Three strategies for businesses to maximize their cloud investment

Which tech investments can withstand a turbulent economy is the hot topic in IT departments right now. Global cloud spending is expected to increase 17.5% to surpass $830 billion this year, according to KPMG, yet 67% of tech leaders have yet to see a significant return on their cloud investments.

Moving to the cloud has improved operational and marketing efficiency, but as businesses try to recession-proof their operations, issues persist about optimizing cloud strategies. Business leaders are under pressure to find technology that will deliver the best return on their investment because economic forecasts are still being determined.

Businesses have invested money and resources in implementing cloud tools and services for data storage, but their cloud strategy should continue beyond there. It is essential to take actions that maximize this investment because improving cloud spending utilization will be a crucial component of good data architecture in the future.

Enterprises must be able to derive economic value from this data, optimize its potential through privacy-first partner engagement, and granularly assess results if they want to expand and stay competitive.

Aligning cloud and business strategies

Businesses have found that data is a substantial source of value but managing it can be difficult and frightening. Inefficient IT stacks and disorganized data are frequently to blame for inefficiencies throughout the company. Departments within a company can easily become isolated from business goals without alignment between data collection, use, and communication.

Businesses must ensure that each unit's tech stack ties back to the organization to help bridge business strategy with a proper cloud strategy. Businesses can start aligning their internal teams by delegating responsibility for the cloud strategy and asking all stakeholders to identify the cloud-based characteristics required to provide effective results. This is supported by a "modern data strategy" that consists of four essential components: a foundational identity, connectivity, collaboration, and the capacity to enhance consented customer data.

People-based foundational identity

Cloud environments need strong identity foundations that integrate diverse data sources throughout the organization to produce a unified customer perspective and seamless omnichannel experiences. With the right identification solutions in place, executing integrated omnichannel campaigns and measuring their success becomes easier, leading to more profit and less waste.

Finding people-based identifiers—first-party insights that are privacy-first by virtue of being consented to—that can securely connect consumer data is the objective as firms assess which identifiers to embed in their cloud. Long before we knew better, identity relied on invasive, imprecise methods like third-party cookies and device identifiers. Category identifiers that are encrypted or encoded have emerged as the preferred option. This is so that secure communication to just intended recipients is possible. Encrypted IDs are controllable and responsive. By recording client touchpoints outside of browser-based ecosystems, they have also demonstrated effectiveness in converting across various identity solutions and authenticating audiences, giving a complete view of customers.

Enterprises may establish and improve customer data architecture and safeguard consumer privacy by removing the need for personal identifiable information (PII) by incorporating people-based identity into their cloud environment.

Data collaboration

Data collaboration tools can advance efforts after a people-first identity framework is set up. Several businesses have already begun to use data collaboration internally to eliminate internal organizational silos and link disparate data sources. These collaboration strategies show forward-thinking business executives what is possible when working with reliable outside partners by not only utilizing underutilized resources to enhance customer profiles.

Companies who have already tried external collaboration with storing first-party data in data clean rooms and other strategies have enhanced campaign planning, data activation, and measurement processes by activating audiences seamlessly across partners without requiring the downstream transmission of hashed or raw PII. As large retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Carrefour, and others have found success by building retail media networks, Google Ads Data Hub was one of the first data clean room pioneers.

External data collaboration can only be successful if the underlying technology respect user privacy and maintain data non-movement. This explains the emergence of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), which allow permissioned teams to access data without transferring it or moving it from its original location in the marketing and other industry sectors.

Businesses may access consumer intelligence and move from aggregate to person-level measurement once they embrace the useful collaboration features for their cloud.

Data-savvy businesses have a difficult challenge in our new privacy-centric world: how to securely combine their different customer data gathering to get more performance insights and more precise customer modeling. The solution is to create a modern data strategy that guarantees connectivity throughout the current tech stack based on the cloud.

Enterprises may maintain control over their data while maximizing every customer touchpoint by integrating business and cloud strategies, incorporating people-based identification, and relying on their network of reliable partners. Enterprises can streamline disruptive digital operations, speed up data innovation, and reduce time to cloud value by making the most of their cloud investment.