“Always on” isn’t always enough. Today’s business requirements are “on-demand”—and that means a lot more than just adding more 9s to application and infrastructure uptime.

Our exclusive research report finds that companies defined as leading in digital transformation are doing so to meet business goals, and are investing in infrastructure to make it happen. Companies that are defined as laggards are not making a digital transformation and are not making these investments.*

Laggards in the digital business world trail specifically in adopting an on-demand approach, demonstrating lower utilization of cloud technology and less line-of-business satisfaction with tools and services they are getting from IT.

Demand differs from one business to another, but there are some common goals. Overall, on-demand infrastructure needs to provide:

Self-service for end-users. For any given business, self-service might mean provisioning IT assets and applications for new employees, adding new customer accounts, launching new applications, or perhaps hundreds of other capabilities. Those capabilities might require spinning up new servers or storage. On-demand IT means providing the business a service catalog of pre-defined and preconfigured services, with no waiting for manual intervention from IT.

Flexibility to adapt. ‘Flexible’ isn’t a word often applied to traditional IT infrastructure. But a modern infrastructure enables an enterprise to scale up—or down—quickly as organizational needs change. Seasonal variances in commercial activities, a new line of business opening or marketing and sales diving into a flood of new data from mobile applications and the Internet of Thing: All of these activities call for an infrastructure that can rise to meet increased demands in terms of number of users, transactions, and applications. At the same time, you cannot afford to just throw money at the problem, buying excess capacity that will sit unused when peak loads subside. (Spoiler: Think ‘cloud.’)