As mobile devices, sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferate, businesses are using the cloud to transform themselves and their customer’s experiences. The result is a hyperconnected world where communities collaborate to solve challenges and every company must re-think its fundamental assumptions about the business it is in, the services it provides and its relationships with customers, competitors and the world.

Hyperconnected networks offer companies competitive advantage by linking buyers, sellers and users. For some of the most innovative companies physical assets have become unnecessary. For example, Uber owns no cars, but is the world’s largest ride-for-hire company and Airbnb  is the world’s largest accommodation provider but owns no rooms.

One of the compelling benefits of cloud operation is that it serves as an integration backbone for enterprise collaboration allowing data to be exchanged at any time and from anywhere. This enables better and faster decision-making throughout the value chain and drives innovation efficiently within a networked and connected enterprise.

Companies today are faced with the challenge of a complex and ultra competitive global market. Strong competition from emerging economies coupled with increasing costs of innovation make product and brand differentiation challenging. For these companies to thrive globally, they need to speed up internal decision making throughout the value chain. That would allow them to better respond to market demand with more innovative and better differentiated products and, of equal importance, to stay ahead of the competition in an increasingly competitive environment.

Companies must be willing to replace current systems and processes in order to use data in better ways. And companies that do use big data have been found to generate higher revenues than those that do not, often through developing entirely new revenue streams based on the data that they hold.

For many companies, security concerns are a significant barrier to cloud adoption. They believe that on premise data is more secure than hosting on the cloud. However, evidence shows that the opposite is true and that professionally managed cloud data is safer because according to the Intel Security Group around 43% of security breaches come from within organisations. This figure may however be much higher in smaller companies. The technology deployed by cloud hosting companies that governs data access is as robust as any achievable on premise. This means that hackers on the outside will face state of the art security and those on the inside will be discovered immediately.

Because no-one can accurately predict what businesses will look like in the years to come companies need to keep their data current and available. So rather than locating it in silo’s that restrict access it needs to become a usable and useful business asset that is deployed for profit.

The only route to this level of sustainable innovation, added security and better returns is to adopt cloud hosting, and thereby reveal and release the business benefits of hyperconnectivity.