5 cloud moves CIOs must make to drive business value — and AI readiness

An effective cloud environment is one with purpose. After all, you’re investing in the cloud to drive business value.

Despite billions invested in cloud, many organizations still struggle to translate cloud adoption into measurable business value. Costs rise, complexity increases, and expected agility often fall short. Succeeding at this means being visionary, broadening your thinking, seeking diverse perspectives, and convincing others of what will be valuable to your organization.

One more factor has entered the equation: AI. How you structure your cloud environment today determines how well your organization can deploy, run, and scale AI workloads tomorrow. That makes these decisions more consequential than ever.

Here are strategies for smoother cloud transformation and increased business value.

#1: Broaden your thinking about ROI and risk

Business team members may know that cloud transformation will benefit the organization, but they may not understand how or why. As a result, they might be willing to do only a few things differently, perhaps because the classic return on investment (ROI) analysis doesn’t apply well to cloud environments. The classic model misses the lower risk, agility, and speed that the cloud delivers.

The cloud allows you to model a project quickly, so you don’t need to spend weeks figuring out an architecture, trying to determine the exact computing or storage to acquire, or which licensing agreement to engage. A cloud computing platform enables you to adjust decisions to fit changes in the business. Stop overspending on infrastructure; instead, use the cloud to scale up and down as needed. Spend time on the initiative's business value.

When making the ROI case, factor in AI readiness. A cloud environment optimized for AI workloads — with the right compute, storage, and network architecture — avoids costly rework down the line. That future-proofing has real dollar value.

#2: Optimize your virtualization approach

Virtualization, the virtual representation of physical hardware, advances transformation and accommodates a hybrid environment with one or more hyperscalers and on-premises resources. Making smart virtualization moves eases your migration from hyperscalers to private clouds for computing resources, enabling you to realize business value faster.

• Track licensing costs using FinOps observability and monitoring tools to minimize the financial impact. FinOps has matured into a formal discipline with dedicated frameworks and AI-powered observability platforms that can predict spend anomalies, automate rightsizing recommendations, and flag underutilization in near real time. This is especially useful because some service providers will charge for license underpayment but won’t compensate for underutilization.
• Keep operations running smoothly with expert shadowing programs from your service provider and implement a comprehensive cloud operating model. This helps you overcome operational obstacles, such as temporary downtime caused by new platform moves.
• Align your cloud vendor agreements with business objectives through careful review and renegotiation, making them clear and flexible to avoid unanticipated costs and service gaps. Consider including scalable service terms and provisions, as well as an exit strategy, if a contract no longer meets your needs. With multicloud strategies now standard and sovereign cloud requirements emerging in regulated industries, your agreements should also address data residency, portability, and jurisdictional compliance.
• Assess your team’s skills and identify gaps, especially in crucial tasks like cloud security, AI integration, and platform consolidation. You can avoid skill and knowledge drainage by investing in competitive salaries and continuous, forward-looking, and role-specific training.
• Develop a strategic roadmap for your IT infrastructure to keep you on course. It should include corporate targets, compliance and business unit requirements, current workloads, change contingencies, platform/vendor transition steps, and company growth plans. Build AI infrastructure requirements into the roadmap from the start — GPU availability, high-throughput networking, and data pipeline architecture all influence which cloud configurations will serve you best.

#3: Find advocates to champion your cloud efforts

Identify and connect with employees on the business side who can champion your cloud transformation. Select people who understand the business value and can educate others on what the transformation will deliver.

Getting the business side involved will show that you’re committed to technology that achieves results. You also increase team buy-in by prioritizing change and innovation.

#4: Leverage smaller, more nimble teams

When launching cloud initiatives, break them down into tasks that can be completed with smaller teams representing different functions of your business. That way, departmental silos won’t slow you down, and the people closest to business objectives can guide efforts toward accomplishing them.

The team decides the structure, which can change based on the challenge. Team members get a call in the morning and decide who will do what and by when. They’re good to go. It’s quick and simple. Most importantly, the team is accountable for the results.

AI tools are amplifying what small teams can accomplish. A lean team with access to AI-assisted development, automated testing, and intelligent monitoring can move at a pace that would have required a much larger group just a few years ago. Build familiarity with these tools into your team's way of working.

#5: Find a partner to drive momentum

Every organization's cloud path looks different. No template exists for how to do things in this environment. Choose cloud solution providers that continuously evolve their approach, cater to your unique needs, and help you market the business value of your transformation.

Consider working with a partner to help you communicate the value of the cloud to your board and business leaders. A partner with cloud expertise will emphasize quality over quantity and can share case studies that illustrate how others have realized business benefits from the cloud. Look specifically for partners with demonstrated experience running AI workloads in cloud environments — the infrastructure requirements are distinct, and experience here matters.

Once you roll out a new solution, keep looking for opportunities for incremental change.

Partner with Unisys on cloud transformation

Continuous innovation and improvement, nimble teams, cloud champions, a broad perspective on ROI and risk, and quality partners will make you more responsive and innovative. As AI becomes central to how organizations compete, cloud architecture is now central to many organizations’ business strategy. Explore how Unisys cloud transformation can give you more business value from your cloud investments.