Cloud adoption strategies

SECTION 1

The cloud is now a strategic foundation for the enterprise

In a competitive technology landscape, cloud adoption has moved beyond the question of whether applications can be deployed to the cloud. According to Elias Khnaser, VP Analyst at Gartner, organisations now commonly accept the pace and innovation of cloud providers as foundational to their business.

The companies that succeed in this environment excel at three capabilities: anticipating market direction, developing relevant strategies and executing their plans effectively. It is this combination that sets a successful adoption apart from a mere technical migration.

This cultural shift is changing how IT leadership pitches its projects: the cloud is no longer defended as a simple infrastructure cost optimisation, but as the gateway to the artificial intelligence, automation and scalability capabilities that now separate market leaders from their competitors within the same sector.

SECTION 2

The role of cloud computing in the enterprise

That projection has played out: in 2026, public cloud accounts for 45% of enterprise IT spending, up from just 17% in 2021, with worldwide spend expected to reach $850 billion according to Gartner, a rise of more than 21% year on year. Cloud computing is transforming how businesses operate: they rely on big data, automation, serverless and now agentic AI to reinvent their business models.

This approach delivers several advantages: reduced costs, accelerated time to market and expansion into new markets. Companies adopting serverless models see it, moreover, "not as a place but as a strategy" to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

### Agentic AI as the new driver of cloud demand

Cloud infrastructure demand in 2026 is driven above all by artificial intelligence: IaaS is growing faster than PaaS and SaaS because companies are sizing compute capacity for model inference and autonomous agent execution, with unpredictable load spikes that on-premise infrastructure struggles to absorb. SaaS, by contrast, is following a more measured trajectory, geared toward optimisation rather than pure growth, a sign of a market rationalising its existing subscriptions to fund its new AI use cases.

SECTION 3

Define business outcomes and plan in stages

### Framing the expected business outcomes

Effective adoption maximises service value while minimising costs, which means aligning technology implementation with business objectives as a unified endeavour. Start by defining the expected outcomes: without understanding why you are adopting the cloud and what its value proposition is, "you are just shifting your technology stack," notes Jeremy Ward, Head of Cloud Advisory at Cloudreach. Common objectives include cost savings, building new technical capabilities, scaling to meet demand, integrating complex IT portfolios, democratisation and self-service, optimising internal operations and gaining agility. Documenting these objectives in writing, with measurable indicators, keeps them from diluting over successive budget trade-offs and changes of internal sponsors.

### Building a phased roadmap

Then plan the entire journey and roll out in stages. Cloud adoption is not instantaneous: full integration can take years. Leaders must establish a roadmap describing the current state of the information system and the desired future state, with data migration timelines, application shift schedules and business process transition plans. Breaking the programme into short waves, each delivering verifiable business value, reduces risk compared with a single massive migration and allows the trajectory to be corrected at every iteration.

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Address risks and choose a deployment model

### Addressing risks

Address potential risks. Migration involves several, to be assessed and planned. Security and compliance first: data is entrusted to third parties and shares server space with other organisations; you must determine whether regulations demand stringent security protocols. Availability and reliability next: vendors handle maintenance, and you should review Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to check they meet requirements. Finally data integration, by defining interdependencies and ensuring data availability across sources. A Zero Trust posture, where no access is trusted by default, is now the default framework for these migrations rather than an option bolted on afterwards.

@cite:securite-cloud-defis-et-solutions

### Choosing a deployment model

Determine the deployment model. The public cloud entrusts computing and infrastructure to a third-party vendor, on a pay-as-you-go basis and serving multiple companies: low cost, no maintenance, near-unlimited scalability and high reliability. The private cloud is owned and managed internally by a single business, on-premises or hosted by a third party, offering customisation flexibility, greater control and enhanced security. The hybrid cloud combines private and public services, to enjoy the benefits of the public cloud while keeping tighter control over sensitive data and applications through private networks. This last model remains the most widespread in 2026: most organisations still combine several environments rather than entrusting everything to a single vendor, including when they repatriate certain workloads on-premises for cost or latency reasons.

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Select the right service

### IaaS, PaaS, SaaS: three levels of responsibility

The choice of service depends on several factors. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provides the infrastructure usually associated with an on-premise data centre: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, with the company keeping control of operating systems and applications. SaaS (Software as a Service) delivers applications over the internet: rather than installing and maintaining software locally, the company accesses it through a third-party vendor who manages access and the associated infrastructure, with operational load falling almost entirely on the vendor. PaaS (Platform as a Service) sits between the two: it provides platforms, development tools and the underlying infrastructure, so teams can write code and test their solutions over the internet without managing the lower layers.

### Serverless and cloud-native architectures

Organisations increasingly use serverless and cloud-native architectures to drive their strategic decisions and innovation: these models bill for actual usage rather than reserved capacity, which suits AI inference workloads whose demand swings widely throughout the day particularly well. Succeeding with this approach means defining clear objectives and carefully planning cloud adoption strategies to ensure positive outcomes.

@cite:infrastructure-cloud-native-entreprises

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Controlling costs with FinOps in the age of AI

### The AI cost shock

In 2026, managing costs tied to artificial intelligence has become the single most sought-after skill set among FinOps teams: the share of practitioners managing AI spend has grown 32% in a year, and nearly all of them now manage at least part of it. Unlike traditional compute, these workloads combine token-based billing, GPU utilisation spikes that are hard to smooth out, and inference and retraining costs that vary from one week to the next, making budget forecasting considerably harder than with classic compute instances.

### Building a continuous FinOps discipline

Faced with this shock, FinOps is no longer limited to optimising public cloud: teams now also track SaaS spend, private cloud, edge and internally hosted AI workloads within a single governance framework. This continuous discipline rests on three simple reflexes that are rarely applied with rigour: systematically tagging every resource to attribute spend to a team or product, setting up regular showback that makes costs visible to the teams generating them, and reviewing reserved capacity commitments as workloads evolve rather than once a year.

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Cloud sovereignty and multicloud strategy

### Sovereign cloud: a growing regulatory premium

Worldwide sovereign cloud IaaS spend is expected to reach $80 billion in 2026 according to Gartner, driven by regulations such as the European NIS2 directive and by increasingly strict local hosting requirements across the Middle East and Asia. This requirement carries a direct cost: major vendors charge on average up to 30% more for their sovereign cloud offerings than for their standard services, a premium organisations must now factor in from the budgeting stage rather than discover mid-project.

### Avoiding vendor lock-in through a multicloud architecture

These regulatory constraints are mechanically pushing organisations toward hybrid and multicloud architectures, combining several vendors and sometimes on-premise capacity to meet data residency requirements. The benefit is real, workload portability, stronger negotiating power, greater resilience against an outage or a commercial decision by a single vendor, but it comes at the price of operational complexity: every additional vendor multiplies the skills to maintain, the interfaces to secure and the invoices to reconcile. At Adservio, we support companies in defining their cloud trajectory, from framing business objectives to choosing the right deployment models, services and FinOps governance suited to their sovereignty constraints.

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