Cloud First. Then What?

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Why Cloud First is only the starting point, and how strong cloud strategy unlocks data and AI advantage.

This is the third edition of Enable Great Conversations - a series unpacking the leadership challenges behind technology decisions, exploring how clarity and confidence can be built through open conversation and experience.

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Over the past decade, “Cloud First” has been front and centre in many conversations about technology strategy. Boards asked about it, technology leaders presented it, and vendors sold it as the answer to everything from cost optimisation to digital transformation.

For many organisations, moving to the cloud was positioned as a destination - the mark of being “modern” or “future-ready”. In my opinion, Cloud First was never an end-state, it was a milestone and organisations that treat it as ‘done’ risk missing the real advantage that comes next…

The Plateau After Cloud First

A scenario I encounter regularly in our industry is the mid-sized company that spent three years migrating everything to the cloud. They decommissioned the old data centre, migrated a host of their productivity services to platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google Suite, and then celebrated the resilience gains - presenting slides to the board about flexibility and cost optimisation.

Eighteen months later many are asking: "What now?"

The promised agility hasn’t always appeared, costs have often crept up as teams spin up new services, and data is still fragmented across multiple systems (in some case, more than it was before). Despite all of the investment, the feeling of meaningful advantage remain elusive.

This is a common story: companies that have ‘completed’ their cloud journey, and then plateaued – not because cloud was the wrong choice, but because they treated infrastructure change as strategy delivered and failed to capitalise on what it unlocked and enabled.

Cloud alone doesn’t deliver a competitive edge.

What Cloud Actually Enables

Cloud matters because of what it makes possible. Without clarity on the why - what outcomes it serves, and how it strengthens the business - it quickly becomes another expensive utility.

Leaders who extract real value from cloud don’t talk about migration milestones, they focus on capability:

• Operational Resilience: How cloud creates reliability and continuity that customers can trust.
• Strategic Agility: How cloud accelerates experimentation, iteration, and scaling of what works.
• System Coherence: How cloud enables integration across previously fragmented tools and data.

…but only when leveraged in the right way. Cloud is the platform that makes these things possible, it’s not a golden ticket to realising their effectiveness.

An Example: Data - Where Value Lives

Let’s consider the strategic benefit of cloud, in the context of data.

Cloud infrastructure gives you the freedom to consolidate disparate sources into coherent landscapes. It makes data more accessible, provides options for consistency, and unlocks actionable insights across an organisation. Most importantly, it creates a foundation for building pipelines and governance that turn information into insight.

This is one example where competitive advantage begins to emerge. Not in the infrastructure itself, but in the clarity and speed that you can deliver when you build effectively on top of it.

Consider the difference between two companies in the same sector: both have migrated to cloud. Company A treats cloud as hosting - same systems, same data silos, just running somewhere else. Company B treats cloud as information architecture. They use is to unify data, create shared views across disparate systems, and enable faster, deeper insight.

Guess which one pulls ahead over time?

The cloud conversation isn’t really about infrastructure and applications. It’s about information architecture.

Companies that understand this distinction are the ones building sustainable advantage.

AI: The Next Capability Layer

This is where the cloud conversation meets AI. The effectiveness of AI depends on the same foundations: data quality, system integration, and cloud infrastructure.

Many organisations have approached AI as a product to purchase, not a capability to develop. The simple narrative is appealing: “an assistant for every employee, intelligent automation for every process”.

AI effectiveness, however, is determined almost entirely by the quality of the foundations it sits on: data quality, system integration, and cloud infrastructure.

AI advantage is not buying a copilot. It is building the organisational and data foundations to deploy AI with confidence and direction.

The companies that succeed with AI won’t be those who deploy it fastest. They’ll be the ones who have consolidated their data, built reliable pipelines, and created the organisational capability to integrate AI thoughtfully into their strategy.

Cloud matters for AI because it provides proximity to AI services, the compute scale to run models effectively, and the data infrastructure to feed them meaningfully... but that only works if the infrastructure – and the cloud strategy - is built with intention.

The Leadership Challenge

This creates a difficult dynamic for technology leaders.

The same boards that once celebrated ‘Cloud First’ slides are now demanding visible progress on AI. Teams want access to tools. Competitors are making noise about their deployments.

The challenge is that the foundational work needed to bridge cloud and AI is rarely exciting. Consolidating data architectures, improving integration, and building governance frameworks to make use of these tools responsibly doesn’t generate the same excitement as launching a new AI tool.

Without foundational work, AI deployments often become expensive experiments that don’t scale (have a read of the recent MIT Media Lab’s report: “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025”). The outcome is often disconnected tools, than integrated capability.

The mature approach isn’t to treat AI as the next shiny object, but as a natural evolution of cloud and data strategy... use it to solve real problems, not to tick innovation boxes.

The question isn’t “What AI should we buy?”, it’s “How do we build the capability to use AI effectively?”

Beyond the Plateau

So where does this leave leaders who have “completed” their cloud migration and wondering what comes next?

First. Challenge the idea that cloud migration is an achievement in itself. It’s infrastructure modernisation; necessary, but not sufficient.

Second. Focus relentlessly on how cloud enables better outcomes for your customers, and for your business. If you can’t articulate this clearly, you might have missed the point…

Third. Use your cloud foundation to create data coherence. This is where real competitive advantage starts to build.

Finally, treat AI as the natural progression of a Cloud First strategy. Success will come to those who use their cloud foundations to build capabilities step by step, not to those chasing the latest release and hype.

The Real Conversation

The cloud conversation is far from over. For many organisations, it has only just begun.

The question is (rightly) no longer “Are we in the cloud?” but “What are we using the cloud to achieve?”. Great technology leaders know that advantage doesn’t come from ticking the “Cloud First” box. It comes from building on that foundation - using cloud to unlock data capability, and using data capability to unlock AI advantage in ways that create real, sustainable value.

Cloud First was never the end. The leaders who treat it as a foundation for data coherence and AI capability will be the ones who find real, sustainable advantage.

That conversation is just getting started.

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Enable Great Conversations

The best decisions don't happen in isolation. They happen in conversation - with trusted peers, experienced advisors, and teams who know what it’s really like.

That's what Enable Great Conversations is about: a series exploring the real moments – the ambiguous ones, the uncomfortable ones, the ones that don’t fit neatly in a playbook - where leadership is tested, and clarity is found. Each release aims to capture a single insight, decision, or challenge that helps move organisations from noise to clarity.

There are many more of these moments worth unpacking and we’ll continue to explore them in the weeks and months ahead. We hope you’ll follow along, or join the conversation in the comments below, or follow along via the Enable Great page.

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This article was originally posted on LinkedIn. You can read and comment on it here.