By Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
15. Allow For Private Deployment
Allowing for private deployment would increase the strategic value of native cloud environments by enabling organizations to have complete control over data residency. Running workloads inside customer-owned machines ensures their data always lives within their systems, streamlining compliance adherence. – Daniel Keller, InFlux Technologies Limited (FLUX)
Cloud-native environments promise agility, scalability and speed, but unlocking their full strategic value requires more than simply migrating workloads. To realize the full benefits, enterprise tech leaders must align cloud initiatives with business objectives, maintain visibility into performance and costs, break down operational silos, and integrate tools across platforms.
Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share their insights and practical tips to help companies maximize the value of their cloud-native environments. From smarter automation strategies to the strategic use of artificial intelligence, here’s how they recommend approaching cloud adoption and optimization to drive stronger results.
1. Stop Treating Automation As A Side Project
In my experience working with enterprise tech teams, the biggest wins come when you stop treating automation as a side project and make it the backbone of your cloud-native strategy. At Opkey, we’ve seen teams cut release times in half by centralizing their change management and testing. It’s about getting out of firefighting mode and letting IT talent focus on innovation, not just maintenance. – Pankaj Goel, Opkey
2. Leverage Open-Source Tools
By enabling increased flexibility and interoperability, accelerating innovation, and optimizing costs, open source is key to empowering enterprise tech teams in their cloud-native environments. With easily customizable open-source tools on hand, your teams can focus their energy and resources on cloud initiatives that truly move the needle while avoiding vendor lock-in, which can eat up budgets. – Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE
3. Adopt A Unified Security Platform
Enterprises can gain value from cloud-native environments by adopting a unified security platform that integrates into developers’ integrated development environments across the software development lifecycle. This streamlines dozens of DevOps pipelines, simplifies management, greatly mitigates risk and accelerates time- to delivery, freeing teams to focus on innovation rather than remediation. – Sandeep Johri, Checkmarx
4. Use Cloud-Native Data Insights To Manage Risk
A core strategic value of a cloud-native environment is its ability to enable smarter business decisions at scale. In addition to speed and agility, it can optimize proactive risk visibility by synthesizing high volumes of data in real time and offering clear intelligence. In this way, organizations—particularly those in regulated industries—can identify and act on risk signals before they escalate. – Rochelle Blease, G2 Risk Solutions
5. Use A Unified Multicloud Management Platform
Enterprise tech teams can gain more value from cloud-native environments by adopting a unified multicloud platform for app management and monitoring. This can simplify software bills of materials and reduce costs and DevOps overhead while boosting developer productivity. By combining this platform with modern practices, such as microservices, teams can optimize agility, workload and standardization, supporting faster time to market. – Steve Millidge, Payara Services Ltd
6. Balance Performance With Scalability And Resilience
As AI increases pressure on cloud-native systems, tech teams must balance performance with scalability and resilience. While speed is critical, long-term strategic value comes from building adaptable, fault-tolerant platforms that support evolving business needs and deliver a seamless, resilient user experience. – Amey Banarse, Yugabyte Inc.
7. Bring In An MSP
To get the most strategic value from cloud-native environments, enterprise tech teams can loop in a managed service provider. MSPs offer customized cloud solutions designed for your specific industry to help your organization reach its strategic objectives. MSPs evaluate how each key decision impacts your digital evolution, financial returns and desired outcomes. – Jonathan Lerner, InterVision
8. Break Down Departmental Data Silos
By breaking down data silos between departments through unified cloud platforms, companies gain visibility into cross-functional operations. This transparency enables faster adaptation to market disruptions and regulatory changes, transforming departments into strategic business partners with improved decision-making capabilities. – Alex Saric, Ivalua
9. Implement A Hybrid Storage Model
Enterprise tech teams need to ensure that their cloud-native environment is supported by on-premises data storage. This hybrid model will allow organizations to become disaster- and ransomware-resilient, take advantage of a tiered-out backup strategy, and easily manage local and remote data. This approach will achieve the mobility, performance and security expected for today’s data landscape. – David Bennett, Object First
10. Automate Root Cause Analysis And Remediation
Enterprise platform teams can drive more strategic value from cloud-native environments by automating root cause analysis and remediation in Kubernetes. This minimizes manual firefighting, accelerates resolution times and frees up engineers to focus on optimizing app performance, reducing costs and delivering features that support business growth. – Ben Ofiri, Komodor
11. Reduce Manual Overhead For SREs
Reducing manual overhead for site reliability engineers is key and can be done with better automation and visibility. Focus on scaling, not maintaining. With the right tools and approaches, SREs can look at optimizing utilization and costs—for example, shutting down unused resources instead of just keeping systems running. Bridging the gap between engineering and business goals should be a priority. – Ben Ghazi, Codiac
12. Leverage AI For Smarter Automation
I recommend leveraging AI for smarter cloud infrastructure automation. Use AI tools to auto-scale based on usage patterns, detect anomalies in real time and optimize deployments through intelligent testing. Platforms like AWS, Datadog and Harness can forecast demand, flag issues early and reduce cloud costs. After all, we all want less firefighting and more building. – Kartik Subbiah, Healthlink Dimensions
13. Embrace Platform Engineering
One way enterprise tech teams can unlock more strategic value from cloud-native environments is by embracing platform engineering. Creating internal developer platforms streamlines deployment, standardizes operations and boosts developer productivity, which allows teams to focus on innovation instead of infrastructure. – Sanjoy Sarkar, First Citizens Bank
14. Adopt A Unified Observability Strategy
Adopting a unified observability strategy across all cloud-native components provides real-time insights, accelerates troubleshooting and aligns performance metrics with business goals. This helps teams make smarter, value-driven decisions. – Srikanth Bellamkonda
15. Allow For Private Deployment
Allowing for private deployment would increase the strategic value of native cloud environments by enabling organizations to have complete control over data residency. Running workloads inside customer-owned machines ensures their data always lives within their systems, streamlining compliance adherence. – Daniel Keller, InFlux Technologies Limited (FLUX)
16. Invest In Smart Alert Management
One way enterprise tech teams can get more strategic value out of their cloud-native environments is by investing in smart alert management tools. You can have the most advanced tech stack in place, but if no one knows when something breaks, reliability suffers. Alerting closes the loop and turns potential into actual operational value, which increases overall proactiveness and productivity. – Judit Sharon, OnPage Corporation
17. Prioritize Effective Cost Management
Effective cost management is crucial in cloud-native utilization. Ensuring proper use can foster CI/CD, thereby enhancing development speed. Merging DevOps with cloud-native environments using technologies like containerization and microservices enables agile operations. Utilizing automation and monitoring tools can efficiently manage complexity, reduce errors and allocate resources to strategic tasks. – Ajit Sahu, Walmart
18. Add Cloud Backup Checkpoints
Enterprise tech teams can implement cloud backup checkpoints throughout their cloud-native architectures. By strategically placing these checkpoints at critical stages, organizations can minimize downtime during failures and maintain business continuity, ultimately transforming a traditional disaster recovery approach into a proactive method. – Chongwei Chen, DataNumen, Inc.
19. Avoid Overcustomization
Tech teams can maximize cloud-native value by resisting overcustomization, which locks them into old versions and costly rework. Strategic teams design for extensibility and adapting needs by choosing platforms that evolve with their business, not ones that trap them. The goal isn’t control through code, but adaptability through configuration. – Sarah Edwards, Kantata
20. Adopt FinOps For Cloud Spending Insights
Enterprise teams need to adopt FinOps. FinOps brings together engineering, finance and business teams to track, optimize and forecast cloud spending in real time. This turns cloud cost data into actionable insights that align with business goals. – Jyoti Shah, ADP