10 A third party’s ability to invest in technology and support operations at scale is one reason why some respondent firms have opted to work with cloud providers. Rather than relying solely on internal resources, firms are leveraging cloud resources to achieve faster time-to-market, especially regarding initial implementation and upgrades. Their rationale is this: the move to cloud can be low-friction and offer quick benefits. A cloud environment can run in parallel with a firm’s on-premises technology environment, and firms don’t need to replace one for the other. A cloud environment enables business agility at a lower cost than on-premises deployment. It also reduces delays in decision costs by enabling pre-built services, and thus, a faster rate to adapt to new capabilities. IT and business resources can instead focus their efforts on building products and tools to support current and future client requirements. 03 Avoiding new software builds on legacy environments. Legacy technology environments do not mix well with innovation; hence, cloud hosted environments have come into frame over recent years as a means to avoid building upon technology that is long overdue for retirement. These more flexible environments enable innovation- and digital transformation-focused teams to sidestep the large on-premises infrastructure investments required to support proof-of-concept (POC) work, while simultaneously developing cloud-native capabilities that position the firm more competitively for the future. Firms can spin cloud-hosted research and development environments up and down when required, better supporting business-as-usual alongside new business and technology initiatives. The introduction of a consistent DevOps layer across legacy technology and next-gen technology, via application programming interfaces (APIs), also facilitates experience consistency, both internally for the business and externally for clients down the road.