These digital challenges also provide significant opportunities for CIOs to make their mark in the transformation of the enterprise – better aligning IT with the business. Cloud is a key enabler here, providing building blocks, agility, resilience and a foundation for new business models, pushing products to market faster with new delivery models. In these unpredictable times, it can also make current IT investments last longer. Re-investing in your application portfolio by enhancing it with cloud-native features, for example, can give longevity to existing services.

However, there is no one-size-fits-all pattern for digital transformation, and the same can be said of the cloud. While lifting and shifting workloads may work for one enterprise, another may require some or all of its applications to be refactored for the cloud.

To develop a successful transformation strategy for the cloud, the CIO must work with other stakeholders to understand new opportunities and business objectives and link the dots to provide the right cloud applications, data and operational capabilities to support existing, new and emerging business models.

At the end of the day, cloud is a business enabler. Operating and managing an environment with reinvented and accelerated value creation using multiple cloud technologies, services, integrations and new data is not easy. CIOs must address these issues if their organizations are to flourish and grow in the digital economy.