Is Cloud First Dead?
March 5, 2024
Written by Mike Martin, Chief Strategy Officer
In the early days of cloud computing, many organizations established a Cloud First strategy to drive cloud adoption. Does a Cloud First approach still make sense today?
At a Glance:
Most enterprises are ten or more years into their cloud journey, with significant investments made over that time.
Many of these organizations started with a Cloud First strategy to accelerate cloud adoption, yet do not feel like they are fully realizing the value of cloud due to cost overruns, lack of agility, or lack of skilled resources.
Cloud First made sense in the early days of cloud, but organizations should now revisit their cloud strategies to assess if they need to get back on track.
Ensure you can provide clear answers to the questions of what your organization is seeking to do with cloud and why.
Cloud computing is a technology mega trend – one of the true game changing technologies of the last twenty years. When commercial cloud offerings gained momentum in the late-2000s, innovative technology leaders saw the potential and sought to capture the compelling benefits that cloud solutions could provide. To encourage and accelerate adoption of cloud technology, many established a well-intended Cloud First strategy for their organization.
Most of these organizations are now a decade or more into their cloud journeys and have made significant investments, often driven by a Cloud First mindset. In 2022, worldwide spending on public cloud services eclipsed half a trillion dollars, and IDC projects this will grow to $1.35 trillion by 2027. With a lot of progress made, and significant cloud investment expected to continue, it is a good time for business and technology leaders to pause and ask some key questions:
Is Cloud First working?
Has Cloud First created unintended challenges or issues?
Should we adjust our cloud strategies going forward?
Cloud First Was Successful in Driving Cloud Adoption
It is important to remember why most organizations established a Cloud First strategy in the first place. Put simply, the primary objective of Cloud First was to encourage and accelerate adoption.
Fundamental shifts to new technologies often take time to gain momentum, especially in complex enterprise environments. As the name suggests, Cloud First directed teams to prioritize cloud-based solutions as primary options. If a cloud-based approach could satisfy the business and technical requirements for a given workload, then a cloud-based approach should be utilized.
Technology leaders were wise to encourage cloud adoption, given the attractive array of benefits that cloud technology can provide. The core benefits driving the cloud value proposition have been proven over time and continue to present significant potential, including:
Increased speed and agility to drive innovation, through rapid provisioning and accelerated enablement of development teams.
Flexibility to scale resources up or down to support experimentation and optimize performance and cost for variable workloads.
Offloading the cost and headaches of “undifferentiated heavy lifting” efforts. Why spend time and money on non-value-added activities (such as operating and maintaining a data center), when those resources could be redirected to things that truly matter for the business?
These benefits can only be realized by embracing the cloud. A Cloud First strategy provided clear direction to the organization to prioritize cloud solutions, accelerating cloud adoption and hopefully, capturing the associated benefits.
The Unintended Consequences of Cloud First
In the classic movie “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner’s character hears a mysterious voice telling him: “If you build it, they will come.” Without spoiling the movie, it is fair to say that guidance worked out well for baseball diamonds built on Iowa cornfields.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the cloud. The unsurprising reality is that building something in the cloud does not guarantee the desired benefits will follow. Proper cloud benefit realization requires thoughtful application of the right cloud solutions for the right sets of requirements.
Yet for many organizations, well-intentioned Cloud First strategies often led to broad financial goals, such as defined targets for increased cloud technology spending. Unfortunately, those broad financial targets often led to substantial indiscriminate cloud spend. The result for too many organizations has been undesirable “cloud sprawl” – a wide ranging, uncontrolled cloud footprint, with rapidly growing costs and questionable associated benefits.
For example, consider an effort to simply migrate existing virtual machines from on-premise infrastructure to a public cloud environment. Or transitioning an existing in-house business application to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. While both would obviously increase cloud category spend, they wouldn’t necessarily drive increased value for the business (in fact, both might actually increase cost).
In some cases, the term Cloud First has actually become toxic within large organizations. Many business leaders have become frustrated by increased spending and unmet business expectations. This can lead to a perception that Cloud First is not working; instead, it was viewed as an IT-driven mandate to always use cloud solutions, even when they may not appear to be the best fit.
Recalibrating Our Cloud Strategies for Success
The time has come to improve on the broad-brush strokes of Cloud First and introduce more precision into our cloud strategies. To fully capture the benefits of cloud, we must be far more specific in outlining what the organization is seeking to do with cloud technology and how it supports key business priorities.
Recognition of this need for a more targeted, thoughtful approach has led some organizations to transition to Cloud Smart as their new, overarching cloud strategy. For instance, the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer has established Cloud Smart as the core guiding principle for the United States Federal Government’s cloud computing strategy.
While the evolution from Cloud First to Cloud Smart is a helpful move in the right direction, the term Cloud Smart remains high-level and thematic. A well-formed cloud strategy must dive deeper, in multiple key areas, including:
A core set of cloud strategy principles
Alignment to top business priorities and strategies
Financial considerations
Security considerations
Alignment to other technology strategies
A defined strategy for exiting cloud environments, if necessary
A set of strategy principles are the core of the cloud strategy, providing clear and thoughtful direction on the intended use of technology in the organization. The number of strategy principles and their specific focus will vary depending on the organization's unique needs. As a general guideline, we find anywhere from six to ten cloud strategy principles to be a reasonable target for most organizations.
As an example, a cloud strategy principle might outline the organization’s position on leveraging a preferred cloud service provider (CSP) versus pursuing a multi-cloud approach. What is the rationale driving the decision? How does that decision guide other strategy principles, such as the degree to which cloud native architectures and CSP native services should be embraced?
In building a comprehensive cloud strategy, it is also critical to remember that the process cannot be driven by IT alone. Effective cloud strategy development requires substantial engagement with a cross-functional team, including key business leaders.
Once established, the cloud strategy should be reviewed regularly and updated as necessary to support shifts in business or technology priorities.
Suggested Next Steps
As you plot your path forward with cloud, these self-assessment questions can help confirm your current cloud strategy posture and identify appropriate next steps for your organization:
Do we have a documented cloud strategy? If so, when is the last time we revisited it?
Is our cloud strategy centered on Cloud First? Has it created any unintended consequences for us?
Can we answer the key questions of what specifically our organization is seeking to do with cloud and why?
Do we have a handle on our current cloud spend? Is it well-understood and aligned with current priorities?
Have we established clear, foundational principles to guide intelligent use of cloud going forward?
If you answered “no” or “it’s not clear” to any of the above questions, that is okay, you are not alone! Windval works with large organizations to answer these questions, align cloud strategy with top priorities, and set a confident direction that drives value for the business.