A new breed of enterprise emerges post-pandemic

New research commissioned by AWS looks into 10,000 senior IT and business decision-makers across EMEA (including the UK, which had 2,000 respondents) about how they managed to keep reinventing their business during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The impact of Covid-19 on businesses has been catastrophic, derailing the most detailed of organisational roadmaps. A recent report commissioned by AWS found that almost half (46%) of decision-makers declared that their organisations struggled to adapt to the changes.

AWS commissioned Coleman Parkes, a B2B research specialist, to conduct an online survey with 10,000 IT and business decision-makers from enterprises with more than 250 employees in France, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the UK. There were 2,000 respondents for each of the five markets. In April and May 2021, the survey gathered feedback from C-level, Heads of Departments and Directors operating across financial services, retail, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and automotive, telecommunications, and media and entertainment. 

The goal was to understand how they managed to keep reinventing their businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic without a roadmap for what would happen next – and to get insights into how they expect their organisations to keep growing in a post-pandemic world.

A new breed of enterprise 

According to the report, the last year has seen the emergence of a new, agile type of business that leverages cloud capabilities to scale and experiment with innovation, allowing for a more flexible roadmap. This included companies that were not as agile before the pandemic. Over two-thirds of respondents report that their organisations have emerged more confident than beforehand, with 65% attributing success to the cloud. The same percentage tried new cloud services during this period, with a whopping 40% trying cloud solutions for the first time. 

In addition to this, the pandemic forced organisations to accelerate digital transformation strategies by almost two and a half years. Over half of the respondents have learned from this acceleration, with 58% understanding the importance of more agile working practices, 55% on the value of creating a closer relationship with customers, and 56% on using collaboration to solve issues. 

The power of reinvention 

The report demonstrates that flexibility is at the heart of organisational success both during and post-Covid. Companies that have reinvented themselves during the pandemic have reaped the dividends, and 69% of decision-makers say they have a clear strategy to seize opportunities, and 60% agree they will need to adjust their business model again once lockdown lifts. As lockdown lifts and companies look to modify roadmaps once more, cloud services are still at the core of this reinvention, with 64% of enterprises stating that they will adopt cloud computing post-pandemic and 54% saying that their business now depends on cloud solutions. 

READ MORE:

The future is not without its challenges. 50% of business decision-makers say their organisations still lack an understanding of how to link business problems to technical solutions, 47% say employees are resistant to change, and 42% say a lack of skills will hold them back. Yet as lockdown restrictions lift, only 50% of enterprises will continue to prioritise digital transformation. 

For more news from Top Business Tech, don’t forget to subscribe to our daily bulletin!

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter

Amber Donovan-Stevens

Amber is a Content Editor at Top Business Tech

Unlocking productivity and efficiency gains with data management

Russ Kennedy • 04th July 2023

Enterprise data has been closely linked with hardware for numerous years, but an exciting transformation is underway as the era of the hardware businesses is gone. With advanced data services available through the cloud, organisations can forego investing in hardware and abandon infrastructure management in favour of data management.

The Future of Cloud: A Realistic Look at What’s Ahead

Erin Lanahan • 22nd March 2023

Cloud computing has transformed the way we work, communicate, and consume technology. From storing data to running applications, the cloud has become an essential part of our lives. But what does the future hold for this technology? In this article, we’ll take a realistic look at the future of the cloud and what we can...

Ab Initio partners with BT Group to deliver big data

Luke Conrad • 24th October 2022

AI is becoming an increasingly important element of the digital transformation of many businesses. As well as introducing new opportunities, it also poses a number of challenges for IT teams and the data teams supporting them. Ab Initio has announced a partnership with BT Group to implement its big data management solutions on BT’s internal...