformation it can bring, and a lack of skills in-house to execute desired digital/cloud strategies.

I'm really excited to be leading our new UK Google practice. I’m passionate about working with our clients to unleash the full potential of cloud, over and above migration and workloads. I want to ensure businesses are using Google technologies in ways that boost innovation and productivity; drive business growth and improve sustainability; and enhance the experience of customers and workforces, right across the UK.

The research quoted above is from Deloitte's Cloud Survey 2021. I’d also like to link to a recent conversation between Anne-Marie Malley, UK Consulting Leader at Deloitte and Laurence Laftont, Vice President, Industry Sales, EMEA at Google Cloud.