What It Is: Managing internally hosted infrastructure can be expensive and burdensome, which is one of the reasons that migrating workloads to the cloud has seen a significant surge over the last decade or so
Why It Matters: While the financial argument of shifting from “capex to opex” sounds favorable at first, a significant number of costs will be introduced when pivoting to a hybrid or cloud-native environment. A structured approach provides a more predictable outcome, while also unlocking new cloud capabilities
Key Concepts
- Cloud strategy isn’t “one size fits all” – A thoughtful approach should be taken to evaluate where cloud migration creates value or competitive advantage versus going “all in”
- It’s also never just a “Lift and Shift” – The minute workloads move outside an internally hosted environment, the technical complexity of a footprint and cyber risk materially increase and additional consideration needs to be given to the impact those changes will have to manage exposure
- Plan to govern from Day One – Moving quickly in the case of the cloud can lead to immediate issues of orphaned assets and spiraling, unexpected costs. Having a migration plan is crucial
- Establish roles and accountability – While the concept of enabling a broader set of delivery stakeholders to provision assets via a console is attractive and responsive at one level, it also introduces considerable risk of things being handled improperly. Thinking through the operating model, expectations of various roles in relation to things like provisioning, managing, and utilizing cloud-based assets is critical
Key Dimensions
Educate
- With any cloud migration, it is important to have the necessary expertise and educate anyone involved in the provisioning and utilization of cloud-based assets to ensure they do so properly
Plan
- Like any other component of an enterprise footprint, cloud strategy should be thoughtful and integrated with the overall technology strategy and not implemented on an ad-hoc basis
- Financial planning should allow for contingency cost until a disciplined FinOps process is in place
Secure
- Cloud migration introduces considerable complexity to vulnerability management, securing transactions and data, managing identities, etc. Additional tooling and monitoring capabilities will be needed for environments, as well as changes to DevSecOps processes across teams
Tag
- An effective tagging strategy (ideally automated) is crucial to establish ownership, provide transparency into asset utilization, manage cost allocation, and maintain the footprint over time
Monitor
- It is critical to establish a FinOps process for monitoring and managing spend to avoid waste
- Cloud migration adds significant complexity to integrated monitoring across hosted, cloud, and edge-based computing environments. Incident management processes will need to be updated
Govern
- Establish ownership for monitoring and governance of cloud-based assets to promote consistent use and standards across an organization, even if assets are provisioned in a federated manner
For Additional Information: The Future of IT, InBrief: IT Value/Cost Optimization, The Intelligent Enterprise 2.0
Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. Courageous leadership is essential.
Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.
Want to discuss more? Please send me a message. I’m happy to explore with you.
-CJG 02/16/2026
Organized Chaos 